The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  When Dahl got back from a holiday in England at the end of the summer of 1952, Marsh’s East 62nd Street mansion was almost finished and “looked marvelous.” Dahl and his new neighbors had regular dinners, and the men often sat up late into the night smoking and talking about the strange, unpredictable turn their lives had taken. In the course of these drunken evenings, Dahl endured many a sermon on the joys of domesticity. Marsh was contemplating a third marriage, this one to Claudia, and wanted the support of his favorite partner in crime. Dahl was by then thirty-five years old, with all the incipient signs of middle age, most notably his receding hairline. According to Ingersoll, Marsh “got it in his head that it was high time for his gay blade to pick himself a wife.”

  When Dahl went to his old friend Lillian Hellman’s for dinner in the fall of 1952, he was very much on the prowl. He was seated beside a beautiful, husky-voiced brunette named Patricia Neal, who was slated to star with Kim Hunter in the revival of Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, which she was mounting on Broadway. With characteristic arrogance, Dahl spent the whole night deep in discussion with Leonard Bernstein, who was seated across the table, and gave no indication he had taken any notice of her until he called a day or two later and asked her out. Famous actresses do not like to be trifled with, and Neal, who had no idea who Dahl was until she queried her hostess, was not amused. “I didn’t like him at all,” she recalled. She declined his first invitation, but when he called back two days later, she relented. He took her to dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant that was owned by John Huston’s father-in-law and won her over with his curiosity, clever conversation, and passion for paintings and antiques.

  Before the evening was over, Dahl told Neal that there was someone he wanted her to meet. He took her up to Marsh’s penthouse suite at the Pierre, where he was staying while his new apartment was being decorated, and introduced her to his magnanimous patron. “I met Charles Marsh, an old man with a strange face,” Neal wrote in a memoir. “With him was a lovely woman named Claudia. While we were there she didn’t say a word, but heeded his every beck and call with the trained eye of a geisha, then quietly returned to her needlework.” Even though this was their first date, Neal could see that Dahl and Marsh had an unusual relationship; “Charles just adored him, he would do anything for him.” As they rose to leave, Marsh conveyed his approval of Dahl’s choice with characteristic bluntness. “Charles knew what pleased him in a woman,” recalled Neal. “He told Roald, ‘Drop the other baggage. I like this one!’”

  All that fall, Dahl frequented the theater, attending rehearsals and giving notes to Hellman. Afterward he and Neal would often go out with friends and various members of the cast. After the play opened in December, he began calling for her backstage every night after her performance. While she found his “consistent but dispassionate interest” intriguing, she was far from being swept off her feet. She had already had that, by her own account, with Gary Cooper and was still “ragged from bitterness” at the end of their long affair. They had met and fallen madly in love in 1947 while filming The Fountainhead and had carried on their relationship, which was an open secret in Hollywood, for four years. When the Coopers briefly separated in 1951, the gossip columns had had a field day, branding Neal as the other woman. One headline read: “THE GARY COOPERS PART: IS PATRICIA NEAL NEXT?” To escape Cooper, whose Catholic wife was never going to grant him a divorce, and the insinuating Hollywood press, Neal had relocated to New York. She was determined to make a fresh start and at twenty-seven badly wanted to settle down and have a family, but she still pined for Cooper.

  Dahl courted her with patient deliberation, introducing her to his friends and gradually incorporating her into his life in New York. “I got to know them all,” recalled Neal. “Ivar and Jo, Ian, David, Bunny, who was very tall and thin like Roald, and just sensational looking. They were really something, these Englishmen. And Ernie Cuneo, who was short and fat, and fantastically chatty. They had this great bond from being in the war together, and talked and joked about it a lot, though I didn’t really understand most of it.” Dahl was also eager for her to get to know Stephenson, to whom he was very close. “It was easy to see why he liked him so much,” said Neal. “He was a super man. I loved the man. I loved them all.” Dahl never divulged what he did for Stephenson during the war. “He honored the code,” she said, “but he was very proud of his secret service work.” What he did tell her is “what fun he had” in Washington: “Roald was a fabulous storyteller. He would talk about how he used to play poker with Harry Truman. He knew all these very important people and liked to tell stories about them.”

