Why Does Cedar Leiter Have a Mid-Atlantic Accent?

In his James Bond continuation novel For Special Services John Gardner described Cedar Leiter as having a "Mid-Atlantic accent." Characterizing this accent as "without a hint of what the British think of as an American accent," not having had "what the British think of as an American accent" clarified for me I initially thought he meant that Britons did not think of the accent of the Mid-Atlantic states as American-sounding. However, I later realized that he referred not to the regional accent of the middle of the Eastern seaboard but rather the mix of Northeastern U.S. and British Received Pronunciation that America's elites fostered in their prep schools and the media and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a U.S. equivalent of Britain's RP.

Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.