Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  On his return to Washington, Creekmore Fath noted that his friend seemed much more “carefree”91 than before. And he certainly enjoyed the pleasure of getting back at his detractors.

  I went to a party, and at the other end of the room was the Air Chief Marshal who’d kicked me out. He strode across and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” I said, “I’m afraid, sir, you’ll have to ask Bill Stephenson.” And he went even darker purple and walked away. It showed Stephenson’s power. The Air Chief Marshal was struck absolutely dumb. Couldn’t say a word. Couldn’t do a thing about it.

  By that stage, he recalled, “I was working entirely for Bill Stephenson.”92

  Initially, he moved out of the embassy into separate BSC offices in downtown Washington at 1106 Connecticut Avenue NW. A few months later, he relocated to New York—to BSC headquarters in Rockefeller Center—where he probably met Stephenson in person for the first time. The building’s fast-moving elevators fascinated him and prefigured the one he would create for Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory twenty years later. “They go up and down faster than I have ever dived in an airplane,” he told his mother. “Your ears pop and your stomach either comes out of your mouth or drops out of your arse according to whether you are going up or down.”93 In Manhattan, Dahl fully got Stephenson’s measure, admiring his quiet, behind-the-scenes exercise of authority, his decisive-§§The fact that this new rank, which was awarded at Stephenson’s discretion, never appeared on his RAF file later prompted speculation that Dahl had invented it, but in this case his own version was absolutely accurate. “Wing Commander,” “Flight Commander,” or “Commander” appears on nearly all Dahl’s official correspondence between the summer of 1944 and January 1946, when he finally left BSC. It would, in any event, have been quite out of character for him to fabricate something as unimaginative and prosaic as a mere rank. ness, his ability “to play around with businesses and scientific things,”94 and his striking mental acuity. He was indeed, as Dahl had imagined, “very, very secret” and “extremely private.”95 Yet this studiedly enigmatic exterior also belied something of the self-publicist. In later years Stephenson would boast of BSC as a “labyrinthine apparatus … the hub for all branches of British intelligence,”96 and encourage his biographers to paint him as a Machiavellian genius of espionage. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was more skeptical. He dismissed Stephenson as a self-serving mythmaker: a puerile grandee, whose assertions were little more than the “dangerous hallucinations” of an isolated old man heading toward second childhood.97 This judgment was perhaps too harsh. But Dahl, whose respect for Stephenson never faltered and whose delight in hyperbole might have inclined him to echo his former boss’s version of events, tended to concur with Trevor-Roper.98 He certainly did not relish Stephenson’s company, describing him later to Stephenson’s most recent biographer, Bill Macdonald, as “a totally uncultivated man … not a pleasure to talk to. … If you met him socially, he never had any conversation at all.”99 He gave him the same nickname he had given Isaiah Berlin: “The White Slug.”100

  Stephenson, for his part, understood Dahl’s strengths and knew that office politics was not one of them. Instead, his intention was to deploy his new employee’s potent ability to dazzle the salons of American high society. Roald, perhaps unaware of his own personal charisma, tended to be self-deprecating about this aspect of his own personality, preferring to think of himself rather as clown than charmer. “I was able to ask pointed questions and get equally pointed replies because, theoretically, I was a nobody,” he recalled in connection with President Roosevelt.

  For instance there might be some argument officially between London and Washington about future operations. I could ask FDR over lunch what he thought, and he could tell me, quite openly, far more than he could say in a formal way. Bleeding this information on the highest level from the Americans was not for nefarious purposes, but for the war effort. That’s why Bill planted fellows like us … I’d walk into FDR’s little side-room on a Sunday morning in Hyde Park and he’d be making martinis, as he always did. And I would say, “Good morning Mr. President” and we’d pass the time of day. He treated me as a friend of Eleanor. And he’d say, naively, as if I were nobody much and he was making idle gossip, “I had an interesting communication from Winston today …” 101

  Aside from hobnobbing with politicians, Dahl described his main function with BSC as that of trying to “oil the wheels”102 that often ground imperfectly between the British and American war efforts. Much of this involved dealing with journalists, something at which he was already skilled. His chief contact was the mustachioed political gossip columnist Drew Pearson, whose column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was widely regarded as the most important of its kind in the United States. Dahl boasted to his mother that it was syndicated to 430 newspapers and that Pearson himself was such an important figure that “no-one dares open their mouth in his presence.”103 In the official history of BSC, on which Dahl would later work as one of the anonymous writers, there is a memorably sharp portrait of the opinionated and often ruthless newspaperman. There can be little doubt as to who was its author.

