Backseat Boa Poem by gershon hepner

The father of Fleming, the author of Bond,
left on the backseat of a car that his wife
had lent him a boa because he was fond
of the feathers that pointed the way to wildlife.
The son loved the ladies as well, on his brain
so much sex that if Allah had sent him to heaven
he’d have heard very soon this great writer complain
he needed more virgins than Double-O-Seven.

John F. Burns writes about an Ian Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London (“Remembering Fleming, Ian Fleming, ” NYT, May 19,2008) :
Bond himself, Fleming said, was “a compound of all the secret agents and commandos I met during the war, ” but his tastes — in blondes, martinis “shaken, not stirred, ” expensively tailored suits, scrambled eggs, short-sleeved shirts and Rolex watches — were Fleming’s own. But not all the comparisons were ones the author liked to encourage. Bond, he said, had “more guts than I have” as well as being “more handsome.” And he was eager to discourage the idea that he had been as much of a Lothario as Bond before his marriage to Ann Rothermere, whom he wed in 1952, the year he wrote “Casino Royale.” But the exhibition suggests otherwise. A section of the show titled “Friends and Lovers” has one of a stable of prewar girlfriends, Mary Pakenham, saying of Fleming, “No one I know had sex so much on the brain as Ian.” And another entry records the disdain of Fleming’s mother, Evelyn St. Croix Fleming, widowed when Fleming’s father, Valentine, was killed at the front in World War I, after she found black boa feathers littered across the back seat of her chauffeur-driven Daimler on the morning after Fleming borrowed the car for a night out — and a backseat romp — with a nightclub dancer called Storm.


5/19/08