Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: A Queer Appreciation of Tiffany Case

There’s much more to Miss Case than meets the eye, regardless of whichever hair piece she happens to be wearing at any given time. Jack Bell takes Tiffany’s own advice and keeps it original, finding fascinating new insights into the character and the actress who brought her to indelible life: Jill St. John.

‘Passport details. American citizen. 27. Born San Francisco. Blonde. Blue eyes. Height 5 ft 6 in. Profession: single woman.’

-Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

The first time we see Tiffany Case—or, specifically, her back as she immediately exits the room—we might notice one of two things first: her long, pig-tailed bottle blonde hair, or the fact that she’s nearly naked.

Ever the spy, James Bond notices both. ‘Weren’t you a blonde when I came in?’ he asks when next she appears in the door, still in her bra and panties but with her hair now loose and deep brunette in colour, as if she has metamorphosised off-screen into the post-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor of one of Joseph Losey’s campy late-60s melodramas.

It is her third incarnation, later in the scene, after she’s finished dressing that is, as she says, ‘her own’. She’s in a long, sparkling black dress open wide at her well-endowed chest, a matching necklace high around her throat, and with her hair now a flaming colour that can only be described as ‘Jill St. John red’.

Throughout this parade of appearances in front of him, James Bond has made his usual licentious quips, mostly to himself (‘I’m glad for your sake it wasn’t Van Cleef & Arpels…’,  ‘I never cared too much for redheads, terrible temper…’, ‘Well, provided the collars and cuffs match…’), but they gain little counter-sparring from the woman who has just flaunted three hair colours, silk underwear, a transparent negligee, and, finally, an evening dress, all in under five minutes like a jungle bird fanning its feathers to both stun and defend against predators.

This is our first scene of Tiffany Case, and it inspires some thought.

Some Bond Girl introductions are iconic (Honey Ryder), while some can be unintentionally banal (Stacey Sutton). Some are subversive (Anya Amasova), and some are funny (Pussy Galore). Tiffany’s, I’ve always thought is, well…confusing, a reaction I’d imagine many others to have once they stop and say to themselves, ‘Wait—what was that thing with all the wigs about?’

Diamonds Are Forever is one of the Bond entries that inspires a good deal more of these thoughts in people than others. Why is there a lunar sound stage complete with moon buggy in Willard Whyte’s desert laboratory? Why does this Las Vegas hotel room have a bed that is also a fish tank, and how is it at all comfortable to have sex on? And why is this international playboy superspy a bit out of shape?

Diamonds’ negativists might dwell on these issues, but its fans will know they’re simply beyond the point. Yes, as a cultural artifact it may well be marked by its time period as much as A View to a Kill and Die Another Day would be in ensuing decades. But still, after all, any devotee of this site itself will know that one of the greatest virtues of Diamonds lies in the simple fact of it being one of the queerest entries in the entire Bond canon, or at least the camp brand of queerness.

Any rival to Diamonds’ crown certainly faces intense challenge. Not only does it have the series’ first openly gay characters, Wint and Kidd, but also it has Charles Gray’s radiatingly haughty performance as Blofeld, which can only be described as Cyril Ritchard-esque (watch some of Ritchard’s performance in the Mary Martin Peter Pan on YouTube for reference if you’re still sceptical—afterward you’ll surely also call him one of the first gay supervillains.)

And then between them is Tiffany Case—icon for redheads—who is one of my all-time favourite lead women of the series. How could I not love her? She’s the Grand Dame of Bond Girls, an undeniable gay icon whose femininity shines not just through her sex appeal but also through her kitsch, and played to the hilt by an actress who would also be as completely at home as the lead in a show by prolific gay producer Ryan Murphy as she is in a James Bond movie.

It’s clear by now that almost every Bond Girl has a surfeit of queer appeal, in the same way that we as gay viewers latch onto the cinematic fire of Bette Davis or Barbra Streisand or Toni Collete more than their milquetoast leading men. Strong women breed identification in their queer viewers, and the women of James Bond are no exception.

