Roald Dahl Read online

  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.

  In the spring of 1966, some of the team, including Broccoli, Gilbert, Adam, and Young, made a preliminary reconnaissance trip to Japan. They took along a well-established Hollywood scriptwriter called Harold Jack Bloom.

  They were looking for ideas, and among other things hoped to find a coastal fortress like Blofeld’s headquarters in Fleming’s novel. There wasn’t one, but they were intrigued to see a large number of volcanic craters in a national park on the island of Kyushu and decided to use one of these, instead, as the film’s main setting. It gave them a basis for a new narrative—Blofeld’s plot to start a war between America and Russia, each side assuming that the other was responsible when their rockets were hijacked in space. The story used current developments in the space race, including the first operations by astronauts walking outside their craft. And it would eventually also feature both a car chase in which the pursuing automobile is picked up by a huge magnet and dropped into the sea and a helicopter battle, in the shooting of which one of the cameramen lost his leg.

  Dahl later claimed credit for every detail of the new plot, and described the film—much of it shot at the Pinewood Studios, near his home—as his one experience of real harmony between producer, director, and scriptwriter.7 This is roughly the version given, too, by Steven Jay Rubin in his history of the Bond films,8 although he says that the main new idea—the fortress within a volcano—was Broccoli’s, and that the helicopter chase was suggested by the invention of a miniature autogiro by another member of the film’s multitudinous crew, Ken Wallis. The director, Lewis Gilbert, is uncertain at what stage in the project he started working with Dahl, rather than Harold Jack Bloom, although he knows that it was Bloom, and not Dahl, who went with them on the first trip to Japan. But soon Gilbert and Dahl were meeting almost every day, either at Broccoli’s Mayfair office or at his home nearby, deciding the details of each scene.9 They got on well together. Gilbert thought Dahl “a brilliant guy,” and was surprised that he wasn’t hired for any of the later Bond films. He can’t remember what it was that Bloom contributed to earn him his eventual credit for “additional story material.” The official Bond histories don’t mention Bloom at all.

  It is a reticence Bloom does not himself share. According to him, he “made up everything you saw on the screen.”10 The credit was originally to have read, “Screen story by Harold Jack Bloom,” but he was later told that if this form of words was used, Ian Fleming’s name would suffer unduly—even though, until Bloom started work, “there was no story at all. The Fleming book was discarded completely.” Bloom says that Dahl changed none of the action in the screenplay. “We should have been given joint credit, at the very least. Had the picture been done here [in Hollywood], I would have been properly credited, but [the British] weren’t crazy about using American writers. I was very disappointed.”

  When You Only Live Twice appeared in June 1967, most reviewers accepted the simple version of events: that the script was exclusively Dahl’s. Only the studio-wise Variety Weekly mentioned Bloom’s name.11 Most of the more favorable attention, in any case, was concentrated on Ken Adam’s set and the special effects. As far as Dahl’s dialogue was concerned, the trade papers were polite, but sharper critics such as those in Newsweek and The New Yorker found the sexual double entendres (“It will be a pleasure serving under you”) unusually labored—a cruder version of the comic style of the earlier Bond scripts. As Pauline Kael wrote: “The gaggy screenplay for this installment coarsens the style. The earlier films had something genuinely blithe about them … but in ‘You Only Live Twice’ the sense of play keeps getting lost.”

  Whatever the critics thought, the film was an enormous popular success. Dahl always claimed that this was all that mattered, and that his contribution had been crucial. In a film, after al
l, the guy who gets the credit is the guy who gets the credit, and in his own mind, Dahl’s importance had been confirmed, while he was at work on the script, by the regular arrival of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce at Gipsy House to pick him up—or, sometimes, just to pick up the latest pages of dialogue.13 It was the kind of attention he always craved, and it took his mind off recent events. Collecting Tessa, Theo, and their friends Amanda Conquy and Camilla Unwin from school, he would regale them with the adventures James Bond had had that day.

