During World War II, Ernest Cuneo, a former NFL player who became America’s first WWII spy, visited Chicago with a close friend — James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
They’d become acquainted while Cuneo was working with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, and with Winston Churchill’s British spies at New York’s Rockefeller Center. They got to be close. Fleming even dedicated his Bond thriller “Thunderball” “to Ernest Cuneo, Muse.”
In his new book “The Invisible Spy” (HarperCollins / Hanover Square Press, $32.99), Thomas Maier — a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter whose previous books include “Masters of Sex,” which was turned into a hit Showtime series — writes about a Bond research trip across America that Fleming took with Cuneo, who by then was one of the investors in the North American Newspaper Alliance. In Chicago, they clashed about Al Capone and visited the Art Institute.
The following excerpt from Maier’s new biography of the first American secret agent of WWII details that Chicago stop with the man who brought the world the fictional British spy 007:
Aboard the sleek Super Chief train — hurtling through the Midwest — Ian Fleming wanted to get a sense of Chicago and the heartland, with his friend Ernest Cuneo as a guide.
Cuneo wasn’t a world chronicler like Alexis de Tocqueville or a traveling hipster like Jack Kerouac. But he’d promised to take his British novelist pal on this roadshow across America at his request, as if they were on some grand expedition.
“Fleming was at this time all but unknown,” Cuneo recalled. “He was, in his own words, ‘waffling about’ not even conceiving remotely of the fame to come.”
On this November 1954 ride, with a notebook in hand, Fleming wrote down as many insights as possible, background notes for future James Bond escapades in his novels and movies. As always, he was a stickler for details.
“We were halfway to Iowa before the Super Chief’s stewards had fully absorbed their instructions on how to make his martinis,” Cuneo said, recalling Fleming’s routines. “He was off at every stop through New Mexico and Arizona, talking to the men serving the train, walking briskly around the desert architecture stations, taking mental photographs by the score.”
The year before, Fleming’s first novel, “Casino Royale,” enjoyed some initial success in Britain. His new novel, “Live and Let Die,” had just been published, and his third in the Bond series, “Moonraker,” would come out in 1955. But sales in America were so far disappointing.
Like a good intelligence officer, Fleming resolved to improve in this foreign land through more reconnaissance.
“I would love to see Las Vegas and then perhaps the Hollywood world very briefly,” Fleming wrote to Cuneo, two months before they departed. “I would also very much like to make the trans-continental trip by train in the luxury to which you and I are accustomed and then perhaps fly back. What do you think of all of this?”
Fleming was aware of Cuneo’s pressing business matters at home but argued the trip would pay personal dividends. “It would take you away from your desk for about 10 days and I wondered if you can spare the time to chaperone me. I do hope so, as my education is now only incomplete with respect to the West Coast of America.”
It wasn’t a hard bargain. Though now married with two small children, Cuneo was only too delighted to reunite with his wartime spy buddies, Fleming and Ivar Bryce, for an extended holiday. They rallied at Bryce’s Vermont home near the Saratoga Springs racetrack, where Ivar’s wife owned and raced thoroughbred horses. From there, Fleming and Cuneo journeyed to Chicago, as the first step in their sightseeing tour.
For many Brits, the Windy City was known as the land of Al Capone. Churchill famously posed for a much-publicized photo holding a Tommy gun, just like the notorious mobster. When Fleming arrived with Cuneo, he expressed eagerness to visit one particular site on Chicago’s North Side.
“Off we go to America’s great shrine — the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre!” Fleming yelped, joyously like a kid.
Cuneo didn’t share his enthusiasm. He and other respectable Italian Americans he’d known, like Fiorello LaGuardia, resented this gangland slur, implying that anyone with their shared heritage was somehow a Mafia criminal. Cuneo recalled that Fleming “at once discerned that he had something in mind that would infuriate me.”
Cuneo refused the offer to visit. “Not me,” he growled. He insisted Fleming go by himself if he must pay homage to this mob shootout scene. “But before you do, let’s drop in at a little place they have here.”
They visited the Chicago Art Institute, home to a large collection of Impressionist and other paintings comparable to the Louvre’s. Cuneo wanted to make sure Fleming knew the Midwest wasn’t entirely made up of cowboys and hicks.
“Fleming was entranced, completely enveloped by the masterpieces,” Cuneo recalled. More so than Ernie, Ian gazed at the Rembrandts and Picassos with genuine appreciation.
He commented on the artistry in hushed, reverent tones as though in a cathedral.
“He forgot St. Valentine’s,” Cuneo recalled. “I almost had to drag him out.”
Out on the street, though, Fleming’s “enchantment evaporated… He went to the St. Valentine’s scene — alone.”
The long ride out West aboard the Super Chief — touted as “the Train of the Stars” because of the celebrities it carried out to Hollywood — provided a place for the two friends to converse. Although they were business partners in their North American Newspaper Alliance syndicate, most of their talk centered on personal affairs. As both men acknowledged, Ian’s life was certainly more complicated than Ernie’s.
Marriage was now part of the equation. Fleming had wed socialite Ann Charteris in 1952, shortly after he finished Casino Royale. “After being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off of it — so I wrote a book,” Fleming later explained, seemingly in jest.
Since the late 1930s, the couple had carried on a longtime on-and-off affair while Ann was married to one man, then another. In 1944, Ann’s first husband, Lord Shane O’Neill, died while fighting in Italy during the war. She then married Lord Rothermere, Esmond Harmsworth, the owner of London’s Daily Mail, who’d also been her surreptitious lover. But that second union ended in divorce in 1951, when Rothermere realized she was seeing Fleming in Jamaica rather than British entertainer Noël Coward.
Though admittedly incompatible, Ann married Ian while she was pregnant by Fleming and they moved in together in London. Their only child, Caspar, was born in August 1952, a month before Cuneo’s son, Jonathan, arrived. The two pals had vowed jokingly during the war that whoever sired a son first would call him Caspar. The uncommon name was an obscure reference to a poem, “The Battle of Blenheim,” about a famous victory won by Churchill’s ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.
Ian made good on the bet. His marriage, though, didn’t fare as well.
“By almost any count, the Flemings’ marriage was ill-fated from the first,” Cuneo said years later. “There is evidence that Anne [sic] and Ian did not drift apart; they tore each other apart instead.”
Yet during their train ride, Fleming spoke of his new family with hopefulness.
“I think it is possible that Ian carried the image of the ideal damsel throughout his life, and found his adult ideal in Anne,” Cuneo wrote, “that Anne was the ideal superwoman, the super-sophisticate, the toast of Mayfair.”
Cuneo wondered how much of James Bond’s extravagant sexual conquests were a reflection of Fleming’s real life. Growing up in puritanical New Jersey, Cuneo had been taught “that evil ‘thoughts’ were as bad as evil ‘deeds.’ ” During World War II, Cuneo had met wife Margaret who also worked as a Churchill spy at New York’s Rockefeller Center, just like his British pal Fleming. But Cuneo’s marriage reflected more the postwar desire for domestic tranquility of the 1950s than the sexual callousness James Bond exhibited toward bikini-clad single women in the 1960s films.
“What came to Bond’s mind, I assure him, would be the last to enter mine, or in fact, anyone I knew or had ever known,” Cuneo told his friend. But Fleming simply laughed. To him, Bond was a creative concoction, not to be taken too seriously. He spoke with detachment about his fictional spy, the way a scientist might talk about constructing a human robot.
Both men shared a carpe diem perspective about the world. As young men during the war, they had witnessed tragedy and impending doom. Like passengers on a sinking ship, they assumed their existence would be short. “You might just as well have a hell of a time while the voyage lasted,” Cuneo said, summarizing their view, “grinding out the juice of each day as if it were the last grape on the vine.”
The tour around America — from Chicago to Los Angeles and then the casinos of Las Vegas — proved a success for both men. “Ian used a lot of the material he gathered in his next book,” Cuneo said. Fleming explained to him his formula for novel writing, which relied on eight hundred words of notes and observations each day for his next work.
“Figure it out for yourself,” he told Cuneo. “At the end of a year, I have about 250 or 300 of these daily memos, and when I go down to Jamaica, I weave them into a book.”
Days after his arrival home, Cuneo received a gift from Fleming: a small plain gold bill-clip, a memento of their quest together. Engraved into the metal, Fleming’s inscription read as though written by James Bond himself:
“To Ernie — my guide on a trip to the Angels and back.
007.”
