Pat was aware of this too and it only added to her unhappiness. Despite the fact that she would later claim she had been a “gorgeous wife … making the beds and doing the cooking,”37 she was, by her own confession, “still no homemaker and no mother.”38 Susan Denson, however, remembered that, when she was working for the Dahls, she had found Pat to be a warm, loving and proactive mother. Now everything had changed again, and Pat found herself with “no authority” because “Papa,” as she now began calling Roald, had completely taken over the running of the house. “My children always had plenty of love for me,” she would write later, “but they regarded me as a peer with whom they vied for Papa’s attentions. Or they totally ignored me.”39 Tessa, though only ten years old, even tried to usurp her mother’s place, imitating her father’s attitudes and sometimes acting, by her own admission, as if she was in charge.40 As a result, Pat was often morose and hostile. Her husband’s relentless optimism particularly got on her nerves. “He would tell me I was 42 percent better than yesterday and 51 percent better than last week. God I was so sick of his percentages, his plans, his programs, his world. It was Papa’s world now. He was a hero and I was hating him.”41
Nevertheless, there was still time for celebrations. First, Pat’s eyepatch came off. Then, on August 4, 1965, she gave birth to their last child, Lucy Neal Dahl, in Oxford. Within hours of the delivery, she was sitting up in bed, being photographed by the press drinking beer and playing dominoes. To celebrate, Roald gave his wife an ancient Greek ring, made in the fourth century BC. A few days later, he told Barry Farrell, who was now living with the family prior to writing the piece about them for Life magazine, that he was certain Pat would act again. Shortly afterwards he made a similar announcement to the press, in language that again was faintly reminiscent of that of an animal trainer. “Pat realizes she must rise to the challenge I have set for her and she is doing it,”42 he declared.
This kind of statement alarmed Pat because privately she was unsure she would ever recover sufficiently to work again as an actress. She was profoundly aware of the extent of her disabilities: she still could not walk properly and found it almost impossible to remember lines. Sometimes, during her remedial sessions, she would try to recite poetry. Usually she would become confused, mangling the sense, speaking gibberish—often without realizing it. But Roald was convinced that only by maintaining the role of energetic leader and pushing her further than she wanted to go would her rehabilitation succeed. “He never let her develop self-pity,” a family friend told a Hollywood reporter. “Every little thing she did accomplished something: she began to rally and this led to her pride in self-accomplishment, so Roald was not cruel.”43 Yet this attitude sometimes made even Farrell uneasy. He admired Dahl hugely, but he was nevertheless perturbed when he discovered Pat in the garden only hours after returning from the hospital where she had given birth to Lucy. She was trying to walk without a leg brace for the first time, while Roald was shouting at her “like a drill sergeant” and yelling: “Don’t limp! Stride out! It’s not onetwo, threefour, onetwo, threefour, it’s one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.”44
On New Year’s Day, 1966, Roald once again publicly raised the stakes on his wife’s recovery, telling the press that he felt certain she would be “working again within the year.”45 As a result, movie offers slowly began to come in. Mike Nichols offered her the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Pat knew she was not ready for the part, which was eventually taken by her friend Anne Bancroft. Peter Sellers offered her a cameo in his movie, What’s New Pussycat? She passed on that as well. Finally, Edgar Lansbury (brother of the actress Angela) offered her the lead in a film version of the Tony Award–winning play The Subject Was Roses by Frank Gilroy. Pat liked the part of Nettie—a tough working-class New York mother, whose son (played by Martin Sheen) returns home from fighting in the Second World War to discover that his parents’ marriage is failing. The role was gritty, raw, and it suited her mood. It had two other attractions: it was not to be shot until 1968, and the filming would be largely in her beloved New York. Val Eaton Griffith convinced her to accept it. Yet Pat remained anxious that she was not ready.
