The famous Miami Beach hotel that served as a key location at the beginning of Goldfinger. It is first seen from an aerial view as a plane tows a promotional banner proclaiming Welcome to Miami Beach.
James Bond (Sean Connery) thinks he’s being booked into “the best hotel in Miami Beach” as a holiday gift from M. In actuality, he’s been ordered to observe the suspicious activities of one Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe). Bond’s orders are delivered via CIA agent Felix Leiter (Cec Linder), who makes his film introduction while walking through the hotel’s famous ice rink and pool area. There he finds 007 getting a massage from Dink (Margaret Nolan), a fabulously proportioned blonde.
Leiter briefs Bond on his mission and then points to a spot near the Fontainebleau pool where Goldfinger is cheating a Mr. Simmons (Austin Willis) at gin. Equipped with a radio transmitter disguised as a hearing aid, Goldfinger is being aided by his girl Friday, Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), who, while looking out a window of Goldfinger’s hotel suite, spies on Simmons’s hand with a pair of binoculars. Masterson is discovered by Bond, who orders Goldfinger to start losing or else he’ll be turned over to the Miami Beach police. Helpless to defend himself lest he give himself away, Goldfinger nods his head, then proceeds to lose $15,000 to Mr. Simmons.
Cec Linder related a funny story about filming at the Fontainebleau Hotel pool in 1964. Said Linder, “The scene in which Felix Leiter strolls past the pool in search of Bond called for a background of voluptuous bathing beauties in bikinis. However, this is not the usual clientele at the Fontainebleau pool. On an average day, the pool is populated instead by a large group of older, silver-haired ladies and their card-playing husbands. Because of hotel restrictions, the film crew could not prevent the vacationers from relaxing by the pool, so the production company had to do some quick thinking to get their bathing beauties in place. What they decided to do was pure subterfuge.
“At the pool that morning, it was announced that at five o’clock in the afternoon, the crew would be shooting the pool area and that since the vacationers were going to be on camera, it would be a good idea for the women to go out and have their hair done. No sooner did all the older ladies leave the area than the crew brought in their voluptuous extras and shot Linder’s walk-by. When the older ladies returned at 4:30 pm, the crew shot the pool a second time—but there wasn’t any film in the camera.”[1] M couldn’t have planned a more successful caper.
[1] Cec Linder, telephone interview by Steven Jay Rubin, July 17, 1989.
