Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days (also 1956). McClory was romantically involved with Elizabeth Taylor. Although he and Taylor reportedly had plans to marry, she eventually left him for her future husband Mike Todd. Todd and McClory fell out over Taylor, yet they managed to complete the final cut of the film side by side. The trio would eventually reconcile, and they remained friends until Todd's untimely death in 1958. In 1957, McClory led an expedition of 25 men in an attempt to drive around the world. He filmed a documentary of the adventure, One Road, as well as a series of ads for his sponsor Ford Motor Company. The team completed the journey in 104 days. He later wrote, produced and directed the 1957 film The Boy and the Bridge, with financial assistance from heiress Josephine Hartford Bryce (sister of Huntington Hartford) and her husband Ivor Bryce, a friend of Ian Fleming. 1960s Bryce was a close friend of Ian Fleming. In 1958 Fleming approached McClory to produce the first Bond film. McClory rejected all of Fleming's books but felt that the character James Bond could be adapted for the screen. McClory, Bryce, Fleming and Jack Whittingham developed the new James Bond character through a number of treatments and screenplays. McClory, Fleming and Bryce settled on the screenplay Longitude 78 West (later renamed Thunderball) and went into pre-production. Fleming had assigned his interest in the film to McClory and Bryce's company Xanadu and would make no more money from the project. He conspired with Bryce to force McClory out of the film, denying that McClory had any legal interest in the screenplays and treatments that had been written during their collaboration. Later and without permission, Fleming novelised the draft screenplay Thunderball, his ninth novel, in 1961, which initially did not credit McClory or Whittingham. The two engaged libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck and sued, and the case opened to the High Court in London on 20 November 1963. After nine days, the case was settled. Fleming paid McClory damages of £35,000 and his court costs of £52,000, and future versions of the novel were credited as "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming" – in that order. Fleming and Bryce conveyed to McClory any rights they held in the screenplays and treatments that McClory, Whittingham and Fleming had written during their collaboration.