‘Whether you feel it or not, people say that you’re growing up in the shadow
of this mighty oak tree and that can’t be good for you,” says Sir Charles
Maclean of his father. “To some extent that was true.”
This is something of an understatement, given that his dad was the putative
role model for James Bond. Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who died in 1996, was also
an adventurer, diplomat and war hero who was parachuted behind enemy lines
to help Tito liberate Yugoslavia from the Nazis. No wonder his son has spent
a lifetime dealing with the misguided expectations of others.
Maclean, 61, assumed his father’s title in 1996, and is the 16th Hereditary
Captain and Keeper of Dunconnel in the Isles of the Sea, but he has
carefully evaded his legacy.
“They were great fun, my parents,” says Maclean. “They were strong and tough,
but very compassionate. They loved other people and were never happier than
when having a knees-up. As children, my brother and I reacted against that.
I certainly did. I wanted to go another way. I guess it would be odd if I
hadn’t.”
The problem was that the multitalented Fitzroy didn’t leave many avenues for
his sons to conquer. At Eton, he won “all the prizes for which he was
allowed to compete”, according to the Eton Chronicle. He won a scholarship
in 1928 to study modern languages at King’s College, Cambridge, but spent a
year in Germany, where he studied Latin and Greek, enabling him to switch to
classics and win a first in his classical tripos.
By contrast, his son struggled at Eton. “I regard all of school as fairly
nightmarish,” says Maclean. “It didn’t suit my temperament. I felt in terms
of education it was mostly wasted.” It didn’t stop him going to Oxford,
where he studied modern languages.
Maclean chose to be a writer and is now associate editor for the glossy
lifestyle magazine Travel and Leisure. His latest novel, Home Before Dark, a
cyber thriller, deals with identity and the morphing of the roles of villain
and hero, one stalking for love, the other stalking for death.
“The internet is changing the way we talk to and relate to each other,” he
says. “I felt that wasn’t being reflected in the novel. I do think a lot of
fiction doesn’t really reflect the world we currently live in.”
The book is Maclean’s third thriller — he has also written factual books and
published fiction under the name James Konrad. A pacey page-turner, Home
Before Dark consolidates his reputation as an author, an epithet with which
he is not entirely comfortable. “I still find it difficult to take myself
seriously as a writer,” he says, reclining in a sofa in the bar of Glasgow’s
One Devonshire Gardens.
Fitzroy, too, was an accomplished writer, but he is better known for his
real-life adventures. After Cambridge, he joined the diplomatic corps, was
sent to Paris, but wangled a posting to Moscow, where he became one of the
few witnesses to Stalin’s show trials of 1938. When the second world war
broke out a year later, he was determined to fight, but the only way out of
the foreign service and into battle was to become an MP. He won the seat of
Lancaster for the Tories in 1941 and put on the uniform of his father’s
regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, in the same year.
The war made Fitzroy. By then in his early thirties, Fitzroy parachuted into
enemy-occupied Yugoslavia, where he was Winston Churchill’s personal envoy
at the head of a military mission to Tito. A founder member with David
Stirling of the SAS, he talked his way out of arrest in Italian-occupied
North Africa by impersonating an Italian officer and haranguing his captors
in their own language.
“My father’s life had this extraordinary narrative, which he made, really,”
says Maclean. “The period around the war was such an amazing span of
excitement and adventure, I did feel that he was somewhat — not disappointed
exactly — but that nothing could match these years again. I was quite
conscious of that.”
Maclean grew up with tales of derring-do, not just from his father but also
from his godfather Stirling and his uncle the clan chief and war hero Lord
Fraser of Lovat, nicknamed Shimi. His mother’s first husband, Lieutenant
Alan Phipps, was a war hero who died in action and left the young Veronica
widowed with two small children by the age of 22. Her eldest son, Jeremy
Phipps, went on to become a major-general in the SAS and led the rescue
mission at the Iranian Embassy in London, where 21 people were being held
hostage by Arab revolutionaries.
“My father had an idea that I would go into the army and follow his career,”
says Maclean. “There was quite a lot of pressure and I resisted it pretty
strongly. I didn’t have the imagination to see how you could make life more
interesting if you went into the army, how you could shape it. My
half-brother Jeremy did and had a fantastic life, very exciting.
“When I was 15 I said rather strongly to my father that I didn’t want to live
at Strachur [the family estate in Argyllshire] when I was grown up. He took
it very personally. My father was an only child and so everything had to go
his way. My mother was just the opposite. I didn’t want to do any of these
things that he had done. Any hint of him mapping out my life and I would dig
my heels in. There is a bit of me that still wonders if I should have joined
up. The army has an appeal.”
It didn’t help that Fitzroy, who had a reputation as a maverick, swashbuckling
figure, was mooted to be the model for Ian Fleming’s creation James Bond.
“My father never really confirmed or denied it,” says Maclean, of the 007
connection. “He was never a spy to the best of my knowledge and I think it
would have come out by now if he had been. My father loved the whole Bond
thing and was very amused by it. But his real friend was Ian’s brother Peter
Fleming. I’ve been trying to find out if Ian Fleming ever came to Strachur.
His wife, Anne, certainly did, as did their rather tragic son, Casper, who
committed suicide.”
If Fleming didn’t visit the Macleans at home, he was one of the few who
didn’t. Sir Fitzroy and Lady Maclean were better connected than the national
grid. In America, their friends included the Kennedy and Bush political
dynasties. In addition to Churchill and Tito, they were on supping terms
with Gorbachev, the Astors, the Mitford sisters, Compton Mackenzie, Evelyn
Waugh, Hilaire Belloc and the Rockefellers. Princess Margaret and Prince
Charles were friends. Maclean remembers Joanna Lumley coming regularly to
Creggans Inn, the restaurant and hotel Fitzroy took on close to Strachur.
