‘To be Bond or to bed him?’

‘James Bond is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like between her sheets’. Over six decades, this assertion has become received wisdom. But it turns out we’ve been lied to the whole time…

Cover art for 2002 edition of On Her Majesty’s Secrte Service by Richie Fahey, his copyright

To be Bond or to bed him? That is the question. Actually, more of a statement, one that does not invite debate of any kind. 

‘James Bond is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like between her sheets’.

This pithy sentence (with textual variants) has followed around the character of James Bond for the majority of his existence - since 1963 in fact - indicating that there must be a kernel of truth in it. But just because something sounds like an aphorism doesn’t mean it contains a great deal of wisdom.

My Pan edition of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (originally my dad’s)

I first encountered this isolated sentence as a thirteen year old, on the back of a Fleming novel - one of my dad’s Pan paperback editions. Even then I found the phrase irksome, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Was it merely because, being a gay man, I was irritated by any attempt to frame sexual desire towards men as something exclusive to women? 

What if I wanted Bond between my sheets? 

For the record, I didn’t. Of the two options, I have always been more inclined towards wanting to be Bond than to bed him. But this single sentence seemed to shut down so many possibilities for others - and not just those related to the bedroom.

Even by the introspective teenager standards, I was an overthinker. So teenage me took this innocuous-looking declarative and pondered: is the appeal of the character really as limited as this Raymond guy (whoever he is) makes it out to be? 

Do we really just return again and again to James Bond because he sates - for as long as we’re reading or watching along - our unfulfilled desires? 

Is Bond a kind of panacea for whatever shortcomings we’re facing in our personal lives, whether these be financial, physical, sexual or otherwise? 

Is Bond a fictional compensation prize for real lives which are fundamentally compromised? 

Worse still, is Bond a sort of ‘opium of the masses’, pacifying a population into accepting their lot instead of trying to improve it?!

Alongside reading Fleming, I was becoming obsessed with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four at the time, which probably explains a lot. That I was able to get all of this from a single sentence on the back of a paperback novel, slapped on there by a publisher in the hopes of flogging a few more books, tells you something about my parlous mental state.

So yes, I was depressed and overly prone to rumination as a thirteen year old. But the strange thing is, three decades later and in a significantly healthier mental space, I find myself getting even more triggered by this stupid phrase! It really brings out the moody adolescent in me. 

I find it especially depressing that it perpetuates the myth that Bond satisfies desires demarcated impermeably (and binarily) along gendered lines. This is simply a fallacy. In the intervening decades since I first encountered this sentence on the back of a paperback, I have gotten to know plenty of women who would much rather be James Bond than share his bed - and plenty of men for who being Bond holds less appeal than finding out what he’s like between the sheets. And plenty of people for whom it’s more of an ‘either’ than it is an ‘or’ situation.

So isn’t it time we retired this hoary phrase, a relic of an earlier age and one that never really held water in the first place?

Apparently not. You would think in the ostensibly-more-enlightened age we’re living in that the quote would carry less currency. But as recently as 2024, the media release for a documentary about the life and loves of Bond actor Roger Moore began with:

“‘Bond is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.’ So said Raymond Chandler - and it's certainly true of Roger Moore.” (BBC, 2024)

There’s so much wrong about this, it’s difficult to know where to start. Not only did it grossly - and lazily - oversimplify the complex life of a real person by conflating him with just one of the fictional characters he portrayed, but it’s also factually incorrect. Here, the sentence is attributed to Raymond Chandler, who never said it. This mistake has even been printed on paperback editions of the Bond novels, such as the 2002 edition of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This is the one with the stunning Roseanne Serra/Richie Fahey cover, which even an erroneous citation cannot blemish.

2022 Penguin edition

An even shorter version of the ‘Chandler’ quote! Women don’t even warrant a mention…

Perhaps the misattribution to Raymond Chandler persists because Chandler’s fictions have persisted. Screen adaptations of his works almost always fall short compared with the books but they are perennially popular, especially The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. The adjective ‘Chandleresque’ gets applied to anything which emulates his style, which is not a million miles away from Fleming’s. The ‘be him/bed him’ sentence does sound like dialogue that might emanate from the mouth of Philip Marlowe.

But neither he, nor his creator, said it. 

Instead, the sentence originates with another Raymond… One who had his fair amount of fame in his lifetime but who is far less of a household name than Chandler these days: Raymond Mortimer CBE (real name Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer) to be exact, who was the critic and literary editor of The Sunday Times. 

Edward Biddulph alerted me to Mortimer being the true source of the ‘be him/bed him’ quote. He has his own theory: “I… wonder whether the error in attribution occurred simply from the confusion of both writers being called Raymond.” What really interests Biddulph is the way the inaccurate quotation has “become a meme in its own right, being spread and replicated without reference to the original source.”

Mortimer coined the phrase in his March 1963 review of Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Mortimer was very complimentary about the newest Fleming novel, declaring it to be “one of his best”. Mortimer was a Fleming fan who put him on a par with his American contemporaries - including Raymond Chandler - all of who had “perfected the streamlined, up-to-date thriller”.

