Roald Dahl Read online

  When a New York Times reporter visited the Pinewood Studios set in October 1967, the stricken Dahl was nowhere in evidence. Hughes made sure that his absence was noticed. “You ’aven’t seen him around ’ere ’ave you?” the paper quoted him as asking rhetorically. “No. I had to rewrite the whole bleedin’ scenario.’25

  In a memorable and fair review, Pauline Kael was to describe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as “almost sadistically ill-planned.”26 It is hard to see why anyone should want to take credit for it, and Dahl himself was relieved to dissociate himself from the whole unhappy episode.27 (He never spoke to Ken Hughes again.) Almost all the reviews were bad, and several mentioned the fact that the film had been, as The Hollywood Reporter put it, “patched and retreaded throughout a long shooting schedule.”28 There was no secret about the troubles with the script, of which a final final rewrite had been undertaken by the James Bond veteran Richard Maibaum.29 But once again, while the result didn’t please the critics, it was a box-office hit, and this time Dahl had a percentage—or a percentage of a percentage.

  He built a swimming pool at Gipsy House and inundated the children with presents. In other ways, too, he spoiled them as much as the absentminded genius Potts in the movie—who, when his children don’t want to go to school, tells them, “Oh well, it’ll give the others a chance to catch up, won’t it?” Valerie Eaton Griffith says, “If they were not happy at school, or if they did not want to do their homework, Roald would always say, ‘Don’t bother.’” But as usual, he was divided in his behavior, and in a way which, whether or not they were aware of it at the time, left them permanently confused. When they wanted pocket money, he would often hand over twice as much as had been asked for, but only after a homily about the importance of thrift.

  Such indulgences must have been partly intended to make up to the children for the losses and disasters they had been through—and perhaps, also, for their father’s own occasional moments of harshness. There was a similarly all-too-comprehensible duality in his behavior toward Patricia Neal. For example, there were the bridge games in which he would encourage her to take part. With a certain amount of tolerance on the part of the other players, and with someone to look over her shoulder, she enjoyed playing cards. But sometimes her husband would humiliate her. Barry Farrell remembered his telling her sharply, one Easter at the Bryces’ at Moyns Park, “You must answer your partner with a bid if you’ve got some points in your hand. You do know how to count points, do you not?”30 However hard Dahl tried, he was too competitive to lower his game for her. “He always wanted a slam,” Valerie Eaton Griffith says. “Roald liked the top contract.”

  The contracts he procured for Pat in the film business were even harder challenges, and more public ones. Again, they certainly helped her toward a fuller recovery, but Dahl never doubted that the only definition of that process was for her to return to exactly what she had been doing before. Yet, however successfully she could be coached into impersonating the old Patricia Neal, it was obvious that there were some things she would never be able to do again. She was still slightly lame, but more problematically, she found it very hard to remember lines, and sometimes just to utter them. During the three months’ shooting of The Subject Was Roses in New York, Valerie Eaton Griffith worked as a prompter by day and a governess by night. At the hotel, she discouraged Neal from going out to parties and took her through her words over and over, night and morning. On the set, she held up “idiot boards” with Neal’s lines written on them for her, or crouched behind sofas and whispered them to her.

  A process which might have seemed humiliating to an onlooker turned out to be a triumph. The performances of Neal and her co-star, Jack Albertson, were generally acclaimed, and each was nominated for, and he won, an Academy Award. (Albertson subsequently played Grandpa Joe in the film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Yet it wasn’t that long ago when she had been unable either to walk or to talk. During the shooting, she loved being back in Manhattan among her old friends, who made a big fuss over her. And she told everyone how grateful she was to her husband for forcing her back to work.31 One weekend, he came to see her, and she was so keyed up that she couldn’t concentrate on filming.32

  Still, his regime continued to make outsiders uneasy. It was partly a matter of the publicity he, as well as she, was extracting from it all: magazine interviews, profiles on TV and radio, each one naturally mentioning his work as well as hers. And now he was turning the situation into one of his stories. Literally so. He had bought the film rights to a new novel, Nest in a Falling Tree, a romantic melodrama by Joy Cowley which he planned to adapt as a vehicle for Neal to star in. If MGM agreed to put up the money, the Dahls would work on a deferred-payment basis, taking their fees only when and if the movie became profitable.33

  In various ways, Dahl based the screenplay on Neal’s actual predicament. She plays Maura, a middle-aged woman recovering from a cerebral aneurysm, who works part-time in a Buckinghamshire hospital, helping children with impaired speech. (In one sequence, she is shown reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) The doctors would like Maura to do more of this work, but—here the film roughly follows the book—she is tied to a crippled mother, a blind old harridan with whom she lives in a run-down gothic mansion. Their existence revolves around the village and the church, a world of gossipy women, and, in Dahl’s grotesquely off-key version, salacious old men in mackintoshes. Dahl has the villagers obsessed with the vicar’s impending operation, maliciously rumored to be a sex change. The trouble with hospitals, says one leering character, is that “one invariably comes away with something or other missing.” “They’re just going to snip it off,” the vicar’s wife innocently replies. “It’s got a lot bigger lately, and that scares me.”

  With an abrupt but temporary shift back to Joy Cowley’s novel, a brutishly handsome boy called Billy arrives on a motorbike, having heard that the two women need an odd-job man. Although his story about himself is unconvincing, Maura’s mother hires him and makes Maura give him her own bedroom. Maura inevitably falls in love with him, but the development of the relationship is undermined by the film’s slowly revealing, and her eventually discovering, another of Dahl’s additions to the plot: Billy is a serial sex killer. From here on, the film leaves behind both the book and the antics that have been superimposed on it, turning into a thriller-cum-sentimental-melodrama. We see Billy rape and kill both a local schoolteacher and Maura’s mother’s nurse. Will Maura herself be next? Unexpectedly, her kindness moves him to remorse, and he tells her his secret. They run away together, abandoning Maura’s screaming mother in a hospital ward. The couple are seen walking on beaches at sunset and admiring young lambs, Neal in a variety of optimistic Shetland jerseys and tam o’shanters. But temptation returns to Billy, and in order to escape it, he throws himself off a cliff.

  Films equally bad have been commercially successful, but this one flopped. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a lethargic although artfully photographed mess.”34 Variety criticized its clichés and inconsistencies of motivation.35 Everyone made unfavorable comparisons with the recently revamped Night Must Fall. MGM let the film run for a while in New York, but it was never released in Britain, and neither Dahl, Neal, nor the director, Alastair Reid, ever saw any money from it. Even as an exercise for Patricia Neal, it couldn’t have been called a success. In the film’s all-English context, her accent isn’t convincing, and there were embarrassing rows over passages in Dahl’s script, which Reid and his editor cut on the grounds that she was having difficulty speaking them. Dahl used his power with MGM to force Reid to reinstate a few lines, but when The Night Digger was released, he once again publicly dissociated himself from it.

  With hindsight, the project’s failure was predictable and arguably resulted from nothing worse than misjudgment of various kinds on Dahl’s part. His experience of screenplays was more limited than might at first have appeared to his partners, because much of the previous work of this sort attributed to him had eithe
r been started or rescued by more seasoned scriptwriters. He had meant well, but had taken on more than he proved able to manage.

