Roald Dahl (25 page)

When some of the helpers saw Neal for the first time after her return, they went home and cried. Later, working with her regularly, they soon realized that she was not only crippled but in mourning. She was an actress who had lost her speech and her memory: whatever her husband said, she knew that her career could never fully recover. Lame, her face fallen and either inexpressive or wildly melodramatic, she had also lost the best of her looks. This was dejecting for the wife in her, as well as the actress. As for the mother, in a sense she had lost her children, too. There were two usurpers. Tessa, if only in her eight-year-old's imagination, took on the roles of hostess and of conversational
companion to her father. More obvious to Pat herself was the fact that while the man she called “Papa” (after Hemingway) did not himself take part in her lessons, he was both their coordinator and, even more fully than before, the organizer of the entire ménage. He gave up their New York apartment and had an extension built onto Gipsy House for their new staff. He discussed meals with the cook, vaccinations with the nurse, drove the children to school, and arranged for them to see their friends, cousins, and aunts. “Everything was changed,” Pat says now. “It was sad because our marriage, it had been good, it really
was
good. I did the cooking, I did the children, keeping the house, the garden, the weeds—and then when I got ill, everything changed in the end. He was the only person who really could control the children, and it was ‘Daddy! Daddy!' You know, they looked up at him and it was just so irritating to me. Everything was turned upside down. We'd been through so much, and [before] we did it equally, really.”
³⁰

Not everyone remembers the pre-stroke Neal as having been quite that much of a housewife, or the marriage as having been such an ideal of mutuality, but it was easy to see why she was irritated and depressed by Dahl's absolute dominance, both in the family—including, it often seemed, the families of his sisters—and over the volunteers whom some visitors called “the handmaidens.” For that reason, but also because her well-advanced pregnancy left her even more lethargic, she looked for subterfuges to avoid the tougher parts of the new regime, deflecting her teachers into games of dominoes or into making cups of coffee. The weather was damp and cold. She would sit indoors for hours, smoking or eating sweets, bored, isolated, and in despair. Quite often, she would tell people that she had lost her mind. She couldn't even make sense of
Pigling Bland
when she tried to read it to Theo. It seemed that her new baby would never be born. And when it was, what kind of a state would it be in?

Dahl, meanwhile, continued to insist that she was on her way
to a full recovery. The doctors were skeptical, but less so than they had been, and it was clear to them that his methods, along with Neal's own strength, were responsible for much of the improvement she had already made. One of those methods was publicity.

That summer, he agreed to a proposal from
Life
magazine that a journalist should come to Great Missenden and follow the last stages of Neal's pregnancy. Barry Farrell was a sensitive writer whose own marriage had been destroyed when his child died.
³¹
He sympathized intensely with Dahl, and often sat up with him late into the night, drinking his good wine and “enjoying his large small talk.”
³²
Dahl, he wrote, “is the best storyteller I know, and listening to him often worked a kind of spell on me.” Under this spell, he seems to have written down whatever Dahl told him and put it into his
Life
article and, later, into a book, the financial proceeds of which were shared between them.
³³
The book was titled
Pat and Roald
, but Roald, or his version of himself, was so much at the center that Pat complained that she scarcely seemed to be in it. Certainly,
Pat and Roald
—of itself, and because it became a main source for other journalists—helped to fix the myth of Roald Dahl in the public mind. Here, readers could learn again how his Gladiator had been brought down in flames by “a burst of machine-gun fire … while strafing a convoy of trucks south of Fuka, a village not far from Alexandria.”
³⁴
Farrell also mentioned Dahl's “invention” of the gremlins: the very word “gremlin”—he gasped—“was Roald's contribution to the dictionary, a word he had coined to name a race of aerial saboteurs during the war.” Every one of his short stories “appeared in
The New Yorker
as soon as they were submitted.”

This last idea must have been a particularly consoling fantasy to Dahl. His most recent rejection letter from
The New Yorker
(about “The Last Act”) had arrived only three months before Farrell. And at around the same time, his latest book for children—the ill-fated anti-shooting story,
The Magic Finger
, which Macmillan had commissioned and then refused—had been turned down by his own editor at Knopf, Virginie Fowler.
³⁵
Fowler preferred Dahl, she says, as a writer of “wonderful fantasies”: the new book was satirical or, as she puts it, “rather sticky, and much more adult in feeling.”
³⁶
Dahl himself, who had other things on his mind, had been untypically self-deprecating about it, so she let it go without further consultation. Harper & Row then stepped in and bought the rights for $5,000.

Alfred Knopf didn't seem troubled when he first heard what was going on, but Dahl soon changed that. Abject letters were rushed off to the incensed author and icy memos to the unfortunate editor. “While I respect greatly the high editorial standards you maintain,” Knopf told Fowler, “I think there are cases where the basic interests of the house override, and must override, your opinion of a given manuscript, and that sometimes if an author wants to publish a given story sound policy requires that we publish it regardless of our opinion of it.… Am I not correct in saying that your decision in this case was never discussed with me, Mr. Cerf, Mr. Klopfer, or Mr. Bernstein?”
³⁷

Meanwhile, Robert Bernstein quickly set about repairing the damage. He sent Dahl word that the Book-of-the-Month Club had bought
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
for its Christmas, 1965, mailing, and that he anticipated over 5,000 sales. He knew that although Dahl was very busy with his family, he felt he was in need of money. Would he like to edit a book of “Knock, Knock” jokes? “I should tell you,” Bernstein added, “that I have still not recovered from the shock of hearing that Harper's was going to publish one of your books. My feeling about you is that you are a wonderful writer and anything that you wish to put your name on we should publish.”
³⁸

It would be five years and several more quarrels before Dahl had anything to offer them. For the moment, he was preoccupied
with three overriding aims. He wanted the new baby to be safely born. He wanted to get his wife not only better but back at work. And he wanted to become so rich that they would never have to think about money again.

The first proved no problem. The child, born in perfect health on August 4, was a girl, and they called her Lucy Neal. The press agencies had the news before Lucy's grandparents.
Life
magazine's photographers were in the delivery room within minutes of her arrival. The pictures show Neal, battered but triumphant, her hair still not fully grown back from her operation. Dahl, looking vaguely North African in his surgical gown and hat, gazes inquiringly into the crib.
³⁹

The birth gave Neal a brief surge of confidence, but she soon relapsed into an ever deeper depression. Dahl pressed on toward his second objective. In place of the roster of handmaidens, he persuaded someone new to work with her single-handedly in her own home. Valerie Eaton Griffith had herself recently been ill with a thyroid complaint. An unmarried friend of Angela Kirwan's parents, she had given up her job with Elizabeth Arden and was living with her father a mile from Gipsy House. Roald drove Pat over every morning, after he had seen the children off to school, and left her there for most of the day. The two women got on well, and Valerie grew both very fond of Pat and increasingly absorbed in her difficulties and the best approach to their cure.

Dahl, in the meantime, went back to his shed in the garden and set about getting rich.

10

Credits

It was from what had until then been Patricia Neal's world that Dahl was to earn most of their income in the late 1960s and early '70s.

There was a lot of sympathy for Neal in Hollywood, and within months of her strokes, her husband was offered a chance to write his first big screenplay,
You Only Live Twice
. According to Neal, the James Bond movie paid him more than she had ever earned.
¹
But it was with a great show of reluctance that he agreed to do it, telling his publisher that he found the idea “exceptionally distasteful.”
²
The harder he found it to write prose fiction, the more protective he was of his literary self-image. He told Barry Farrell what he also kept promising Alfred Knopf, that his “only real ambition” was to turn out a new, “really solid” collection of short stories.
³

Of course, he had stooped to films before. His work with Walt Disney on
The Gremlins
had helped to launch his career, and since then, he had contributed to the film of
Moby Dick
, had sold his story “Beware of the Dog” to MGM for its successful war thriller 36
Hours
, and had written the script for the abortive Robert Altman project,
Oh, Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling
. There were also plans for a film of
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory
, and despite the book's attacks on TV watching, a television series based on it was discussed, too.
⁴
Several of Dahl's adult stories had already been successfully adapted for TV.

For all his grouses, Dahl showed every sign of enjoying the Bond project. Ian Fleming had died two years earlier. Dahl had met him often in Jamaica and in New York, through their mutual friend Ivar Bryce,
⁵
and he hero-worshipped him. They had much in common: sporting prowess, not having been to university, the Secret Service, attractiveness to women, interests in gambling and collecting, and a robust, if juvenile, fantasy life. Fleming was the more cosmopolitan, a top-drawer version of many of the younger man's qualities and enthusiasms—so much so that Dahl told Fleming's biographer, John Pearson, that, for him, “there was a great red glow when Ian came into the room.”

Glow or not, and despite Dahl's much-bruited contempt for Hollywood's cavalier treatment of writers, he made no objection when United Artists abandoned any pretense of following Fleming's original novel.
You Only Live Twice
, published in the year the author died, is far from being Fleming's strongest book. Essentially, it is a long sequence of touristic episodes set in Japan, with asides on Oriental customs, international politics, and (in the encyclopedia-entry manner which Dahl's own stories often imitated) poisonous plants. The horticultural strand forms part of a more than usually farfetched intrigue by Fleming's power-maniac, Ernest Stavro, to wipe out the Japanese warrior class.

The film rights belonged, like those in most of the Bond books, to a Canadian-American partnership, Eon, based in London and owned by Harry Saltzman and Albert (“Cubby”) Broccoli. Eon had already made four hugely successful James Bond films for United Artists, starting with
Dr. No
. So far, each of them had been dramatized by Richard Maibaum. It was Maibaum who established the formula of toning down the novels' sex and violence and playing up their humor and fantasticality,
⁶
but the screenwriting process had always been complicated. The first script of
Dr. No
, for example, was written jointly by Maibaum
and Wolf Mankowitz, but subsequently reworked by two others. On the following three Bond films, three writers other than Maibaum earned credits, not to speak of those who were paid for their work but not finally named on screen. Partly to satisfy union rules, the writers chosen for these Britain-based projects had been, like Wolf Mankowitz, British: Johanna Harwood, Paul Dehn, and John Hopkins.

You Only Live Twice
involved new problems, both because of the weaknesses of the original book and because the project faced intense competition from other Bond-type comedy thrillers, several of which had appeared in 1965 and 1966—among them
Our Man Flint
, starring James Coburn as the agent-stud, and Columbia's
The Silencers
, with Dean Martin. Meanwhile, Columbia also hired Wolf Mankowitz to write the screenplay for an Ian Fleming novel which Saltzman and Broccoli did not own,
Casino Royale
. This film had already gone into production with John Huston as director, and a starry cast including David Niven, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, Peter O'Toole, and Woody Allen as a walking atom bomb.

Broccoli responded by pouring money into the new Eon project (a million dollars was budgeted for the set alone) and hiring a team made up equally of the most dependable of the previous Bond specialists and some famous new blood. John Stears, who had won an Oscar for the special effects on Eon's previous Bond production,
Thunderball
, came into the first category, as did the designer Ken Adam and the composer John Barry. Lewis Gilbert was persuaded, at first reluctantly, to direct. He had had a big success recently with
Alfie
, the film version of Bill Naughton's play about a cockney Don Juan, played by Michael Caine. Gilbert's box-office successes also included
Reach for the Sky
(about Dahl's old Shell colleague the war hero Douglas Bader). For
You Only Live Twice
he brought in Freddie Young as cameraman: Young had just won an Academy Award for
Dr. Zhivago
.