The experience left the grandmother of two stirred but unshaken. Hardly surprising, considering Lady Ridsdale was Ian Fleming's model for Miss Moneypenny, the unflappable secretary of his James Bond novels and the movies that followed, including the current Tomorrow Never Dies, starring Pierce Brosnan (and Samantha Bond as Moneypenny). During World War II, Ridsdale worked as an administrative assistant to Fleming in British Naval Intelligence. The future spy novelist, she says, was a dashing rogue with a fondness for beautiful women, fine suits, gambling and, yes, shaken martinis. "Ian Fleming was James Bond in his own mind," says Ridsdale. "He wrote about himself, there's no doubt about that."
But while the fictional Moneypenny, secretary to M, Bond's boss, suffered an unrequited love for Agent 007, Ridsdale says that in real life the roles were quite the opposite. "He'd go off and do something brave and come back with silk stockings and lipsticks for me," she says of Fleming, but "I always kept him at arm's length." Ridsdale, who could hear Fleming's phone calls to women from his desk beside hers, "knew Ian too well" to become one of his many conquests. "He'd ring one in the morning, 'Oh, hello, my darling, oh yes, yes, that was a lovely evening,' " she recalls. "Then he'd put the receiver down and call somebody else: 'Darling, should we have lunch?' "
But "despite all the dumb foolery," says Ridsdale, Fleming "was a very hard worker" who was involved in the Enigma project, an elaborate operation to crack the German military code. And Ridsdale herself helped with one of the war's most audacious coups: a project later made famous in the movie The Man Who Never Was. In 1943 the body of a dead civilian was dressed as a Royal Navy officer, planted with bogus documents suggesting the Allies would not invade Sicily and set afloat near the coast of Spain. Ridsdale's task was to help create a background for the man. "I was sent to buy clothes in all the best men's shops and had to pose as his girlfriend. I had to go to post offices and rather loudly send this telegram to 'my boyfriend,' hoping of course that somebody would overhear me. I wrote him love letters." The Nazis found the drowned man and eased their defenses in Italy, which saved thousands of lives when the Allies actually did land at Sicily.
Ridsdale, who was 19 and working as a nurse when she was approached for the intelligence job, still marvels that she got the assignment, which she attributes to her "solid" upper-crust lineage. Her father, Joe Bennett, was an army colonel who served on the Control Commission, which negotiated the peace after World War I. Her mother, Edith, was the daughter of the last English judge to sit as recorder (circuit judge) of Dublin. Lady Ridsdale says her spunk is genetic: "Half of me is Irish, the other half is Yorkshire [England], so the battle is terrific."
She was a child of privilege from day one. Her father, stationed in Germany after World War I, felt it unsafe for her to be born there. "So," says Ridsdale, "my mother came back and went into a nursing home, said it was terribly uncomfortable and moved into Claridges," perhaps London's ritziest hotel. Victoire Bennett, an only child, was born about 10 days later. After being educated in London private schools, she was sent at 16 to the Sorbonne in Paris, finishing her architecture studies shortly after Hitler invaded Poland. "First thing I thought of was, 'It's war, I better start nursing.' " The intelligence officer who recruited her three months later appealed to that same sense of national duty. "He said, 'I don't know of anything more valuable than if you came and worked for us,' " she recalls.
After two years working with Fleming, Bennett left Naval Intelligence to marry Julian Ridsdale, the nephew of former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and an officer with MI2, the intelligence arm dealing with East Asian matters. The two had met over tennis. "They said I was spoiling the war effort when I married her," he jokes. Fleming sent along a silver entrée dish but skipped the wedding.
After the war, Julian and Victoire—who gave birth to the couple's only child, Penelope, during an air raid in 1943—bought a house in rural Sussex in the south of England and started a farm, growing gooseberries and raspberries while Julian tested his fortune in politics. In 1954 he was elected to Parliament, winning a seat he held until he retired in 1992. "I never really stopped working," says Lady Ridsdale, who founded a Conservative Wives' Club and continues to host the party's Winter Ball.
In 1991, in honor of her wartime service, she was made a Dame of the British Empire (the female equivalent of knighthood) by Queen Elizabeth in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. She entertains frequently at her elegant house in London's luxe Kensington borough, where photos of her friends the Queen, Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher adorn her grand piano. She and Fleming, who died in 1964, fell out of touch. "I met him a few times after the war," she says, and later she read his books and saw the movies (Sean Connery was her favorite 007). But, says daughter Penelope, 54, whose husband, Sir Paul Newall, is a former Lord Mayor of London, "she's never talked about any of her past, and it's only recently that things have come out." But though Ridsdale is now comfortable revealing her secrets, she insists on one important clarification. "I certainly wasn't as lovelorn as Miss Moneypenny," she says. "I had more sense than that."
SAMANTHA MILLER
JOANNA BLONSKA in London
- Contributors:
- Joanna Blonska.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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