The second draft (the first that Dahl showed to anyone) was completed in 1961, and though Sheila St. Lawrence had now officially stopped working as an agent, Roald was eager to have her critical input on the story and wrote to Mike Watkins asking him to forward it to her.31 That same day he wrote to Sheila personally, telling her that he “valued enormously” her comments and would “feel lost” without them.32 It took her a month to reply, and when she did so, her response was tentative. “I’ve read Charlie’s Chocolate Boy; reread it for the children, and then gone over it again myself,” she began, admitting that “I have hesitated to write to you for I felt it was not my place … I didn’t want to be a backseat driver.” Soon however she was enthusing about how much she had enjoyed the book. “I can’t tell you how excited I was by the idea of the story. It’s marvellous. As soon as I got the gist of where you were going, my mind ran away with all the kinds of candy that could be brought into the story, the smells and feels and colours, and all the wonders that go into cooking and making candies.” However, she added, the story was bogged down by details of the plot. “Somewhere, somehow, someplace along the line this initial magical excitement gets lost …”33 She went on to suggest a mass of changes—including having the greedy Augustus Pottle (later Gloop) get stuck in a glass pipe after he has fallen in the chocolate river, and having the gloating Hilaire Belloc–like songs about how the bad children get their just deserts delivered by the white-coated factory workers, rather than by a “chorus of tiny whispering voices.”34 In conclusion, she told him. “I’d like to see more humor, more light Dahlesque touches,” adding circumspectly that “I hope some of my remarks will produce counter remarks in you that will stir you to flights of fancy to make the book take off and fly as it undoubtedly will.”35
“Your letter was just what I have been waiting for,” Roald replied, continuing that he agreed with “virtually everything you say. Yes—just about everything.” Predictably he could not stop himself from telling Sheila that he too had previously considered a number of her suggestions and then rejected them—wrongly, so he now realized. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that he was “most grateful” for her help.36 A year later, however, the book was still unfinished. Dahl told Mike Watkins that despite Sheila’s enthusiasm—she had recently told him she thought the book was “simply excellent”‡
—he appeared weary of writing for children. He even wrote to Alfred Knopf telling him that he would much prefer to be writing for adults.37 The U.S. sales of James and the Giant Peach (only 2,600 copies in its first year) had horrified him. “Who the hell am I writing these lousy books for?” he asked Watkins angrily.38 By the summer of 1962, the new story had been through four drafts. The fifth version, renamed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was the draft that was eventually sent to Virginie Fowler at Knopf. “If she doesn’t like it then I guess we will throw it away,” Roald commented grumpily to Watkins, adding as a coda: “I do want some money out of it.”39
Ironically, for several years even the self-confident Dahl failed to see the power—both financially and artistically—of what he had created. Indeed, shortly after the book was finally published in the United States in 1964, he wrote an article for the New York Times in which he attacked the vogue for short, expensive picture books, which he felt were dominating the market to the detriment of properly worked-through stories. Admitting that he was uncertain of the value of what he himself had written in this genre—“for all I know they may be worthless”—he concluded that writing them was “a big drain on his batteries” and “an uneconomic diversion.”40
Virginie Fowler, an experienced but traditional children’s fiction editor, certainly had no idea whatsoever that a classic tale had landed in her lap. She liked the book, but had reservations about the literary conventions that it broke and felt that parts of it were vulgar and in singularly bad taste. “This world of children’s books has its own set of rules,” she wrote to Dahl; “ignoring these rules does cause unnecessary difficulties for a book.”41 Her new boss, the aggressively commercial Bob Bernstein, viewed it differently. He had recently been put in charge of juvenile publications for the new Random House–Knopf–Pantheon group, and sensed at once he was dealing with something out of the ordinary. Not only did he see the remarkable merchandising potential inherent in the tale, he also loved its concept and execution. “It is a wonderful, wonderful children’s book,”42 he enthused to Dahl, recounting how his three sons had received it with rapture. So did Alfred Knopf, who found the book “miraculous,” and immediately predicted it would become a classic,43 largely because it appealed to adults as well as children. His wife Blanche agreed. “Children should adore it,” she told Roald, “and—judging by myself—old ladies too.”44
The venerable Knopfs and Bob Bernstein’s children were among the first to appreciate that beyond the coarse humor and madcap violent morality lay a fantasy underpinned by powerful emotional ingredients. A child, starved of opportunities and avenues of self-expression, finds an unexpected soulmate, who believes in him and empowers him to succeed. It was a potent recipe. Willy Wonka may be a confectionery wizard, but he is also the “special friend” that most children long for—the one who recognizes their worth and talent and with whom they can share their vulnerabilities. Many years later Dahl himself would jokingly admit that his child hero had always been a “rather boring little bugger” and that it was really Wonka “who makes the stories.”45 Yet it is perhaps Charlie’s very blandness that so readily allows a child reader to implant him- or herself in the story and create their own special relationship with Wonka.
This theme of the unexpectedly transformative friendship would reoccur in many of Dahl’s most successful books. It was one with which Dahl himself resonated closely—although he would probably have hated admitting it, because he was so uncomfortable with articulating his own vulnerabilities. In the case of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that resonance was particularly immediate. Many critics have pointed out the similarities between the top-hatted chocolate magnate and his creator. Both men shared an apparently boundless self-confidence and “No arguments, please” public manner. Both could be grandiose, mercurial, capricious. Both cultivated a sense of mystery around themselves. Both were misunderstood. In all these respects Wonka mirrored his creator. However, Dahl was also Charlie. The little boy’s sense of wonder, his vulnerability, his rich inner life of the imagination, his recognition by a powerful maverick, all had parallels in Roald’s own personal story. He was not just a showman. He was also the teenage loner, happiest in his Repton darkroom; the shattered airman, comforted through the desert night by a fellow pilot, or—perhaps most pointedly—the broken writer redeemed by an irrepressible, eccentric and verbose buccaneer. In that context, Wonka was surely also a veiled tribute to Charles Marsh, who now lay bedridden and near the end of his own life. Both had unquenchable optimism. Wonka’s energy-giving pleas to Charlie—“You mustn’t despair! Nothing is impossible!”46—echoed the confidence Marsh had shown in Dahl himself only ten years earlier, when Roald, like his child hero, had faced his own crisis of self-doubt and felt himself rejected and undervalued. For ten years before that, Marsh had encouraged him to write, sorted out his medical problems and baled him out financially. He had even acted as unofficial broker and therapist in his marriage. At all times he had encouraged his young protégé’s sense of self-belief and destiny. Dahl had relied on this friend and father figure. But he could do so no longer.
As he completed the book, all of Roald’s gurus were either dead or dying. Matthew Smith had passed away in 1959. Henry Wallace lay in Connecticut, debilitated by Lou Gehrig’s disease; he would die in 1965. The most important of them all, Charles Marsh, was now under twenty-four-hour nursing care in Washington. He would die, largely forgotten by the world, shortly after the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, on December 30, 1964. Roald barely saw him in his sad final years. It was probably simply too painful for him to witness the decline.47
Twenty years earlier, Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl had been Charlie to Marsh’s Wonka. For hours, he had lain on the latter’s sofa in wartime Washington and listened to him pontificating about people, politics, and philanthropy. He had learned from him. Now, many of his mentor’s ideas and attitudes had become his own. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory inhabits the hinterland between the world of the child and that of the adult—territory that Dahl himself was ideally equipped to explore. At the end of the final version of the book, Wonka (now unmarried and childless) gives his factory to Charlie because he acknowledges he is vulnerable and needs an heir. He could pass his kingdom on to a clever grown-up, Wonka tells the lad. But he doesn’t want to. “A grown-up person won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child.”
Dahl himself, the “geriatric child,” who often communicated better with children than with adults, will always be remembered as a Mr. Wonka figure—garrulous, exotic, rambunctious. But a part of him, a vulnerable, hidden part, remained the child: the child who absorbed as much as he radiated and who, as a young man, had formed much of his own personality in the company of his swashbuckling, iconoclastic Texan mentor. As a father he passed some of these attitudes on to his own children, but as a writer he passed them on to the world.
Roald’s own moral views had powerfully flavored Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They would be apparent too in a new children’s book on which he had just started working when Olivia died—a parable directed against “all the brave deer hunters and duck hunters in the country.”48 Constructed from an assigned 250 words, it was part of a project in which a group of famous adult writers—including John Updike and Arthur Miller, the “so-called giants of the literary world,”49 as Dahl described them—were each paid $2,000 to create a children’s story using this limited vocabulary. With the exception of a magical story by Robert Graves called The Big Green Book, Roald thought that most of their efforts were “tripe.”50 The other stories were “guaranteed to anesthetise in two minutes flat any unfortunate child who got hold of them.”51 However, he could not afford to turn down the “monstrous bribe”52 the publishers had offered him.
His own story, completed in that bitter winter of 1962–63, turns the tables on a group of duck hunters by transforming them into birds, and having the ducks hunt them. It is a clever, witty fable that wears its heart on its sleeve. The story is told by an eight-year-old girl narrator, whose sense of injustice and response to the cruelty she sees about her inspires her to develop magical powers. “I can’t stand hunting,” she bluntly tells the reader, “I just can’t stand it. It doesn’t seem right to me that men and boys should kill animals just for the fun they get out of it.”53 His publishers, Crowell Collier, fearful of offending the powerful U.S. gun lobby, sat on the manuscript until their option to publish had expired. Eventually, the rights reverted back to the author.
Dahl then offered the book, which for most of its gestation was known as The Almost Ducks, to Virginie Fowler. She turned it down. Three years after its completion, the story was published by Harper & Row as The Magic Finger. Fowler’s decision soon got her into trouble with her boss, Knopf, who could not believe she had acted so unilaterally. “You took me rather by surprise last week,” he complained in a memo,
when you told me that Mike Watkins had sold a story by Dahl to Harper for $5,000…. You also made it clear that you thought so badly of this particular story that you felt it a great pity that it was going to be published at all, and didn’t seem greatly concerned about the fact that an author closely identified with us, and heretofore very important to the house, was going to appear at least once in another imprint. … I do not think a decision to refuse to publish a story by Roald Dahl should be made without discussions with, and approval by, the very top people in Knopf and Random House. … I am afraid that we are all more concerned about and embarrassed by what has happened than you can realize.”54
From now on, Roald would not have to deal with her again.
The summer of 1963 found Roald and Pat “up to [their] necks in charity work.” Pat’s new film, now simply titled Hud, had opened to “smashing reviews,”55 and the UK charity premiere in Aylesbury had raised almost £1,000 for children’s causes of Dahl’s choice. The bulk of the proceeds were used to enable twenty of Father Borelli’s Neapolitan “urchins,” aged between five and eleven, and ten illegitimate girls from Bari to travel to England and stay with families for up to three months. Dahl went to meet the children at Victoria Station. He described their arrival as “an enthralling sight.”
Their suits were ill fitting, but clean, while their shoes, which in several cases were decorated with fantastic brogue patterns across the tops and sides, were often far too large for the feet. Some of them were carrying very small battered suitcases whose handles had been repaired with string or wire. One had his possessions in a canvas water-bag. Another was lugging around an enormous portmanteau made of cardboard. And one very small child, who had no bag at all, was clutching with both hands a red plastic petrol container—a treasure which he had undoubtedly swiped at great personal risk from a Naples garage in the days before he was introduced to Father Borelli.56
In late summer, Susan Denson got married and decided she would leave Gipsy House. The parting was not easy. She had been employed as the Dahl’s live-in nanny for more than four years and been through two terrible traumas with them. She had become family. In the Gipsy House nursery, shortly after Olivia’s death, Roald and Pat had tried to make her promise that she would never leave them and offered her the guest house as a permanent home. Before she could answer, old Mrs. Ingram, the housekeeper, who had overheard their request, piped up and said that Mr. Dahl was being unfair. He was asking too much of a girl so young. Sue was immensely grateful for the housekeeper’s intervention and felt that when she did tender her resignation a few months later, both Roald and Pat’s attitude toward her cooled swiftly. She also felt she compounded the frostiness by not asking Tessa to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. She had intended that both Olivia and Tessa would be her bridesmaids. “I felt as if they were my children,” she told me tearfully. “After Olivia died, I thought it would simply be too painful for Pat and Roald—and for me—to see just one daughter going up the aisle … I was probably wrong.” Her husband agreed that in retrospect the decision was almost certainly a mistake,57 and one that helped ensure that, after Susan left the Dahls’ service, she soon grew apart from them.
Pat was away filming in the summer, so in August 1963 Roald went up to Scotland to interview some twenty potential candidates for Susan’s job. Some of his old comic energy was clearly returning, for he wrote to Mike Watkins of the choices he had had to make. “It was an odd experience. One of them had never boiled an egg. One was still asleep in bed at eleven am when I called. One answered our advertisement because she thought, ‘I’d like to see something of London.’ A girl living in a place called Clackmannan said she’d webbed feet and was a good swimmer. But I found three nice ones and they’re all flying down at our expense to be grilled some more. It’s a busy life.”58 They eventually chose Sheena Burt, whom Pat described as “a lovely twenty-one-year-old Scottish lass.”59
When Pat returned home from shooting her latest movie—a thriller called Psyche 59—she began to sense a new buzz of anticipation around Hud. The New York Film Critics voted her Best Actress of 1963, as did the National Board of Review. A few weeks later she was nominated for an Oscar, but because the ceremonies in Los Angeles were taking place in April 1964, when she would be eight months pregnant, she decided not to attend. She also thought she was a rank outsider for the award. Then, at 5 a.m. on April 13, the phone rang to inform her that she had won. Roald’s former lover, Annabella Power, had collected the statuette for her. It was a moment of triumph both for Pat and for the family. Her talent had finally been acknowledged and her own professional future now seemed to be secure. “Not only did my whole industry think I was good enough,
” she wrote, “but now, finally, a fabulous new career was just around the corner. And we’d make a fortune.”60
Ophelia Magdalene Dahl was born in May—her name, perhaps consciously, evoking Olivia’s—and a few weeks later the entire family decamped to spend the summer in Honolulu, where Pat was co-starring with John Wayne in a movie called In Harm’s Way—a wartime drama, directed by Otto Preminger. Roald was not happy there. He disliked the “gold taps” style in which they were living. It brought out the Spartan in him. “I don’t really like this place,” he told Mike Watkins, “and I don’t like living like the Aga Khan with a suite of eight adjoining rooms, four bathrooms, three kitchens—all paid for thank heavens, by old Preminger. I don’t like luxury living in any form,” he concluded somewhat disingenuously. “It rots the soul.” Inspired perhaps by his memories of the intrepid “Iron Discipline” in Tanganyika, he took consolation searching the island for phalaenopsis orchids, then his current hobby, to take back for an orchid house he was planning to create at Gipsy House. He was also befriended by a young and unknown movie director called Robert Altman, who tried to “pressure” him into writing a movie script.61
Roald was flattered by the attention and he liked the idea Altman proposed, but he was reluctant to get involved. His wartime experiences had left him suspicious of the genre, and watching Hitchcock shooting one of his short stories at the Royal Albert Hall in 1955 he had found tedious in the extreme. Now he contemplated film and television work only when he needed money. After Theo’s accident, for example, he had “made a bloody fool”62 of himself, introducing an edgy “grand guignol” half-hour U.S. television series called Way Out. He had done it to pay hospital bills. From time to time, when he was broke, “a bit of awful movie work in Hollywood”63 would always tempt him. Normally, he managed to resist the temptation.
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