  In the autumn of 1967, Dahl sent the ten-year-old Tessa away to her aunts’ old boarding school, the grand, expensive, and conservative Roedean. He thought that Theo, too, would soon be self-reliant enough to go as a weekly boarder to a nearby prep school, Caldecote, although Pat wasn’t so sure, and in the end, neither of these attempts was a success. Tessa was moved after a couple of years to the more liberal Downe House. Theo had a private tutor for a time, before being sent with a local friend to a school in Switzerland for children with special educational needs. Ophelia and the baby, Lucy, meanwhile, were still at home with their nanny.

  Pat’s powers of communication were improving steadily, but she was still lame and bitterly depressed, and Roald was sure that the only remedy was to get her back to acting. As early as January 1966, he had put out another press release saying, once again, that she would be at work within twelve months. That April, they appeared on an American TV program, The Merv Griffin Show. In the first half of the twelve-minute interview, shot at Great Missenden, Griffin interviewed Neal alone about her illness. He asked whether her doctors thought she would be able to return to acting. Her voice drawling but clear, she said that she hadn’t discussed the idea with them. Griffin then turned to Dahl’s children’s books, and the author came in on cue. He said that although no one in his wife’s situation had ever recovered more than she already had, he was confident that she would achieve complete normality. According to one viewer at the time, he seemed “determined that she will get well, and she is determined that if he feels that way, she will.”14

  How far Dahl believed his own myth is hard to know. He had given much thought to the best psychological approach to take with Pat, and knew that she would find it all too easy to give up. Sheer determination was involved, on his part as well as hers. When friends tried to help her out of cars or up flights of steps, Roald told them that she must do it herself. At such moments, even he sometimes wavered, according to Dennis Pearl. Yet domineering came more easily to him than it might have to someone else. In the same way, his optimism was both deliberate and an unavoidable part of his larger-than-life, fantasizing mentality. There was a similar ambiguity, as the months and years passed, in the way he encouraged her to act independently of him; or, as some saw it, got her out of the way. In March 1967, he arranged for her and Valerie Eaton Griffith to go to the States without him, to speak at a dinner in aid of the New York Association for Brain-Injured Children—a frightening challenge and one which both women tried to resist. Soon afterward, he accepted a sizable role for her in the film of Frank D. Gilroy’s play The Subject Was Roses, about the difficulties of communication between a returned war veteran and his parents. It was shot in New York at the beginning of 1968, less than three years after her stroke.

  When Neal asked him if he would accompany her on the first American trip, he refused, saying, “You’re on your own now.”15 It was a larger-scale version of his agreeing to Valerie Eaton Griffith’s suggestion that they move Pat’s lessons out of Gipsy House into Griffith’s place in Grimms Hill. As he said at the time, now he would be able to listen to some Beethoven before going off to his hut to write.16 But perhaps he already sensed that, as time went by, he would need to put still more distance between himself and his wife. He was determined to do his best by her, but could not disguise from himself how frustrating he found her lethargy, her moodiness, her lack of interest in the things he cared about. It was not until many years later that he could bring himself to talk about these feelings to others, and even then, he wouldn’t admit that he might have made some mistakes. He told Valerie Eaton Griffith, “I’m frightfully good at blocking off one side.… I get efficient and busy and am more interested in the work side of things. It’s very important to keep busy.” Griffith bravely suggested that it was also important not to be too busy, but he brushed the implied criticism aside.

  In Griffith’s subsequent experience with her now nationwide Volunteer Stroke Scheme, few marriages survive a stroke where the ill partner’s communication is seriously affected unless the couple are well into middle age or older. “Stroke kills marriages,” she says bluntly—among other reasons because, in a literal-seeming sense, the affected partner may no longer be the same person as before. Sexually, despite some early difficulties, Roald and Pat were gradually able to resume relations, but he still often boasted about his attractiveness to other women, not least in front of his wife.17 The attraction went along with, seemed partly to derive from, his arrogance: the easy assertiveness with which he would commandeer girls to go with him as tasters and bag carriers on expeditions to shop for food or to pick mushrooms. It may only be the subsequent change in manners that makes some remember this approach, not only as seductive, but as strangely humiliating.18 But among those humiliated, of course, was Neal herself. When, while she was pregnant with Lucy, he had joked with her that he might “nip into London and find myself a girl,” she gamely answered back that he should beware of a heart attack. But she didn’t forget what he said.19 Her anxieties on this score made her both give and demand shows of affection in a way which irritated, and began to repel, her less demonstrative husband. “I love her,” he wrote to a close friend, “I’ll never leave her. But I have to live with her all the time, and you would go round the bend within a couple of hours.”

