Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  So, the more complex truths of Pat’s recovery remained hidden from the public eye. Occasionally the cat escaped from the bag. Once, Roald told an interviewer that he had compelled his wife into making The Subject Was Roses. “Pat’s not ambitious,” he added. “I really did have to bully her into making another film. She didn’t want to do it.”67 Pat herself could be even franker about her defective memory and her limp, admitting to the National Enquirer on May 9, 1971, that despite the success of The Subject Was Roses, she was well aware that producers were still “fighting shy” of her. Future triumphs however lay in store. In 1972, she won a Golden Globe for her performance in Fielder Cook’s The Homecoming, although she was disappointed not to get the role in its television spin-off, The Waltons. Then, at seventy-three, she stole the show as the pipe-smoking Cookie in Bob Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune (1999). But throughout the 1970s and 1980s, her television and movie appearances became rarer and increasingly she spent her time giving well-paid talks about her life, often on her own or accompanied by Val Eaton Griffith. Her relationship with Roald too had altered dramatically. He was “Papa” Dahl—and she was a dependent. Tessa hated the change. “Like two baby birds in a nest squawking for food, we sat open-beaked, craving his attention,” she wrote in Working for Love.68 Eventually it got too much for her. She asked to be sent to boarding school just so that she could get away from a home where, she bluntly told her mother, there were simply “too many babies.”69 It was clear to Roald too that—at least for the short term—he would have to become the major breadwinner. To achieve that end, he decided he had to turn his own talents to a world he instinctively disliked and distrusted: the movies.

  In the summer before Pat’s stroke, when the family were in Hawaii, Roald had toyed somewhat halfheartedly with writing a fantastical comedy script for a young director, Robert Altman. He liked Altman, he liked his story about First World War fighter pilots and their raid on the Zeppelin base at Friedrichshafen and he particularly liked the title Altman had given the project—Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling?—which he had plucked from the refrain of an old RAF song, “The Bells of Hell.” Roald had worked on the script in Hawaii, but he had other things—like orchids—on his mind, and for several months there seemed little urgency to the project. In any event, he was doing it “for fun.”70 He brushed up his first draft over the autumn in Great Missenden. He was not paid a fee. He had agreed to share the rights with Altman. Payment would come when Altman sold the project to a studio that would accept him as a director.

  This was not an easy task. Although he had a stack of television credits, Altman had not yet directed his first feature. The project was still uncertain when the Dahls returned to Los Angeles in January 1965. Just a few days before Pat’s stroke, Roald wrote to Mike Watkins, telling him about Cary Grant’s enthusiasm to take the lead role. “The snag with Grant,” he added, was that he had yet to be convinced that Altman was a “capable director.”71 Grant never was. Nevertheless, the relationship between Dahl and Altman remained trusting, casual, friendly. Too friendly for Watkins, who worried that the agreement between them was “awfully vague.” When a hard copy of the contract finally arrived, he told Roald that he only approved it because he knew of his special relationship with Altman.72 With Pat earning good money, however, Roald was happy to wait until Altman found the right studio. The stroke changed that dynamic overnight. In Roald’s eyes, Altman was suddenly transformed from an inexperienced and engaging young director into a stubborn opponent, whose selfishness was preventing him from realizing the cash he now desperately needed for his family.

  By April 1965, there was a complete impasse. In Los Angeles, with his wife just out of hospital, Dahl was desperate to sell the project to United Artists, who had offered $150,000 for the script, but only on the condition that Altman gave up directing it. Altman, however, had refused. As a result, the two men had fallen out. “I called Bob, who was a small television director,” Roald later recalled, “and I said: ‘Look, I need the money!’ And he screamed: ‘You can tear the bloody thing up, if I don’t direct it.’ ”73 The conflict was only resolved when Dahl hired a legendary Hollywood agent and dealmaker, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, to help him. “I don’t see Altman at all now,” he told Watkins later in the month. “The feelings run high between us. The whole thing is a mess and a great pity. He is not behaving well at all. If only we could sell it now, I could get some expense money immediately from a studio for the rewrite, which would make it less of a drain to remain here with this vast household.”74 When the Dahl family returned to England the following month, the issue was still unresolved. Six weeks later, Lazar persuaded Altman to back down. They split the proceeds down the middle. Altman got $75,000 and—after paying Lazar’s 10 percent—Roald collected a fee of $67,500, which he put straight into a trust fund for Theo and Tessa. It made him feel, he told Alfred Knopf, “a bit safer.”75 Altman, however, was devastated by what he saw as his friend’s disloyalty. Years later he told Roald’s youngest daughter, Lucy, that though he had long since forgiven him, he still felt her father had “betrayed him like no one’s ever betrayed me in my life.”76

