Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  Curiously, he had just earned the biggest movie fee of his life, from MGM, and he had done it without writing a sentence of dialogue. Earlier in 1964, Pat had showed him a script of a movie called 36 Hours, which she felt was very similar to Roald’s own short story from 1944, Beware of the Dog. The film was indeed a direct parallel to his tale of an RAF pilot who awakes from unconsciousness after baling out of his plane to discover that the hospital he is in is not in England, as he has been told, but in Occupied France, and that the doctors who speak perfect English and are looking after him so assiduously are actually Germans, bent on extracting information from him. MGM’s version, scripted by the director George Seaton, involved an American diplomat (James Garner) with knowledge of the D-Day invasion plans, who is kidnapped, drugged and taken to a sanatorium, where German doctors, pretending to be Americans, stage a similar charade. They tell him that he has awakened from a coma long after the war has been concluded. For his own good, they try to make the patient remember his last thoughts before the trauma and thereby reveal details of the invasion plans, which they pretend are of no more than academic medical interest to them. Seaton had made no acknowledgment of Dahl’s original story, and Roald immediately sensed an opportunity to extract a substantial sum of money from the studio. He instructed his reluctant agent to do battle with MGM.

  The fight was a short one. Watkins initially advised his client to settle for $12,500,64 but Dahl was confident of the strength of his position and wanted at least $25,000. “We could hold up the whole picture if we wanted to,” he argued, “or let them make it and then sue.”65 But the studio refused to increase their offer. So Dahl calmly increased his demand, explaining his resolve to the nervous Watkins in terms of his responsibilities to his family. “As you know I am not personally greedy for money. This property is not mine now. It is in trust for Theo, who may well need funds throughout his life, especially if he becomes an epileptic. The chances of this are even.”66

  MGM still prevaricated, but Dahl—convinced of the justice of his case—held firm. “This is a big matter for me,” he told Watkins. “That is why I am making such a song and dance about it. It is not often in a lifetime that a storywriter has a full movie based on his story. He must, therefore, get (for his children) all he possibly can out of it. Every extra thousand counts. … I think you could tell them that I am in a fighting mood about all this (which I am) and that I intend to get at them or the writer in some way or another if they don’t come through.”67 In the end, his tenacity paid off. MGM not only gave Dahl a credit as the originator of the story but a payment of $30,000 made directly into his children’s trust account. Dahl’s earlier experiences had already left him battle-hardened and cynical about studio executives. “If one does not fight for one’s rights with these people,” he told Mike Watkins’s assistant, Peggy Caulfield, “they will always screw you in the end.”68

  Roald returned to London prior to the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He had initially wanted the young Maurice Sendak, who had illustrated the Robert Graves children’s story The Big Green Book, to do the drawings.69 In the end he was persuaded to choose the slightly more experienced Joseph Schindelman. When the book was published in September 1964, it was an immediate success, provoking none of the controversy it would later cause when made into a movie. The New York Times Book Review declared on October 25, 1964, that Roald Dahl, “a writer of spine-chilling stories for adults, proved in James and the Giant Peach that he knew how to appeal to children. Now he has done it again, gloriously.” The reviewer praised his fertile invention, his rich humor, and his acute observational skill, declaring that Wonka was a “Dickensian” character and that the tale itself made a “lovely book.” It was selected as one of the New York Times’s books of the year. All over America, adults and children responded to the story with warmth and enthusiasm. “It will be read not once, but over and over again,” declared the Tulsa World. The Star News in Pasadena noted that, while the book was written for children, it also had “adult appeal.” The reviewer for the Boston Globe begged to differ. He thought the descriptions (the Oompa-Loompa Song about the contents of Wonka’s rubbish chute perhaps) might give adult readers indigestion, but agreed that “the young, with their stainless steel digestive systems, will take to it with relish.” Only one group of people were unconvinced: the librarians. The Library Journal commented primly that while Mr. Dahl’s “facility with the pen is unquestioned, his taste and choice of language leave something to be desired.”70

