金眼岛

April 5, 2008
Goldeneye, the home of Bond, is to become a celebrity village

Ian Fleming liked to say that James Bond would never have existed without Goldeneye, the Jamaican seaside villa where he wrote all the original 007 adventures.

He loved it above all for its simplicity. Goldeneye was beautiful, built on a former donkey racetrack and so humbly furnished that Noël Coward, a friend and neighbour, called it “Goldeneye, Nose and Throat”.

But now, in an indication of how far Bond’s prestige has outgrown the character’s modest origins, Fleming’s island hideaway is to be turned into a $120million (£60million) resort for sports stars, rock musicians and high-flying businessmen. Work began this week on the project, which will include 85 homes ranging in price from $750,000 to $3million, two restaurants, a health spa, delicatessen, supermarket and water sports centre.

There are concerns that the scale of the development will overwhelm the intimate appeal of Fleming’s original four-room whitewashed villa, grounds and secluded private beach.

Chris Blackwell, 70, the owner of Goldeneye and the man who made Bob Marley into a global superstar with his label Island Records, believes it can be preserved. He hopes that the project will become an example of how luxury tourism can help society: the new development is expected to create 1,500 jobs on site and in the surrounding area, where unemployment is about 70 per cent.

“The Jamaican people are the root of my success and I want to give something back,” he said. “I will keep Fleming’s house as it is so that people can see the Goldeneye that he wrote in, but the future of this place is as a resort location.”

Goldeneye is currently one of the leading celebrity bolt holes in the Caribbean: a discreet 12 bedroom hotel for presidents, Hollywood A-listers and the sort of people who expect to find copies of Private Jet Lifestyle magazine in their room. It is on the north coast of the island, two and half hours from Kingston on a good day, approached via a potholed road that climbs through a creeper-strewn forest of African tulips, coconut and banana palms. A small wrought-iron gate with no sign leads through more tropical trees to Fleming’s villa. In a tradition begun by Anthony Eden when he spent three weeks at Goldeneye after the Suez Crisis, labels at the foot of the trees record which guest planted them. Contributors range from Johnny Depp, the Clintons and Naomi Campbell, to Dawn French and Lenny Henry.

Guest accommodation is limited to four lavish wooden cottages, with bedrooms named after Bond girls, and the original house, which is perched on a cliff above a discreet coral beach.

Fleming fell in love with Jamaica during a conference on the U-boat threat to the Caribbean in 1942. He bought the 15-acre plot four years later and built a house, which he named Goldeneye after a wartime operation that was never put into action. He wintered there for the rest of his life.

When he embarked on Casino Royale in 1952 Fleming was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking journalist deep into middle age who was writing to forget about his impending marriage to his long-term mistress Ann Rothermere.

He did not appear destined for literary immortality. He had failed at Eton, Sandhurst and in the City before discovering a flair for journalism and then a sense of purpose in the Second World War, which he fought from behind a desk as a spymaster for the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy.

At Goldeneye, Fleming developed a strict routine, typing fast for three hours every morning (between breakfast and his midday swim) and one hour in the evening, never looking back “except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to”.

He kept the shutters on the enormous windows closed “so that I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside.”

When not writing or snorkelling, he drank prodigious quantities of martinis and whisky and conducted his last love affair, with Mr Blackwell’s mother, Blanche.

His presence in the house remains palpable, although the desk at which he wrote is missing on an overseas assignment of its own: it is one of hundreds of Bond relics from the manuscript of Casino Royale to the bikini worn by Halle Berry in Die Another Day, about to go on show at the Imperial War Museum in London in For Your Eyes Only, a year-long exhibition on Fleming and Bond.

After Fleming’s death in 1964 Goldeneye gradually fell into disrepair until Mr Blackwell persuaded Marley to buy it.

“When Bob came to see it he felt it wasn’t his kind of thing - it was too English,” Mr Blackwell recalled. “But by this time I was flush, so I bought it.” In 1992 he turned it into a hotel.

Today Goldeneye’s appeal is still its simplicity, although it now offers the sort of humble, homespun experience that costs hundreds of pounds a night to sample and is only possible because staff outnumber guests by at least three to one.

Sportsmen, musicians, writers and businessmen are among those who have already put down deposits for one of the new homes, on a stretch of reclaimed land opposite the Fleming villa.

Nick Simmonds, the Managing Director of Goldeneye resort, said: “we are hoping this will be a prototype for a new breed of luxury hotel that actually engages with the local community and gets away from the idea, which has been very prevalent in Jamaica, that guests should not go out at all.”

Inevitably the building work will leave Goldeneye shaken but, fans and developers alike will hope, not permanently stirred.

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond runs from April 17 to March 1 next year. For tickets: www.iwm.org.uk/007 or 020 7416 5439