Bond star Roger Moore and the Bond girls from View to a Kill (Image: GETTY)
As confident in the bedroom as in a gunfight, irresistibly charismatic, and often deadly, Ian Fleming’s Bond daughters are some of the coolest female characters in fiction and on the big screen. But how did these sexy, seductive, and stunning femme fatale come to be?
A new book reveals two real-life women who more than any other have inspired the leading ladies of 007 – the high-society sisters, Anne and Laura Charteris.
The party-loving duo left a trail of emotional chaos in the upper echelons of British society.
Groomed by rich and powerful men who gave them titles, country mansions, and stately homes in London, they led a life of shameless hedonism—seven marriages between them.
Indeed, one of Anne’s conquests was Fleming himself.
The couple began an affair while she was still married to her second husband, the Conservative politician and journalist 2nd Viscount Rothermere, enjoying brutal, adulterous sexual relations, before finally marrying in 1952 after her last divorce.
“Fleming appears never to be celibate, but he had a passionate, exhausting and all-consuming relationship, which led to his first and third marriages,” says Christopher Rendorp, a former BBC World Service journalist and author of Never Shaken, Never Stirred. .
Ian Fleming and his wife Anne, nee Charteris (Image: GETTY)
The Charteris girls captured his imagination, with Anne becoming the most important figure in his life until his early death.
“I am convinced he based the Bond girls on the character of his lover and then wife, but he was also infatuated with Anne’s sister Laura.”
Casino Royale, the first of the highly successful Bond series, was published the following year in 1953.
Reindorp delved into letters written by the sisters, the author of Bond, and their friends, to piece together the alchemy behind their relationships.
The two socially rival sisters brought together a total of seven husbands between them, but nothing in their early years indicated that they would become such influential figures in society.
Anne was born in London on 13 June 1913, the eldest daughter of Captain Guy Charteris and his wife, Frances Tennant. Her grandfather was Hugo Charteris, 11th Earl of Wemyss.
A sister, Laura, was born two years later, and they had a brother, Hugo, who became a novelist. A third sister, Mary Rose, came in 1919.
As was the pattern in the last days of the Edwardian era, the girls were taught by a governess, but Anne was more bookish and spent some time at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
Presented to high society as a neophyte, Anne married the financier Shane O’Neill, 3rd Baron O’Neill, and they had two children, but she could not resist the overtures of press baron Esmond Harmsworth, eventually marrying him after her first husband was killed in the Second World War.
Around the same time, she fell in love with and was charmed by Fleming, and embarked on a clandestine affair.
The Bond creator became anxious over the discovery of his illicit affair, writing in one letter: “I know how to leave things lying around like a crow and expect every day that it will be the end.
“I hope you’re in trouble and don’t leave my messages between your bras and your pants. Please try. I know very well that one day you’ll come up with a tragic face and say everything’s out.”
During this period, Fleming was a senior journalist for The Sunday Times, a rival to Harmsworth’s newspaper empire.
In another letter, there was a clear allusion to the lovemaking between them: “I have bruises on my arms and shoulders. All this damage will have to be paid for some time.”
Anne was then impregnated by Fleming while still married but unfortunately their daughter, Mary, died shortly after her birth in 1951.
She formally separated from Harmsworth at the end of that year and tentatively began to forge a new life with Fleming, who was spending more and more time at Goldeneye, the Jamaican seaside house he had built in 1946.
They married in a quiet registry office ceremony on the Caribbean island in March 1952 while she was pregnant with their second child. Waving goodbye to his life as a bachelor, Fleming was overjoyed at his new status as husband and soon-to-be father, but realized he would need a great deal of money to give his bride the kind of life she was used to, even though her second divorce included a £100,000 settlement.
“Anne never had to think about money during her years with Esmond, and Ian’s income was only as a journalist,” Rendorp explains. He had to get extra income because he was really concerned about supporting Anne. I kind of asked him about starting a book by saying, ‘I don’t think you’re going to be more than a journalist.'”
He wanted to prove to her that he could write a book. She was definitely there when the James Bond character was born. It gave him the impetus to write.”