  Roald got paid another $25,000 for rewriting the script with the new director, David Miller. Miller was an American, in his mid-fifties, who had been directing movies since the 1930s. He had worked with John Wayne and the Marx Brothers, but he had none of Altman’s idiosyncratic charm. Roald was distinctly underwhelmed, describing him as “competent … but extraordinarily ignorant.” He told Peggy Caulfield at the Ann Watkins Agency that Miller would not make “anything brilliant, ever,” but concluded that—in view of the $6 million to be invested in the picture—he was doubtless safe.77 He wasn’t. The two men never saw eye-to-eye and, with his money banked, Roald swiftly lost interest in the project. His correspondence suggests that ultimately he was less concerned about the script than whether he would get sufficient expense money to pay for his entire family to come on holiday to Switzerland, where the picture was being shot.

  The film was a disaster. After over a month on location, the studio abandoned it, and declared their investment a write-off. “Sting-a-ling as you probably know has folded,” Roald told Watkins in August 1966. “I’m told they got a writer called Robert Alan Arthur … and he fucked the thing up to a point where neither he nor the director knew what they were doing. They shot three minutes of film in five weeks on location.”78 Yet something of the energy of the original project lingered on—at least in Robert Altman’s memory. Not long before he died in 2006, the director, then in his eighties, was asked by a journalist how he regarded his own imminent mortality. “I’m aware of it, I do wake up and face it most mornings,” he told the interviewer. Then he paused, smiled and simply uttered: “Oh Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?”79

  Dahl’s script for the film was not entirely wasted. It had impressed Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, two producers who also had a deal with United Artists. They owned the James Bond movie franchise, and were looking for a screenwriter for their latest 007 project, You Only Live Twice. Roald quickly found his name at the top of their screen-writing options. He was in many respects an obvious choice. He had known Ian Fleming well. Both men had worked in espionage for William Stephenson during the war, and both had similar reputations as hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing sophisticates. They also shared the same attitude toward money. “Despicable stuff,” Fleming had once remarked to Dahl, adding: “but it buys Renoirs.”80 Roald himself was in need of money now, not so much for Renoirs as for school bills and medical fees. So he was delighted by the approach. He admired Fleming. He thought him one of the few writers worth meeting, describing him as “a sparky, witty, caustic companion, full of jokes and also full of odd obscure bits of knowledge.”81 He told Fleming’s biographer that “a great red glow” illuminated the room when Fleming entered it.82 But he was less enamored of his friend’s writing skills, describing You Only Live Twice variously as “tired,” “bad,” and “Ian
’s worst book.”83 For his first meeting with the two overweight moguls, Broccoli and Saltzman, Dahl was ushered into “an enormous room.” He discovered that they shared his low opinion of Fleming’s novel; they told him he could do anything he wanted with the story so long as he didn’t change the Japanese location, “mess about” with the character of Bond, or tamper with the franchise’s famous “girl formula.”84

  The movie plot was indeed almost completely different from Fleming’s book. But it was not all Roald’s work. He was given a number of useful suggestions by an established Los Angeles television writer named Harold Jack Bloom, who proposed many of the narrative ideas that were in the final film, including Blofeld’s scheme to threaten the Russian and American Space Programs and the idea of faking Bond’s death at the opening of the movie.85 Nevertheless, a lot of the details—giant magnets, a battle between miniature helicopters, and a spacecraft that “swallows” another—were quintessential Dahl. Like the cunning magpie, one of his favorite birds, Dahl picked what he wanted from Bloom’s outline and then made it his own. The first draft took him just eight weeks to write, including one week spent on holiday with his family by the sea in Tenby. After he had delivered it, he wrote to Mike Watkins telling him that “the bosses” were thrilled with the draft, adding with characteristic boastful self-deprecation that he thought the script was “the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever put my hand to.”86

