Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones

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 ofthe 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 with
Warhead 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