Vanity Modern: happy days in the tourist playgrounds of Miami and Havana

Ian Fleming's recently-opened Floridiana Hotel, in Miami Beach, where James Bond's client, Mr Junius du Pont, ‘promise[s] to make [him] comfortable’, was correctly matched in the film adaptation ofGoldfingerwith Morris Lapidus's Modernist Fontainebleau Hotel (1952–54) rather than with Miami's Mediterranean-style Hotel Floridian. Fleming was not enthusiastic about the architecture of the most expensive hotel in the world (at the time of its opening), nor about its ‘rich and dull’ gardens. He obviously chose it as a representation of the ‘easy, soft, high’ life of 1959 in Miami, and as the perfect setting for a gathering of American millionaires and secret agents, gamblers, gangsters, hitmen and prostitutes.

Directly below Bond['s Aloha Suite], the elegant curve of the Cabana Club swept down to the beach – two storeys of changing-rooms below a flat roof dotted with chairs and tables and an occasional red and white striped umbrella. Within the curve was the brilliant green oblong Olympic-length swimming-pool fringed on all sides by row upon row of mattressed steamer chairs on which the customers would soon be getting their fiftydollar-a-day sunburn.

The evening before, Bond had ‘the most delicious meal […] in his life’, at the most expensive restaurant of Miami. But the thought of ‘eating like a pig […] the easy life, the rich life revolted him. He felt momentarily ashamed of his disgust […] It was the puritan in him that couldn't take it'. It was also Fleming's nod to his readers, barely out of the grim austerity of postwar Britain, where food was rationed until 1954, bombsites abounded, housing was severely substandard or temporary, smog was thick and yellow, and wartime shortages lingered to the end of the decade. Despite Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's optimistic 1957 assurance to his fellow Conservatives that most of them had ‘never had it so good’, outside lavatories and no central heating were still common. His calls for ‘restraint and common sense’ were hardly answered by Bond's life of oyster-and-champagne dining and air-conditioned vacationing.