The fact is, Esquire seems to have made quite a regular practice of touting the Bond films as they’ve rolled into movie houses worldwide. In June 1965, for instance, a dinner-jacketed Sean Connery posed amid a trio of potential femmes fatales in the cause of plumping the fourth Bond flick, Thunderball. There was hardly room enough left for the cover line, which read simply, “12 pages on the new James Bond movie. Wow!” Then, two years later, with You Only Live Twice set to debut, the March 1967 Esquire headlined, “If You’re Sick of James Bond, Rejoice! Rejoice! James Bond Is Dead!” Another three women, this time dressed for grieving rather than seducing, and huddled over an ornate casket, gave newsstand browsers the impression that Britain’s most renowned secret agent had finally been done in by the villainous henchmen of SPECTRE, that impression buttressed on the inside pages with an excerpt from the You Only Live Twice shooting script, describing a scene in which 007 is first trapped and then machine-gunned, post-coitus, inside a Murphy bed. (Only several pages later is the spoiler delivered, complete with a diagram of Bond’s specially made burial-at-sea shroud: “old Jimmy Bond isn’t really dead. It’s all a fake to make SPECTRE think he’s out of the picture.”)Interestingly, Roger Moore, who starred in seven Bond movies, compared to Connery’s “official” six (with the latter’s seventh Bond outing, in 1983’s Never Say Never Again--a remake of Thunderball--not being considered part of the film canon), never won Esquire cover treatment of his own, at least according to the magazine’s extensive covers archive. Nor did Timothy Dalton, who appeared in The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989), or, for that matter, George Lazenby, who broke Connery’s streak of Bond films by playing 007 in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Not until 18 years after the notorious “James Bond Is Dead!” cover did Ian Fleming’s colorful creation finally front Esquire once more, this time in the person of Pierce Brosnan, the Irish-born actor who’d won a following as the co-star (with Stephanie Zimbalist) of U.S. television’s Remington Steele. The November 1995 magazine trumpeted Brosnan’s Bond debut in the forthcoming GoldenEye, headlining its story (in direct, if not conscious, rebuttal of its previous cover announcement), “Bond Is Back!” As the subhead explained, “He still drinks a lot, drives too fast, shoots people, and sleeps around. Way to go, 007!” The main article inside, which analyzes the screen evolution and continuing appeal of Bond, was penned by British journalist Richard Rayner (who has since gone on to a noteworthy career writing novels, including 2005’s noirish standout, The Devil’s Wind) and is accompanied by a photograph with more than a passing resemblance to the Connery cover from 1965 (see image, above right).As the teaser on Rayner’s lengthy tribute to the cult of Bond observed, “there’s no man alive who has never wished he were the suave, violent bastard who saved Western civ.” Which likely explains why Fleming’s espionage operative continues to be featured regularly in Esquire, not to mention on the cover of pretty much every other entertainment-oriented mag in America and Europe. If the men holding editorial positions at those publications are not themselves Bond devotees, they’re quite certain that their male readers are, and periodic reinvigorations of the 007 mythos (complete with photographs of Bond girls new and old) only remind everyone what attracted them to this elaborate fantasy in the first place. Such enthusiasm is captured clearly in Esquire’s September 2006 cover story about the forthcoming film Casino Royale, which is touted on the inside under a headline that settles precisely between the magazine’s sales gimmicks of the past:
“Bond Is Dead! Long Live Bond!”
READ MORE: “New 007 Causes a Stir” (The Sun).
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