You will almost certainly have first encountered Rosa Klebb in the form of Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s muse and wife, now aged 65 but looking agelessly murderous, in the 1965 film of From Russia With Love. You will also, just as certainly, not have forgotten her, whether starched into her ribbon-bedecked military uniform, or, sinisterly disguised as a maid, trying to kick the life out of James Bond with the poison-tipped blades concealed in her shoes - the ultimate stilettoes. Either way, these are horribly kinky performances, although you may not quite be able to put your finger on why if you are watching the movie in the traditional manner (stuffed with turkey and the Queen’s Speech).
All was made frightfully clear, though, in Ian Fleming’s novel. The movie Klebb is a shadow of novel Klebb for the simple reason that the villain’s sexuality could not have been so directly addressed on the screen as on the page, even in 1957, when it was published.
The plot, as you may recall, involves getting a beautiful Soviet agent to seduce Bond and also offer him a decoding machine, and the plan is to kill him ignominiously, causing maximum embarrassment to the British, in France, where the press is tractable to Soviet propaganda and reports this kind of affair with practised relish. (For reasons I forget, in the film Klebb is a defector from SMERSH, the Soviet spy network, and is secretly working for SPECTRE, Blofeld’s mob, but I am going to be confining myself to the book from now on.)
A suitable morsel of bait is found, one Tatiana Romanov, but before we meet her we have had ample opportunity to learn just how frightful Klebb is. Her name, for a start: presumably named after Rosa Luxembourg like a good socialist heroine, the “Klebb” violently annuls any trace of beauty in the name “Rosa”: it is the sound of lips smacking obscenely.
Fleming had a thing about lips and mouths: Blofeld had “a purple wound of a mouth”; his henchwoman in On her Majesty’s Secret Service, Irma Bunt, a Klebb knockoff, as it were, “had a square, brutal face with hard yellow eyes. Her smile was an oblong hole without humour or welcome, and there were sunburn blisters at the left corner of her mouth which she licked from time to time with the tip of a pale tongue.” (Fleming never put his villains in more than one book, with the exception of Blofeld, whom he put in three, each time with wildly differing physical features. But Bunt is definitely one of his creepy, ugly women.)
When we first meet her, we do not know Klebb is a woman. We see “a toad-like figure in an olive-green uniform which bore the single order of Lenin”, a “squat face” which “broke into a sugary smile”. And then: “The Head of Otydel II, the department of SMERSH in charge of Operations and Executions, hitched up her skirts and sat down.”
This was presumably meant to come as a surprise, though it isn’t now, of course. But we should try to bear it in mind, for it is Klebb’s sexuality that Fleming wanted to vie with her cruelty as the most disturbing thing about her. We have a description of her interrogating the tortured – “it was said that Rosa Klebb would let no torturing take place without her” – and it is rather formulaically chilling, as she orders the tortures (“Now No. 64”, etc.) while at the same time cooing into her victims’ ears: “There, there, my dove. Talk to me, my pretty one, and it will stop. It hurts. Ah me, it hurts so, my child ... This pain is nothing. Nothing! ... Well then, your mother must try a little, but only a very little, of No. 87.”
But it is in Fleming’s description of her eroticism that we are really meant to gag. (Let the record state that I here formally distance myself from any approval of Fleming’s characterisation.) Having ordered the terrified Tatiana to her apartment – one is usually only in the worst kind of trouble when Rosa Klebb wants to see you – she disappears after an intrusively personal interview into her bedroom and reappears wearing literature’s most unappealing lingerie: “Colonel Klebb of SMERSH was wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine. It had scallops of the same material round the low square neckline ... Below, she wore old-fashioned knickers of pink satin with ... ”
But I shall spare you the rest. Fleming poured all his disgust – and he had plenty – into his creation; and even though today one simply does not describe people, especially lesbians, like that, and nor should one, you still have to salute the energy and creative malice that resulted in such a memorable baddie.