  Bloom, whose screen credit read “additional material by,” felt he had got the raw end of the deal. In an interview with Jeremy Treglown, he claimed he had created “everything you saw on the screen,” and that he and Dahl should by rights have shared the screenwriting credit87—a familiar cry in an industry notorious for its ruthless treatment of writers. In the past, Roald himself had felt that sense of injustice, but this time, after a run of bad experiences of his own, he had finally hit the jackpot. He revelled in his regular trips to the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, and in the luxury of sending scripts down to London in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.88 He also liked working with Lewis Gilbert, describing him in a radio interview as “the only fine, lovely director I’ve ever worked with”—one who “never changed a word” of the script.89 Best of all was the money: $165,500.90

  It transformed the Dahl’s finances. Roald boasted to his neighbor Alan Higgin that he would never need to work again because he had “made so much money from that movie.”91 Nevertheless, when Cubby Broccoli offered him the opportunity to adapt Fleming’s children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at a fee of $125,000 with a percentage of profits and an agreement to pay the money into an offshore account, which saved Dahl paying 91 percent rates of UK income tax,92 he found he simply could not refuse. But the project did not really excite him. He described the work as “simple, rather childish,” and the script as “rubbish.” He told Alfred Knopf that he was only doing the work to accumulate sufficient capital to take care of his children should he “croak,”93 as he did not believe in insurance. To Mike Watkins he admitted that he was desperate for Pat to be working again, so that he could abandon movies and get back to writing fiction. “I do not like this film business,” he confessed, adding optimistically that Pat was progressing so well that he hoped he would be “a free man” again in just eighteen months’ time.94

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was as grim as the Bond film had been gratifying. Roald rapidly fell out with the director, Ken Hughes, who was used to writing his own movies and who contrived to take the script away from him after the first draft,95 claiming that Broccoli thought Roald’s work “a piece of shit.” Hughes claimed later that he had written “every fucking word”96 of the final script on his portable typewriter. He was almost certainly exaggerating. It’s hard to believe, for example, that Dahl was not directly involved in devising many of the new characters and storylines—the preposterous Truly Scrumptious, for example, the Kingdom of Vulgaria, or the “toot sweets,” which unexpectedly summon all the dogs in the neighborhood to the candy factory. His fingerprint is most apparent in the film’s most memorable character: the sinister “Child Catcher.” This spindly, long-nosed monster captures children in a cage baited with candy, sniffing them out in their hiding places with his extremely sensitive nose. He is Willy Wonka’s evil doppelgänger, treading that line between the creepy and the comic that Dahl had already made distinctively his own. Aunts Sponge and Spiker had walked it already. Miss Trunchbull and the Grand High Witch would step along it two decades later. But the Child Catcher is perhaps the most terrifying of them all. With good reason, he is often described as one of the scariest characters ever to appear on screen.

  Dahl hated the final version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and his involvement concluded in an acrimonious dispute between himself and Broccoli over why he was not invited to meet Queen Elizabeth at the charity premiere. It was a classic example of the contradictions in his character. Dahl the iconoclast claimed he did not care about shaking hands with royalty. But being excluded from the top table was infuriating. “I am sure you are aware that I personally don’t give a damn whether we met the Royal Family or not,” he complained to Swifty Lazar. “What I did care about was Cubby’s behaviour and the way I have been treated all through.” His exclusion from that limelight reminded him that—despite his growing fame, wealth and status—even self-made men like Broccoli ultimately shied away from him. “I have now produced two worthwhile original scripts for Cubby and as far as I can tell, have done nothing wrong,” he told Lazar. “It makes me very cross.”97 It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Dahl that his growing reputation for being irascible and unpredictable might have accounted for his exclusion from the royal glad-handing. Yet, despite his protestations that he disliked cinema, his fi-nancial successes had rekindled his interest in movies, and he consciously sought out more projects. Illness alone forced him to abandon an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and for a while he seriously contemplated writing a screen adaptation of Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, about the miscarriage of justice surrounding a real-life serial killer, John Christie.