  Andrew Russell Pearson is a tall, tight-lipped individual, who looks uncomfortably like a horse, a likeness which is increased by his habit of snorting as he speaks. He has little sense of humor. … He had a goatish indifference to the feelings of others, and was quite unperturbed if one of his disclosures cost a friend or acquaintance his job.104

  Dahl “fed information”105 to Pearson, and Pearson returned the compliment, often supplying him with confidential material from Roosevelt’s acerbic and bespectacled secretary for the interior, Harold L. Ickes. “I figure Pearson had something on Ickes,” Dahl later recalled, adding that Stephenson “arranged to supply me with carefully chosen information that I could feed to Pearson in exchange for a lot of high level cabinet stuff,” and that his own reports were forwarded by Stephenson directly to “C” (Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Services).106 The information Dahl gleaned was varied and exotic, including a report that, as early as 1944, the Americans were planning to land a man on the moon,107 but much of it was obtained in a self-consciously clandestine manner. Henry Wallace, in particular, had little but contempt for what he perceived as BSC’s unnecessary furtiveness and skulduggery. “Why don’t they [the British] proceed directly by coming in touch with our American agencies instead of spending all the effort to sell American opinion in an underhanded way?” he had reflected in his daily diary. After all, he added, wasn’t this supposed to be a “united” war effort?108

  The other wheels that Stephenson required lubricating were those that whirred in the salons of the Washington and New York hostesses who helped form public opinion. And if Dahl was something of a neophyte in the area of intelligence and propaganda, in this world of jewels and cocktail parties he was fast becoming a master. The war had created a shortage of eligible young men in both cities and the dashing twenty-seven-year-old RAF officer and author found himself constantly in demand as a guest. He was already a skilled flirt. Beatrice Gould, the co-editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, who published many of his early stories, was a willing victim of Dahl’s “manly beauty” and revelled in her slightly risqué correspondence with him.109 So too, in their own way, did Ann Watkins and even Eleanor Roosevelt. All were of a type: wealthy, older, sophisticated and married. Roald had a “whole stable” of women to wait on him, recalled Charles Marsh’s daughter, Antoinette Haskell, confessing that although her feelings toward Roald were always those of a sister, she had to acknowledge that her father’s new protégé was nevertheless “drop dead gorgeous.” “He was very arrogant with his women, but he got away with it,” she recalled with a chuckle. “The uniform didn’t hurt one bit—and he was an ace. I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year.”110 His friend Creek-more Fath admiringly described Roald as “one of the biggest cocksmen in Washington.�
�111

  One of the more exotic salons Dahl frequented was that of Evalyn Walsh McLean, a “fabulous and rather tipsy dame,” as he described her to his mother. Widowed and in her early fifties, she had inherited a fortune from her father, who had struck it lucky as a gold prospector in Colorado. She was vulgar, loud and wore large round dark-framed spectacles that made her look somewhat like a startled owl. She was also the proud owner of a gigantic bright blue gem, the Hope Diamond, which had a reputation for bringing misfortune on all who owned it, but inspired little fear in her. Roald described his visits to her house as “like going to the circus and getting a free meal served into the bargain.”112

  The woman herself is fantastic and rather stupid. … She staggers down stairs at about 8.30 covered from head to foot in enormous diamonds and carrying under her arm a horrible little dog, “only six in the country,” she says, which bites you whenever it gets a chance … I always giggle when I talk to her because standing way above her as I do, I can’t help looking down and seeing the closely guarded secret of her finely shaped bosoms. She has enormous pads stuffed into her shirt front, and the effect is very good to anyone who is under 6′5″ in height.113

  Once a staunch isolationist, McLean had switched sides and was now a devoted supporter of the war effort, but her salon was still full of anti-British types, including her best friend Cissie Patterson, who owned the Washington Times-Herald. Dahl’s job was to keep his ear to the ground and push the British cause in whatever way seemed most effective. But the comic possibilities of the milieu around him constantly threatened to subvert his intentions. McLean herself flirted constantly with him, calling him, by turns, “dear boy” or “you bastard,”114 and providing a fund of anecdotes with which Roald could entertain his family back in England. A description of supper, with blunt golden cutlery, was typical. On that occasion, bending his knife “almost double” while attempting to cut a piece of steak, Roald shocked his fellow guests—all “dopes” in his eyes—by asking for a steel replacement, then trying surreptitiously to take the gold one home with him as a souvenir.115

  McLean found Dahl attractive. She also liked his habit of stirring up political and social controversy at the dinner table. One evening he got into a heated argument with Frank Waldrup, the managing editor of the Times-Herald, whom he publicly compared to Joseph Goebbels. Waldrup, who was already in a bad mood because he had been bitten on the finger by his hostess’s “monkey-dog,” took the bait, responding that he thought the British were instinctively devious and that he did not care for all this “Winnie and Franklin” stuff.116 Dahl then upped the ante by likening Waldrup to Hitler himself. A slanging match ensued that silenced almost everyone at the table, including Vice President Wallace, who subsequently chronicled the event in his journal.

  It was one of the first examples of something for which Dahl would become famous: dinner table arguments that escalated into full-blown rows. In later years these outbursts could be destructive, but on this occasion, at least as far as Mrs. McLean was concerned, Roald covered himself in glory. Her dinner party had become an event. Excited by the controversy, she begged him to come back again the following week. Roald, for his part, was delighted, departing in high spirits and offering to pluck the priceless Hope Diamond off her breast and wear it “for good luck” until he returned. The McLean salon was just the kind of place in which Dahl thrived: an environment where his iconoclasm and his eagerness to shock were celebrated. And immersing himself in that world was exactly what his job with BSC demanded. As Roald once remarked of Evalyn Walsh McLean: “she runs a good saloon [sic] … and there are lots of folks to see and that’s my business.”117

  Older women were playing a big part in Roald’s life in other ways as well. When in New York, he usually stayed as a guest at the apartment of another prominent anglophile, Helen Rogers Reid, the sixty-year-old wife of Ogden Mills Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and the New York Herald Tribune. Dahl described her to his mother as a “charming little grey haired woman,”118 but as far as Charles Marsh, whom she repeatedly snubbed, was concerned, Mrs. Reid was “Horsewhip Helen.”119 She wielded enormous power in the capital and regularly influenced editorials in her newspapers. Marsh once described her as “the great female agent of the British Empire in America.”120 And she was a big fan of Roald Dahl’s. Roald was staying at her apartment when he attended the New York premiere of Eagle Squadron, a propaganda movie, co-written by C. S. Forester, about U.S. airmen who had volunteered to fight for the RAF before Pearl Harbor. His date for the evening was the actress Nancy Carroll, a thirty-nine-year-old divorcée, but at the party afterwards it was Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, the wife of the owner of Time and Life magazines and a vituperative critic of Henry Wallace’s, who caught Dahl’s eye.

  Mrs. Luce, a reluctant anglophile, quickly succumbed to the allure of the glamorous young air attaché, thirteen years younger than she was, and Dahl did not return home that night. “I got home to the house of my host at 9 AM the next morning,” he told his mother, “and failed to make my room without being seen to ruffle the bedclothes. … I had to do a lot of talking to re-establish my reputation.”121 Later, Creek-more Fath claimed that the embassy encouraged the liaison in the hope that Dahl would convert Mrs. Luce to a more pro-British position, particularly on Dahl’s pet subject, postwar air freedom, which she had opposed in a recent speech in Congress.¶¶ Two months later, Dahl told his mother that he was “working very hard” on her. “I hope to be able to make her change her views a little, and say something better next time she speaks.”122 Eventually, this “assignment” may have proved too much for him. According to Fath (who seems to have lapped up these stories), Dahl told Halifax he was “all fucked out” because Luce “had screwed [him] from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights.” Halifax apparently told him it was his patriotic duty to return to her bed. Isaiah Berlin later dismissed this story as a “wild flight of fancy” that was typical of Dahl. He thought it “inconceivable” that Halifax would ever have talked like that.123 Berlin was right. But he had missed the point. For Dahl its very improbability made the tale hilariously funny.

  A host of wealthy, glamorous older women crossed Dahl’s path. Most made little impression. Barbara Hutton, whom the press had dubbed the “poor little rich girl,” Roald dismissed, rather bitchily, as “quite pleasant, but not so beautiful as her jewellery.”124 Those involved in the arts were usually more to his taste. Aside from Nancy Carroll, Charles Marsh’s daughter Antoinette recalled Roald having a brief affair with Leonora Corbett, an actress eight years his senior, and another with the writer Martha Gellhorn, also eight years older, when her marriage to Hemingway began to disintegrate. She found Roald “very, very attractive and slightly mad.”125

  Roald’s most significant conquest of 1944 was the oil heiress Millicent Rogers. Rogers was forty-one when she met Dahl. She was quick-witted, well connected, and had something that he found truly irresistible—a great art collection. His description of his first weekend at her mansion in Virginia reads rather like an auctioneer’s catalogue:

  I took first weekend for a long time at Easter. Went to the most marvelous and lovely house. Owner is Millicent Rogers, a sort of Standard Oil millionairess, and it was all very fine. It was an old colonial house in South Virginia, and from the back verandahs, long smooth lawns sloped down to the James River, which went on rolling along between gardens of cherry blossom and daffodils. Millicent had ten dachshunds, and a great dane and she had a lot of other things. In the small library (which was huge) there were

  Degas pastel 5′ × 3. Very beautiful.

  another Degas pastel, a little smaller.

  A Gauguin 5′ × 2′

  A head of Renoir by Degas

  Two Renoirs

  Two Corots

  One Monet

  One Manet

  In the next room there were twelve Boucher and some Fragonard. All very beautiful and carefully bought by M. I had an enormous bed with gold hanging
all around it, and a Norwegian maid to wait on me. As I say, everything was very fine.126

  Rogers was in many respects an ideal lover for Dahl. She was not interested in marriage or fidelity. Indeed, she was probably having an affair with his friend Ian Fleming at the same time as she was sleeping with Roald. What she did value was style and good living. Apart from her estate in Virginia, she had houses in Manhattan, Washington, and a summer home she had inherited from her father in Southampton, Long Island. Roald liked her real estate, but found her companions either disagreeable or dull. “Women with ruby necklaces and sapphire necklaces, and God knows what else sauntered in and out and down below amidst miles of corridors,” he wrote about one weekend in Southampton. “There were swimming baths, Turkish baths, colonic lavages, heat treatment rooms and everything else which is calculated to make the prematurely aging playboys and playwomen age a little less quickly. I didn’t like it much.”127

  Millicent was infatuated with Roald. She showered the handsome air attaché with gifts, presenting him with a gold key to her front door as well as an elaborate Verdura gold cigarette case and lighter. Her Schiaparelli clothes and her penchant for dressing as Marie Antoinette held little interest for Roald, who nicknamed her “Curvature,” probably because her posture was slightly stooped as a result of childhood rheumatic fever.128 Her art collection, on the other hand, continued to be a source of endless fascination to him. In the summer of 1944, while his own apartment was being repainted and she was in Long Island, she lent Roald her Washington home. He could not prevent himself cataloguing its art treasures—mostly more Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including, in his bedroom, “the finest and largest Renoir of red roses that you’ve ever seen, also, a Pissarro, a Sisley and a Burne-Jones.”129 He enjoyed her Steinway piano, too, and whiled away the evenings trying to play Bach preludes on it.