  In Dahl’s case, going round the bend took the form of a slipped disk. Ever since his plane crash he had been prone to back troubles of one kind or another, but in the summer and autumn of 1967 they became acute, and in November he underwent a spinal operation which was a failure and had to be repeated.20 While he was in hospital in Oxford—excruciating pains in his neck and lower back compounded by infected surgical staples and a fissure in his colon—his eighty-two-year-old mother telephoned him to ask how he was and to send her love. She didn’t mention that she herself was very ill. Before he came home, she died. The date was November 17, the fifth anniversary of Olivia’s death.

  With all that had happened since Theo’s accident seven years ago, it was hard for the sick Dahl to feel this new loss. But he needed the company of strong women. Sofie had long been crippled and housebound, and her son had automatically taken her place at the head of the family.

  There was rarely a day when Else didn’t drop in at Gipsy House for a few drinks, with or without her twin daughters and their older brother, Nicholas. (Roald introduced Nicholas to an enthusiasm for contemporary art which was to become his career.21) Asta appeared less frequently. She and her strong-willed Scottish husband, Alex, still lived nearby with their three children, but Roald had never quite forgiven Alex for being a vet, or perhaps just for not admiring him enough. Alfhild, on the other hand, was a very frequent visitor, partly to escape from her eccentric husband. One day she reported that she and their daughter had returned home from a shopping trip to find a gun on the table, with a message from him saying, “When you get in, please shoot yourselves.”

  Roald and Alf always telephoned each other when there was gossip to relate. Tessa remembers that while all the family “loved to discuss drama, they didn’t like to discuss the effect on people’s emotions.” Still, Roald absorbed himself in all domestic issues, whether concerning his sisters or the running of Gipsy House. Friends noticed that while he had been away in hospital, Pat had seemed not only more active around the house but much more cheerful.22

  School fees and domestic wages remained dominant concerns. After You Only Live Twice, Dahl spent some time on a screenplay for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
but couldn’t find a way into the story.23 Cubby Broccoli came to the rescue by signing him up to adapt a children’s story, again by Ian Fleming: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The film’s director was to be Ken Hughes.

  This time, the original book provided much of the first part of the eventual film. In Fleming’s story, on the face of things well suited to Dahl, an eccentric inventor makes some money with a new kind of confectionery, buys and restores a vintage car which turns out to have magical powers, and takes his mother and children in it to France, where they are involved in various adventures. This wasn’t enough for Broccoli, who had been enviously eyeing Walt Disney’s recent success with the extravaganza Mary Poppins. He talked over other possibilities with his director. Ken Hughes was accustomed to writing his own films, which had ranged from an updated gangster version of Macbeth, to The Trials of Oscar Wilde, starring Peter Finch. According to Hughes’s own account, he went away and worked out what was to be the eventual storyline of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which he then passed to Dahl.24

  Dahl was suffering the first stages of his new back problems. He may also have taken umbrage at seeing the plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang rewritten before he had even begun work on it. For whatever reason, he didn’t communicate with Hughes. After about four weeks, according to the voluble cockney director,

  Broccoli starts to say, “What’s going on?” I said, “He’s the writer, leave him alone,” but Cubby got increasingly nervous.

  Roald is in his country cottage. Five weeks to the start of shooting, the producer says, “I’ve got to have some pages”—terrible thing to say to a writer. So finally Roald sent some pages around. He’d hardly got through a third of the script. Cubby read it and went white. I said, “What do you think?” He said, “I think it’s a piece of shit—Ken,” he says, “write the fucking script.” So I hit the typewriter and I was still writing the day before we went on the floor. Every fucking word in that bloody script I wrote on my portable typewriter I bought in Maida Vale.