The Gremlins was finally published as a book in April 1943. This time there was no “Pegasus.” Now, with the official sanction of Viscount Hali-fax,55 the author was clearly credited as Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl. The book carried the byline “From the Walt Disney Production” and was illustrated by an uncredited Bill Justice, fresh from animating Thumper the rabbit in Disney’s 1942 hit Bambi. On the front cover was a fighter plane, with three naughty gremlins boring holes in its fuselage and sawing off its gun turrets. Far from printing half a million copies, Random House printed only 50,000 for the U.S. market. Dahl ordered fifty of these for himself and assiduously posted them off to almost everyone of note he could think of, including Halifax, who sent the author a note of thanks, informing him that he would “make himself familiar” with the gremlins’ habits before he passed the book on to his children.56 He also sent a copy to the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who replied enthusiastically that she found the story “delightful” and hoped the handsome young writer would come and visit her soon.57 The print run sold out in six months; plans to reprint 25,000 more were only abandoned because of the intensity of the wartime paper shortage.58
Despite the book’s success, particularly in Australia, where 30,000 copies were sold,59 and the fact that Disney had even begun merchandising for some of the characters—the Fifinellas and Widgets were particularly popular—the film project was gradually running out of steam.60 Continued difficulties with the storyline dogged the script. Dahl’s own view, that Disney’s drawn gremlins lacked sufficient warmth and humanity, may well have been a key, if unspoken factor. The illustrations certainly lack the charm or wit of other contemporary Disney movies, such as Dumbo or Bambi, or indeed the Kittelsen creatures Dahl remembered from his childhood, and after which he may unconsciously have been hankering. Disney’s desire to gamble with the project may well also have been hampered by financial constraints: of his recent films neither Pinoc-chio nor Fantasia had yet gone into profit.
Nevertheless, Disney repeatedly asked Dahl back to California to advise on the script, begging him to “come out for a period of at least two months so that, together, we can whip the story into final shape.”61 Without this involvement Disney did not feel that he “could be responsible” to the RAF for the finished treatment. There was no way that Dahl could go to Los Angeles for that length of time. Moreover, one senses that suddenly, after all this enthusiasm, he was becoming bored with the project. It was a typical behavior pattern. An interest would become obsessive, absorbing, all-consuming. Then, quite suddenly, his own passion for it would wane and he would move on to something else. He eventually went out to Hollywood for ten days in April 1943, reluctantly taking unpaid leave of absence from his job to do so. The studio did not pay him a fee, but it did take care of all his expenses, putting him up at a “palatial suite” at the Beverly Hills Hotel. His Los Angeles schedule was a busy one—he reported to the studio at seven thirty every morning and rarely left until seven at night—but he made sure he found time for relaxation. One evening he had dinner—and perhaps a little more—with Ginger Rogers, at her home “up on top of the hills overlooking the sea.” On another he went to Dorothy Lamour’s wedding reception, where he reencountered Spencer Tracy, and met Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, with whom he was “most impressed.”62 One day, frustrated at being cooped up in the windowless studio while the sun was shining, he dragged his illustrators off to Hoagy Carmichael’s house in the Hollywood Hills and continued their meeting by the swimming pool.
After the illustrators departed, Dahl penned a wistful little piece of verse for Carmichael’s two children, Hoagy Bix and Randy Bub. The lines owed a debt to John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight,” and sing of the lingering regret he felt at no longer being a pilot. However, they also suggest his continued dislocation from the ordinary world around him, as well as his sense of himself as a superman.‡‡
When I am old and bent and crinkly-faced
When you are big and strong and muscle-meat,
I know you’ll learn to fly; you’ll like the taste
Of freezing clouds at thirty thousand feet;
You’ll like the taste of hail and ice and sleet.
When you come down to earth, you’ll have to pay
You’ll have the people talk of little things;
You’ll have them laugh, and some of them will say:
“It isn’t only angels that have wings.”
If they do this, you mustn’t even yield.
Walk away slowly, never start to run.
Stand in the middle of a poppy field—
Stand on your toes and try to reach the sun.
If someone hits you where it really hurts
Then says “I’ll see you in the afternoon”—
Just throw away your most expensive shirts.
Stretch out your hand and gently touch the moon.63
All through the summer of 1943, Disney continued to tinker with the movie, despite the diminishing enthusiasm of those around him. Recent polls were not encouraging. They suggested that contemporary moviegoers were increasingly uninterested in war pictures, while an Associated Press article declared that gremlins were now getting “tiresome”; they have “whimsied [the public] to pieces.”64 It was also becoming clear that by the time a film was finished, the war was likely to be over. In July, Disney told Dahl that he thought the film would now be made as a short. He gave as his principal reason the draconian RAF controls on the project: “With the amount of money that is required to spend on a feature of this type, we cannot be subjected to the whims of certain people, including yourself.”65 In August, there was a depressing story conference in which one of Disney’s top creatives observed shrewdly that “these little guys” were in many regards simply the pilots’ alibi for “their own stupidity, dereliction of duty, and neglect.”66 Disney, however, was reluctant to abandon the project completely and Bill Justice, the illustrator, recalled it “dragging on and on.”67 Finally, in December, Walt wrote off his $50,000 investment and informed Stalky that the movie had been shelved. His official reason was that the distributors felt the public “had become tired of so many war films.”68 Dahl for his part believed that Disney had missed the point. “It could have been successful,” he told the Disney Studios historian Robin Allan much later, in 1984. “He [Walt] had no feeling for England in any way. Or Europe. It was too English. … He was not into it. He was a hundred per cent American. A hundred per cent.”69 So the gremlins went underground. But they would continue to scuttle around in Dahl’s imagination, and two years later reappeared as the subjects of his first novel. At that point Dahl contacted the studio and asked if he could have the movie rights back. Roy Disney offered them for more than $20,000—a price the young writer could not possibly afford. And though Disney promised that the studio would not act as “dog in the manger,”70 he argued with some foresight that in the future gremlins might indeed turn out to be “very useful picture material.”71
Dahl made sure that all his literary royalties went to charity, but out of the sales and syndication of Shot Down Over Libya he allowed himself one important luxury—a splendid new set of false teeth, crafted by Lord Halifax’s dentist himself, with a plate made out of a “mixture of gold and platinum,” and a price tag of $380. This “new set of clackers,” as Dahl joyously described them, still left a “tidy hunk” for the RAF,72 but they were a source of great pleasure to their owner, who believed that in most cases real teeth were more trouble than they were worth. Removing them, in his view, was a radical but undoubtedly prophylactic measure—preferable to years of infections, toothache and expensive dental treatment.
Curiously, this was not an opinion he had formed as a result of his head injuries, but one arrived at while a trainee at Shell. Thus, at the age of twenty-one, just before he went to Tanganyika, he had paid a visit to Leslie Wright, a top Harley Street dentist, to have most of his teeth extracted and artificial replacements fitted. He browbeat his mother into having her
teeth removed as well, before turning his evangelical zeal on his siblings. They put up more resistance. But Roald continued to try and persuade them, getting increasingly impatient, foul-mouthed and irrational when Alfhild in particular refused to go. He was delighted when, in the mid-1950s, he persuaded his brother-in-law, Leslie Hansen, to go to an American dentist and have all his teeth extracted. Hansen’s subsequent decision not to have any new teeth fitted at all and to live the rest of his life chewing on his gums surprised him. But only momentarily. It soon became yet another eccentricity to savor.
Roald Dahl was revealing himself as a young man who held his opinions with strength, clarity and energy. He was idealistic and high-minded. His views might be willful and unusual, but they were almost never halfhearted. He liked to be in control and could appear brash and arrogant in the exercise of his authority. The move to Washington had been a huge leap for him and the embassy was not his natural habitat. By no stretch of the imagination was he a born diplomat. He preferred the company of entrepreneurs like Walt Disney or artists like Jim Bodrero to that of men, like Air Marshal Peck, who got annoyed if their internal memos were expressed too informally, and who referred to everyone by their abbreviated job title rather than their real names. His charm and good looks had carried him a long way, and he enjoyed some of the socializing his job entailed. But the hostesses and social market also horrified him to such an extent that he told his mother he usually did not even bother to reply to this sort of invitation when he received it.73
He was much happier on his own, in his little house, inventing stories—with a glass of whiskey or a bottle of wine at his side. His alternative worlds—his fiction, screenplays and letters home—provided him with an escape valve through which he could deal with all his new experiences and still remain in touch with his own most personal feelings. He found it hard to make close friends, and had little interest in forming deep relationships with women. So he fell back into his familiar role as the outsider, the free spirit, the naughty child. These behavior patterns could be unpredictable and were sometimes paradoxical. Charming and offensive, boastful and blasé, confident yet diffident, he was impossible to pin down. Even his family in England felt these contradictions. One moment he could be vigorously domineering, berating them about some issue or other, the next he would be affectionately protective—sending home regular packages of cheese, sugar, underwear and lipstick. In Washington he struggled to find anyone who relished those inconsistencies and who he could genuinely call a kindred spirit.
Shortly after Dahl’s return from Hollywood, all this began to change. The agent of this transformation was one Gabriel Pascal. Pascal was a native of Transylvania—an urbane rascal, whom Dahl admiringly described as “an amazing scoundrel,”74 “an awful old rogue,”75 and, in a letter to the U.S. vice president, “a great man, a very indiscreet great man.”76 Pascal’s early years were shrouded in mystery. He claimed he had been raised by Gypsies, trained as an acrobat, and that he had got his big break in film, while accidentally riding naked on horseback through the set of a silent movie that was being filmed in the Hungarian countryside. He must have looked good, for the director, apparently “enchanted” by what he saw, asked the youth to repeat his appearance several times for the camera.77 So Pascal got into movies.
Then, while on holiday in the South of France in the twenties, he saw the geriatric playwright George Bernard Shaw wallowing nude in the sea. Pascal swum over to greet the bearded naturist, who was lying on his back, near a big red buoy, “rocking contentedly upon the waves.” Pascal’s presence initially disturbed him, until the Irishman noticed that he too was swimming au naturel. Observing the “wet golden-brown” of Pascal’s tanned buttocks, Shaw apparently asked if he was a gypsy. It was a perfect conversation opener. Pascal told Shaw his life story and, after almost an hour in the water, they swam back to the shore, with the older man asking the younger to come and see him if ever he was financially in trouble.78
Two years later, a penniless Pascal turned up on the playwright’s doorstep. True to his word, Shaw, who had never before sold the film rights of any of his plays, baled Pascal out, selling him the rights to Pygmalion for half a crown. The resulting movie, which Pascal produced, starring Leslie Howard, pleased Shaw so much that he declared his producer a “genius.”79 And when Shaw won an Oscar for his screenplay, he offered Pascal the rights to another play: Major Barbara. Pascal chose to direct this one himself, shooting on location in London during the height of the Blitz, with the support of another of the Dahl family’s favorite rogues, Alfred Chenhalls, who, thanks to his relationship with Leslie Howard, was now involved in wartime propaganda work for the government and a director of Pascal’s company.§§
Pascal was now in New York with an ambitious new movie idea: a sweeping allegorical tale about the nature of good and evil that told of “the fight between the children of light and the children of darkness throughout the ages.”80 He was passionate about the project, which was a product of his mystical devotion to the Indian guru Meher Baba, and he had captivated the idealistic liberal vice president Henry Wallace with his plans. A distinguished Iowan agronomist, Wallace also possessed strong mystical tendencies. As a young agricultural journalist with Communist sympathies in Des Moines, he had fallen under the spell of the Russian artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich. Roerich had designed the sets for the infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. But he was also a charismatic radical; a philosopher who wanted to change the world for the better. His fierce intellect and piercing dark eyes, set above a gray-white mustache and beard reminiscent of both an Oriental priest and a Russian revolutionary, gave weight to his belief that all arts, all religions and all cultures would eventually blend into one magnificent peaceful civilization. Roerich’s vision influenced many who met him in the early twenties, when he exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute and created stage designs for the Chicago Opera Association. Wallace was one of these acolytes. The two men subsequently exchanged coded letters about sacred chalices and “fragrances from other worlds.” Wallace even began giving Roerich money and addressing him as “guru.”81
By the 1940s, when Roerich was living in India and being hounded by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for tax evasion, the relationship between them had understandably cooled, but the idealistic vice president remained influenced by his contact with the Russian mystic. As one of his aides, the streetwise Stewart Appleby, would recall: “Very few would have said he was a screwball, but they would have said he was queer.”82 Pascal’s intention was that Wallace would provide the vision—and incidentally the money—for his movie.
The two men were a perfect combination. Their ideals and their fascination with Eastern spiritualism made them natural colleagues. But neither was a writer. Pascal needed someone with whom he could exchange ideas, someone also with whom the vice president would feel at ease. He had read Introducing the Gremlins and sensed something in Dahl’s imagination that might resonate with Wallace. Perhaps it was the love of a fantastical tale? Perhaps it was his connection with Disney? More likely it was his British connections allied to a naive and childish sensibility. Whatever the reason, Pascal decided that he had found the man for the job.
Dahl was swept off his feet by the offer. As he told his mother, with almost breathless excitement:
I said—“Well …” And the next day I found myself having lunch with the Vice Pres. of the United States and talking to him from one o’clock until 6 p.m. He said he wanted me to give up my job for three months, retire into the mountains somewhere and write the script! I said no, I wouldn’t—but if he liked I would try to do it in my spare time. He said O.K. and then rang up Lord Halifax and I had a lot of long talks with him about it. He said “Go ahead.” So I suppose I’m going ahead. No one knows, least of all myself, why they should pick on me. Money is apparently no object, because the Vice-Pres. is arranging all that with the U.S. Treasury.83
Soon Dahl was meeting Wallace almost every da
y to discuss the content and storyline of the movie, and before long the president himself, “old Roosevelt,” had been brought into the discussions. All of a sudden, the young air attaché had been catapulted into the highest echelons of Washington life. His Widgets and Fifinellas, so scorned by the top brass of the RAF, had obtained for him the ear of the most influential politicians in the country. For once he did not exaggerate when he told his mother, “we move in high circles—so bloody high that sometimes it is difficult to see the ground.”84
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