Rendorp is convinced that Fleming modeled the idea of a Bond girl on his wife and her sister Laura because there are so many similarities between the two women and the two Bond girls in the original novels. “Anne and Laura were incredibly glamorous on the social scene, wonderful hosts, and had a great interest in fashion,” he adds.
Bond girl Ursula Andress (Photo: The Image Gate/Getty)
In the novels, Ian takes a lot of time describing what women wear. Ian once said that the ideal woman is a lady who can make béarnaise sauce as well as she can make love. That was very much Ann.
“She was such an accomplished hostess, an excellent cook, and had such a prolific record of extramarital affairs, I think it is safe to assume that she achieved the same feat in the bedroom. In the world of society, both Anne and Laura were known for their magnetic sex lives.”
Rendorp says the sisters also had some toughness about them, just like Vesper Lynd, the dual character from his first novel Casino Royale, played by Ursula Andress in the 1967 film spoof and French actress Eva Green in the 2006 Daniel Craig remake.
“Vesper was very cold, but very charming,” adds Rendorp.
“It was tough and so was Ann, Ian later found out.”
When Flemings’ son Caspar was born in 1952, the novelist’s life changed dramatically. In his mid-40s, he was not used to a domestic routine.
“The marriage was idyllic at first,” says Reindorp. They moved into a flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Laura described it as the happiest of families, but Anne’s niece told me that the Flemings were much better at courting than they were at marriage.
They continued to have major disagreements. There were definitely times when the marriage was on the verge of falling apart.
“I was exhausted just reading the letters, which showed the strain in the marriage. There was intense love, but neither of them could resist the relationships.
“In the beginning, both sides turned a blind eye to what was going on. That was the way they did it in community circles.
“There were also tensions in the marriage because Anne was keen to buy and develop large properties while Ian preferred smaller venues.”
After less than a year on Cheyne Walk, Anne and Ian bought a country house near Buckingham Palace, which she spent months renovating while her husband complained about the high costs.
During the winters, Ian would regularly head alone to Jamaica where he found the peace he needed to write his books and also the time to strike up a relationship with a local woman, Blanche Blackwell.
Rendorp believes that Caspar was “deeply damaged by the ups and downs of his parents’ marriage”. During his early years, he spent a lot of time with his children’s nanny.
Meanwhile, Anne becomes infatuated with the rising star of the Labor Party at the time, Hugh Gaitskell.
Although he was also married, they began an affair and she was very upset when he died in 1963.
Anne suffered another shock the following year when Fleming, whom she still loved, died of a heart attack at the age of 56, on Caspar’s twelfth birthday.
In search of solace, Anne turned to alcohol.
She was further disturbed by the mental decline of her son, who had been expelled from Eton at the age of 16 when a loaded revolver was found in his room.
During a visit to Goldeneye, Caspar swam away overboard in an apparent suicide attempt, and later died of a drug overdose at his mother’s home in London in 1975. While Anne leads her whirlwind life, society columnists Laura preoccupies her own complicated relationships. .
She married Walter Long, 2nd Viscount Long, in 1933, and had her only child, Antoinette. Ten years later she married William Ward, 3rd Earl of Dudley, but divorced in 1954.
In 1960 she married Michael Canfield, who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Prince George, Duke of Kent.
Her fourth and final husband was John Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough, but their marriage in 1972 lasted only six weeks before he died and she was forced to leave the magnificent home of Blenheim Palace.
Anne died in 1981, aged 68, at Sevenhampton Place, the country house in Wiltshire, which she insisted had been bought back in the 1950s to give them a large country mansion for weekend entertaining. She, along with Ian and Caspar, spend many happy days there before dark times come.
The three are resting together at St James’ Church in Sevenhampton, in peace after a turbulent life that may have come straight from the pages of a spy thriller.
- Never Shaken, Never Stirred: The Story of Anne Fleming and Laura, Duchess of Marlborough by Christopher Rindorp (The History Press, £22.99) published 23 February. For free P&P, visit Expressbookshop.com Or call 020 3176 3832
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