  When Dahl proposed to her one night in her dressing room at the theater, however, she was so taken aback that she turned him down flat. She had seen him turn on people at parties and pick fights for no reason. “He could be the most charming man in the world when he wanted to be,” she recalled, “and then he could be just terrible, terrible, terrible.” Some of her friends had already been burned, and they begged her to break it off, including Hellman’s longtime partner, Dashiell Hammett, who took exception to Dahl’s rudeness and bullying humor. They had had a particularly bad row at Lillian’s one night and were no longer on speaking terms. “Dahl couldn’t stand him,” she said. “He had a great crush on me at one time, and really cared about me.”

  Despite her misgivings, Neal’s desire to have children got the better of her. She told Dahl she had reconsidered, and shortly thereafter Marsh surprised her with a ring. “[He] suddenly produced a large marquise diamond ring and offered it to us. It was not a gift, as I later found out. Charles expected Roald to pay for it eventually, but he was obviously anxious for his favorite couple to get moving.” At a previous meeting Charles had quizzed her on her movie earnings, at one point asking her directly how much she had in the bank. He was clearly disappointed by her answer. While Dahl was working for the top-paying magazine in New York, he was earning only $3,000 per story, and at the rate of two a year was far from well off. Neal could see that Dahl’s sponsor was concerned that he had no money and was hoping he would “find a rich girl.”

  They were married on July 2, 1953, in the little chapel of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. Marsh was Dahl’s best man, and all their closest friends were in attendance, including the Bryces, Ogilvys, Cuneos, and Ingersolls. Hellman, proud of her matchmaking, accepted congratulations. Afterward everyone went back to Marsh’s home for a champagne reception. Exactly two weeks later Charles and Claudia tied the knot in France. The two couples honeymooned separately. Roald and Pat took off for a six-week tour of the Italian seacoast and the French Riviera in a secondhand Jaguar that Dahl had managed to pick up cheaply. Then they crossed the Channel to England, as it was Roald’s wish that they end their sojourn with a grand meeting of the Dahl family. Since returning to New York, Dahl had been spending part of every summer in Great Missenden and hoped his new bride would want to do the same. He asked his sisters to help them find a place of their own, and they eventually bought a lovely Georgian farmhouse on five acres, which according to the original deed was known as Gipsy House.

  Neal adored the lush pastoral setting but found Dahl’s mother cold and critical. Dahl, in turn, had nothing but disdain for her Kentucky clan, whom he considered dull and uncultivated. The marriage got off to a rocky start. While Neal went on the road with The Children’s Hour, Dahl continued his social rounds in New York and kept company with Gloria Vanderbilt. He told Neal that the heiress was infatuated with him but that he had managed to “cool her ardor” by reminding her he was a married man. (Years later Vanderbilt would confess to an affair and described the love letters he wrote to her as “very well done.”) There were more tense moments than happy ones. After less than eight months, Dahl announced he wanted a divorce.

  Marsh intervened and invited Neal to Jamaica for an emergency summit. “Charles was a friend, teacher, and Father Confessor,” Neal recalled. They spent days walking the beach and talking about what went wrong.
Marsh felt that as a successful actress, Neal overshadowed her husband and that she needed to assume a more traditional housewife role. Marsh advised her in no uncertain terms to drop the diva act, quit lying in bed all morning, and start making breakfast and washing dishes. “Boy, he told me off,” she said ruefully.

  Marsh was convinced that money was at the heart of the problem. He told her that Dahl was having difficulty handling the fact that she was the breadwinner, and if she wanted to save their marriage, she should turn the checkbook over to him. “You don’t understand men, Pat,” he counseled her. “When it’s a question of sex, not all of them want to be on top. When it comes to money, they all do. You can’t have the balls in the family. You can make the money, but Roald must handle it.” Assured it was that simple, Neal promised her husband, who had come to join her, that she would try harder.

