The Tastes Of James Bond: “007 In New York” And “Never Say Never Again”

The two James Bond subjects treated in this article are unrelated and therefore require being treated separately. The first is from a 1966 collection short stories entitled The Octopussy Collection that appeared after Ian Fleming’s death in 1964. (I’ve already written about both the story “Octopussy,” and the subsequent film.) The collection also includes “The Living Daylights,” whose title was used for a movie many years later (to be discussed in another article here), and “The Property of a Lady,” which never was. “007 in New York” is a tossed-off bit of memoir, with Bond musing about his favorite hotels and restaurants in New York.

The story was originally called “Reflections in a Carey Cadillac” and was first published in the NY Herald Tribune in October 1963.

The slim plot invoices Bond flying to New York to track down a British agent who is unwittingly sleeping with a KGB agent. 007 is to meet her at the Central Park Zoo’s Reptile House, but finds there is no such exhibit there and she does not show up.

While on the BOAC airliner to JFK in New York, Bond recalls the great fun he used to have at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem years before. Upon landing he checks into the Astor Hotel, originally built in 1905 and famous as a venue for New York’s social elite. It also appeared in the film The Clock. By 1966 the hotel had been sold and re-sold, that year for $10.5 million, but it was demolished a year later.

Bond preferred the hotel’s location near Times Square, where he liked going to the Automat and always laughed about the big BOND clothiers neon sign on Broadway. He has a martini at the ‛21’ Club (where he’d dined with Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever) then heads for lunch at the Grand Central Oyster Bar &

Restaurant, which opened in 1912 in the train terminal’s underbelly, where he intends to savor their famous oyster stew with a Miller High Life beer. But he finds the cavernous dining room to noisy, so, afterconsidering Chambord and Le Pavillon, he decides on lunch at the baronial Edwardian Room in the Plaza Hotel, where he has another martini, smoked salmon, Taittinger Brut Rosé Champagne and scrambled eggs (the recipe from his maid is provided), musing that “one could never tell with American food. As long as they got their steaks and sea-food right, the rest could go to hell.”

He plans to have dinner with a New York girlfriend named Solange at Lutèce, the city’s finest French restaurant of its day, then drinks with CIA agent Felix Leiter at the Embers nightclub.

The title for the film Never Say Never Again came from a remark actor Sean Connery’s wife Micheline made after years of his refusing to play Bond ever again. Roger Moore had already embraced the character as of 1967, and, now six years later, Bond was coaxed back into the role by other producers who got hold of the literary rights to Thunderball, which Connery had starred in in 1965, but not the right to use the title, so Never Say Never Again was used. As it turned out, Octopussy, which came out the same year, was a far better Bond flick than Never, which suffered from cheap production values and weak script. Connery looked like he was phoning it in.

Never Say Never Again follows the Thunderball novel’s plot to a large extent, though it differs greatly from the earlier film, both of which begins with 007 being forced to check into Shrublands Clinic by M, who contends Bond’s skills are being compromised by too much “white bread, red meat and dry martinis,” to which Bond replies, “Well, I suppose I can cut out the white bread, sir.”

Once checked in and having been told of the clinic’s strict diet of bland health foods, Bond breaks open a suitcase full of Russian sevruga caviar, Georges Bruck foie gras, Absolut vodka and Château Cheval Blanc

While there, he spies on a beautiful nurse named Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera) beating a patient whose face is bandaged. Blush sends an assassin named Lippe to kill Bond, who, after a savage fight, blinds the man by throwing a beaker of Bond’s urine sample at the man.

Blush works for SPECTRE, run by Ernst Stavro Blofield (Max von Sydow), who has plans to steal atomic warheads in order to extort billions from NATO. Bond follows a lead to the Bahamas, checking into the British Colonial Hilton Hotel and goes to its Gazebo Barfor a martini, where Fatima Blush sweeps onto the beach and splashes Bond, saying she hopes she didn’t get him too wet. Bond responds, “Yes, but my martini’s still dry.”

He also meets Domino Petachi (Kim Basinger), lover of Maximilian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), SPECTRE’s top agent.

Bond then heads for Nice, where Blush also arrives at a café on Villefranche-sur-Mer. Bond finds that Largo is hosting a gala event at the Casino Royale (actually the Casino de Monte-Carlo, also used in Dr. No), and he crashes the party, where he and Largo play a 3-D video game called Domination that 007 wins. After a car and motorcycle chase, Bond is captured by Blush, who forces Bond to declare in writing that she was his “Number One” sexual partner. Bond responds, “Well, there was this girl in Philadelphia once. . .” then kills Blush with his poison fountain pen.

Invited aboard Largo’s yacht, the Flying Saucer, Bond finds Domino, and attempts to make Largo jealous by kissing her; they are captured and brought to Palmyra, Largo’s North African base of operations. 007 escapes and rescue Domino, and they find the first warhead, then search for the other at the Tears of Allah, below a desert oasis in Ethiopia. In an underwater battle, Largo is shot and killed by Domino with a speargun, Bond finds the bomb and defuses it. He returns with Domino to the Bahamas, sipping tropical cocktails. where he declares to her never again to work as a secret agent.