Moreover, Mortimer was a massive Bond fan - but one with a more nuanced appreciation of the character’s appeal than the ‘bed him/be him’ quotation might lead us to believe.

The line appears exactly midway through the review.

What’s surprising - to anyone overly-familiar with hearing ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets’ is that Mortimer doesn’t stop there. There’s a ‘but’ and it’s a big one:

“But only in their daydreams: few men would really welcome a life so dangerous and so isolated (Bond has neither family nor friends); and few women could stay with a lover so cold-hearted and self-centred.”

The first time I read the full paragraph I felt like I’d been lied to for decades: lied to by omission. Did the first publisher to omit this half of Mortimer’s thoughts about Bond’s appeal think about the consequences? In full, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you could use to sell more paperbacks. No wonder it’s been excerpted whenever it has been used for this purpose.

What’s really weird about all this is marketeers being so keen to employ any part phrase at all. Would they be so eager to do so if they knew more about the man who did say it?

Raymond Mortimer was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, a London-based group of writers, artists, and intellectuals. We remember them today as much for their unconventional sex lives as much as their cultural output. We might apply labels such as ‘polyamorous’ to the intricately connected sexual and romantic relationships between many of the members, which certainly challenged the heteronormative conventions of the opening decades of the 20th Century.

Among Mortimer’s lovers was Eddy Sackville-West, twice second cousin of Vita Sackville-West. Vita was a muse and lover of Bloomsbury core-member Virginia Woolf. According to some sources, Raymond and Eddy were “life-long friends”, although their letters show they were most definitely - in modern parlance - ‘friends with benefits’.

Edward ('Eddy') Sackville-West; Raymond Mortimer by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 14-16 June 1923 © National Portrait Gallery, London (Creative Commons Licence)

I now find the overly simplistic, reductive, gender-deterministic ‘be him/bed him’ sentence to be doubly ironic. Firstly, because it’s more often than not attributed to the wrong person. Secondly, because the man who did say it was maybe wanting to bed Bond more than be him.

In his doctoral thesis, academic Mark Armstrong relates how Raymond and his ‘fwb’ Eddy joined many upper class London-based gays in escaping the increasingly repressive capital for havens of sexual freedom. In the 1920s, Portsmouth was the place to be, before the action moved down the coast to Brighton in the 1930s. 1920s Portsmouth was, in Armstrong’s words, a “Mecca for gay men”. Why did the gays take so many trips to Portsmouth? Throughout history, men in the armed services have sought to supplement their incomes - as well as satisfy their desires - by taking jobs on the side as ‘trade’. And Portsmouth was, quite simply, heaving with seamen. Even today, two thirds of the Royal Navy surface fleet (not including submarines) have Portsmouth as their home base. In the 1920s, it was similarly busy with ships coming and going.

Thus, in short, Raymond Mortimer loved a sailor. 

For me this puts a new spin on the ‘be him/bed him’ quote, the one that still follows Bond around like a bad odour and which has irked me for most of my life. Somehow, knowing the quote’s full provenance takes the sting out of it.

As Bond fans, we often project parts of ourselves onto the characters, particularly Bond himself. Did Mortimer enjoy On Her Majesty’s Secret Service so much because he, despite being a gay man, could connect with the character?

It’s a possibility. 

Was Mortimer secretly turned on by Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R. and put himself in the role of the woman when formulating his famous explanation of the appeal of 007? Rather than wanting to be like Bond, might Mortimer have preferred the Royal Navy Reserve Volunteer between his sheets?

It’s another possibility.

Opening up possibilities is something the Bond series does brilliantly. I used to think the ‘be him/bed him’ line shut down more than it opened up. But if we quote Mortimer’s words in full, they have the opposite effect: Yes, Mortimer makes the case for Bond being a source of wish fulfilment. But he also alerts us to the limitations of Bond’s fantasy life, reminding us that desire can co-exist with what we already have. We can have it all: we can be like Bond, we can bed people like Bond… and we can also not take for granted the parts of our lives that James Bond will never be able to access.

References

Armstrong, Mark (2012) The Quentin Kind: visual narrative and The Naked Civil Servant. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

Biddulph, E. (2012) ‘What Raymond Chandler Didn’t Say’ James Bond Memes JamesBondMemes.com Available at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/2012/07/

Although I don’t go into this much in my piece, Edward points out that not only is the quote attributed to the wrong person but it’s often repeated incorrectly, with different wording to the Mortimer original.

Tamagne, F. (2006) A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939. New York: Algora Publishing.

Something else that didn’t make the cut of this particular article because it was too tangenital… When looking through Florence Tamagne’s book for material about Mortimer I found that Mortimer knew William Plomer, Fleming’s friend and editor of the Bond novels. This is hardly surprising considering both were gay men of letters. Quite how well they knew each other is uncertain. Plomer wasn’t terribly enamoured of the Bloomsbury set. But they were comfortable enough in each other’s company to attend the same lesbian house parties.

Thanks to Tom Mason for his help with The Times article.