  The next morning they woke up to shocking news. During the night, the sixty-six-year-old Marsh had been bitten by a mosquito and contracted a grave form of malaria. By the time the doctor arrived, he was near death. Marsh refused to let go. Although he rallied, the high fevers, followed by a series of devastating strokes, damaged his brain. He was never again able to speak more than a few words. To see such a dynamic force struck down broke Dahl’s heart. The following week Dahl and Neal left Jamaica saddened and deeply shaken. In a strange way, the tragedy brought them closer together. Neal always believed that Dahl intuited the lecture that Marsh would have given him had he not been robbed of his voice, and straightened up according to his mentor’s wishes. From that moment on, it was decided: they were vulnerable and would have to stick together.

  Marsh lingered on for another ten years. On Sunday morning, December 1, 1963, just six days after John F. Kennedy had been laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, Lyndon Johnson went to the gravesite to lay a wreath before heading to the Oval Office. On November 23 he had been sworn in as the country’s thirty-sixth president in a hasty proceeding aboard Air Force One, using Kennedy’s own Bible, while the body lay in a casket in the back of the plane. On his way to the White House, which he had yet to occupy out of respect for the grieving family, Johnson instructed his driver to make a short, unscheduled stop at Marsh’s home. He bounded up the familiar stairs and, with only a quick nod to his hostess at the door, went in search of his old friend. He found the Texas publisher stretched out beneath a sheet, being pummeled by a masseur. Unaware of how far Marsh had slipped, Johnson tried a self-deprecating joke about his “new eminence.” As Antoinette later recounted, when “he got no reply, and as the silence lengthened, he blanched.” Johnson stared at the long, limp body. Stunned, he descended to the foot of the stairs where Claudia waited and, with tears in his eyes, asked, “Where are Mr. Sam [Rayburn] and Charles now, when I need them?” Then he turned and left. The next day the Washington Star reported that the mysterious detour held up the new president’s motorcade only “four or five minutes.”

  Dahl and Neal made New York their home for seven years, until another calamity sent them reeling: a speeding taxi ran over their infant son in his carriage, smashing his skull and nearly killing him. Dahl decided he had had enough of city life. In the summer of 1961, he moved his family back to England, where his two young daughters, Olivia and Tessa, would be safe, and Theo could heal. Both Dahl and Neal had been rocked by the deaths of close friends: Gary Cooper from cancer in May, followed by Hemingway’s suicide in July.

  Dahl was sure life in Great Missenden would be good for them. He devoted himself to caring for his children, particularly his son, who had developed hydrocephalus, a dangerous swelling of the brain. He could not bear to watch the boy suffer and spent months working with a friend, Stanley Wade, the inventor of hydraulic pumps, to design a nonblocking valve to drain fluid from the brain that could replace the primitive shunts that kept clogging and necessitated repeated cranial operations. He finally succeeded, with the help of a neurosurgeon named Kenneth Till, and the DWT (Wade-Dahl-Till) valve was developed and put into use; thousands of other injured children became the ultimate beneficiaries. Ivar Bryce, who was Theo’s godfather, did everything he could to help. He and Jo had bought Moyns Park, an idyllic seventy-room Elizabethan mansion on the Essex-Suffolk border, and invited the Dahls to come and relax, as Neal recalled, “weekend, after weekend, after weekend.”

  In the fall of 1962, just as Theo began to come into his own, their eldest daughter, Olivia, caught the German measles; four days later she was dead, the result of encephalitis, a rare complication of the disease. Although a measles epidemic had swept through their village earlier in the year, Olivia was never vaccinated because the gamma globulin that would have saved her life was not readily available in England after the war. Dahl, whose sister Astri had also died at the age of seven, was overwhelmed by a sense of doom.

  Although nothing would replace the little girl they had lost, they were thrilled at the birth of another daughter, Ophelia, in May 1964. Dahl’s depression lifted. He managed to pick up the pieces of his life again and even took in stride the untimely death of his friend Ian Fleming, from a heart attack, that August. Months went by in calm, comforting monotony. Then during a stay in California while working on a film, Neal was felled by a series of cerebral hemorrhages, the last one massive. After undergoing surgery to remove the clots in her brain, she lay in a coma for days. As fate would have it, the aneurysm was preordained: it was a congenital weakness. It had always been just a matter of time. When she finally regained consciousness, Neal’s right side was completely paralyzed, and her memory, fine motor control, and power of speech were impaired. She was three months pregnant. She felt her belly, but “could not remember what the roundness meant.”

