James Bond in Jamaica

Arch Digest revisits the Goldeneye resort, where Ian Fleming wrote his novels featuring the silver screen’s most famous secret agent.

Leave it to Ian Fleming to have discerned the gleam in the hot spot that he would brand “Goldeneye”—for the past couple of years part of music mogul Chris Blackwell’s unique tropical-hotel empire. Today—or tomorrow—you and I, for a price well worth it, can kayak, snorkel, spear lobsters and run waves in the setting where Fleming dreamed up and banged out his James Bond fantasies.
Fleming fell in love with Jamaica during the war—with what he called its “peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world”—and lost no time in buying a fifteen-acre patch of land on the island’s lush northern coast, near the somnolent old banana port of Oracabessa (“Golden Head” in Spanish). Fleming’s headland loomed sixty feet above a crescent of lint-white beach, where an ocean the temperature of warm tea, a secluded cove, a dark coral reef and foaming rock pools added up to a veritable theater of water. There he built a simple U-shaped stone-and-concrete barracks-style house with foot-thick walls and a hipped shingle roof with wide eaves. The strikingly white, aridly forbidding edifice, which time would tint and vegetation soften, reminded its detractors of a small private hospital—indeed, his old friend and onetime tenant Noël Coward, who would soon have his own hillside hideaway, Firefly, in nearby Galina, cattily referred to it as “Goldeneye, nose and throat clinic.” Suspending his wit for a minute, how-ever, Coward pronounced Fleming’s beach “unbelievable.” And later he changed his tune entirely and composed a little song: “Alas! I cannot adequately praise / The dignity, the virtue and the grace / Of this most virile and imposing place…”

- from ArchDigest