  His reasons for turning down 10 Rillington Place also offer a revealing insight into Dahl’s own aesthetics. In an interview in Los Angeles in 1970, he described the role of writer as that of entertainer, and explained that for him “fantasy” was the best means of performing that function. He wanted to take his audience to somewhere “marvellous, funny, incredible,” concluding that he “would never want to write anything that wasn’t completely made up or invented.”98 The story of Christie, a mild-mannered Londoner who killed seven women, concealing the bodies behind the wallpaper of his flat, disgusted Dahl because it was much too real and because it lacked wit. “I am sorry but I don’t like it,” he told William Dozier, the potential producer. “The history of this man Christie is so sordid and so humourless that I cannot see it as entertainment. A macabre story, if it shall be successful, must have a quality about it that makes one smile at the same time that it makes one wriggle. That is the secret … Christie’s story is a succession of seven carefully premeditated sex murders, all of them too beastly to contemplate. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry. I expect it will be a huge success, but it’s not my stuff.”99 The grand guignol fantasy of Ambrose Bierce or Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs was much more to his liking. Admitting that the only project that really appealed to him was adapting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a musical, he declared once again that he was tired of films. All he wanted now was to go back to writing stories and children’s books.100

  He was not quite finished with movies, however. He did adapt Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the following year, in an attempt to create a project for Pat, he acquired the rights to Nest in a Falling Tree, a psychological thriller by a young New Zealander named Joy Cowley. The plot focused on the plight of Maura Prince, an intelligent, sensitive spinster, who falls for a mysterious young handyman without realizing that he is in fact a serial rapist and killer. Maura was a wonderful role for Pat
. In his script, he even turned her into a recovering stroke victim. But The Night Digger, as the movie was finally titled, never really engaged Roald’s full attention perhaps because, like 10 Rillington Place, the story had little intrinsic humor in it. He tried to inject some, much to Cowley’s own delight.101 But even so, the tale relied on the kind of suspense, built on subtle psychological detail, that was not Dahl’s strength. It is testimony to his determination to make things happen for his wife that he pursued the project with such doggedness.

  Swifty Lazar was skeptical. He thought the story tame, predictable, “almost Victorian.”102 But Roald was tenacious. Writing in the middle of the night—his five-year-old daughter Lucy used to see his light on in the hut when she got up in the night to go to the bathroom—he told Lazar he thought his finished script might be the best screenplay he had ever done.103 A number of directors were sent the script, including William Friedkin, Lindsay Anderson, and the young Ken Russell, who liked the story but thought he himself would not be a sufficiently good collaborator.104 Roald had teamed up with an amiable English producer called Allen Zinn Hodshire, who even approached Robert Altman to direct. “He will see you at once,” Roald declared bullishly, “if you tell him that Pat and I want him and Pat especially wants to be directed by him.”105 Unsurprisingly, Altman, still smarting from his fallout with Dahl four years earlier, did not respond and eventually they chose a young Scottish director called Alastair Reid.

  Though Roald owned the rights to the story, he needed to strike a deal with an experienced production company in order to access the funds from the studio to make the picture, and he found the process extremely frustrating. He was psychologically ill-equipped for the chicanery and hot air involved in being a movie producer and quickly became impatient with the endless inconclusive meetings. “He floats around like a small jelly,” he wrote of one potential producer, “waving his chubby hands and only appearing on the scene when there is nothing to be decided.”106 Finally, he struck a deal with a company called Youngstreet Productions, which had persuaded MGM to put up the money for the project. The new producers turned out to be ruthless. They demanded that Dahl replace the luckless Hodshire with two of their own staff, and Dahl swiftly consented to their demands. His decision to drop Hodshire revealed how tough adversity had made him. It seemed as if he now believed that everyone outside the tight family circle was ultimately disposable if the situation required it. The abrupt parting came as a cruel, unexpected and “staggering” blow to Hodshire,107 who had given the project a great deal of his own time and energy, and had been working with Roald unpaid, in the expectation that he would receive a producer’s fee if and when the film got financed.