Maclean may have thrown off his father’s mantle as quickly as he could, but he
has inherited his knack of people collecting. Billy Connolly was a boyhood
friend and used to cycle out to Strachur when he was visiting relatives in
Dunoon.
“I showed him how to hypnotise chickens,” says Maclean. “I had this gesture
which immediately silenced the chickens. Billy Connolly was very impressed
by this. I saw him a few years ago and he reminded me of it. I can’t really
remember if he was funny as a young man, I was more impressed with the fact
that he had a bike with drop handles.”
Maclean’s first job after school was setting up The Ecologist magazine with
Edward Goldsmith and helping to write the influential, if wacky, Blueprint
for Survival, the precursor to the Green movement.
“I read all these frightening books about biological time bombs, which said
the end is nigh,” he says. “They were absolutely right, of course. But
everybody thought I was mad and then I went to work for somebody even
madder. Teddy Goldsmith had all these theories, but there wasn’t a word you
could understand of anything he wrote or said. We often used to have to go
to his brother [Sir James Goldsmith] to get the funds for the next issue of
The Ecologist. They were never given easily and it was always somewhat
humiliating. Teddy was delightful and eccentric. I didn’t take much to the
older brother.”
Maclean left the Green movement after they all decamped to a commune in
Cornwall. “There was an idealism there, but it was a gloomy idealism,” he
says. “It was so depressing.”
Politics would seem to have been an obvious route. One of his oldest school
friends is the former Conservative cabinet minister William Waldegrave.
Maclean is passionately anti-independence, a view coloured by his experience
in the Balkans. Fitzroy and his wife had a house in Korcula, a Croatian
island.
“Nationalism can produce some horrendous situations,” he says. “Nationalism
isn’t a political philosophy. It is an exploitable emotion that depends on
grievance to thrive.”
Once again, however, his father had got there first.
“My father had a very old-fashioned view of politics,” he says. “He liked
being around the centre of power, but he wasn’t really a politician. Just as
I was put off golf at the age of nine by being made to caddy and put off
gardening by being made to dig holes, so I was put off politics by being
dragged to meetings in Rothesay town hall with five people and a heckler. My
generation was rather suspicious of the people who went into politics and I
think that was a bad thing. But you have to have a thick skin and my problem
is I see the other side too easily. I also have a need to undermine. I’m a
natural contrarian.”
Escape came in the form of America, initially to work on a ranch as a cowboy
and then bum around with folk musicians such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. His
half-sister Susan (“Suki”) was a friend of Bob Dylan’s and Maclean was in
thrall to his cousins, Rory and Alex MacEwan, who were pioneers of the
burgeoning folk movement. His father was surprisingly encouraging of this
move.
“He was very good in that way, very broad-minded,” says Maclean. “He might
have secretly wished for something different, a more public life, a life of
service, as he had had.”
It was in America that Maclean met Deborah, a model from Chicago, now his wife
and mother of his four daughters. He hung out at parties with Andy Warhol,
Susan Sontag and the Kennedys, where the James Bond connection wasn’t always
an advantage.
“I remember a Fourth of July party given by George Plimpton, the writer and
socialite,” he says. “I was there with a British friend. The house was on
the beach and Caroline Kennedy suddenly said to the pair of us: ‘Let’s go
for a swim.’ It was pitch black and the middle of the night. The waves were
huge. Caroline stripped off and dived in. Her head bobbed and she
disappeared. I just thought: ‘My God, What if something happens? We’re done
for. We’ll be in jail for ever.’ It really was a terrible moment. Then she
reappeared and called us a couple of wimps.”
A realisation that New York was not a place he wanted to raise his own
children, coupled with a growing acceptance of his destiny, a desire to
spend time with his elderly parents and a love of the west coast brought him
back to Strachur, the estate Fitzroy bought when Maclean was 11.
For all Fitzroy’s exploits as a soldier, scholar, diplomat, author,
film-maker, estate manager, bon viveur; hotelier, Highland chief and —
according to Lady Maclean — “the most passionate of lovers”, the one role in
which Fitzroy didn’t excel was that of father. In addition to his sons James
– publisher of The Erotic Review — and Charles, and stepchildren Jeremy and
Suki, there was a love child, Annabel, from a previous relationship, about
whom Maclean is gracious but taciturn.
Lady Maclean described her husband as “an eternal bachelor” who never became
“the complete family man”, and mused that his detachment may have caused
resentment in his stepchildren. Her son, by contrast is a new man.
“He was an only child and he had the diplomatic training, which made him
somewhat buttoned-up,” says Maclean of his father. “I am a very hands-on
father, as are most of my contemporaries. But I’m not sure that is a good
thing. We most of us lead cowardly lives and the refuge for a man is the
family. At times of great stress and war a man puts his family to the side
and does what a man’s got to do. Now men have bought the whole ‘new man’
package, they don’t need to be warriors any more. But I worry that that
makes it more difficult for us to be brave, to have principles and stick to
them. What’s happened to that conviction?
“We grew up with a certain amount of romanticism and idealism, but life cures
you of these afflictions. You settle and in settling you betray something.”
It’s not just the thriller writing that makes you think Maclean has stepped
out of Fitzroy’s shadow into a darker world.
Home Before Dark by Charles Maclean is published by Hodder & Stoughton
on June 26