  Again Dahl refused to give up without a fight. He took her back to Gipsy House and commandeered her rehabilitation, instituting a daunting regimen of physical therapy at the RAF military hospital nearby, followed by laps in the pool and lessons in everything from speech to reading and writing. With his deeply ingrained Nordic stoicism, Dahl could be a cruel taskmaster, and there were times when she hated him. Nevertheless the grueling daily routine worked, and she improved. Less than six months after her stroke, Neal gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Lucy. Life magazine sent a reporter to do a piece on her recovery or, as Neal put it, to profile “the Greek tragedians of Great Missenden.”

  Through all this, Dahl, by necessity, had to keep writing, as he was now the family’s sole means of support. In an unexpected twist worthy of one of his own creations, his children’s books, which he had turned to again in the early 1960s to help pay the bills for his growing family, suddenly caught on. James and the Giant Peach became an international success and was followed in the same year by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which became an even bigger success, and was made into a movie. The books were blackly humorous, grotesque even, but enormously appealing to the young, in part because of their complete irreverence for authority. Dahl also took to writing screenplays, which he considered a “beastly job” and only did for the money. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, asked him to write the script for You Only Live Twice. That led to his doing an adaptation of Fleming’s fanciful novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For the first time in his life, Dahl was not only making a living, he was earning large sums, and he gloried in his fame and fortune.

  Still, he was in a hurry for his wife to go back to work, whether for her own good or to allow him a little respite. Neal felt in no shape to return to acting. Her speech was still slow and halting, and she had a limp and often stumbled. In her memoir, she maintains that Dahl badgered her into accepting the few roles she was offered, and there followed a string of forgettable films about women coping with illness and adversity. In 1972 Dahl negotiated a deal with David Ogilvy’s agency for Neal to serve as Maxim Coffee’s spokeswoman for a year. The campaign was a hit, and she was asked to do more, flying regularly to New York to shoot the commercials. Felicity Crosland, a freelance fashion coordinator for Ogilvy & Mather and a d
ivorced mother of three, became a family friend and a fixture in their lives. Before long she also became Dahl’s mistress and in 1983, after a bitter tabloid divorce, his wife.

  Dahl stayed in the garden shed where he wrote and never waivered from his routine. When the furor died down, he presented his new wife to the world as if his thirty-year union to Neal had never existed.

  In a cookbook entitled Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with Crosland and published posthumously, the family tree omits any mention of their previous spouses, so that Roald and Felicity appear to be the parents of all seven children. Despite his tempestuous personal life, he was remarkably productive, writing nine books of short stories in all and nineteen children’s books, many of which were best sellers and are now considered classics. In the mid-1980s he penned two brief, beautiful remembrances of his youth, Boy and Going Solo. Together he and Felicity turned his literary legacy into a lucrative cottage industry, repackaging stories and putting out cute cartoon versions of his stories. Last year approximately 10 million copies of his books sold in the United States and abroad.

  In his declining years, Dahl was made to seem like a slightly grumpy English version of Mr. Rogers, complete with grandfatherly cardigan. His snide humor continued to get him into trouble, however, and a number of reckless remarks about Israel, expressed to interviewers and in written reviews, earned him a reputation for anti-Semitism. He grew bitter that he never received the knighthood he felt his work warranted, particularly his charitable endeavors in neurology, hematology, and literacy. Dahl never lost his taste for the good life acquired at Marsh’s elbow, demanding to the end that his publisher dispatch a Rolls-Royce to collect manuscripts from his home. He died of leukemia on November 23, 1990, at the age of seventy-four. Dahl appointed his second wife, who still resides at Gipsy House, executor of his literary estate. She reportedly divides half the income generated by his estate among his four children and uses her share to fund his charity, the Roald Dahl Foundation. In 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden.