| Image Click on image to see it at a higher resolution |
|
|
|
Click here for complete *.pdf version of "Discovered: James Bond's Rolex," WatchTime (February 2009), by Dell Deaton |
Fleming, too, had many watches. Photographs from the 1950s show him variously wearing a half-dozen-or-so nondescript wristwatches, mostly on straps. None stands out. This parallels the attitude of his character through the period as well. I don’t suggest that Fleming treated his own watches as disposable (as his alter-ego certainly does). But Fleming heirs told me last summer that his Explorer I is the only wristwatch known to have survived him.
Some Bond aficionados insist that Rolex is established as the definitive “James Bond watch” in Live and Let Die (1954). I don’t think so. When Fleming settled on a brand, he tended to either repeat it or clearly label its replacement. We don’t simply read about locks, we read about Yale locks, again and again, in multiple novels. James Bond drives a Bentley or an Aston Martin or a Thunderbird, a specific car, as opposed to any car we might imagine.
That’s not the case with the 1954 Rolex. After Live and Let Die, almost a decade passed before Fleming gave Bond another Rolex. In the meantime, Fleming hadn’t forgotten the brand, since “a solid gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual Chronometer on a flexible gold bracelet” features prominently as a bad guy’s watch seven novels later, in Thunderball. (This Rolex becomes a “James Bond watch” of sorts, since Agent 007 puts it on his own wrist after removing it from the villain’s dead body.)