  After Christmas, the entire Dahl family along with Sheena, the new nanny, and Angela Kirwan, the sporty twenty-two-year-old daughter of one of their neighbors, headed to Los Angeles, the city Roald once described as “Gomorrah and destruction and the Lion’s den,” where “none of us is Daniel.”71 There Pat was scheduled to star in what would be John Ford’s last movie, Seven Women. Her role was that of a missionary in China, who gives herself up to marauding barbarians in order to save the lives of the other sisters in the mission. As Martin Ritt, the director of Hud, was away with his wife in Europe directing John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the Dahls rented their home on Romany Drive, Pacific Palisades. It was a big, spacious Hollywood house, filled with pink marble, and it had a kidney-shaped heated swimming pool and a sauna. For several weeks, the house—on a street whose name had reminiscences of Dahl’s beloved gypsy ideals—seemed auspicious enough. Pat was now a star. Since the Oscar, her fees had increased hugely and she was enjoying some of the additional “perks” of increased celebrity. A British magazine had offered to redecorate Gipsy House for free when they were away, while she was able to boast to a journalist that she was now being paid “so much money … it’s almost ridiculous.”72 She went on to assure the reporter that none of this new success was going to change their lifestyle and that most of this new money was going straight into a trust fund for the children. As shooting commenced, what neither of the Dahls had told anyone—not even John Ford—was that Pat was three months pregnant.

  On February 17, 1965, the fourth day of filming, she spent much of the time riding a donkey. Ford required Pat to repeat the same sequence of events many times. When he was finished, she was exhausted. Pat’s friend, the actress Millie Dunnock, who was also in the movie, dropped her home at around five thirty. Ophelia was asleep, but Tessa and Theo “besieged” her with questions about the day’s filming and particularly the donkey.73 Roald brought her a martini at about six. Then Sheena took the children off to have their baths. Pat followed them. She wanted to bathe Tessa herself. Downstairs, Roald was making her another martini. As she sat on the lavatory seat, a searing pain shot through her head. “Mummy, what’s wrong?” Tessa cried, as Sheena helped her mother stagger out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Roald, who was coming up the stairs with Pat’s drink, found her sitting on the bed. “I’ve got the most awful pain right here,” she told him, pressing her hand to her left temple. She told Roald she was seeing double and experiencing what her medical notes later described as “bizarre fantasies” and “peculiar thoughts.”74 Suddenly her head jerked back and she lost consciousness. Roald suspected at once that she was having a stroke. He rushed into his study and called one of L.A.’s top neurosurgeons, Charles Carton, whose home number he had pinned to the wall because the two men had met only recently to discuss bringing the Dahl-Wade-Till valve to the United States.

  When he took Dahl’s call, Dr. Carton initially assumed there was something wrong with Theo, but as soon as Pat’s symptoms were described to him, he dispatched an ambulance. Roald returned to the bedroom to find his wife just conscious. She was covered in vomit and could not recognize her own children. Tessa, still naked, was staring at her with a look of “utter desolation.”75 Five minutes later, sirens wailed. “What’s that sound?” Theo asked. Sheena told him it was a cat. Tessa however, perhaps remembering the night Olivia died, knew exactly what it was. “It’s an ambulance coming for Mummy,” she said.

  The paramedics put
Pat on oxygen and stretchered her out of the house. Roald climbed into the ambulance beside her, asking the driver not to switch on the siren until they were away from the house. It was now 6:20 p.m. On arrival at the UCLA Medical Center’s emergency room, Pat was able to talk again, and initially Carton thought she might have just had a seizure. Then she passed out once more. A spinal tap confirmed Roald’s initial diagnosis: the fluid was “scarlet with blood.”76 With a lead apron over her abdomen to protect the unborn baby in her womb, the doctors took her in for two and a half hours of detailed X-ray examinations. They discovered that she had already suffered two severe hemorrhages. While Carton was studying the results and working out what to do, she had a third—the most massive of them all. Urgently, he asked Roald’s permission to operate, warning him that he doubted his wife would survive the surgery. When Roald asked him what would happen if he said no, Carton told him that his wife “would succumb for certain.”77

  The operation began at midnight and lasted until after 7 a.m. the following morning. The doctors shaved her head, sawing loose a 4- by 6-inch trap door in her skull so they could remove the clots that had formed and inspect the damage the spurting blood had inflicted on the surrounding brain tissue. The surgery revealed that the rupture had been caused by an aneurysm, a genetic weakness in the wall of the artery. Perhaps pregnancy and the stress of a tough day’s shooting caused it to burst at that particular moment, but it was a disaster that had simply been awaiting its moment to strike. Carton delicately removed the damaging clots—one of which was located in the part of the brain that controls speech and movement on the right side of the body. Then he put metal clips on the base of the aneurysm and sprayed on a plastic coating to reinforce the artery wall.

  Roald stayed in the hospital throughout. Early in the morning, he called Mildred Dunnock, who was staying ten minutes away at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and asked if she would go over to Pacific Palisades and tell the children what was happening. Roald himself rang Pat’s mother. If her daughter made it through the next ten days, he told her, she might just recover some sort of normal functions. He was being optimistic. As Carton emerged from the operating theater, he had taken Roald aside and advised him that, even if his wife did pull through, her disabilities were likely to be so severe that he might come to regret her survival.

  Pat remained in a coma for almost three weeks, lying on an ice mattress to minimize swelling, and besieged by tubes. Antibiotics to prevent infection and anticonvulsants to prevent further damage to the brain dripped constantly into her system. She was fed both intravenously and through another line into her stomach. The doctors had performed a tracheotomy to assist her breathing, so there was yet another tube coming out of her neck.78 She made no voluntary movements. Ed Goodman, who flew in from Manhattan to see her, recalled her condition as “pitiful.”79 Roald, he remembered, sat by her side for hour after hour, repeating endlessly, “Pat, this is Roald.” Sometimes he would shout in her ear, “Tessa says hello. Theo says hello. Don Mini [Theo’s nickname for Ophelia] says hello.” Sometimes he lifted an eyelid to see if he could get a response. Millie Dunnock remembered that on one occasion Roald slapped her across the face to see if that would provoke a reaction,80 but Roald told Dirk Bogarde that this recollection was untrue.§ For days there was no improvement in Pat’s condition. On February 20, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that there was “little hope.” Two days later, Variety announced that Pat had passed away, running the headline: “Film Actress Patricia Neal Dies at 39.” But on March 10, almost three weeks after the hemorrhage that nearly killed her, Pat began to regain consciousness. Roald was by her side when she falteringly opened a single eye. She could not move. She could not speak. She had no idea where she was or why she was there. The world she saw around her was confusingly blurred and hazy. Anger and fear coursed through her system as she tried to work out what was happening. Alone in her room when everyone had gone, all she could hear was a strange sound swirling round and round in her head: “wubble-wubble-wubble-wubble.”81

  Roald himself could have been forgiven for wondering whether some malignant neurological spell hung over his family. In 1940, his own head injuries had arguably altered his personality and led to a life of almost continual pain. Shortly after his marriage, a brain inflammation had incapacitated his best friend Charles Marsh. Then his son’s skull had been shattered on a New York street corner. Two years after that another brain inflammation had taken his beloved daughter from him. Now his wife lay in her hospital bed, speechless and immobile, her head swathed in bandages after radical cranial surgery. What future lay ahead of her? As he gazed at the “enormous pink cabbage”82 in front of him, it would not have been surprising if, for a moment, he had reflected on the fictional brain of William Pearl, which he had imagined in his short story William and Mary. That “sensitive, lucid, uberous organ,” with its “ridges and creases running over his [sic] surface,”83 isolated from its body, incapable of expression and communication, with its single eye floating in a basin of Ringer’s solution, was shockingly, almost mockingly prophetic of his wife’s current situation.

