A child of Ian Fleming might have become one of the most powerful press barons in Britain, according to a scandalous diary entry discovered by his biographer.
Nicholas Shakespeare, whose Ian Fleming: The Complete Man was serialised in The Times this week, said that a previously unpublished journal entry from one of Fleming’s friends helped to explain why the Daily Mail had been so hostile to the James Bond author.
The Mail declined to review Fleming’s first Bond novel and ran a series of hostile articles about him that built his reputation as a sado-masochist and gambler who was embarrassed by his mass-market fiction.
Fleming had been a close friend of Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, in the 1940s but the men had a catastrophic falling out after Fleming had an affair with the Mail owner’s wife.
Ann Harmsworth, a socialite who would later marry Fleming, was married to Esmond from 1945 to 1951. She fell pregnant in 1948 with what her husband believed was his child. The truth, known to her and Fleming, was that the baby was theirs.
Biographers have written previously about the love triangle, but Shakespeare discovered that Esmond Harmsworth was doubly hurt because he believed that his son from his previous marriage was illegitimate.
Maud Russell, a friend and former lover of Fleming, wrote in her diary on April 25, 1948, that Fleming had come to visit. “He had an immense amount to tell me about Jamaica, Annie & his love affair with her,” she wrote. “And that she is going to have a baby by him in Oct.
“And how secret this must be kept. That it was important Esmond shouldn’t suspect – or not so much Esmond, oddly enough – but Harmsworth relations as if the child is a boy Esmond is going to make a will leaving the Daily Mail to him. I said: ‘But why not to his eldest boy, his son & heir?’ And [Ian] said: ‘Because he believes him to be someone else’s son’.”
If Russell’s account is reliable then Esmond Harmsworth thought that Vere Harmsworth, who became 3rd Viscount Rothermere, was the product of another affair. The Mail is now owned by Vere’s son Jonathan, 4th Viscount Rothermere.
Ann Harmsworth’s child was not fated to inherit the Mail. Her daughter was born with defective lungs and died within hours of birth.
“I held my baby’s hand for one minute and was amazed at how long the torture lasted. It is screaming physical animal pain to lose a child,” she wrote to her sister-in-law. She said it was “the greatest sorrow” that “can come to any woman and one can only think of strange things like God chastens those whom he loves”.
‘Since then a caricature has taken hold’
Shakespeare said that he was moved to write Fleming’s biography because of the contrast between his seedy public reputation and the kindness and generosity described by his friends.
“It struck me that a moral of Fleming’s story is this: don’t run off with the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Mail if you want to avoid being forever after rendered into tabloid fat,” Shakespeare said.
“Since that moment a caricature was encouraged that has taken hold: of a card-playing golfer who hits the road after whipping his wife, roaring home late at night in his Ford Thunderbird from Royal St George’s golf course or Boodle’s, fortified on a diet of martinis, Turkish tobacco and scrambled eggs, before tip-toeing, slip-on shoes in hand, up the narrow staircase in Victoria Square, past Ann’s smart guests, to his monastic top-floor bedroom, where, after first removing his polka-dotted bow-tie and navy blue Sea Island cotton shirt, he would lie with his blanket over his head listening to over-educated voices on the floor below snigger at his latest book.”
Shakespeare wrote in his book that Esmond Harmsworth never came to terms with Fleming’s betrayal. His son from a later marriage, also named Esmond, recalled that Fleming and his lover were “absolutely forbidden subjects”.
“My father loved spy novels, but there were no Ian Fleming books. We had a cinema at Daylesford [Rothermere’s Gloucestershire estate], and he’d get the first run of films, but it was never possible to have James Bond. I was quickly told by my nanny Mrs Hardy – who had been nanny to families in the mafia – never to bring it up.”
Fionn Morgan, Fleming’s step-daughter, suggested that Esmond Harmsworth probably knew the child was not his. “It seems extraordinary if he did not. But then Loelia [Westminster, a close friend] didn’t know,” she said. “It’s possible that it was not clear to him that it definitely wasn’t his.”