But why is it Tiffany Case—wig-changing, pants-blowing leading lady of a virtual buffet of cinematic camp pleasures—who can squeeze delight from my own gay little heart harder than any other of her compatriots of the series?

Perhaps it is her strength of character above all else. She might not be the toughest of all Bond Girls, no Jinx Johnson or Wai Lin; the only time she touches a gun, it serves only to throw her off the side of an oil rig. But still, there’s an undeniable resilience to her which is entirely unrelated to violence or spycraft, a constant durability of character kept beneath her grit of external allure. Unlike her predecessors, she’s a character who knows exactly the worth of her sexuality: how to weaponise it, manipulate it, and keep her own self-worth intact throughout.

The more I watch and study her (in times when I’m not distracted solely by her amazing white pantsuit or paisley headscarf), the more fascinated I become in thinking of Tiffany Case not just as a character herself, but also as a Bond Girl caught almost directly in the mid-point between damsel-ism and self-determination. And the more I think of her, the more impressed by her I become.

It’s interesting to that the novel’s Tiffany, far removed from her cinematic counterpart, had been ‘gifted’ what for Fleming would soon become old-hat for his female characters’ tragic backstories: a childhood sexual assault that leads to a pathological hatred of men. After this, she drifts through a myriad of jobs and identities over the years, including hat check girl, dancer, movie extra, waitress, blackjack dealer—diamond smuggling would of course be nothing more than an additional vocation for someone so desperate to find her place amid an adrift life.

Her arc in the novel is one tied almost exclusively to Bond, since it is he who becomes her destiny once he swoops in on his mostly unrelated mission to pick up and carry her to her new existence.

Meanwhile, though, the movie’s Tiffany wisely dispenses with this weepy backstory so as not to leave her as such a wounded bird of a character now that the series’ women were allowed to be more proactive. Much like her character, even the backstory of her name is amended to be more comical than melodramatic: instead of an expensive powder case having been left by her parting father, she’s instead birthed in the namesake store itself as her pregnant mother shops for wedding bands.

To me, it’s this new cinematic backstory that ironically grants Tiffany the sense of purpose her literary character searches listlessly for: diamonds themselves. Having been literally born on an actual showroom floor of priceless gems, it’s difficult to think an obsession not unlike Auric Goldfinger’s fetish for gold had not been also born in that moment. It would even make sense, too, to then finally understand Shirley Bassey’s gaudily brash title song being sung solely from Tiffany’s perspective more than from any other:

                        Men are mere mortals
                       who are not worth going to your graves for…

                        I don’t need love
                        for what good will love do me?
                        Diamonds never lie to me...

It’s a curious fact though, I’ll admit, that between the novel’s more developed and purposeful arc of Tiffany, I’d still choose the movie version of her any day. It’s Fleming who leaves her adrift as a character, bumping between shores and waiting to be picked from the water, while movie Tiffany paddles her own canoe, even if in a narrower stream.

Of course, literary fidelity itself was rapidly running to the end of its wick by the point of Diamonds Are Forever. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service might have been the last gasp of faithfulness to the literary imagination of Ian Fleming, but Diamonds casts it off a mountain entirely by shifting its source material’s prosaic mobster plot to a new grand scheme by Ernest Stavro Blofeld in accruing smuggled diamonds to craft an orbital death-ray. And more the better for it, I say, since at the same time it comfortably side-stepped the awkward task of having to find an actress to mousify herself into literary Tiffany’s shoes.

It was the 1970s, after all. Now that Tracy Bond had opened the floodgates, there were far more possibilities for serious and experienced actresses rather than merely international beauty contest winners to fall into the arms of James Bond (and with their own undubbed voices, too).