  Perhaps this is all that lies behind the slight edginess that comes into the manner of some of the people involved when you mention The Night Digger. Yet there is something more than uncomfortable about the ways in which Dahl had altered the story for his wife. However well she had recovered, what did he suppose she would feel about the new scene in which the crippled mother is casually abandoned? Or about the fact that such tension as the plot has comes from the prospect that the character she plays seems likely to be both raped and murdered by her lover? Reid found Dahl’s behavior exceedingly distasteful. “He was a bully, a big, overpoweringly enormous guy. He would make [Pat] repeat things in front of people, and treat her like a child. It must have been completely humiliating for her. And he used to talk about her, not exactly behind her back, but as if she wasn’t there.” Reid concedes what those closer to Dahl emphasize more, that he may have acted like this in order to “provoke a spark,” but says it seemed as though he liked doing it.36

  Dahl’s work on The Night Digger more or less coincided with a falling out between him and another film director, Mel Stuart, who was making the film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl had contracted to write his own adaptation, and for a time, the two projects overlapped. He was in Hollywood without Pat, both finishing his screenplay for the children’s movie and raising money for The Night Digger. Alastair Reid was there, too, busy with a different film, and they shared a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Although Dahl was always rude about Hollywood people, Reid noticed that he seemed to enjoy their company well enough. He knew everybody and everybody knew him—less as a scriptwriter, perhaps, than as Patricia Neal’s husband, but also now as a famous children’s author. Reid says that kids followed Dahl around in the street as if he was the Pied Piper. He also had in tow a glamorous girlfriend who was staying at the same hotel—the daughter, it was said, of a Chicago gangster.

  Dahl and Reid drank and gossiped together, and Reid, then in his early thirties, still remembers the older man’s wartime anecdotes: how he had been shot in the back by bullets from his own crashed airplane; how Winston Churchill had asked him personally to spy on Roosevelt, who was a deep admirer of his writing; and how MI6 had instructed him to eliminate a double agent, which he did by pushing him off a ship in mid-Atlantic. Meanwhile, though, Mel Stuart was unhappy with the progress of Dahl’s script for Charlie and, without telling the author, brought in a young unknown named David Seltzer to rewrite it.37 Stuart says he wanted the story to be treated more “realistically,” although it is hard to see what this means in relation to the final product, which is unabashedly and enjoyably fantastic. Some of the changes reflected a concern for the sensitivities of a more racially mixed audience than Dahl had had in mind—the film’s Oompa-Loompas, for example, are not only no longer black but orange with green hair. (It was for similar reasons that the title was altered to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—“Charlie” being Afro-American slang for a white man. The change was explained in publicity handouts as reflecting an in fact nonexistent expansion of Wonka’s role.) But other alterations were made simply to add to the fun.

  Dahl had returned to Great Missenden by the time he learned that David Seltzer was—in Hollywood parlance—“writing behind” him. He was so incensed that, in order to appease him, Stuart had to fly to England from Germany, where Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was being shot. But the new script stayed. Apart from the additional episodes, Seltzer had redrafted much of the existing dialogue, had given Willy Wonka a taste for literary quotation (“All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”), and provided a new ending. Mr. Wonka tells Charlie not to forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he had ever wanted. When Charlie asks, “What happened?” he tells him, “He lived happily ever after.” Dahl hated this, although it seems to fit the story well enough.

  Seltzer was not given an on-screen credit for his work (the screenplay is simply attributed to Roald Dahl), but the film helped to launch him on a highly commercial Hollywood career, one of whose successes would be the award-winning The Omen, with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. As Mel Stuart proudly says now, “He turned out to be as talented as he really was.”38 The implication seems to be that, in Hollywood’s terms, Roald Dahl was less talented than he was turning out. The combination of The Night Digger and his attempt to adapt Charlie in effect brought an end to his career as a scriptwriter. By the time other such offers began to come his way, even he felt rich enough to refuse them.

  11

  Businessman of Letters

  Dahl was glad to give up film work, or to be given up by it. He was bad at collaborative enterprises, and in any case, he was beginning to see the commercial potential of concentrating on books for children.

  Although he disliked the movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, its release in 1971 increased his fame. But his children’s books were already doing extremely well. By March 1968, Charlie had sold 607,240 copies in the United States. The figure for James and the Giant Peach was 266,435.1 Knopf’s royalty statement showed the author as being owed almost a million dollars. Before the end of that year, all these figures had doubled.2 And both books had at last broken through in Britain, as well as in France (where James was published by Gallimard in 1966, a year earlier than in England). In the course of the following decade, they were to appear in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, and Israel. But it was success in Britain that mattered most to Dahl. He achieved it in a way that both pleased him very much and allowed him to use his commercial cunning.

  Tessa had a school friend, Camilla Unwin, who lived in the next village, Little Missenden. Her father, Rayner Unwin, was a publisher: J.R.R. Tolkien’s publisher, in fact, although he didn’t specialize in children’s books. One day Camilla brought home copies of the American editions of James and Charlie, given her by Tessa. A letter from Allen & Unwin was soon on its way to the author.3

  Unwin didn’t know that the books had been turned down by practically every other established publisher in Britain, and Dahl sent him a poker player’s reply. Allen & Unwin, he said, was one of the few British houses which hadn’t already approached him. However, the many offers he had received were too hedged about with conditions. His books were unusually successful in the States and he was ambitious for them in Britain. How could Unwin improve on his rivals’ terms?

  The usual publishing arrangement in Britain and the United States is one in which a publisher offers an author an advance, a sum of money before the actual book appears, and in many cases before it has been written. The author keeps this money whether or not the book turns out to be profitable, but takes a relatively small share of the total proceeds from copies sold: usually a 10–12.5 percent royalty of the book’s purchase price, which must first of all repay the advance. Rayner Unwin is by his own account an old-fashioned publisher, and he suggested to Dahl an old-fashioned publishing arrangement: a partnership of the kind which his father, Sir Stanley Unwin, had very successfully formed with Tolkien and, earlier, with Bertrand Russell. Allen & Unwin would print and market the books in full liaison with the author, but without advancing him any money. If sales didn’t cover the costs of production and administration, Dahl would make nothing. But any profit would be divided equally between them, and if the books were a success, his share would be bigger than under his other publishing contracts.

  Because of his recent earnings, Dahl for the first time didn’t feel in need of an advance. He was also impressed by the best-selling names on Unwin’s backlist. So he accepted, and was soon taking a keen interest in every aspect of the deal. New illustrations were commissioned, from Faith Jaques, for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the case of James and the Giant Peach, Allen & Unwin, at Dahl’s suggestion, used the illustrations for the French edition by Michel Simeon. The books were printed economically i
n East Germany and bound in hardcover but without a separate jacket. As a result, they could be sold at twelve shillings and sixpence (62.5p: in today’s terms, about £4)—considerably cheaper than most British hardcover illustrated children’s books at the time.

  The shy-seeming, gentlemanly Unwin found Dahl extremely tough to deal with over business matters, and learned to keep his distance from him at home. “He was a very heavy persuader and a gambler,” Unwin says now. “He sort of radiated power. I’m glad he didn’t go into politics.” But of course, the gamble paid off. And while Unwin felt similarly squeamish about the extent to which Dahl used his family’s personal tragedies as a way of getting publicity, the interviews with him which appeared everywhere increased sales. Talking to journalists, Dahl emphasized both the low price of the books and the shocking effect they had had on humorless American “female librarians.”4 Female British reviewers did not fall into the same trap. In The Times, Elaine Moss called Charlie “the funniest book I have read in years” and predicted that it would become a classic. “Dahl’s dialogue in these two books smacks of Carroll,” she wrote, “his verses of Belloc. But he is a great original.” The review was helpfully quoted in the influential trade journal, the Bookseller, just before Christmas, 1967.5

  In New York, meanwhile, the staff of Knopf were still in a spin about Virginie Fowler’s rejection of The Magic Finger, which Harper & Row published in 1966. Dahl increased their nervousness by complaining about distribution arrangements at Random House (the group of which Knopf was now part).6 He passed on a report that a wholesaler in Los Angeles had been kept waiting two months for five hundred copies of Charlie which had been ordered for Christmas but did not arrive until January. Alfred Knopf replied in person, laying the blame on new technology.