Dad begins to treat him like a child. ‘Is that a fair answer to give, when you do not know anything about it?’ ‘No, I said that is what it appeared to me, but I do not know.’ The slight slippage of grammar in this answer may indicate flusterment.
Dad continues to strike the infantilizing note. ‘But you do not know who is responsible for the format of the front page or for the headlines?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know why headlines are prepared? Do you know what the function of a headline is?’ Dad could hardly go further in this line of calculated humiliation if he told Galbraith to stand up straight or to take the chewing-gum out of his mouth.
A little later, seeming to take advantage of his psychological ascendancy, Dad asks, ‘And the answer to my question is a simple “No”, is it not?’
‘Will you repeat your question?’ Not an unreasonable request in the circumstances, since there has been a fair amount of intervening by-play. Dad is almost toying with him by this time, saying, ‘No. I am sorry, Mr Galbraith, but I will not,’ before returning to a crucial point. ‘Do you now agree that reasonable persons of goodwill might quite properly take the view that the relationship between you and Mr Vassall was one which was too familiar between a minister and a junior civil servant?’ ‘I certainly do not.’
This exchange by itself may have earned Dad his fee, with Galbraith showing the soft white underbelly of any future libel case, and Mars-Jones QC refraining for the moment from sinking forensic teeth into it.
Galbraith sometimes made some odd choices in his correspondence — something in which the tribunal took a keen interest, in fact, since he had sent John Vassall a chatty postcard while on a family holiday in Belgium. But it seems safe to assume he sent no Christmas card that year to W. L. Mars-Jones QC.
Kevin McClory, though, kept in touch with Dad. They were on good terms, as was only right if McClory had benefited in a strong material way from Dad’s taking the case. If I don’t remember Dad going to a preview of Never Say Never Again when it was released in 1983, it doesn’t mean he didn’t go. Kevin McClory was executive producer, and Sean Connery returned to the role of James Bond after twelve years. Film critics found it disappointing that the film was so clearly a new version of Thunderball, not realizing that it couldn’t be a fresh story without exceeding the rights McClory had won in 1963 and rendering him liable to be sued in his turn.
When my first book was published McClory passed on an invitation through Dad for me to spend some time with him in the Bahamas and to write the real story of the Thunderball affair. I wasn’t really tempted. There might be a wetsuit waiting with my name on it, but there might also be a harpoon-gun whose bolt had the same inscription. ‘The real story’ I was supposed to tell wouldn’t be an independent account but Kevin McClory’s version. Mars-Jones père had helped bring him prosperity, and now Mars-Jones fils would add a little polish to his reputation. McClory wasn’t known for being open-handed — perhaps the idea was to pay me in daiquiris and sun cream.
Ian Fleming was in poor health during the court case and died the next year, but the Thunderball affair rolled on. Jonathan Cape, publishers of the novel, and having every reason to know that Kevin McClory watched fiercely over his interests, brought out a biography of Fleming by John Pearson. McClory wasn’t satisfied with the account it gave of the legal action and its findings, so once again the lawyers were whipped out of their kennels and sent across the fields baying for redress.
Pearson’s tone had been misleadingly breezy:
As [Fleming] sat in court day after day, swallowing the nitroglycerine pills prescribed to prevent another heart attack and listening to all those old arguments again, he must have told himself how unnecessary it all was, how easily it could all have been avoided. A little thoughtlessness, a great deal of impatience, a lifetime’s habit of taking too much on trust — they were all to blame.
Again McClory won the point, so that the first edition of Pearson’s book had to have a statement from the publisher bound in (with the promise that the alterations would be included in subsequent editions and reprints), setting the record straight and apologizing for inaccuracy. ‘Since these pages were written,’ went the statement from Jonathan Cape,
certain facts have come to the notice of ourselves and the author which enable us to amplify passages in Chapters 24 and 25 which, whilst published by us in good faith, do not fully reflect the events leading to the High Court action in which Ian Fleming was concerned …
If you have an aversion, as I do, to the prissy form ‘whilst’, feeling that it carries a note of insincerity wherever it goes, then the word will seem perfectly at home in a passage of forced apology.
After two such successes, it was always likely that Kevin McClory would overreach himself. In the 1990s he proposed a second remake of Thunderball, to be called Warhead 2000 A.D. and possibly starring the Bond du jour Timothy Dalton. He then joined forces with Sony with plans to open up a whole rival franchise, having at this late date decided that he had been shortchanged by what had been thought in 1963 a highly advantageous settlement. Now he put in a claim for a proportion of the total profit from the whole roster of Bond films, on the basis that the work he had done on that early script had provided a template for the entire catalogue. He didn’t get his way in court this time. It seems pretty clear that his ownership of rights to the one film was easier to establish than any claim to the whole series. If he had scaled down his demands, instead of trying to go nuclear, he might have got his way withWarhead 2000 A.D.
Kevin McClory died in 2006, to muted mourning, but the disputes didn’t die with him. In 2007 there appeared a book called The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers, not from Cape but from Tomahawk Press, which reproduced court documents from the Thunderball trial. This time it was the Fleming forces on the attack, with the Ian Fleming Will Trust contesting that these documents were not a matter of public record and therefore an infringement of copyright. Tomahawk’s position was that the documents were indeed public — but a small publisher must think twice before taking on a rich estate. Unsold copies of the first edition were surrendered, presumably to be pulped, and the second edition, though bearing the traditional defiant slogan ‘The Book They Tried to Ban’, leaves out the disputed material.
In compensation it has a foreword by Len Deighton, who felt confident that he knew Fleming well enough to speak in his name in opposition to the Fleming Will Trust. He writes: ‘How Ian Fleming would have hated to know that this book had been censored … As a gentleman he would have felt that harassing a fellow author to be the ultimate demonstration of bad taste.’ I don’t know much about cricket but I can recognize a sticky wicket when it swallows the batsman whole. Fleming’s gentlemanliness has to be assessed as part-time, and when he was off the clock he wasn’t above appropriating another writer’s work and passing it off as his. If Ian Fleming’s gentlemanliness had been uninterrupted, there could have been no book for him to rise up in hypothetical righteousness to defend.
The dispute over Thunderball, with lawsuits erupting over so many years, resembles a small volcano in its alternation of activity and periods of dormancy, or perhaps a cold sore brewing up every few years a fresh batch of litigant virus. Dad stuck around for one cycle of infection and then moved on.