The REAL Pussy Galore
As the sexiest Bond girl of all returns in a new 007 novel, the untold story of the war heroine who was ...
Bond slowly regained consciousness. in his groggy stupor, he became bluntly aware of pains all over his body. His head ached as if it were composed entirely of vodka martinis. He felt both shaken and stirred.
it must have been quite a night, Bond thought. His eyes crept open. it seemed to take all his strength to force them to focus.
Within a few seconds, he could make out a face — an extremely attractive face. it belonged to a woman in her mid-30s, perhaps a little older. Her thick, blonde hair was arranged in a bouffant bob, and her sensuous lips were cruelly smirking at him. ‘Who are you?’ Bond croaked. ‘My name is Pussy Galore.’ now it was Bond’s turn to smirk. ‘i must be dreaming,’ he replied.
They held each other’s gaze. Bond was immediately attracted to her, but there was something about the constancy of this particular woman’s stare that indicated his usual dominance over the opposite sex had been temporarily weakened.
Besides, the tranquilliser gun in Pussy’s right hand suggested the only business she meant was strictly impersonal . . .
no one who has ever watched Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, can forget the stunning entrance of the character Pussy Galore. Played by Honor Blackman, there has never been a better Bond girl in the 50 years since the film was released.
in fact, it is hard to think of a sexier, funnier, tougher, and more formidable woman even outside the Bond franchise. Pussy Galore is not only a brilliant pilot, she is also highly proficient in judo, enough — for a while at least — to withstand Bond’s lecherous advances in a stable.
and she is not just a physical match for the British secret agent; her wit is just as sharp.
it therefore comes as fantastic news for Bond aficionados that the character of Pussy Galore is going to be revived by the bestselling author anthony Horowitz in his novel, Trigger Mortis — the latest instalment in a series of books based on ian Fleming’s hero, written by modern authors.
Horowitz has so far revealed that his story, to be published in september, will begin in 1957 — two weeks after the end of Fleming’s novel Goldfinger. What the author has not yet revealed is whether his version of Pussy Galore will, like the version in Fleming’s book, be openly lesbian.
in the film, Pussy’s sexuality — which is finally ‘overcome’ by Bond — is only ever hinted at when she repels 007’s advances with the words: ‘You can turn off the charm, i’m immune.’ at the time, it was reckoned by the filmmakers that the censors would never allow an openly-lesbian character to appear in a family film.
of course, one of the best aspects about Pussy Galore is her name, with its deliciously racy doubleentendre that had many sixties moviegoers spluttering into their popcorn. But now, thanks to the release of some highly secret government papers, the story of the woman from whom Fleming drew inspiration for the character can now finally be told.
astonishingly enough, the real woman was also called Pussy, although her surname was to have no double meaning — deakin.
Just like her fictional counterpart, Pussy deakin was brave, beautiful and resourceful. she even married a British secret agent and oxford don — and it was through this marriage that she would meet Fleming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real Pussy was not born with that name. When she arrived in the world in Bucharest, romania, on august 7, 1916, she was called Livia stela nasta, and was the daughter of a distinguished romanian journalist who worked as a newspaper editor.
We know little about her early life, but by the outbreak of war in 1939, when she was 23, she was a secretary at the Ministry of Cooperation in Bucharest.
For the first year of war, Livia’s homeland was to remain neutral, but by late 1940, a fascist coup saw romania joining the axis powers.
in March 1941, Livia decided to flee. Like her father, she was an avowed anti-fascist, and she bravely decided to do her bit to rid romania of fascism. Travelling via Belgrade and Budapest, Livia arrived in athens on March 29. From there, she somehow managed to make contact with the British.
she soon found a job in egypt, working as a secretary for the squadron Leader at the RAF’s 2nd Photographic reconnaissance Unit in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo. But for the redoubtable Livia, working as a secretary did not offer the kind of hands-on opportunity to really strike back at the hated fascists.
in october 1942, she was vetted by a Major e. C. Masterson to join the special operations executive, or soe. Tasked by Winston Churchill to ‘set europe ablaze’, soe was a unit that tried to foment and assist resistance movements in countries that were under the jackboot.
intriguingly, in Livia’s secret soe file, which has only recently been opened at the national archives in Kew, London, the vetting procedure was carried out under her real name and also that of a Czech identity she had somehow acquired — that of olga Prohazka. she joined a department called special duties B3, part of soe’s Cairo headquarters.
By now, Livia had acquired the nickname Pussy, and it stuck with her for the rest of her life.
With her great looks and charm, she was undoubtedly a hit around Cairo’s dinner tables, but often her mind was on more serious matters.
‘Pussy nasta used to leave in the middle of dinner to broadcast back to her country,’ recalled one fellow soe agent, ‘always afraid that her voice might be recognised and harm come to her family.’ Pussy also wrote articles for an soe propaganda mission called Go slow, which was presumably targeted at romanian factory and oilfield workers to encourage them to be as unproductive as possible.
What we do not know is whether Pussy actually served behind enemy lines. Certainly, she had the linguistic skills and the chutzpah to have done so.
once again, her soe file offers tantalising glimpses. in March 1942,, the British Consul-General in Cairo o issued ‘ olga Prohazka’ with a permit to travel around Palestine,, syria, Turkey, egypt, india, southh africa and the United Kingdom,, which suggests she was being g earmarked for missions further afield. The photograph attached to the form shows a young woman as confident as any Bond girl.
But if we cannot be sure that Pussy found the level of adventure she may have wanted, what she did find was love. it came in the form of Bill deakin, a tutor of modern history at oxford University’s Wadham College before the war.
after serving for two years in the Queen’s own oxfordshire Hussars, in 1942, deakin was sent to Cairo to join soe. His mission was to help assess which element of the fractured Yugoslav resistance movement the British should support, and in May 1943, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia on a highly dangerous mission.
its aim was to make contact with Josip Tito, then a Yugoslav resistance fighter and later the country’s first president. Codenamed TYPICAL, the operation was anything but.
nevertheless, deakin managed to escape, and when he was back in Cairo, he married Pussy.
While deakin was awarded a dso, Pussy was given an official commendation for her secret work Glamour: Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore and (inset) Romanian-born Pussy Deakin during the war. after the outbreak of peace, the couple moved to oxford, where deakin resumed his academic career. He was made Warden of st antony’s in 1950, and was Winston Churchill’s ultra-dependable literary executor and assistant.
as well as being friends of the Churchills, the couple also hobnobbed with high society, including ann Fleming, who was married to ian. it is doubtless this connection that gave the Bond author the inspiration for his formidable character in Goldfinger.
deakin was knighted in 1975, and, like any good Bond heroine, Lady deakin seemed to remain forever youthful and beautiful.
Just a few months before she died in 2001, the couple were visited by the author Gully Wells, who recalled how Pussy was ‘delightfully bossy’ but had ‘the most beautiful skin i have ever seen’.
Brilliant, brave, and willing to maintain her beauty at all costs, there is no doubt that Bond would have very much approved of the real Pussy Galore.
She was brave and beautiful — just like her fictional namesake She found love in the shape of a British agent