Foreword by Fiona MacCarthy O.B.E.Robert Harling, Man of Mystery Who was Robert Harling? The author of this wonderfullycandid memoir of his great friend Ian Fleming was wellknown in his day as a typographer and type designer, architectural critic, advertising executive and a notably long-servingeditor of House & Garden back in the great era of the glossy magazines.Harling, a handsome and rather raffish character, who stalkedaround Mayfair in a black fedora, was a key figure in mid-twentieth centurygraphic design. He makes an appearance in The Spy WhoLoved Me as the expert compositor on the Chelsea Clarion . There areelements of Harling that are clearly recognisable in Fleming''s creationof the character of Bond. Through two decades of close malecamaraderie, which started in wartime naval intelligence, Harling andFleming shared a multitude of esoteric interests, including an intrepidfascination with sex.
Harling was a master of obfuscation. No one knew where he hadcome from. He romanticised his past. So much so that even I - afriend of his for forty years, veteran of countless intimate lunches atthe Causerie in Claridge''s (Robert''s favourite place for entertainingfemale friends) - swallowed the tale he told about his parents dyingyoung and Robert, as a boy, being brought up in Brighton by a familyfriend, whose husband was a dairyman. This was the account hegave in his semi-autobiographical novel Amateur Sailor , published(typically) under a pseudonym, Nicholas Drew. It only emerged later, after Robert''s death in 2008 at the age ofninety-eight, when I came to write his entry for the Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography , that both his parents had survived untilwell into their seventies. His father had been a taxi driver living innorth London. This was where the young ''Robbie'' was brought upand went to school.
He had also drawn a veil over the fact of his firstmarriage to a young drapery saleswoman named Mary Adelaide.Harling later became an accomplished thriller writer, but his toweringachievement was to fictionalise himself. When Harling first met Fleming in late summer 1939, just beforethe outbreak of the Second World War, he was already well establishedboth as a designer and a typographic entrepreneur. With hisfriend James Shand, Harling conceived and published an innovativespecialist graphics magazine. Instead of simply covering conventionalfine printing, Typography included lettering on every level. The firstissues, for instance, featured Kardomah tea labels; the second containedan analysis of train ticket typography. Harling''s eclectic tastesin typographical ephemera anticipated 1960s pop culture in a fascinatingway. Typography formed an immediate bond between the two men,when it emerged that Ian Fleming had subscribed to the magazineright from the beginning.
Fleming was, by then, already workingsurreptitiously in naval intelligence. He had been impressed by Harling''s''News-Reel Maps'' for the News Chronicle , a series of data mapsand captions containing information for the general public on likelyGerman invasion points in the coming war. Fleming recruited Robertto redesign the admiralty''s then lamentably dowdy Weekly IntelligenceReport over the first of what developed into a long series of convivialand confidential male-to-male lunch meetings, first at Scott''s andlater on at the Etoile. What I love about this memoir is the vivid sense it gives us of theburgeoning friendship between two witty, clever, sophisticated men,very different in background: Fleming, with his establishment valuesderived from Eton, Sandhurst, the City and the admiralty; Harling,working-class in origin, a self-invented man of charm, ambition andprofessional finesse. The two men shared a certain inner loneliness.War suited both of them. They both had a taste for action, an almostboyish longing for adventure and escapade. Harling, always a keen sailor, had volunteered for the navy in theearly days of war.
In May 1940, in charge of a whaler, he took partin the evacuation of Dunkirk. Promoted to a sub-lieutenant, he thenbecame the navigator of a Corvette, on convoy duty in the WesternApproaches. In 1941, conscious of his special talents, Fleming extractedRobert from the navy, recruiting him to work in the Inter-Services TopographicalDivision (ISTD). This department interacted closely withintelligence in collecting information on ports, beaches and other potentialenemy targets. It was something of a cloak-and-dagger operation.Harling''s far-flung foreign forays, travelling under cover, often toexotic places, gave scope for unlimited sexual liaisons. One of these waswith Andrée, Parisienne mistress of a ''Turkish bigwig'', encountered,Harling tells us, through eye-to-eye contact in an Istanbul café. Harling''sISTD travels and diversions, reported back to Fleming in suchnovelistic detail, have obvious parallels in Fleming''s fictional JamesBond.
Remember, it was Harling to whom Fleming first confided,over a wartime picnic of Calvados and rations in 1944, his intentionto write ''the spy novel to end all spy novels''. James Bond bears a distinctresemblance to Robert in his sardonic elegance of manner andhis cool sexual expertise. Robert talked of Fleming often, with affection and admiration. But,more than I had realised, Fleming played an increasingly influentialrole in Harling''s professional career. After ISTD, Fleming summonedhim to join 30 Assault Unit (30AU), the outfit referred to byRobert as ''Fleming''s Secret Navy'', formed to operate on the frontline at the end of the war to capture German codebooks, wirelessequipment and security documents before these could be destroyedby the retreating enemy. Harling became the unit''s expert on minesand minefields. It was also Ian Fleming who used his influence as foreign managerof the Sunday Times to get Robert appointed typographical consultantto the paper - a weekend job he doted on, adoring the dramas of theever-changing Saturday night front pages. The journalistic world ofpower politics enthralled him, and Robert''s Fleet Street thriller, ThePaper Palace (published in 1951), is the best of all his fiction, chillinglyobservant of the journalistic mores of the time.
Another Fleming introduction brought Harling to House & Garden ,the Condé Nast magazine based in Vogue House, which he ruledas a wonderfully autocratic editor from 1957 until 1993. It was here, ashis so-called merchandise editor in the 1960s, that I first got to knowRobert, who ran his small staff of mini-skirted young assistants like anamiable harem, extracting us one by one for lunch or coffee and a rundownon our sex lives. He never got the hang of feminism. Reading this memoir brings Robert Harling back to me in his gloriouslyrisqué, idiosyncratic wit. Whether the subject of discussionis gussetless knickers (a favourite of Harling''s) or sadomasochisticsex (Fleming seems to have liked it, Harling certainly does not),their recreated dialogue discussions, as Harling recollects them,are immensely entertaining. But more valuable still is Harling''sview of Fleming as the ''deeply ingrained melancholic'', who neverquite recovered from the death of his glamorous, devoted (althoughendlessly put-upon), chestnut-blonde girlfriend Muriel Wright.Muriel - Wren despatch-rider, crack polo-player, James Bond girlpersonified - was killed in one of the final doodlebug raids on Londonby a bomb descending on her elegant mews house. Harling shows all his novelist''s acumen in his account of IanFleming''s eventual marriage to ''Annie'', the socialite ex-wife of LordRothermere.
He watches with dismay and a growing fascination''the gradual dissolution of their early passion into their tragicallyquerulous relationship''. Fleming''s miseries stand in stark contrastto Harling''s own demonstrably happy marriage to Phoebe Konstam,a well-known Harley Street psychiatrist''s assistant, whom hespotted in Regent Street and later on accosted with his usual sexualaplomb in Leicester Square. Phoebe was a beautiful woman with a penchant for gold shoes.They lived in an exquisite eighteenth-century Gothic house in Surrey,hung with paintings by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden - RobertHarling''s friends. The Harlings had three children, Nicholas, Simonand Amanda, all of whom became writers. Robert carried on ''scribbling'',as he liked to call it, into his great old age. This memoir of Ian Fleming, Harling''s last substantial work, throwsnew light on the creator of 007, but I think it reveals just as much ofRobert Harling himself - that debonair and dashing, multi-talented,enchanting and extremely private man.