THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996 TAG: 9604140266
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
It was an actual encounter worthy of the most sensational fiction.
Naples, Italy, 1960: Mafia kingpin Salvatore ``Lucky'' Luciano, long since deported from his U.S. prowling ground, still a wheel in the international heroin trade, sat down to China tea and lemon in the upscale surroundings of the Excelsior Hotel.
Intent before him, ebony cigarette holder aloft, was famed thriller writer Ian Fleming, urbane creator of superspy James Bond.
Object: interview.
What visions of the incomparable 007 across the gaming table from Le Chiffre, or facing down Auric Goldfinger on enemy turf! Bulldog Drummond confronts Carl Peterson! The Saint meets the Tiger!
Fleming, diffident, inquired tentatively of the mobster's involvement with drugs.
Shrugged the man not accidentally named Lucky: ``I was framed.''
So much for a moment of truth.
Life does not imitate art in Andrew Lycett's meticulous biography Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (Turner Publishing, 486 pp., $24.95). Nor does it reveal its meaning as neatly, which is one of the reasons why we read fantasy. But Lycett helps us understand how life generates art in this uncompromising portrait of a privileged dreamer.
Actually, the Fleming-Luciano contretemps is emblematic of that understanding. An outsider might have seen the roles reversed: the colorful writer, haggard and cruel of kisser, ravaged by alcohol and heart disease, might have been cast as the villain. The murderous drug trafficker, ``benign, sedate, distinguished,'' gray of hair and avuncular of manner, might have been a detective-story inspector.
The key is not that Fleming failed to pry revelatory information out of his adversary, but that he expected to. At 52, he remained a romantic. And just four years from the end of his life, Fleming, the trained intelligence officer and wannabe rake, was still, inside himself, something of an innocent.
He was not unaware of this as the self-professed scribbler of ``fairy tales for grown-ups.''
``And fantasy isn't real life by definition,'' Fleming acknowledged a year before his death. ``It's very much the Walter Mitty syndrome - the feverish dreams of the author of what he might have been - bang, bang, kiss, kiss, that sort of stuff. It's what you would expect of an adolescent mind - which I happen to possess.''
Deep into a premature old age.
``I've always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle,'' the author wrote in his notebook, ``and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes a rather painful splits of one's life.''
The consequences of a Peter Pan predilection can be terrible. Fleming's sadomasochistic marriage was one, as was the suicide, long after the author's death, of his neglected and drug-addicted son, Caspar. These are specters from the flip side of a celebrated sophistication.
So is this passage from the saga of the fabled womanizer, The Spy Who Loved Me, in the words of the heroine:
``All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.''
One doesn't have to be a feminist to recoil from that.
Our myths tell us much about ourselves, and so does the disturbingly successful one of 007 as latter-day St. George.
It survived its creator and arguably still endures in the less self-consciously elegant but equally stone-violent incarnations of macho colossi Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They are as ultimately dismissive of women, despite certain nods to the times - the sacrificial virgin has, by now, become a professional.
It was Ann Fleming, Ian's wife, who asked Lucky Luciano pointedly about a church in Naples where corpses were supposedly preserved by having gold poured into their veins.
``That sort of thing doesn't happen here, Mrs. Fleming,'' Luciano lied.
In fact, life does sometimes imitate art. The night before his assassination, John F. Kennedy was reported to have been reading a Bond novel. So was Lee Harvey Oswald. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB