Dear Ann,
I got your cable and then I fled. I have not read your letter. I have not dared to read it. Perhaps it’s chasing me. But I don’t think it will ever catch me because I am moving fast.
Roald.119
It was the great professional crisis of Dahl’s career. His saviour, at this moment of watershed, was his companion in Beirut, his confessor and father figure, Charles Marsh. Charles swept his friend out of England onto an extended trip, offering him a salaried job working for the Public Welfare Foundation in New York and securing him an indefinite U.S. working visa. He even put him up in the guest wing of his own apartment.
It was a mark of the love that he felt for Roald and to which their voluminous correspondence is testimony. Both Charles and Claudia understood more clearly than anyone else that their friend was in need, and their remedial actions were swift and transformative. They offered him a safe, supportive and secure environment in which he could rebuild himself, and their speedy, decisive action almost certainly saved him from a more serious breakdown. It was little surprise that Roald dedicated his next collection of short stories to Charles.§ Indeed, so positive was their response that Dahl was able to disguise the disaster from family, friends, perhaps even from himself. He almost managed to disguise it from posterity. In his own files, he destroyed the letters from Ann Watkins and Peter Wyld that dealt with the rejection of Frogskins. A copy of the manuscript survived, but nothing else. It was a moment of failure and humiliation over which he rapidly drew a shroud. Were it not for Watkins’s own archive, evidence of the rejection might have been lost for good. It was a moment too of watershed. Dahl bid farewell not only to his book but also to greyhounds, life with his mother, and his conviction that he wanted to be a novelist. A chapter in his life had closed. The rural idyll, the “Scholar-Gypsy’s” existence, was over.
* The fact that Roald squandered his inheritance on greyhounds was also confirmed to me by his wife, Patricia Neal.
† These later became The Dogchild (unpublished) and A Picture for Drioli, later retitled Skin.
‡ Dahl incorrectly boasted to his mother that it was the “only one he’s ever done.” He was wrong. Smith also painted memorable portraits of his friend Augustus John and the novelist Henry Green—Dahl, Letter to his mother, 04/18/45—RDMSC RD 14/5/4/20.
§ In her autobiography, Patricia Neal claimed that Dahl initially intended to dedicate the book to her, but that she had made him change his mind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Master of the Macabre
NEW YORK OF FERED DAHL a refuge from his troubles. It gave him a measure of financial security and he enjoyed being back among friends who believed in him. He was returning to the city that had brought him success and celebrity. Yet he also felt isolated from his family and the English countryside he loved. He missed his greyhounds, his poaching, his garden, his mother, his sisters, and their children. He longed to be flying model aeroplanes with his nephew Nicholas or tickling trout with Claud Taylor. Most of all he missed his independence and the sense of being paterfamilias. He was now thirty-six years old and it disturbed him that he was once again relying on the largesse of Charles Marsh. The rejection of Fifty Thousand Frogskins too had taken its toll on his spirits and it would be many months before he would fully recover. Ann Watkins’s assistant, Sheila St. Lawrence, recalled that her first impressions of Roald at that time were not of a brash, argumentative entertainer but of a quiet, bespectacled man, who struck her as “rather shy and retiring.”1 Charles Marsh and Claudia Haines thought that what their friend needed more than anything was a wife.
Soon Dahl was dating a Hungarian-American divorcée called Suzanne Horvath, who was clever, sophisticated and had a small child from her previous marriage. Horvath was able to beat him at chess—a quality he later confessed he found both attractive and irritating.2 In the autumn of 1951, he bought her a $200 Patek Philippe watch, which he acquired with the profits he expected to make from two paintings he had purchased in Zurich with Charles Marsh—a Redon oil of a naked boy and a Rouault cartoon of President Woodrow Wilson.3 Soon afterwards he proposed to her. Still secretive when it came to emotional relationships, he was strikingly unforthcoming about her in his letters and this lack of communication irked his mother, who believed Suzanne was the main reason her son was staying in Manhattan. To Claudia Haines that December she wrote plaintively, “I have not heard from Roald for a very long time. We are all wondering if he has married Suzanne yet.”4 Two days later Roald answered her. “Suzanne is fine. We are not hurrying over getting married. There’s no point in that. I see her every day and my guess would be that it will happen about next spring or summer. Financially also it is better to wait.”5 Two months passed and Sofie Magdalene heard nothing more about Suzanne. Then, in February 1952, she received a letter from Roald, informing her that he was planning to wait “a long time yet” before making any final commitment.6
If he did share any of his thoughts on his private life, it was with Charles and Claudia, but even with them he was frequently tight-lipped. Sofie Magdalene, sensing that her son was getting cold feet, wrote to Claudia to try and find out exactly what was going on: “I understand that Roald’s marriage plans have been shelved for the time being. I am pleased that they will not get married unless they are sure of making each other happy. Roald is not rich enough for keeping a divorced wife. I was not surprised as I had not expected it to come off. I don’t know why.”7 At some point in 1952, the relationship formally ended. Exactly why remains a mystery. But it seems Suzanne took the decision to end it. Shortly after Sofie Magdalene heard the news, she wrote again to Claudia in search of more information. “He never says how he is feeling,” she complained. “We never found out why Suzanne gave him up—except that it was she that finished it. … Perhaps it was the best,” she concluded ruefully.8 In reply, Claudia—always a wise and balanced critic—cast an interesting light on “the end of Suzanne,” hazarding her opinion that she would not have made Roald a suitable wife. “I think he would always have had to take care of her,” she observed, “that she would have taken more from him emotionally and every other way than she had to give.”9 Liccy, however, who understood Roald’s need to “look after” people, reflected later that, for this very reason, she might actually have made a very good match for him.10
But just as the relationship with Suzanne Horvath was fizzling out,* Dahl crossed paths unexpectedly with another person who was seeking refuge in Manhattan. In September 1952, Patricia Neal, a twenty-six-year-old actress from Tennessee, returned there after the breakup of her three-year love affair with the Hollywood movie star Gary Cooper. The dark-haired Southern beauty, with her distinctive deep chocolate voice, had just completed a series of live shows for American troops stationed in Korea, which culminated in her almost being raped by a sex-starved soldier in Seoul. She was exhausted. A promising movie career had dissolved in a series of “ ‘disappointments’ and ‘heartaches,’ ”11 and now she was returning to the city where she had made her name, winning a Tony Award for best actress at only twenty. That accolade had secured her a movie contract with Warner Bros. in Los Angeles, but none of the thirteen films she subsequently made there had shown her talent in a positive light. In her two movies with Ronald Reagan she was described as “gauche,” “embarrassing,” “painful,” and “ill-at-ease,” with reviewers complaining about her inexperience and lack of subtlety. One described her as “a tigress in a cat show.”12 Despite appearances in three movies that would go on to become cult classics—The Fountainhead, The Breaking Point and the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still—Neal’s confidence was destroyed. The contract with Warners was not renewed.
This professional disappointment was compounded by the failure of her relationship with Cooper. Not only did the understated movie star, almost twice Neal’s age, eventually abandon her to return to his wife, he insisted that Pat abort their child. As a consequence, she suffered a serious mental breakdown and unfairly
won herself a reputation among the gossip columnists as a home-wrecker.13 In New York, Neal hoped to regain her self-respect and to remake her career. Not long after her return, she went to audition for her old friend Lillian Hellman, in whose play, Another Part of the Forest, she had won her Tony six years earlier. The feisty and stern Hellman, then in her late forties, regarded the young actress as a particular protégée of hers, and when Pat appeared at the auditions for a revival of The Children’s Hour, Hellman’s voice had boomed reassuringly from the back of the auditorium: “Hello, Patsy Neal! Glad you’re back in New York where you belong!”14 Neal, who was underweight and thought she looked “ghastly,”15 did a wonderful audition. Hellman immediately offered her the choice of either leading role in her play about two women teachers who are suspected of being lesbians, and invited her over for dinner, where the guests included Leonard Bernstein and Hellman’s old friend and sparring partner, Roald Dahl.†
Dahl confessed years later that at this point both he and Pat were equally “eager to get married,” and this may have explained why Hellman seated them next to each other. Both were attractive and eligible. Both were drawn to glamour and celebrity. Both were also straight-talking. Yet both were bruised as well. Pat, like Roald, was also often melancholy. Cooper had broken her heart and she still missed her father, who had died unexpectedly when she was eighteen. “She was not gay,” Roald remembered. “She was reserved, holding herself in; obviously pretty shaken all round … I think she planned to work hard as an antidote against her personal misfortunes. … It wasn’t a happy girl I was seeing.”16 Nevertheless, both were survivors. They tried to maintain an appearance of ease and keep their problems to themselves.
The relationship did not get off to a good start. Pat had noticed the “lean handsome” man who towered over the other guests as soon as she entered the room and was instantly attracted to him. But Roald was in no mood for flirtation that night. He ignored the young actress seated next to him and instead monopolized Bernstein, whom he regarded as the “young musical genius”17 of America, and who was sitting opposite him at the table. “Never once during the entire evening did he look my way,” Pat later recalled, remembering that Roald’s behavior had “infuriated” her and that by the time she left Hellman’s apartment she had “quite made up her mind that [she] loathed Roald Dahl.”18 Dahl agreed that he had behaved badly. His excuse was characteristic—that once he had got into an argument with Bernstein, “there was no backing off from it.”19 In any event, composers interested him more than actresses. Before he left Hellman’s apartment, however, he got Pat’s telephone number and called her the following morning to ask her out on a date. She initially refused her “horrible dinner companion.”20 But when he rang again two days later, she weakened and accepted his invitation.
Roald took her to a restaurant owned by John Huston’s father-in-law and did his best to impress her. “He was acquainted with just about everybody,” Pat wrote later. “And he was interested in everything. He spoke of paintings and antique furniture and the joys of the English countryside. He was as charming that evening as he had been rude the first time we met. I was fascinated. I remember his taking a sip of wine and looking at me for a long moment through the candlelight. ‘I would rather be dead than fat,’ he said.”21 She had agreed. The evening ended with another audition. Roald took her to meet Charles Marsh, who was staying in the penthouse of a nearby hotel because his own apartment was being refurbished. Neal evidently passed this test, too—and with flying colors. As Roald and Pat were about to leave, Marsh took him aside and whispered in his ear: “Drop the other baggage, I like this one!”22
Dahl took his friend’s advice to heart. But with his family, he was almost as uncommunicative about Pat as he had been about Suzanne. Her name first appears in his letters home in the context of the opening night of The Children’s Hour. Roald took his neighbor, Anthony Eden’s ex-wife, Beatrice Beckett, to the show—in which he and Charles had each invested $1,000. Lady Eden still fitted into the mold of his favorite female: sophisticated, well connected, temporarily unattached or perhaps with a mari complaisant, and normally more than ten years older than he was—the kind of woman who enjoyed his playing what Charles Marsh’s friend, Ralph Ingersoll, described as his “gay blade” role.23 Roald described Lady Eden to Claudia as “nice but a very long nose—like a banana.”24
Afterwards, he told his mother that he had waited up with Hellman and other members of the cast into the early morning to read the reviews in the early editions of the papers and that the critics had been almost universally favorable.25 But he gave no inkling that anything romantic was in the offing. A few weeks later, he sent his mother a cutting from the gossip column of a New York newspaper, which reported that “Patricia Neal is now adored by Roald Dahl.” He attached no comment of his own, but when he sent the same clipping to Claudia, he added that the piece was all a “considerable exaggeration.”26
Tongues were set wagging back in Buckinghamshire, but they all knew better than to ask Roald for details. Instead, Else wrote to Charles and Claudia, who were on holiday in Jamaica, asking whether they knew what was going on. The cutting had “made us all inquisitive,” she admitted. “Is it the real thing this time?”27 Claudia took her time, but eventually she responded positively. An effusive letter from Sofie Magdalene arrived by return: “I am so very pleased to hear from you that you like Pat and think that Roald has at last found the right one. I hope she will like the Dahl family, which is a bit out of the ordinary, as they are all very fond of each other and stick together more than most sisters and brothers do. They never quarrel! I am sure Roald wants a family,” she added, “as he is unusually fond of and good with children, but that is their business and not mine.”28
Roald’s courtship of Pat was not exactly romantic. “Deliberate,” was how Neal would later describe him. “He knew exactly what he wanted and he quietly went about getting it.”29 They were certainly sexually compatible. Pat found Roald attractive, and when she saw photographs of his nephews and nieces, became convinced that the two of them would “make beautiful children.”30 She also responded positively to his individualism, his wit, and the “deft authority” with which he looked down at the world. “When he said ‘Well done!’ ” she recalled, “it was as if God Himself were bestowing the credit.”31 And she was impressed by how well he got on with her friends. He could talk medicine with Edmund Goodman, theater with her friend Edla Cusick, and stocks and shares with Edla’s husband, Peter. He energized her. The gossip columnist Louella Parsons observed that Patricia Neal was a “happy girl” again and that her new escort had once more made her sparkle.32 Neal herself wrote to her actress friends Jean Valentino and Chloe Carter that she was daily becoming fonder of Roald Dahl. “So who knows? Might work,” she concluded, adding hesitantly that “he is cautious too. And I think—stable. You would like him—I think. Very British.”33 It was a pragmatic relationship. But both instinctively drew back from the idea of commitment. Pat’s reluctance here was made more intense by the fact that she suspected she was still in love with Gary Cooper. Indeed, her attachment to Roald might well have come to nothing had not Charles Marsh intervened.
“He loved me,” said Pat of Dahl’s mentor, “and he desperately wanted us to get married.”34 To this end, she recalled how Marsh had forced the issue soon after she met him, by asking her how much money she had in the bank. Though she prevaricated and tried to avoid answering, he eventually made her admit that she had $20,000 saved from her work in the movies. Pat was proud of the figure, but shocked at Marsh’s unexpected reply: “Ah yes, that is poor,” he had murmured.35 She was surprised that he thought the wealth of his protégé’s potential spouse so important, but Charles knew Roald well. This Scholar-Gypsy was also a sybarite. The world of heated indoor swimming pools and vast indoor croquet lawns, of butlers, fine wines, chauffeurs, and private flying boats was by no means everything to Dahl, but its luxury attracted him. As he once admitted to Sheila St. Lawrence: “T
he rich are always interesting.”36
Pat was flattered that, despite her relative lack of funds, Charles still believed she would make Roald the right wife. However, when Roald unexpectedly asked her to marry him one evening in her dressing room, she was astonished. And, much to his chagrin, she refused. “He looked horrified that I had turned him down,” she remembered. But she was still not really sure that she loved him, or indeed that she really wanted to get married at all. At the same time, she knew that her responses were confused. “I did want marriage. And a family. Roald would have beautiful children. What was I holding out for? A great love? That would never come again. When was I going to face reality?”37 She said no, but a few weeks later she changed her mind.
Perhaps it was this uncertainty that made Roald so uncommunicative. On May 16, 1953, he wrote to his mother about his plans to come back to England in the summer. His dates had changed slightly, he told her, because he had decided to bring Pat with him as well. At that point, he told his mother almost nothing about her—just a little about her family background and a bit more about how much money she was earning. Proudly he boasted that she was being paid $1,000 a week for The Children’s Hour in New York and that she had just agreed to go on tour in September for a run of five months at $1,250 a week. He told her he thought these figures were “pretty good.” And they were—particularly by comparison with what he was earning. “We are considering getting married,” he continued, “but there doesn’t seem to be any point in hurrying it. She’s twenty-six and not been married before, so is almost as cautious as I am. Therefore what we propose to do is to buy a car here in New York, a good second-hand 1951 Jaguar four-seater convertible (open)—about £850—and ship it direct to Rome. We would then fly to Rome … pick up the car and drive slowly up Italy through France, and so to England arriving maybe somewhere around early August.”38
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