That inner source may simply be dissatisfaction with what is. Or, paradoxically, it may be hopelessness that initiates a search for hope, because to do otherwise is to face a future of gnawing despair ending only at death. Sometimes, the source is a lingering pride, all but extinguished by the ruinous effects of an illness, or by despised traits in one’s character. The strength for change and for overcoming hardship may even be found in that immodest extension beyond pride that we call vanity, which refuses to accept as unalterable reality the dissatisfied or even racked visage reflected from the mirror of each day’s living. Or the source for change may be anger, which mounts into a productive rage of determination that the fates decreeing this assault on self-worth shall not triumph.
And sometimes, the inner source of perseverance consists of the conviction that we do, after all, live for others—it is for them that we need to seek something better. But the role played by others is often not as passive as merely motivating one’s own pursuit of wholeness because a loved one’s future will be diminished without our active contribution. The fact is that our own successful betterment is more often than not stimulated, encouraged, and made easier by those who hold our hands and steady our way as we take those tentative steps forward. On occasion, it is necessary that loved ones not do the holding gently, but instead so forcefully that they drive us into the only choice that can avoid their pushing and pulling, and their opprobrium if we hang back. They become drill sergeants in our lives; in order to accomplish their aims, they make demands, or even assert power over us. They know what is needed—and prod, rage, or domineer us into making choices we might otherwise not know we had, but for their hectoring.
Such a drill sergeant was the acclaimed writer Roald Dahl. The harshness of his demands may have grown out of his accustomed ill-tempered irascibility rather than out of purity of motive, but it hardly mattered. The butt and beneficiary of his bullying was Patricia Neal, the Academy Award–winning actress who was his wife; the occasion for his armed intervention was the crippling stroke Miss Neal suffered one evening in February 1965, when she was thirty-nine years old, pregnant with her fifth child, and at the peak of her career. Without Dahl’s browbeating, she might have given in to the stroke’s devastating after-effects.
Miss Neal told me about these things on a January morning forty years after they took place, when I visited her in New York a few days following her return from her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. She had traveled there to celebrate her eightieth birthday at the opening ceremonies for a new movie theater at the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center, which is part of the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center. It is a place important to her, not only on account of its name and the contributions she has made to its mission, but also because she is well aware that her visits inspire the men and women being treated there—they know how hard she had to struggle in order to overcome her disabilities. “I try to make them feel it’s well worth the work,” she said to a reporter that day. “You really have to work,” she told me during my visit. “It takes so much time and effort, but you simply must do it.” Patricia Neal is an exemplar of her own teachings.
Sitting on the opposite side of a small kitchen table from her, I try to mask the clinical appraisal of my subject that I had promised myself to make. The residual evidence of her stroke is only with difficulty visible to me from that perspective. I can detect none of the right facial paralysis that once disfigured that extraordinary face, nor do I see any weakness of her arm. Only when she had earlier walked into the room to greet me, and later as she accompanied me to the door on my departure, was I reminded that she has for forty years lived with the restrictions imposed by a partially paralyzed right leg.
We are together in a small alcove between the kitchen and living room of Miss Neal’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her back is to a spacious window looking out on a traffic of small boats busily plying their workaday courses up and down the East River. Though most of the vessels appear to be tugs, scows, and delivery boats, the effect of the scene—with the majestically serene and quite beautiful face of a movie star of my youth directed toward me against the river-bisected skyline of New York City, set before the bright, brittle coldness of a winter morning’s sky—is, to my admiring eyes, nothing less than magnificent.
As though conceding that it is out of place here, the brief foray into clinical detachment soon disperses itself and surrenders to the kind of youthful awe with which I might have viewed this stunning portrait half a century ago. Even the prosaic nature of the drab boats chugging their diligent ways over the rippling highway of densely black water is transformed by the aura enveloping my field of vision. Miss Neal speaks, and I hear the same voice that enthralled me all those years ago, with the same soft, perfect dignity of diction—though a few too many cigarettes each day for far too many years have made it a trace huskier than I remember, but for that reason even more alluring.
I have brought with me a brand-new digital voice recorder, but I forget at first to turn it on because I am mesmerized by the magically retained smoothness of the skin I am trying hard not to gawk at, still somehow youthful despite time and the cigarettes that usually leave so much wrinkled evidence in their wake; by the directness of the gaze Miss Neal has fixed on me with those clear deep-blue eyes (I would soon learn, to my surprise, that she is blind in her right visual field); and by that presence—she has not lost an iota of that presence, and it is no wonder that I am now so deliciously immersed in it that I have no wish to escape its spell. During our entire time together, I permit myself the perception of having been allowed within the gracious circle of radiance cast by royalty of a sort—specifically of a sort no longer known.
Though she does it tongue in cheek, as though acknowledging how far she has traveled since those long-ago days, Miss Neal still refers to herself as a hillbilly, a country girl born in the remote town of Packard, Kentucky, and brought up in Tennessee. She is of a time, a place, and an atmosphere from which American dreams were once made, and every gesture conveys her awareness—and enjoyment—of it. There is an openness in this, and it makes me like her almost from the first moment. Her easy smile and her comfort with banter convey her enjoyment of our time together, which makes my awed sense of her all the more magical.