Val, however, had already persuaded her to deliver a speech in New York in March 1967. Roald had written the text of her address, and Val coached Pat on it daily for a month, before accompanying her on the flight to New York for the celebrity dinner. “An Evening with Patricia Neal” was a fund-raiser for brain-injured children held at the Waldorf-Astoria. Its starry guest list included Leonard Bernstein, Joan Crawford, Yul Brynner, Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Alistair Cooke, Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and it was Pat’s first public appearance since the stroke. Her speech—including a line borrowed from Sonia Austrian to the effect that “Tennessee hillbillies don’t conk that easily”—won her a standing ovation, and the event raised $90,000. The adulation stimulated Pat’s desire to recover and she began to believe she truly might pull off the movie comeback. That night she too hailed her husband as a “great man” and saluted him for what he had done to force her back into the limelight. Later, she would articulate her gratitude more eloquently: “I knew at that moment that Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless courage, Roald the Rotten, as I had called him more than once, had thrown me back into the deep water. Where I belonged.”46
Pat’s newfound confidence began to evaporate when she started to realize how much greater was the challenge of The Subject Was Roses. She prevaricated, looking for a way out of her commitment. “It is not my desire to work at all,” she told Cindy Adams. “My husband coerced me. He felt that my rehabilitation would only be completed once I was back at work. … I’m no longer used to the hustle and bustle and rushing and fittings and make-up tests and press interviews.”47 Most challenging of all was a five-page monologue that the director wanted to film from various angles, each time in a single take. The thought of it terrified her. Nevertheless, with Val Eaton Griffith’s focused support, she got through most of the filming. Then came the evening when the soliloquy would be shot. The set was closed and teleprompts and cue cards hidden in case she needed them. Roald flew over to New York to support her. She got through the session with some difficulty, but Roald’s effusive praise, so rarely given, filled her with delight.
When the film was released in 1968, Pat’s performance brought forth a throng of accolades. The critic of New York magazine was left “groping for superlatives,” while Time magazine praised Miss Neal’s “vast resources of energy and intelligence” and her “melancholy dignity.” “She no longer indicates suffering,” the reviewer concluded, “she defines it.”48 The movie won her another Oscar nomination. It seemed to the world that, against all the odds, a star had miraculously been reborn.
The story of how Patricia Neal’s clearheaded and determined husband had defied medical convention and masterminded her “return from the dead” quickly became the stuff of popular legend. Roald’s “cruel to be kind” approach toward her rehabilitation did indeed revolutionize treatment for future stroke victims, mainly through the media publicity that Pat’s story attracted. However, there was also an element of self-conscious mythmaking in both their versions of the narrative, which downplayed the enduring physical and mental problems that remained when Pat was away from the limelight. And it drew a veil over something that was obvious to their neighbor Alan Higgin: Pat had changed. Sue Denson, who had tea with her former employer shortly after she had finished The Subject Was Roses, agreed. Pat seemed like a different person, she told me. She found her “vindictive”—particularly when it came to Mrs. Ingram, the housekeeper, whom Denson believed to have been the mainstay in running Gipsy House and who had recently handed in her notice.49 Lou Pearl too felt that her aunt was no longer so demonstrative and affectionate, but more obsessive, much less open.
Roald simply refused to see this. His version of events seemed not to acknowledge that there might be a limit to Pat’s powers of recovery. It was as if he had planned the
story of her return to health in his head and was determined to force reality into the mold of his imagination. No other viewpoint could be tolerated—even from members of his family. Eura Neal thought an article he had written for the Ladies’ Home Journal about her daughter self-absorbed and inaccurate and wrote to her son-in-law to tell him so.50 Roald was dumbfounded by her accusations and by the emotional pressure he felt she was trying to exert on his family. “Please, what is it that bothers you? How have I offended you?” he asked. “In a case like this, Pat’s family has only one duty—to support the husband who is trying desperately to cure her. Any letters that contain criticisms or demands or requests to her serve no purpose. So for heaven’s sake stop them. I will not concede that I have wronged you in any way.”51
The mythology had been further reinforced during the summer of 1965 while Barry Farrell was living with the family for his Life magazine article. For several months, the thirty-year-old Farrell became part of the family. He even went on holiday with them. Starved of male companionship in his almost entirely female world, Roald took the young journalist into his confidence. They took long walks together and often talked until late in the night. Farrell was captivated by Dahl and revelled in his “large small talk.” Describing him admiringly as “the best storyteller I know,” he confessed that “listening to him often worked a kind of spell on me.” Farrell too had been skeptical about the idea that Pat could return to what she was before her stroke. But he had been turned around. “In the months I had spent visiting Gipsy House,” he wrote, “I was always made uneasy by Roald’s talk of a ‘hundred per cent recovery.’ Now Pat’s cheerful radiance seemed to bear him out miraculously, and his optimism was infectious: everyone agreed that the change in Pat after only six months made any recovery possible in the end.”52 Four years later, Farrell would expand his article into a more measured book called Pat and Roald. It would serve for many years as Dahl’s only published biography and set in stone for a generation the legend of his role in his wife’s recovery.
Roald’s relationship with Farrell was a paradigm of many others he would have with younger professional males in the last twenty-five years of his life. Initially, Farrell was seduced by his charm and charisma—when one was with Roald on his own, he had an uncanny ability to make you feel special—but the contradictions in his personality would inevitably put the friendship under strain. In Farrell’s case, he underestimated both how much Roald needed control over his own story and the extent to which he valued his family’s privacy. It was a reasonable misjudgment. Roald was probably not dissembling when he appeared to welcome Farrell’s presence in Gipsy House. His home was often full of visitors. But, on another level, intruders irritated him. His friend Marian Goodman observed this inconsistent attitude a number of times, recalling that although Roald criticized Pat for sending her publicity photographs and news cuttings to Tessa while she was at school, he himself would often ring gossip columnists and “feed them” stories about his own children. “It’s the old story—methinks the lady doth protest too much,” reflected Mrs. Goodman. “He disliked publicity and would pick it up on somebody else, but then he succumbed himself. … He loved being interviewed.”53 It took Farrell a long time to understand that his subject’s sword was double-edged, and that while he was celebrating their late night têtes-a-têtes, his friend was complaining behind his back about his “endless talk and probings.” Dahl told Mike Watkins he only put up with it because of the $100,000 worth of publicity he reckoned the article and book would bring him.54
When Roald and Pat eventually read Farrell’s manuscript, in 1968, they were shocked by some of his observations—in particular his assertion that Pat’s personality had changed after her stroke and that she seemed to be becoming an alcoholic. His observation that she was garrulous, unpredictable and intolerant—even to Val Eaton Griffith—also stung them. Pat later admitted that she had indeed been “rude” and “obnoxious”55 to Val and that she probably did have an alcohol problem. At the time, however, the wounds were much rawer and even the unshockable Dahls were startled by the picture Farrell had painted of their family.
Roald did not speak to Farrell personally about his concerns. He called Farrell’s publishers instead, accusing the author of cruelty and slander, and threatening to block publication unless changes were made.56 Farrell was forced, as he put it, to censor his manuscript, removing various details, including the circumstances surrounding the departure of the nanny, Sheena Burt, who, he asserted, had slapped Pat’s face in frustration at her treatment of the infant Ophelia. Pat herself wrote to Farrell complaining about “the rotten things” he had said about her and claiming that his book portrayed Roald as “the hero” and herself simply as “the bitchy woman.” In particular, she resented his insinuation that she was a dipsomaniac. “I am not a drunk! I am not a drunk! I am not a drunk!” she railed, adding, only partly in jest, “At least I don’t think so!”57 Yet her nephew and nieces, the Logsdails, agreed with the journalist that a haze of intoxication now hung over Gipsy House and that tempers were often frayed. It was a far cry from the tight family unit Susan Denson recalled in her four years with the Dahls between 1958 and 1962.
A devastated Farrell made the required changes, complaining to Roald and Pat that cutting the manuscript had made him feel “like a whore.” “It was not a cruel book,” Farrell wrote, arguing that “a great deal was left out … to protect your feelings and your privacy. Nonetheless, you attacked it using means that suggested contempt for the work as well as for the friendship of its author. … I feel stung and betrayed by you and I regret every day that I ever gave an hour to writing the vain, false book that is now to be issued under my name.”58 Roald thought his letter “nasty and childish,” and suggested Farrell come over and see them to sort it out. Farrell was too hurt to accept his offer.59 Ironically, many of the book’s falsities were of its author’s own making. As a writer, Farrell—who died at the age of forty-nine in 1984—was not constrained by much fact-checking and his weak research helped establish many fictions about Roald’s life as truths in the public’s mind. Dahl, the fighter pilot, shot down by enemy fire over Libya; Dahl, the sole inventor of the gremlins; Dahl, the laid-back and successful writer, whose tales were published in The New Yorker just as soon as he submitted them. All of these and more were enshrined in Pat and Roald. For over twenty years these stories were repeatedly rehashed by a stream of journalists and often by Dahl himself. It was not until 1994 that Jeremy Treglown set many inaccuracies straight and began systematically to unravel the complex web of fictions that Roald had woven around himself.
Farrell’s book became the basis of a television film about Pat’s stroke called The Patricia Neal Story, made in 1981, with Glenda Jackson playing Pat, and the Dahls’ near neighbor Dirk Bogarde as Roald. The movie reinforced the image of a resilient Dahl family, led by its charismatic and determined paterfamilias, pulling together to deal with a crisis that would have broken many others. What Roald had achieved in pushing a recovering stroke patient to the limit was indeed remarkable. And Patricia Neal’s celebrity status ensured a high profile for this new kind of stroke therapy, while Val Eaton Griffith’s book about managing strokes in the family would help many others to deal with similar crises. It also spawned a network of “stroke clubs” across the world. Both book and film, however, encouraged the world to believe that Pat’s recovery was complete and that the Dahl family unit was uniquely strong and robust. It wasn’t. Serious stresses tugged at its heart, but they were concealed by the compelling narrative Dahl had created around them. He may even have been aware of what he was doing. “I do not display emotions,” he told Bogarde, when offering him some tips on how to play him on screen. “They may churn madly inside, but I always keep them there. Unsentimental. I am cool and competent in a crisis. Act swiftly, never get visibly excited.” Most tellingly, perhaps, he compared his tenacity in dealing with Pat’s stroke to that of completing a book. “All good writers,” he explained, “have a very
great tenacity and endurance. They do not give up. … The act of rehabilitating Pat was like writing a long and difficult novel.”60
Barry Farrell had not known Pat before her stroke, but he observed how it had affected her personality. He described traits that Roald’s family told him she had not exhibited before: how she had become fixated by trivia, how she picked up litter obsessively and complained loudly about lights being left on in the house when people went out.61 “When Pat had her stroke, Pat became more Pat,” claims Marian Goodman. “She was the same woman … but the self-interest, the self-centeredness were more exaggerated. She was just more demanding.” Even today, Mrs. Goodman still finds these qualities frustrating in her good friend. “Sometimes I’d like to shake her until her teeth rattle,” she told me, “but my compassion for her is endless because I realize just what she’s been through.”62 Roald too was impressed by Pat’s determination. He had seen her progress from an “idiot,”63 whose only vocal means of communication was grunting, to an Oscar nominee in less than three years. Yet, by 1967, admiration was about all that remained of his feelings toward the woman he had once proudly dubbed “my girl Pat.” The “wild, gorgeous” woman that the actress Maria Tucci remembered had first been “tamed” by her husband and then brought low by her illness. Speaking to Pat after her stroke, Tucci recalled, was like speaking to “an adorable but rather odd ten-year-old.”64 Roald’s physical desire for his wife was dwindling, and for Pat having sex was now “agony.”65 Val Eaton Griffith noted that she had become loud, intolerant and “actressy,” making peace in the household almost impossible. “It was extremely hard for all of them,” she said, “and very hard on Roald.”66
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