Dahl fought hard to get exactly the rights he wanted, “straining at gnats,”14 as Rose described it, before concluding his deal. In the final stages he was assisted by the eminent attorney Sol Rosenblatt, whom Dahl proudly described as “the best lawyer in the country” and who, he was delighted to find, offered his services for free when he discovered the author’s royalties were going to the Royal Air Force. Dahl’s attitude to the people around him was always clear-cut. A person was either good or bad, positive or negative. There was no room for shades of gray. Rosenblatt was a good guy. He had waived his “enormous fees.”15 Disney’s New York copyright lawyer, Frank Waldheim, on the other hand, was the villain-in-chief. Referred to jokily in some correspondence as “Waldstein”—the name of Roald’s favorite Beethoven piano sonata—in letters home, he was also portrayed melodramatically as “a dark cunning little Jew.”16 Likewise, the Disney studio was depicted as ruthlessly, relentlessly commercial. In response to his mother’s assumption that it too might be giving its profits away to charity, Dahl commented tartly: “Not bloody likely.”17
In this particular battle, however, the good guy prevailed. The final contract gave the RAF significant control over how the project evolved and appointed Dahl himself as their representative, to “furnish such advice and suggestions as may enable the British Air Ministry to approve the final version of said motion picture.”18 He was triumphant, crowing to his mother in one of his fortnightly letters about this “marvellous clause” which gave him “full power to disapprove of any part of the film at any stage of its production,” and bragging that when Disney had spent “I don’t know how many million dollars on making [the film] and I still don’t like it, I can just say ‘Stuff it up.’ And he has to.”19 Such boastfulness had not been so apparent a few weeks earlier when Rosenblatt’s aggressive stance caused Dahl to worry that the Disney team might drop the project altogether. Writing effusively to thank him for all his help, Dahl also begged his lawyer “not to make them so angry that they’ll chuck the whole thing overboard.”20
Walt Disney, however, had to weigh up his sense of patriotism with the commercial health of his studio, which was then running a deficit of over $1 million.21 Before the war, the maximum amount of film produced in any one year had been around 37,000 feet; in 1942–43, the studio produced 204,000 feet—almost all of it commissioned in one way or another by the U.S. military. These included the feature film Victory Through Air Power, the Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face, training films about flush riveting and spark plugs, and shorts encouraging Americans to pay their taxes on time and informing them how to avoid malaria and venereal disease. These were all made without a profit margin, to help the war effort, so developing more commercial subjects was essential for Walt and his brother Roy, who looked after the business side of the studio.22 Gremlins here seemed promising material, but the brothers were nonetheless concerned about the intellectual ownership of the creatures, which their researches discovered dated back to the First World War. A memo from Chester Feitel to Roy and Walt Disney after his first meeting with Roald had confirmed that they were not original to Dahl. “The Gremlin characters are not creatures of his imagination,” Feitel reported. “They are ‘well known’ by the entire RAF and as far as I can determine, no individual can claim credit.”23 Walt and Roy liked things more cut and dried. So Walt decided to proceed carefully and use the seven-page Cosmopolitan story not only as an opportunity to try out some prototype illustrations but also to see if it flushed out any would-be claimant to rights on the story.
Despite his tenacity in keeping control of the project for himself, Roald was generous about crediting others who had been involved in the story’s development, and he was especially open about Douglas Bisgood’s role in its evolution.‡ “There is an awfully nice lad called Douglas Bisgood, who may ring you up … and ask to come out,” he told his mother in October, “I came here on the boat with him. … He knows all about Gremlins.”24 Indeed, he naively encouraged Bisgood to speak to Disney personally about the film. This proved counterproductive, as Bisgood tried to claim ownership of the project and assert that he was himself the “arch gremlin.” Fifinellas and Widgets were “family names, which I claim as being my originals,” he told Disney, adding that he was himself planning his own story about them.25 This, of course, only increased Disney’s copyright worries. Concerned, Walt wrote to Dahl wondering “if this fellow will be inclined to cause trouble,” and concluding that this sort of complication was precisely why he felt he must “surround” himself “with every precautionary measure.”26 Dahl reassured him that he knew “Bissie” very well, that he was certain Walt did not need to “take anything he says too seriously,” and that he was confident his friend would not interfere, “particularly when he finds out how we are treating the matter and what we are doing with the proceeds.”27
He was right. Though there were a number of other potential gremlin projects in circulation in December 1942, when Cosmopolitan published “Introducing the Gremlins,” no significant authorial worms emerged from the woodwork—probably because the author of the article was anonymous and it was clear that proceeds were going to the RAF.§ The magazine dealt with the issue cleverly, boldly trumpeting the story as “unquestionably the greatest contribution to living folk-lore in more than a hundred years” and explaining that the author, a “noted gremlinologist,” made no claim to be the creator of the little creatures. “ ‘Nobody really knows,’ he says, ‘how the legend started.’ ”
Now that the contract was sorted, Dahl turned his critical attention to something that interested him even more: the illustrations. Unsurprisingly, his opinions about the artwork were forthright. Reacting to the drawings that Disney’s illustrators had sent to accompany the magazine story, he acknowledged that some were “very close to the mark,” but tiny details infuriated him—most strikingly Disney’s refusal to incorporate the gremlins’ “regulation green bowler hat.”28 He complained to Walt personally about this, and did so even more forcefully behind his back—particularly to the editorial staff of Cosmopolitan. Disney “has not got his gremlin at all as it should be,” he grumbled. “There should be a great deal more expression on the face, which actually has an almost human appearance. So far as I can see, he has omitted the most important item of all, and that is the bowler hat, which they wear when they are not flying. The Leprechorn [sic] or Woffledigit, as I intend to call it, has been represented as an old gnome-like man with six legs, whereas I explain very carefully in the story that he looks like a wolf.”29 Some of these complaints may now seem comically pedantic, but they reveal how strongly Dahl felt about the world he had created. Time and again, he played his “chief gremlinologist” card—arguing to Disney and his illustrators that only he truly understood the subject matter of the story. “I do wish you could let me see any other tentative drawings which you may make of the little men,” he pleaded, “because I really do know what they look like, having seen a great number of them in my time.”30 If Roald was angling for an invitation to Hollywood, then the ploy was successful. Disney suggested he come out for two weeks to the studio in Burbank. And after a short internal discussion, the Air Ministry in London agreed to let him go. On a chilly autumnal day in late November 1942, he boarded an American Airlines plane for Los Angeles.
The two weeks he spent there were exhilarating. He was put up at the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel, provided with a car for the length of his stay, and introduced to a host of celebrities. On his first night in Tinseltown, Disney threw a party in his honor, where Spencer Tracy, Bill Powell, Dorothy Lamour and Greer Garson all acted out the roles of different gremlins and Charlie Chaplin entertained everyone by pretending to be a Widget. At the same event Roald fell for “a very beautiful dame.” She was an actress and socialite called Phyllis Brooks, whose previous lovers had included Cary Grant and Howard Hughes. Roald proudly declared he would “make it his business to organise her” for the rest of his stay.31 He did. She was probably the first of hi
s Hollywood flings, although their parting was not entirely amicable. Six months later, writing to a colleague who was going out to Los Angeles, Dahl described her as “a well-known character commonly known as Brooksie. She wants to shoot me, so if she sees you, she will probably shoot you as well.”32
With his youthful good looks and RAF uniform, Roald certainly cut a dashing figure about town. He was a “ladies’ man” and “ruggedly handsome,” remembered the illustrator Bill Justice. “All the girls went crazy for him. I felt invisible when I accompanied him to parties.”33 When not organizing actresses, giving interviews to the Los Angeles Times or singing bawdy songs at the Wrigley Mansion—home of his new friend, the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael—Dahl would be found at the studio, ensconced in Walt’s “magnificent” office, complete with sofas, armchairs and grand piano. There, Disney set him and six artists to work on an illustrated book that he intended should precede the proposed movie. Roald was intoxicated by the glamour of the experience, boasting to his mother that it would be the “biggest film he [Disney] has yet made,” with the added novelty of using live action performers as well as cartoons.¶ He also took particular pleasure in working with the illustrators—an experience he would not enjoy again until he returned to children’s fiction in the 1960s. “I wrote and they drew,” he remembered. “As soon as I’d finished a page, it was typed out in the pattern they wanted, sometimes with the type going slantwise across the page and sometimes squiggly. Then they drew pictures all around it, and now and again a full colour picture for the opposite page.”34 Within a week the first draft of the book was finished.
Disney presided over the process with stern benevolence. Dahl came to admire him, although he described him as “quite an erk,”** and was shocked to discover that he could barely draw. Yet he was impressed by the way he ran his studio and the fact that all his employees seemed to “worship” him—despite his frequent grammatical errors and his occasional shortness of temper. When one of the artists drew a cover image that he did not like, Roald reported his boss’s explosion back to his mother in a comic mixture of American and British vernacular. “Goddamit, Mary, I have to buy the stories, direct the pictures, produce them, but son of a bitch, I’m buggered if I’m going to draw the illustrations as well.”35 Disney, for his part, warmed to the charms of the young airman, nicknaming him “Stalky” because Dahl was so tall, and because he could not pronounce “Roald.” But though flattered by the attention he received in Burbank, Dahl was by no means dazzled into submission when it came to the project. He remained feisty and dogmatic, fighting his ground at every turn, and insisting that his text should not be altered even if, as with the green bowler hats, it led to discrepancies between what was written and what was drawn.36
He returned to Washington before Christmas with four signed books and a watercolor by Jim Bodrero of two galloping mules with Mexicans on their back. He told his mother with considerable pride that any one of the artists working on his story could sell a picture for $1,000,37 but he was not about to try the market with his gift. He also wrote exuberantly to Walt that he had not enjoyed himself so much in a long time and that never had he seen “so many ‘good types’ as we call them, gathered together under one roof.”38 Energized by his trip, and no doubt also by the sense of fantasy that he had been able to indulge at the studio, Dahl persuaded Cosmopolitan to allow the RAF to reprint the story in their Christmas journal. He even ghost-wrote a playful introduction for the magazine, apparently from Disney himself, in which Walt asked his readers if it would be possible to capture a gremlin “and have him crated and shipped to California. I can assure you he’ll be treated with the utmost care and consideration at this end.”39
Disney’s own plans were evolving rapidly. After shooting a test reel in November 1942, which was well received by all involved on the project, he abandoned the idea of mixing live action with animation, turning instead to a more conventional, entirely drawn movie. But he remained unsatisfied with the storyline and at one point abandoned Dahl’s scenario, experimenting with several alternative ones. One involved the gremlins helping the RAF to defeat the Nazis and featured cameo roles for Hitler and Mussolini. It was dismissed by one of Disney’s lawyers as “pure pro-paganda.”40 Dahl was never sent a copy. Titles considered included Gay Gremlins, The Helpful Gremlins, The Gremlin Legend, Gremlin Trouble and Look! Gremlins. Eventually, after consulting with more than forty different people, Disney returned to a script outline that was very close to the book Dahl had sketched out on his trip to Los Angeles. By this time, rumors about the project had spread to the publishing houses of London and Dahl had already received a handwritten note from Hamish Hamilton asking if his company could publish the story (with Disney illustrations) in England.41 In America, “Gremlinmania” had broken out. Time and Newsweek magazines began debating the origin of the word, going back to the Old English greme meaning “to vex,” while the malicious imps themselves started appearing all over the place, getting the blame for cock-ups connected with everything from sporting events to coffee rationing. Bob Hope even joked that they had ruined his recent book.
Dahl was on a high, energized by this fantastic aerial world he had created, and delighting in the celebrity status he now felt he had acquired. Writing to Air Marshal Richard Peck, the assistant chief of the Air Staff in London, he chummily dramatized his time in Hollywood, taking personal credit for “wangling the script” into the Disney Studios and boasting about the imminent book release, which he claimed was likely to sell half a million copies and thereby greatly benefit the RAF Benevolent Fund. He added, en passant, that it would of course “be essential” for him to go out to Los Angeles again when shooting commenced, to ensure the studio “got certain things correct and accurate.”42 Peck, no doubt irritated by his junior’s boastful tone, simply forwarded the letter to his director of public relations, Viscount Stansgate,†† who in turn passed it on to one of his juniors, William Teeling. Teeling, a gifted writer and traveller, who had spent his twenties as a hobo in the United States living with the unemployed and homeless, riding the freight trains in the Dust Bowl and reporting back to The Times about his experiences, took an immediate interest in the project and in Dahl himself, whom he clearly viewed as a kindred spirit, telling him that he had “never heard anybody’s praises sung so highly as yours” in the corridors of the Air Ministry, and concluding that as far as Dahl was concerned, gremlins were certainly more like “kind gnomes … than evil spirits.”43
Teeling’s judgments were not entirely accurate. Some of Dahl’s colleagues, like J. B. Hogan, his immediate boss in London, responded well to his enthusiasm and ebullient comic energy, remarking to Roald that “if we all had your sense of balance in these wretched and dark days, life would be far pleasanter.”44 Others, like Isaiah Berlin, felt success had gone to the assistant air attaché’s head, and that he had started to become bumptious and overbearing. Berlin described Dahl as “extremely conceited,” and recalled him striding around the embassy apparently with visions of himself as “a creative artist of the highest order, and therefore entitled to respect and very special treatment.”45 And higher up the ladder, Dahl’s attitudes were making him genuine enemies. In February 1943, Teeling warned him that he had overstepped the mark with Air Marshall Peck and consequently needed to watch his back. He reported that Peck had told another senior air marshal that he did not appreciate receiving personal signals and felt that Dahl “ought to be a little more formal.” This overfamiliarity had also “rather alarmed” both air marshals, whose attitude toward their assistant air attaché in Washington had now become “a little chilly.”46 Teeling advised Dahl to tread carefully. But Roald was not about to heed the warning.
Dahl already felt himself undervalued by the RAF top brass. He believed they had shown him scant respect for negotiating such a good contract with Disney, and little appreciation for his decision to hand over his royalties to air force charities. He was grateful for the glamorous times he had had in Hollywood, and for t
he fact that the RAF had allowed him to be their representative, but he was also very aware that he had written the book in his own time, and was now using up his valuable leave in order to develop the project further. Gradually it became clear to Dahl that many of the apparatchiks in Whitehall simply viewed his gremlins as a source of resentment, irritation, or worse—as an administrative anomaly that needed to be clarified.
In January 1943, the assistant under secretary in the Air Department, Clement Caines, a sixty-one-year-old career public servant, wrote to Air Attaché William Thornton, requesting him to draft a deed of assignment between Dahl and the RAF. This would ensure that Dahl was “acting as a trustee on behalf of the RAF,”47 and that, in the event of his death, the RAF would continue to benefit from the book and the movie. Dahl was stung by the bureaucratic tone of Caines’s memo, which threatened to deny him the pleasure of choosing how he would distribute the money amongst needy airmen and their families. Gamely he argued back, and eventually the RAF allowed him to keep 20 percent of the proceeds for a fund of his own, dedicated to specific individual needs that he had identified. These included buying wireless sets, magazine subscriptions, and sporting equipment for RAF personnel stationed in the United States and helping the mothers of Eagle Squadron pilots who had been killed in action.48
The Air Ministry’s cool attitude festered in Roald’s mind and drove a further wedge between him and his superiors. He wrote to his mother that he thought they had “gone too far,” reflecting ruefully that “if you give someone something, they always want more.”49 A month later he complained to William Teeling that he had been “taken aback” by Caines’s desire “to tie me down, both when alive and dead, in order to make sure I would not embezzle any of the money which I had promised to give away.”50 It was all the more upsetting because Caines was seeking to distance the RAF from the project, telling the air attaché that he did not want Disney “to describe the film as having been sponsored or approved by the Air Council or the Air Ministry.” Caines saved his most cutting blow until last, concluding that the gremlins were, after all, just “a joke.”51 Roald took this as a personal insult. For him, the little creatures were intimately involved with experiences that still bubbled urgently and sometimes uncontrollably in his unconscious. Yet his horned companions were becoming ever more democratized. Gremlin stories were everywhere—and Roald was distraught that the mischievous elves were being turned into “ridiculous figures of fun.”52 He wrote to Disney, desperately asking if there was anything he could do to stop it. “The legend will be ruined,” he complained, when everyone sees gremlins “playing with peppermints, bitching up bicycles and trying out toothbrushes.”53 In their defense, he produced an article for This Week magazine, begging his readers to “treat them with respect” and declaring that all non-RAF versions were impostors. Only the chosen few were able to see real gremlins. “Allied pilots the world over, navigators, air gunners, radio operators and bombardiers—all are capable of seeing them. BUT NO-ONE ELSE IS. No one in the whole world, but those who fly …”54
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