The Bond Files

In 1953 two events occurred that reshaped the world and forever altered the concept of entertainment for men. Ian Fleming, a former intelligence officer for the British Navy, created a fictional alter ego named Bond. James Bond. Casino Royale, the novel introducing the stylish spy, appeared in a modest first printing of 4750 copies. In Chicago, Hugh Hefner, a former employee of Esquire magazine, launched playboy magazine. The first issue's print run was a modest 51,000 copies.

The fictional Bond was a man of sophisticated taste, a man who had not domesticated the rogue energy or wolfish charm that characterized men in the Forties. He was a product of WWII, a bachelor by circumstance and choice. He enjoyed women, fast cars, champagne and risk. Fleming had taken the idea of the adventure story and added the "advantages of expensive living."

Hef had taken the idea of a men's magazine and added style, stating in the first issue that he liked "mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex."

In 1959 Playboy took note of Bond in a review of Fleming's seventh novel, Goldfinger. The editors wrote to Fleming and commissioned a novella. In subsequent correspondence, Fleming admitted, "I'm sure that if he were an actual person, Bond would be a registered reader of Playboy." We gave Fleming a tour of Chicago when he was here doing research for his book The Wicked Cities. He dined at the Mansion. Hef and Fleming began a casual correspondence, discussing, among other topics, the wisdom of building a Playboy Club in hurricaneprone Jamaica. When Fleming's The Hildebrand Rarity appeared in the March 1960 issue, Playboy became the first American magazine to publish Bond. An alliance was born. (text concluded on page 168) Bonds Files(continued from page 84)

The Bond phenomenon received two more boosts. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy included From Russia With Love on a list of his 10 favorite books. (Some of the other titles? Melbourne by David Cecil, Montrose by John Buchan, Marlborough by Winston Churchill, John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis. None, you may notice, went on to become major Hollywood franchises.)

Dr. No hit the screen in 1962--the same week the Beatles released their first single. The sexual revolution had its first sex symbols.

Hef screened an early print of Dr. No at the Chicago Mansion and realized that he was watching the beginning of something special. He would soon commission a pictorial of Ursula Andress, beginning a five-decade celebration of Bond girls. But the magazine remained a friend of the paper Bond. Prior to book publication, a three-part serialization of On Her Majesty's Secret Service ran in April, May and June 1963, followed by The Property of a Lady in our tenth anniversary issue. You Only Live Twice ran in April, May and June 1964.

By that time, both Playboy and Fleming had become wildly popular. The magazine had sold more than 100 million copies while the Bond novels had sold some 30 million copies worldwide. Fleming sat for a Playboy Interview that appeared in December 1964, a few months after his death. We had lost a friend, but we continued to publish Fleming's stories, giving the world its first taste of The Man With the Golden Gun in 1965 and Octopussy in 1966.

Playboy and Bond came to symbolize Cold War cool, the swinging lifestyle of the Sixties. From the outset, Playboy and the movie Bond were linked in the public eye. We both liked gadgets and girls. A Bond movie was "Playboy magazine with a gun."

Playboy celebrated the new Bond with a special issue in November 1965, interviewing Connery and running a pictorial of Bond girls. Over the years there have been more than three dozen Bond-inspired features in the magazine. Readers came to associate each new Bond film with even more revealing pictorials of the girls in You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Never Say Never Again, Living Daylights and Tomorrow Never Dies. The fictional Bond eventually visited the Mansion in January 1999 in Raymond Benson's Midsummer Night'sDoom. We seemed to move in tandem. A critic for The Orange County Register noted: "Like swing dancing, cocktails and Playboy, James Bond has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the late Nineties."

And we know why. Playboy and Bond defined the male mystique for the latter half of the 20th century. Even that bastion of propriety, The Washington Post, noted that, above all else, Bond was about "sexual style." The clothes, the cars, the food, the gadgets, the girls, the wit, the sensual pleasure--these things matter. The enemy was not Spectre but ennui, conformity, the daily grind. Whom the gods would destroy, wrote Fleming, they first make bored.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of our collaboration with Bond. To celebrate, we put together this insider's guide to the Best of Bond. And we proudly present a look at Doubleshot, a new Bond novel by Raymond Benson.

From the outset, Playboy and Bond were linked in the public eye. We both liked gadgets and girls.