Such is the web spun by Patricia Neal at the age of eighty, and she seems to know it. She chats, she smiles in bemusement and amusement, she speaks unself-consciously of the great and famous as easily as the rest of us do of our coworkers—for many of them were indeed her coworkers. And she tells with charming frankness of her feelings, her experiences, and the close attachments she has made, from the great love of her life, Gary Cooper, to Richard Daniel, who helped her up from the sidewalk in front of his shop when she fell one day, invited her in for coffee, and became her hairdresser, a pal with whom she would meet of an afternoon to share a cup and a few thoughts.
And she tells also of those terrible months four decades ago, after the bursting of a congenital weakening in one of her cerebral arteries let loose a small torrent of blood into her brain, one evening as she was bathing her seven-year-old daughter, Tessa. Aware momentarily only of an intense pain at her left temple, she staggered into the bedroom to get Roald, before collapsing into unconsciousness.
“I lay in a coma like an immense vegetable,” she would twenty-three years later write in her autobiography, As I Am. “No one detects any movement in a vegetable except, perhaps, the shrewd gardener who knows its roots are reaching deep into the earth. So, perhaps, was my unconscious body reaching into the wellhead of raw existence.”
She awoke days later in the intensive care unit of the UCLA Medical Center, having undergone a seven-hour operation on the night of her stroke, to evacuate the blood and clip the offending artery to prevent further hemorrhage. During all the time of coma, Roald Dahl was at her bedside, talking to his unresponsive wife, occasionally trying to arouse her by slapping her face as hard as he could, and squeezing her hand again and a
gain, until one day she squeezed back. That bit of squeeze was his first signal that she might survive.
When she first became aware of her surroundings, the confused, disoriented patient was completely paralyzed on her right side, unable to speak, and seeing double. But worst of all, “My mind just didn’t work.” As her thoughts cleared over the next few weeks, she realized that her husband had completely taken over. He insisted on telling her the details of her surgery, controlled the flow of visitors so much that some of her closest friends were forbidden entrance, decided which cards and letters she should be shown, and essentially forced her to make physical and mental efforts that she believed to be far beyond her capability.
Roald Dahl was an imposing man, and could be a forbidding one too. He was six feet six inches tall and was said by his wife to have “looked down on the world with deft authority.” Dahl was born in Wales of Norwegian parents, and was a World War II hero of the RAF. He was shot down in Libya, crash-landed behind enemy lines, and through a combination of daring, quick-wittedness, and luck, made his way back to safety despite having fractured his skull during the crash. He later became a renowned and award-winning author of unconventional short stories and macabre children’s books in which adults are often the subject of merciless revenge in retribution for their own cruelties. The most famous of them are The Witches and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but there are many others, most of them replete with menacing characters, ingenious and often bizarre plots, and plenty of puns and neologisms to spice up the narrative. They are clearly the product of a uniquely imaginative mind consumed with the sinister aspects of human nature and the underlying antagonism between the world of dark childhood fantasy and the stifling world of adult repression in which it is forced to exist.
If an author’s writings are the key to his unconscious mind and a prediction of his behavior when challenged, Patricia Neal might have done well to listen to several friends who strongly advised her against marrying Dahl, including Dashiell Hammett, who told her, “He’s a horror. I can’t understand why you’re doing this.”
She explained to herself that she was “doing this” less out of love than because she wanted a family. And she was still on the long rebound from her intense affair with the married Gary Cooper. She tried to ignore Dahl’s caustic wit, his never-ending need for admiration, his frequent rows with her friends and others, and an arrogance that demanded dominance over every situation in which he found himself. “Roald could be like sand in an oyster shell. He seemed to feel he had the right to be awful and no one should dare counter him. Few did.”
In short, Roald Dahl was not a nice man, and Patsy, as her friends called her because it was her birth name, knew it long before she decided to marry him. But he had a certain élan about him that charmed her during the early days of his pursuit. And he was persistent. “Deliberate is a good word for Roald Dahl. He knew exactly what he wanted and he quietly went about getting it. I did not yet realize, however, that he wanted me.”
It was precisely the persistence, the deft authority, and the ability to get what he wanted that would save Patricia Neal’s future after her stroke. And, ironically, it was Dahl’s wide streak of ill-disguised sadism, his almost brutish insistence that he be obeyed, and his refusal to be proven wrong that saved Neal’s future. His very awfulness preserved her.
Both in the metaphoric and real sense, Dahl stood over Patsy with a pitiless insistence that she push herself beyond what she thought to be her limits. He accepted neither hesitance nor backsliding. Nothing would do but that she obey his dictatorial will that she recover. He demanded it, organized it, and oversaw each step in its accomplishment. Dahl found skilled therapists and helping hands of various sorts, watched over their work, and constantly sought new challenges that he ordered his struggling and uncertain wife to take on.
“I couldn’t have done it without him,” she told me. “No, no, no—not possible. He was so strict with me—he pushed me and pushed me.” In time, and long before she thought she was ready, Dahl pushed her into making a movie. He did it not by his usual frontal attack but rather by means of a flanking maneuver. On New Year’s Day 1966, he told reporters that his wife had said she felt certain of being ready to work within twelve months. “I felt nothing of the sort and was dismayed that he continued to press me to go back to work. He even got the Oscar down off the shelf and placed it smack in the middle of the sitting room window.” He told her that she would never be fully recovered unless she went back to acting. “He insisted that I do the first film.”
Reluctantly, Miss Neal signed a contract to make The Subject Was Roses, with Martin Sheen and Jack Albertson. When the filming began, she was still seething in anger at Dahl. “I didn’t want to do it,” she told me, grimacing a bit with the memory. “But by the third day of shooting, I began to be interested. Soon, I was feeling so glad he’d made me act again.” She was enjoying herself, and knew that she was on her way. “Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless scourge, Roald the Rotten, as I had called him more than once, had thrown me back into deep water. Where I belonged.”
Dahl had one ally in his unyielding campaign: his wife’s anger at all that had befallen her. “I was the most angry woman in the world,” she recalled, smiling just a bit now, perhaps because the thought of it contrasted so starkly with her present serenity. “I was the most bitter woman you’d ever want to see. I screamed and cried. And my anger helped me.”
Of course there were moments, even in the early days after the stroke, when the anger was forgotten: when so many of her good friends rallied to her support; when they helped her remember not only her accomplished past but the necessity to concentrate on the expectation of having an accomplished future, though she could not at first believe what they were telling her; and then there was that lovely day when Lucy Neal Dahl was born by a normal and surprisingly easy vaginal delivery on the beautiful summer morning of August 4, 1965—169 days after the stroke.
I asked Miss Neal whether faith had helped her, even in the midst of her anger. Though I did not know it at the time, she had addressed that question in As I Am: “I can remember what was left of my shambled brain bitterly reminding me that God had done this to me. And I hated God for that. I was angry and I would be angry for a long time.”
In later years, the anger at God would dissipate and finally disappear, to be replaced by its opposite. “When I had my stroke,” she told me, “I woke up not believing in one thing. I didn’t think God could help me. But now, as time has passed, I must believe.” It is unclear how far Miss Neal’s faith goes, at least with respect to structured religion. Though not a Catholic, she has several times sought spiritual refuge for long periods of time in the nunnery of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where the tranquility and the wise counsel of the abbess brought her the peace and reconciliation that enabled her to write As I Am in the late 1980s. That book, from which several of these quotes have been taken, is dedicated “To my beloved Lady Abbess of Regina Laudis on her golden jubilee, for insisting that I remember it all.” What is sensed in the book and in Miss Neal’s presence is an abiding need for sustenance of the spirit and a deep conviction of God’s guidance, rather than a systematic framework of belief. That unquestioning conviction has clearly had a profound effect on her thinking.
At the abbey, I was deeply impressed that God was using my life far beyond any merit of my own making. The stroke had been a means of allowing me to reach so many who were suffering. He had not given me the stroke. He was giving me the strength and love to move with it. I learned that my damaged brain cannot reclaim what is dead. It has to create totally new pathways that will allow me to make choices I would never have made had I not suffered that stroke—choices that an infallible voice assures me will be blessed.
But the notion of her choices being blessed must be understood in an earthly way, I think, for Patricia Neal seems unconcerned with rewards that might await her in some other world to come. What is importa
nt here is the conviction that it is her choices that are blessed, not herself. Those choices are made in the interest of other people. The reward is the happiness that sustains her sense of herself and her peace of mind, and nurtures her spirit. Plato was right—virtue is, indeed, the purest form of self-interest, and in this way is its own reward.
The fact is that Miss Neal has not thought much about any notion of afterlife, and assures me that she doesn’t care whether or not there is one. And yet, she prefers to believe that something continues beyond the end of life. “I don’t know, but I think we go on somehow” is the way she puts it. “I don’t mind dying one bit,” she continues, “because I’ve lived my life—I really have lived it. I’m so happy now. I really am, you know. So much has happened.”
Patsy Neal of Knoxville, Tennessee, certainly has lived her life, and so much has really happened. One hundred thirty pages of her 403-page autobiography deal with the years after the stroke, and the book ends at publication in 1988, which indicates how much more has been lived since then. And much more time may yet remain in which to use her choices as an example to those who have benefited from her ongoing activities. Those 130 pages describe one ascension after another, despite the residual handicaps with which the stroke has left the author. I count performances in twenty-five motion pictures during that period, at least eleven notable television appearances, and numerous other professional undertakings since she made The Subject Was Roses. After that triumph of will and recovery, there was no stopping the onward course of Miss Neal’s professional career. When I asked how she would like to be remembered, the validity of her answer was proven by the events of her life. “For my guts,” she replied softly but nevertheless emphatically. “I refuse to be beaten. I’ve had a lot of stuff happen to me, and I’m still here.”
The Art of Aging Page 11