No cars were allowed instead, each guest was given an electric golf cart. Frenchman’s Cove was a landscaped tropical fantasy set along the sea with 18 secluded cottages, called “homes,” made of hand-hewn coral stone with copper roofs. Said to be the first all-inclusive resort in the world, it was, as one magazine article from 1971 put it in a headline, “Only for the Very, Very Rich.” It was reported to cost a whopping $1,650 a week back then, with a two-week minimum that included everything under the Jamaican sun caviar, fine wine, a personal chef, transportation, water sports, laundry. The scene got a boost in 1960, when Garfield Weston, a Canadian cookie manufacturer, opened the exclusive Frenchman’s Cove Resort on a 45-acre property set around one of Jamaica’s most beautiful beaches, just east of Port Antonio. Just east of Port Antonio, Frenchman’s cove is blissful, picturesque retreat., © Doug Pearson/JAI/Corbis. Marley bought Goldeneye from Ian Fleming’s estate in the late 1970s, and sold it to Blackwell in 1981. He founded Island Records and was the guy who made Bob Marley the first international reggae star. Today, Goldeneye is an exceptional, boutique-size resort hotel run by music-business legend and pioneering hotelier Chris Blackwell. He went there every winter to write a James Bond novel. Ian Fleming lived just up the beach from that Dr. I’ve been going to “the other Jamaica” for more than 30 years now. Jamaica is a large island, about the size of Connecticut, and has room for a variety of places.
That part includes the likes of Sandals and Hedonism II (“breaking the boundaries of other nudist resorts”).
Mary’s, is often nowadays referred to as “The Other Jamaica,” presumably to distance it from the part with all the murders-sections of Kingston, the capital-and the part with the cruise ships, ganja touts, and loud mega-resorts. This part of Jamaica, the parishes of Portland and St. No was set in Jamaica, and that scene was shot on its sleepy, lush northeast coast, just east of Ocho Rios. Whenever I turn a corner and hit a blast of cold winter wind, it pops up still.ĭr. That beach scene became my definitive tropical fantasy. As a student in cold and gray New England, I was thinking not just, “Who is that?,” but also, “Where is that?” I had never even been on a plane, but this looked like exactly where I wanted to go.
She wore a white bikini and a knife on a belt. To males of a certain age, one of the indelible images of the early 1960s was Ursula Andress rising out of an azure sea onto a perfect white sliver of beach.