However, it might have been just as obvious that although the first American Bond Girl would have some heavy heels to fill, there would be few in the new league of acclaimed Hollywood superwomen of the 70s who would consider a role of such historically bimbo-like proportions. Actresses like Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Gena Rowlands, Karen Black, and even former Domino Derval candidate Faye Dunaway were now icons of the bold New Hollywood era, and as much as Barbarella would surely have fit the bill for a Bond Girl there was no turning back time for her, only to find the next actress of the era to combine spunky power with sex appeal.

Jill St. John was no Diana Rigg in terms of classical training, but was certainly no slouch as an actress either. After all, aside from Rigg, St. John had probably the most experience in feature films of any major Bond actress up to that point, on a par with Goldfinger’s Honor Blackman in Britain and You Only Live Twice’s Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama in Japan.

After dramatic performances in the second-tier Tennessee Williams story The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, the turgid Fitzgerald adaptation Tender is the Night, and the disastrous but hugely entertaining Valley of the Dolls forerunner The Oscar, she seemed to cast off entirely her attempts at old-style studio drama with aplomb, declaring with arrant confidence: ‘I’m a comedienne. I’ve never attempted to be a dramatic actress. But I’m very funny.’ If spoken in an interview today, such a comment would surely spawn at least a good week or two’s worth of memes, but goes to show still how comfortably she knew where her dramatic strengths laid.

In the bald-faced Harper private-eye movie cash-in Tony Rome, for example, St. John plays the role of a flirty socialite with a Champagne smile and a long trail of ex-husbands with such grandly kitschy proportions that she basically becomes a drag queen’s act of herself, while also gifting the queer world this iconic exchange:

Sue Lyon (to Jill St. John): ‘Slut!’

Jill St. John (to Frank Sinatra): ‘Now that I’ve been introduced, who are you?’

But despite usually giving what could very well be described as an early 70s TV movie of the week-level performance in her many roles (Diamonds itself is one of the few James Bond movies filmed and acted in such a way that you could plausibly imagine Detective Columbo to show up in the story after an act break), St. John cannot be underestimated as an actress who knows with mathematical precision the calibre of the material she is called upon to give colour to. As tempting as it would be to imagine how a classically-trained or Method actress would choose to interpret such a line as ‘Blow up your pants!’, we fortunately don’t have to, since Jill St. John, former co-star of Jerry Lewis, knows exactly how to nail it.

It’s true, though, that Jill St. John is certainly no living room queer icon on par with Judy Garland or Cher (I’d definitely be interested to know if any contestants on Ru Paul’s Drag Race have ‘done’ The Oscar, though I doubt it). But to me, she very well occupies the same brand of fiery feminine iconoclasticism I indulge in, along the lines of, say, Ann-Margret in her ‘60s prime (herself being one of the few plausible second choices for Tiffany I could dream about).

Still, gay icons come in all shapes and forms, and none hold any higher a crown than any others if their fans are devoted enough. It’s hard to argue that the best gay icons are the women who combine camp, power, and femininity, and much like them, Bond Girls too give their queer viewers immeasurable extra values of entertainment. They offer something to grasp onto, identify with, and cherish with talismanic embrace. Tiffany Case and Jill St. John are my gay icons, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

But it’s important to know the appeal strong women have for gay viewers is beyond just that of camp, and can become reducivist to see them only on that level. Tiffany Case is a queen, obviously, but I’ve more often lately been plumbing deeper the depths of what her character tells me about the value of feminine strength and how it is utilised in so masculine a setting.

Queer people, too, perhaps know more than most the value and safety of performance: we hide ourselves behind personas and empathise with women forced to do the same under the heel of a heteronormative, patriarchal society. So in this way, it’s impossible not to recognise that Tiffany is one of the most performative characters of the entire Bond series. She’s not a secret agent, of course, but that’s not to say she doesn’t know how to enact the tradecraft of identity to keep herself from danger.

It’s Tiffany’s performances that keep her in check and alive, after all. She performs the role of the no-nonsense connection for her diamond smuggler associates. She performs the role of double agent both against and for MI6 to keep herself alive, out of prison, and with her own head above water (specifically the water of a Nevada swimming pool). And later, too, she performs the role of bikini-clad sex object for Blofeld as if it is only that which is most appropriate in her new role as the captive moll.

But most importantly, for James Bond himself she performs the role of Bond Girl. She bats her eyes, engages in silky repartee, and pretends to fall under his spell exactly when he wishes her to in ways that had previously fallen flat in her Amsterdam apartment when she thought of him only as lowly smuggler Peter Franks. She seems to immediately know how the role of Bond Girl is to be played, but approaches the part only on her own terms.

The novel’s Tiffany might have scorned men on psychological principle (‘I’m not going to sleep with you,’ she says bluntly to Bond over their first dinner, ‘so don’t waste your money getting me tight’), but movie Tiffany does so only until she is sure of their worth. She and Bond make love for the first time immediately after she has had Plenty O’Toole dispatched from his hotel room via the window—shortly after this defenestrative catfight, she lets Bond ‘discover’ her waiting in his bed, presenting herself as a pure sexual commodity come to life while also allowing him the ego of thinking it is he who successfully seduced her.

In fact, it’s only here that one can now truly appreciate the thematic genius of Tiffany’s introductory musical chairs of wigs. She tells us exactly who she is in that scene: Tiffany is no one person. Like her hair colours, she will change, adapt, and shift her persona with chameleon-like precision for her audience, whoever they may be. She might seem a blonde for the diamond smugglers, a brunette for Bond, a redhead for Blofeld, but as far as her colours go, she’s only ever truly on the side of herself.

In an odd way, I feel as if Tiffany’s closest series correlation might well be Camille from Quantum of Solace, an equal of toughness and character who also forges a path of her own mission only tangentially related to Bond’s. But, then, Camille was never allowed a line of dialogue equal to the power of, ‘Keep leaning on that tooter, Charlie, and you’re gonna get a shot in the mouth!’

But still, if Tiffany is a woman slinking her way through a man’s world, where does that leave her with Bond himself?

One of the literary Bond’s more iconic quotes of the series—‘Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other’—expresses his trepidation towards falling too deeply in love with Tiffany at the end of their story. This is very soon conquered, however (with the assistance of a deus ex machina in the form of a Sauce Bérnaise recipe; the knowledge of which is Bond’s strangely specific measure for his ideal woman) to allow for one of the series’ somewhat more convincing post-mission love affairs. In the next book, From Russia With Love, Bond even experiences some of the most real heartache since Vesper Lynd in his memories of how Tiffany soon afterward walked out the door in favour of a safer life away from him.

Do we get this teary wrap up in the movie? Well, we get our extra surprise from Wint and Kidd, Bond’s quick dispatch of them, a final quip from him about and tails and legs, Tiffany’s strongest physical embrace of him thus far, and the last line of the entire film as she gazes into the glittering night sky and says: ‘James…how the hell do we get those diamonds down again?’

Could it be clearer where Tiffany Case’s mind really is when it’s supposed to be with James Bond?

We know what her true love still is. It’s not the man she supposedly ‘wins’. And she knows it too, with the final twinkle in her eye as strong as the glimmer from Blofeld’s dormant, diamond-studded satellite drifting somewhere in the stars above.

Seven films into the franchise and we’re finally gifted the first Bond Girl that could herself feasibly leave Bond after the end of the movie before he leaves her. After all, why should she have to wait around to be abandoned herself, when we know already that diamonds lustre on far beyond love? And as the credits begin to roll, every queer viewer caught in the jewelled gaze of Tiffany Case can surely say nothing but: get it, queen.

Jack Bell is a recent Creative Writing graduate from Brisbane, Australia who is still waiting for the productivity to finish a novel. His unformed opinions and various other pointless thoughts can be found on Twitter at @quirkycynic.