Great-Uncle James Bond Tells The Goldfinger Story In His Own Words
I don’t usually talk about my work as 007, but why not? Let’s see. I arrived at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami for the Goldfinger job in the late winter of 1964. Or maybe it was early spring. No, it was the twentieth of March, so definitely late winter.
Goldfinger was a gold-bullion dealer who ended up getting sucked out of an airplane window. Does anyone know what level of purity gold has to have to be classified as bullion? Wrong. Wrong again. Nope. The answer is 99.5%.
Anyway, Goldfinger arrived at the hotel’s pool area and began playing high-stakes gin rummy with another guest. I watched from a distance until I noticed a girl — sorry, a woman — named Jill with binoculars and a walkie talkie watching Goldfinger’s table from an upstairs balcony. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say Jill and I had room service together that night in my suite.
Oh, alright, I’ll tell you everything. She had the snapper with a vegetable medley and I had the shepherd’s pie.
After we finished eating, Goldfinger’s manservant broke into the room and knocked me unconscious. When I came to a few hours later, I found Jill covered in gold paint and dead of skin suffocation.
By the way, one of the many things the movie got wrong was the manservant’s name. It wasn’t Oddjob, but Odoja, as I told the producer again and again during my brief stint as a script consultant.
I spent the rest of that day completing a 347A incident report on Jill. After I submitted copies to the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, and the Attorney General’s Office, I followed Goldfinger to Switzerland and fought off his minions using a tricked-out Aston Martin.
Wait, I left out something. I also sent a copy to the Department of Health & Social Care.
Anyway, I got captured and the next thing I knew, Goldfinger’s personal pilot, Pussetta Gabor, was taking me to his stud farm in Kentucky. The movie got Pussetta’s name wrong, too, but by then the producer had filed a restraining order on me, so I couldn’t set the record straight.
There I learned of Goldfinger’s plan to spray nerve gas over Fort Knox and then irradiate all its gold with an atomic device so that no one could touch it for a long time. In his mind, this would drive up the price of his own gold.
At that point, my mission was clear. I had to do what I always did with villains — explain why the scheme wouldn’t work.
I know the reason seems obvious today, since it’s been years since anyone took gold into or out of Fort Knox. It’s mostly kept there because people would get their knickers in a twist if they realized that nothing but faith and confidence in the US government is backing the dollar, which is terrifying when you think about it.
But we were on the gold standard back then, and foreign governments were still converting dollars into …
Say, where are you all going? If you like, I can finish the story later, perhaps at breakfast when we’re all together again.
Very well. What Goldfinger was failing to consider was that gold’s radioactive isotopes have short half-lives, so the gold would be back to normal after a month or so.
I started by giving him a lecture on neutron activation and radioactive decay. He kept checking his watch, so I skipped the part about electron capture and jumped right into Au-169, which, of gold’s forty-one isotopes, has the lowest mass.
It was when I got up to Au-188 that Goldfinger excused himself to use the restroom and never came back.
That evening, though, I got Pussetta alone and showed her how radiating an atomic nucleus puts it into an excited state, but that it rarely lasts long. By morning, I’d convinced her that Goldfinger’s plan was crazy.
Long story short, Pussetta ended up spraying a harmless gas over Fort Knox and I got locked in its main vault with Odojo while the timer on the bomb clicked down.
I got out alive, though, and killed Goldfinger.