  Yet Dahl later claimed that he had not felt fatalistic. He had not thought “in terms of a curse or anything melodramatic,” but reflected rather on the strange coincidence of it all. “I don’t think I’m capable of taking it beyond that,” he told the journalist Barry Farrell. “Superstition is something that one grows out of. You try avoiding all the cracks in the pavement or you touch all the posts in the fence. But then you find out later that it doesn’t help. You find out that it’s not going to make a bit of difference if you step on the cracks or not. I think I just realise subconsciously that if you start thinking about bad luck, you’re going to weaken. The great thing is to keep going, whatever happens.”84

  * Sodium amatol was a barbiturate used to treat catatonic mutism. It is possible the doctors thought Olivia might have had some psychiatrically based catatonia and were trying to quickly determine if this was indeed the case. Because its effects are short-lasting, the medics may also simply have been using it to make sure Olivia remained inert while they performed the lumbar puncture.

  † A distinguished pediatrician who had been involved in Theo’s treatment.

  ‡ This was probably the final exchange between Dahl and St. Lawrence until he invited her to meet him in Ireland twenty-five years later. The last mention of her in his letters is in February 1963, where Roald wrote to Mike Watkins, expressing surprise that Sheila had not written to him about Olivia’s death. “Incidentally not a word from Sheila—ever,” he observed with evident regret. “I wrote to her about Olivia. Perhaps she just cannot write”—Dahl, Letter to Armitage Watkins, 02/13/63—WLC Box 25.

  § In a much later letter to Bogarde, who played Dahl in The Patricia Neal Story (1981), Dahl told him that he “never slapped Pat on the face when she was unconscious (or otherwise). That is a false note. Please don’t do it”—Dahl, letter to Dirk Bogarde, 01/09/81—Dirk Bogarde Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Indomitable

  IN THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY following Pat’s stroke, Roald spent most of his time at the hospital, by her bedside, arriving there each morning at 6 a.m., and returning home only for meals and to sleep. His responsibilities were immense. On top of all the medical issues, an army of journalists and photographers lurked around the hospital waiting for news, quotes, stories, any scrap of information they could gather about the fate of the Oscar-winning actress who lay, as it seemed, in death’s embrace. More than a hundred letters arrived each day from friends and well-wishers. Roald might have been overwhelmed, but it was the kind of crisis he was able to endure because it offered the opportunity to take complete control of the situation and also because he saw the chance of a positive outcome. The image of himself as the lone fighter, struggling against adversity to keep his family alive, was now profoundly ingrained in his psychology. Each crisis seemed
only to intensify its presence.

  Once again, the odds seemed stacked against him. After three weeks in a coma his wife lay, as she later put it, like “an immense vegetable,”1 on a life-support machine. The damage to her brain was as yet unquantifiable. Her appearance was so upsetting that her sister was warned by her husband not to go to the hospital.2 At first Theo and Tessa were kept entirely away. A few days after she began to emerge from the coma, however, Roald decided that the children should see their mother. The experience was traumatic. Theo, aged four, was upset. And seven-year-old Tessa was terrified: a mixture of “horror, fear, nausea” welled up inside her as she contemplated “this hideous creature who cackled and moaned … this thing that was meant to be my mother. This woman propped up in bed with tubes coming out of every hole. … She had no hair, she had a black eye patch, she had lipstick smeared over a lopsided mouth.”3

  For days, Pat made little sense. She found it difficult to recognize people, her ability to speak was severely compromised and her right side was paralyzed. But despite the pessimism he must have picked up from almost everyone around him, Roald seized on the advice of Charles Carton that immediate and intense stimulation offered perhaps the best hope for his wife’s recovery. He set her to work immediately, hiring speech therapists and physiotherapists to help her relearn the simplest things. Sympathy was not high on his list of priorities. He limited the number of visitors she could receive, removed most of the flowers from her room, and destroyed the bulk of her get-well cards, dismissing them all as dangerous indulgences that might drag his wife into the mire of self-pity and distract from her recovery. Within days his draconian plan seemed to be working. Pat’s mobility began to improve and doctors were startled at the speed with which she tried to put sentences together. A few days after she had regained consciousness, Roald gave his mother a report on her condition. Its clipped, no-nonsense optimism was typical of the brutally positive attitude he was adopting: