Or Not Quite Ready to Leave the Nest
I was in high school when I first read Ian Fleming’s Incredible Creation, a cheap paperback which reached the book racks of corner drugstores just in time to cash in on the Bond Bandwagon, a few months after Fleming’s death. The book consisted of two parts, an essay by Jacquelyn Friedman and an introductory memoir penned by Paul Antony, a man sometimes described as Ian Fleming’s occasional drinking partner.
In Paul Antony’s view, the death of Fleming’s father when Ian was only eight years old may have stunted the boy’s emotional development. As evidence, Antony cited an occasion when he had noticed the adult Ian “reading a boy’s comic with obvious enjoyment.” Of course the 14-year-old version of me wanted to know which comic book he was reading, because one candidate had immediately popped into my head: Walt Disney’s “Uncle Scrooge.”
By that age I had already come across the reference to Walt Disney squirreled away in the pages of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, though I had not yet read You Only Live Twice where a mention of Disney’s California amusement park lay waiting. Several more years would pass before I would learn about the connection between Fleming’s friend Roald Dahl and the Disney organization, or Fleming’s fear that someone might connect the flying car in Disney’s Absent-Minded Professor with his own Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
However, a year earlier I had read Goldfinger, in which the vertically-challenged villain pours out his heart to James Bond:
Mr. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.
I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat.
And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup.
If Auric Goldfinger’s ode to gold invites comparison with any other confession in modern literature it is surely the credo of Scrooge McDuck:
No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while!
And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And toss it up and let it hit me on the head!
If they had been been published in reverse order, I would be tempted to call Uncle Scrooge’s speech a lampoon of Goldfinger’s.
And make no mistake, it wasn’t just money of any stripe that Scrooge McDuck coveted - it was the golden kind. By the time Fleming’s novel Goldfinger rolled off the presses, Uncle Scrooge had gone “Back to the Klondike,” sought “The Seven Cities of Cibola,” escaped a “Golden Fleecing,” and pointed a rocket ship at a “Twenty-Four Carat Moon.”
Scrooge kept his golden hoard in a concrete money bin which was in constant peril of being robbed by a gang of cartoonish criminals known as the Beagle Boys. The Beagles were a clan of single-minded recidivists, repeatedly paroled or otherwise on the loose from the criminal justice system, who were forever drawn to Scrooge’s money bin like moths to a searchlight.
While there was no real-world Uncle Scrooge in possession of a squat gray structure containing heaps of gold, there was a certain Uncle Sam who was widely known to keep one.
For his breakout thriller, From Russia, With Love, Fleming had adapted Disney’s 1950 Cinderella as a spy thriller, spliced to an even more sinister version of the climax of “Sleeping Beauty.” His follow-up, Doctor No, was essentially Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, rethought as a jailbreak from an island prison instead of a submarine, with a side-order of Green Mansions and scraps from Robert Graves's The Greek Myths.
After tapping two Disney movies in succession to energize his latest Bond thrillers, Fleming may have decided to search out a different category of Disney property for his follow-up, although, as George Lucas pointed out in a preface to Uncle Scrooge: His Life and Times, Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge stories very nearly were movies, or at least storyboards for movies.
They have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and operate in scenes, unlike other comic strips and books. Barks’s stories don’t just move from panel to panel - they flow in sequences - sometimes several pages long, that lead to new sequences.
Imagine Uncle Scrooge summoning the Beagle Boys to help him knock over Uncle Sam’s gold reserves, and you could have Fleming’s elevator pitch for Goldfinger, and perhaps one reason why Pussy Galore’s code name for Auric Goldfinger is “uncle.”
After all, Fleming wasn’t just writing novels by this time, but novels intended to be turned into movies, which was where the real golden treasure lay waiting to be discovered.