It wasn’t until recently that I discovered that film director Jack Bond had died at the age of 87 on December 21st, 2024. It was a shock, because I had last spoken to him a couple of months ago on the phone, and he seemed as irrepressible as ever. We said we would meet up soon, but soon never came.
I first met him back in the mid-nineties, when researching a short story for Esquire. It was about “Williams” the man who won the inaugural Monaco GP in 1929 and who later became a Special Operations Executive operative in wartime France, alongside two other talented race drivers – Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille.
I had begun my research by contacting Gervaise Cowell, the SOE Advisor to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, an archivist role, SOE itself having been wrapped up with possibly undue haste at the end of WW2. Frustratingly, the files I obtained were heavily redacted. At the time I thought Cowell was simply being wilfully obstructive, although after his death in 2000 I discovered that he was something of a Smiley figure – he had been Our Man in Moscow in the early sixties. I think secrecy was in his blood.
One day Valerie, who was Cowell’s assistant in the SOE office, called and told me someone else, a Jack Bond, was researching the same resistance circuit, at which my heart sank. (In fact, there were three of us – Joe Saward, whose non-fiction The Grand Prix Saboteurs book on the drivers is highly recommended – was already taking an interest.) Valerie offered me Jack Bond’s name and number. I rang him and he invited me to his office near the British Museum.
Somehow (that word features a lot in any account of Jack’s career), somehow he had managed to persuade a well-known hotel chain to open a film division, with him in charge, and they funded the offices. The company’s first project was to be Early Morning, named after a painting by William Orpen, who was a character in the real-life story of Williams (in reality William Grover-Williams) and his wife Yvonne. It quickly became modified to Early One Morning.
At that meeting Jack and I discussed the story. I had been chatting to Peter Howarth, my editor on Esquire, and had told him about my difficulties in extracting the exact facts from SOE. “Make it up,” he said. “we’ll publish it as fiction.” Which I did, and it appeared in Esquire as The Man with One Name. Jack wanted to do something similar but didn’t have a script. Would I write it?
I had never tackled a sceenplay before, but Jack had, of course – he had a long string of successful projects behind him.
What was he like? At that first encounter, he reminded me of a cross between Terence Stamp, Richard Harris and Ian McShane in Lovejoy (Jack loved a leather jacket). There was a disarming, almost rogue-ish charm and a sophistication about him that made you happy to be in his company. He was also a born storyteller, most of them tales drawn from a life well lived. There was always the feeling that here was a man who had enjoyed a rich and varied life, both creatively and personally, and that yours was somewhat dull in comparison.
An accountant at the hotel company eventually asked Why have we got a film division? Good question. So, the offices and financing disappeared. But we did write a script and its fate became another picaresque story among the many that dotted Jack’s life. It was bought by Granada Film who subsequently went bust – not because of how much they paid us, but due to the poor performance of several of its films. We went into the dreaded turn-around. At one point Jack phoned me and told me he had sold it on to an Irish film company that had never made a film. And, as it turned out, never would.
Frustrated at the lack of progress, I decided, with Jack’s blessing, to combine the short story with some plot points from the script and produce a novel, also called Early One Morning. It was my fourth book, and the first to become a Sunday Times bestseller. I still get calls asking to option it as a movie and I have to explain that, thanks to its chequered history, it comes with some baggage.
Jack carried on making films and I carried on writing books, but we would meet now and again to discuss ways to revive the project and Jack never lost the ability to surprise me. I remember us drinking a coffee on Wardour Street when an elegant 1960s Bentley glided by. “I used to have one of those,” Jack said. “When?” I asked. “When I was a millionaire,” came the reply.
But that’s another story for another time. Goodbye, Jack.
*The picture of Jack was taken by his partner, cinematographer and photographer Mary-Rose Storey
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