There once was an island where movie stars and royalty came to play. It was a place where Elizabeth Taylor holidayed with Noël Coward. Where the Duke of Edinburgh swam in the same turquoise waters as Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe frolicked in the surf with Arthur Miller. Where Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier sunbathed in the nude and Ian Fleming wrote, and Lucian Freud and Sir Winston Churchill painted (but with very different results). And where everyone partied, especially Errol Flynn, with anyone he could find but particularly with the very pretty and the very young. It was Mustique before we had Mustique, St Barth's before the oligarchs bustled in. It was Kenya's Happy Valley, but with rum instead of gin. It was Jamaica.
Even then, Jamaica was a little naughtier than anywhere else. There was sunshine and palm trees and beautiful beaches, but there was also weed and sex and Noël Coward's swimming pool, known for its naked pool parties. His villa, Firefly, set high on a hill overlooking the sea, had a door on the first floor that opened out over the water; guests could leap straight in from upstairs, providing spectators with quite the view from down below.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm at Ian Fleming's old home, Goldeneye, a low-slung whitewashed villa set above a perfect little sandy cove. No naked pool parties here - but this is where he banged out his Bond novels, between rum punches and affairs. You can rent the villa, which now belongs to Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records and the man who discovered Bob Marley and introduced the rest of the world to reggae. It is part of a ravishingly beautiful boutique hotel, with more beach villas down below and funky wooden cabanas fringing a lagoon, plus exactly the kind of laidback, rum-flavoured, no-shoes vibe you'd hope to find in Jamaica.
Much like Blackwell himself, who is spry, charming and so laidback he might as well
be lying down, with a scraggy beard and open-necked shirt and a slow, scratchy voice. You'll often see him ambling around the lush grounds of Goldeneye, between the smart, sunbathing tourists and superstars hanging out around the bar (Johnny Depp, Grace Jones, Kate Moss). He lives here with his girlfriend: 'She's younger than me. Much younger.' In her 40s, in fact - he is 80 but looks 60.
Youthful genes run strong in the Blackwell family. His mother Blanche, a beautiful socialite whose family has been in Jamaica since the 16th century, is now 104, living in Knightsbridge and sharp as a tack. 'She always says, "I love men - they make such good pets,"' drawls Blackwell. The Old Harrovian, whom the Daily Telegraph once called the 'original trustafarian' (totally unfair - he's far too cool for that), knew Fleming well as a child and worked for him as a location scout for Dr No, parts of which were filmed just down the coast. His mother had a long, fiery and very public affair with Fleming - who died in 1964 - after divorcing the Crosse & Blackwell scion, Joseph Blackwell, and the relationship spawned Coward's play Volcano, which was deemed so scandalous it wasn't staged until after his death.
Anyway, Blanche had loved to swim at Goldeneye, so Blackwell bought the property - via Bob Marley - in the Eighties. 'It wasn't Bob's scene - it was too posh and isolated. Not "street" enough,' Blackwell tells me. Blackwell then turned it into this gorgeous hotel in the Nineties, luring a fashionable new set to Jamaica's shores.
It was Errol Flynn who first brought the stars, washing up in swashbuckling fashion in the early Forties during a storm that forced his yacht to dock at Port Antonio, in the north-east. He loved it and stayed, saying it was more beautiful than any woman he'd ever known, and he'd known more than most. Fleming, on the other hand, first visited it as a naval intelligence officer (read: spy), fell in love with the place and built his estate after the war, much like Coward, who wanted to escape dreary post-war Britain. They disapproved of Flynn's antics, which reportedly included driving a Cadillac into a pool and emerging with his cigar still lit, but they were all terrific friends - Blanche Blackwell helped Coward host the Queen Mother when she visited for tea - and with them came the top crop of literary and artistic sorts, escaping the gloomy European and American winters.
Why did they all come? They all came because they all came, if you see what I mean. But also because it was far - in every sense - from conservative post-war Europe. It felt like 'another world', Blackwell tells me. 'If you wanted to make a phone call in those days, you had to book it three, four days in advance. When you were here you were on another planet - so they could live a wilder life.
The smart set still come, but now, perhaps thanks to iPhones, they're careful. No wildness, no naked pool parties - at least, not that you'd hear about. It's all very hush-hush, like Lara Hughes-Young and Tom Inskip's wedding at the Round Hill resort in March (Prince Harry was there with Meghan Markle). The tabloids were all over it, but not by invitation, and not a thing leaked about it. They're a tight-knit lot.
