What the Hell is a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?

I suppose we should start the story with Felix Leiter, the C.I.A. secret agent who was a close friend with Bond, James Bond.  Felix Letter started the whole ball rolling.

This is kind of a fuzzy start, since Felix Leiter doesn’t actually exist:  he is a creation of the writer, Ian Fleming, but Fleming created the character and named him after two close friends:  Felix was the middle name of Ivar Bryce and Leiter was the surname of Marion Oates Leiter.  This was a friendly gesture and would probably have been completely forgotten if weren’t for the fact that Marion Leiter was also a close friend of John and Jackie Kennedy.

Fleming recycled a lot of names in his books, naming characters after people, places and events throughout his life.  He wrote all of the Bond books at Goldeneye, his Jamaican beach house, which was named for…no, not the book…for Operation Golden Eye from World War II.  As a British intelligence officer, Fleming had been in charge of a secret plan to install spies throughout Spain in the case it fell under Nazi control.  (If you are wondering about the origin of the name James Bond, he was the author of Fleming’s favorite book on birds of the Caribbean.  And the German code name for the Zimmerman Telegram during World War I was 0070.)

In March of 1960, Ian Fleming came to Washington D.C. to visit Marion Leiter and while she was driving him around Georgetown showing him the sighs, she spotted John and Jacquelyn Kennedy out for an afternoon walk.  As she was already scheduled to have dinner with the couple at their home that night, on impulse she stopped the car and asked then Senator Kennedy if she could bring a friend to dinner, introducing Fleming to the future president.

“James Bond?” said Kennedy, “But of course, by all means—do please come.”

It turned out that Kennedy was a fan of Ian Fleming and enjoyed reading his novels.  It was Leiter, in fact, who had first given him one of Fleming’s novels, Casino Royale, to read while he was recovering from back surgery.  The chance introduction on the streets of Washington would lead to a lasting friendship between the two men.  When President Kennedy publicly recommended the novel From Russia With Love in 1961, stating it was one his favorite books, sales of the book in the United States skyrocketed, eventually making Fleming one of the top selling authors in the United States, and attracting the interest of Hollywood.

The friendship was relatively short, but Fleming did reciprocate the publicity gift Kennedy had given him.  In his novel The Spy Who Loved Me, the author has Bond stating that the world needs more leaders like Kennedy.  Kennedy remained a fan of Flemings work—the last movie he watched was the From Russia With Love, and the night before his assassination, as he rested in the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, he relaxed by reading Fleming’s latest novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

In The Man With a Golden Gun, the first Bond book written after Kennedy’s assassination, the book opens with Bond relaxing with a glass of bourbon while reading Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

When the Bond books took off in America, several things happened all at once.  First, Fleming became the top crime writer in America.  Second, Hollywood signed Fleming to a five movie deal, and third, Fleming suffered a heart attack.  At the top of his career, Fleming had to stay home and recuperate.

Fleming didn’t have the closest relationship with his son, Caspar, and while he was resting, his son told him one day, “You like James Bond more than you like me.”  Chastened, Fleming feverishly embellished a bedtime story he used to tell his son—who he nicknamed 003-and-a-half—and finished his only book for children, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car.  Unfortunately, the book came out two months after Fleming’s death from a second heart attack.

By the time the book came out, the Bond movie franchise was firmly established by Albert R. Broccoli, an American movie producer who produced the Bond films in Great Britain, with American financing.  It was largely the reception of American audiences that turned James Bond into an enduring franchise.  Broccoli had found success with Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, so it was only natural for Broccoli to be interested in making a film from Fleming’s latest book.

Purchasing the rights to the book, Broccoli hired Roald Dahl, who had written the screenplay for You Only Live Twice, to work with director Ken Hughes to produce a screenplay from the children’s book.  The writers shortened the title and substantially changed the plot, adding a female lead named Truly Scrumptious, in honor of the outrageously named female characters Fleming had written into his Bond books. 

The movie had more than a few connections to the Bond films.  John Stears, who had designed Bond’s Aston Martin (along with all sorts of other machines—from Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder and the iconic Jedi lightsabers to R2D2—was hired to supervise special effects.  Ken Adam, the set designer for the Bond film, designed the true hero of the film, the car.

Actually, six of the cars were built, only one of which actually functioned on the road.  Though a stick shift is visible, actually the car had an automatic transmission as Dick Van Dyke, the star of the movie, did not know how to operate a manual transmission.  Today, the car is owned by director Peter Jackson, who used to chauffeur the actors of The Hobbit around New Zealand in the vehicle while a sound system installed in the trunk would play the theme song from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.  (And I bet that obnoxious music is mentally playing in your head right now.  NASA used the music—ONCE—as the wakeup song for the International Space Station.  The astronauts threatened to take the station to a different planet.)

The movie was not exactly a great success, losing money at the box office and receiving poor marks from the critics.  Recently, three sequels of the book were released, and a musical by the same name had a brief run.  But, neither the books nor the movie answer a fundamental question:  What the hell is a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?

When asked, Ian Fleming said that he needed his heroic car to produce a distinctive sound, so he had named it after the race cars of the 1920’s built by Count Louis Zborowski and his engineer Clive Gallop.  While the count was one of the richest men in the world and thus able to finance his hobby, Gallop was a former fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force.  The first of three cars to be named Chitty-Bang-Bang, was fitted with an air-cooled Maybach aircraft engine (the oversized exhaust pictured was a phony to confuse the competition) and was unbelievably loud—so much so that the village of Canterbury passed an ordnance that Count Zborowski, whose workshop was nearby, was prohibited from entering the town in the car.

When asked about the distinctive name, the count would smile, and say that the car was named after the distinctive noise that an aircraft engine makes—which is highly unlikely since the exact nature of the car’s engine was a closely held secret.  Eventually, the car was replaced with Chitty-Bang-Bang 2, and the original was sold to the family of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

At one point, it was even suggested the name referred to Lelitha Chitty, a female aeronautical engineer.  This was unlikely since her fame was unknown by the time the race car was created.

So where did the name really come from?  Undoubtedly, the name came from Clive Gallop.  During World War I, while stationed at the front, soldiers in Gallop’s unit would occasionally request a pass—usually referred to as a chit or chitty—for just a few hours off base in order to visit what the French locals called a maison close.  (Or what is generally called a whorehouse).

Surely, I don’t have to explain the Bang-Bang portion of the name!