Ian Fleming

In September 1925 Ian Fleming received seven blackballs when his brother Peter put him up for membership in Pop, the exclusive Eton social club. The future author of the James Bond novels was 17. It must have rankled to be found not up to standard, not the right sort. He got his own back via Bond's arrogant perfection.

Fleming's life reads like a good novel. He was a scoundrel, a lowlife among the uppercrust, a borrower of other men's wives. In 1939, his great coup as a spy went awry when he was caught smuggling condoms out of the Soviet Union; his cunning idea was to have them analyzed to learn the state of the Soviet rubber industry. He was 30 and a bit old for a spy, really. In his novels he could fantasize about how a competent spy might operate. He named his hero James Bond after an ornithologist, an expert on the subject of West Indian birds, something Fleming was an expert about too, in a manner of speaking. Ian Fleming appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

The Spy Who Couldn't Cook

In August 1942, Julia McWilliams began her new job at the O.S.S., the World War II forerunner of the C.I.A. She was 30. She wore a leopard fur coat to work on cold days, and lived in a tiny two-room apartment in the Brighton Hotel in Washington. For a kitchen she made do with a two-burner hot-plate set on top of the refrigerator in her living room. She wasn’t famous for her cooking, but she later would be, after marrying Paul Child and moving to France. Julia Child appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Julia

The new Julia Child movie opens this weekend. The shelves are full of books about her and by her, by people who remember her, and by people who want to be like her or at least want to cook like her. Her kitchen is in the Smithsonian. Her voice is in our heads whenever we cook, although it might be the voice of Dan Ackroyd. No wonder. She is our modern domestic goddess, never mind Martha Stewart and Alice Waters. (All three women have several anecdotes each in A Book of Ages.)

What surprises me is that Nora Ephron didn't think Julia had enough back story for a movie of her own, that she needed to share the screen with a young woman blogging about her recipes. What can you say? Today's TV obsession with chefs and kitchens has more to do with egos and speed and extravagance, with concept, less to do with the down-to-earth creation of good food and eating it. This young wife, played by Amy Adams, promises to cook every recipe from The Art of French Cooking in one year. Hilarity ensues. But which life are we more interested in? Who do we identify with?

That's the point, I guess. Julia works for the spy agency called the O.S.S. during WWII, travels to India and China, marries an urbane diplomat, moves to Paris, enrolls at the Cordon Bleu to learn French cooking (she didn't know how to cook at all until her mid-30s), she writes a cookbook (which her publisher turns down), then goes on public TV and becomes a star. Every life has an arc, and Julia's is interesting and full of surprises. She appears six times in A Book of Ages.

My book is about how famous lives reflect our own, so it's the private, domestic details I find most interesting. Freud and Henry Ford collecting antiques, Steve Martin collecting art, Churchill learning to paint, Jack Kerouac and Edward Elgar learning to drive, Hitler becoming a vegetarian. So I include Julia Child's first meal on her first trip to France––she was 36. The most vivid detail I discovered was the hotplate in her D.C. apartment, where she didn't cook very much or very well.

Our Man in Havana

In July 1941, Graham Greene became a spy. He was given the number 59200, the same number he later gave to Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman and spy in his 1958 satire Our Man In Havana. He was 36 years-old. Greene appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Washington Irving, Jesse James, Graham Greene

Washington Irving, America's first literary celebrity, was born on this day in 1783. He was also the godfather of the New York Knicks. He was 37 when he published Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He appears on page 137 of A Book of Ages.

Bank robber Jesse James was murdered on this day in 1882, which was either a bloody shame or served him right, depending which legends you believe. He was hanging up a picture at the time. Mr. James appears in A Book of Ages at ages 15, 29 and 34. He is often confused with Billy the Kid. Also, occasionally, with Henry James; the two were not related.

Graham Greene died on this day in 1991. Novelist, Catholic, spy, adulterer. He never won the Nobel Prize for literature, but would probably have had conflicted feelings about it if he had; he did about everything else. He appears at ages 15, 20, 29, 35, 36, 42 and 86 in A Book of Ages. A life filled with ironic anecdotes.