Through talent, luck and a dogged refusal to be beaten down, he had also become a rich man. Even Pat acknowledged that she had “supported him for many a year,” but that Roald had now begun to make “fabulous money.”141 His cellar was well stocked with good Bordeaux and Burgundy, though he was not so precious as to prevent the fourteen-year-old Tessa from decking it out with silver foil for a party she was giving with her friend, Amanda Conquy. He had built a covered swimming pool in the garden, which was freely used by friends and neighbors alike, for whom the Dahls and Gipsy House had now become something of a lovable and eccentric village institution. That sense of Roald as the head of a sprawling family vividly struck the young Amanda Conquy. She remembered what a big presence he was around her, though she found it “odd” he was at home so much, when everyone else’s father was out at work. “He was completely different,” she recalled. “No other fathers drove their children to school and were so actively involved in family life. … No one else had a father who was around at lunchtime during the week. It was very unconventional behavior in what was a very conventional society.”142
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a celebration both of family life and of the genius of a prodigious paterfamilias. These were two key factors in Dahl’s own psychological makeup and he found solace in creating a fable about a family of foxes whose encounters with disaster bring them ever closer together. The Dahl family, however, despite all Roald’s efforts, was starting to crumble, and it was crumbling from the top down. Patricia Neal was no Mrs. Fox. She was a complex, demanding and extraordinary woman, but one from whom her husband now preferred to keep his distance. That largely unspoken tension was a problem. Sooner or later something was bound to give. Roald had done much with his life. He had fought back from the brink of death. He had shot down and killed men. Flying in his Hurricane over the Mediterranean, he had aspired to touch the face of God. He had mixed with presidents and movie stars. He had slept with some of the most beautiful women in the world. He had made a career out of writing and kept his family together through a series of terrible personal disasters. But he had never yet fallen in love.
* These were Landscape at Malabata (1963), Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963), Study for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1964) and Head of Lucian Freud (1967).
† “Murder by fucking has been something I have wanted to do for years,” Dahl wrote, “but I have not had the guts to try it up to now.” The New Yorker had rejected The Last Act because of its unpleasant material. But Dahl told Watkins: “I won’t tone it down. That would simply blunt the knife”—Dahl, Letter to Armitage Watkins, 04/09/65—WLC Box 26.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Gentle Warmth of Love
THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN a degree of sexual tension in Roald’s marriage to Pat and this was exacerbated by her stroke. In 1965, when Pat was pregnant with Lucy, Barry Farrell reported a conversation where Roald joked to her that she was getting “a bit long in the tooth” for him. “When you go into hospital to have the baby, I think I’ll go into London and find myself a girl,” he told her. “Someone not quite so fossilized.”1 Pat bantered back that he too should watch out. He was now so old he might have a heart attack while philandering. However, these jibes had a serious edge. During his marriage, Roald had not always been entirely faithful, but his affairs had generally been transient, leaving scarcely a ripple behind them. They were like his brief wartime fling with the Canadian cosmetics wizard Elizabeth Arden, nearly forty years his senior, whom he sometimes claimed as his “first older woman.” He had called at her salon in New York because he had a problem with acne. The cream he wanted was out of stock and, after some discussion, Arden herself appeared. Commanding one of her assistants to make sure new supplies were delivered at once from the factory, she whisked the dashing young air attaché off for lunch and a visit to the races. “It didn’t last long,” Nicky Logsdail remembered his uncle telling him, “but it cured my spots.”2
Other old flames were more enduring. Pamela Berry, the Marchioness of Huntly and daughter of the newspaper magnate Lord Kemsley, was one of these. Roald had first encountered her when both were on their way to Jamaica in 1948 and had stayed at her house near Ocho Rios, which was only three miles from Charles Marsh’s Jamaica Inn. He liked her independence, her practicality and her sense of adventure—she later became a skilled aeroplane pilot. Her seven-year-old daughter Lemina remembered Roald as “a lovely man” who spent a lot of time with the children. She recalled how he would often take her into the sea, telling her to hang onto his back while he ventured out into deep water—an experience she found both terrifying and exciting, as she couldn’t swim.3 Pam and Roald saw each other a great deal between 1948 and 1952, when she was often absent from her husband, whom Roald described unflatteringly as “a small mousy ex second hand car dealer.”4 He visited her in Scotland, where her husband had a castle, and together with Charles and Claudia, they travelled around Scandinavia. As a teenager, Nicky Logsdail was taken by his uncle to Lord Kemsley’s “enormous stately home” in Wales, where he was persuaded to try out his new tent on the front lawn, while his uncle passed the night more comfortably indoors.5 Roald and Pam saw each other less frequently after Roald’s marriage, by which time he had also become good friends with her sister-in-law, Mary Berry, “a very attractive lady” with whom, Sue Denson recalled, he sometimes played poker in London. “She used to come down on the train when Pat was away too,” Denson mused. “She had an eye for Roald.”6
None of these female friendships seems to have destabilized the Dahl family dynamic. But it appears that in 1966, as early as a year after Pat’s stroke, Roald may have already been beginning to contemplate the end of the marriage. Tim Fisher recalled that Roald went to seek reassurance once again from his ex-headmaster, in Trent Rectory. By this time Geoffrey Fisher was almost eighty years old, yet Dahl’s relationship with him remained full of paradoxes. The “Boss” represented the kind of establishment he affected to despise when he felt strong, but to which he felt drawn in moments of crisis. Fisher was another father figure—a strong older man who had known Roald since he was a rebellious but vulnerable teenager. “I understood Dahl was in a dilemma,” Tim Fisher told me; “that he felt he could not leave [his wife] when she needed so much support.”7 Whatever advice the former archbishop gave him, it seems only to have added to Roald’s growing sense of uncertainty about his marriage—a feeling that was essentially foreign to him and that he found difficult to handle. He was used to being the self-righteous, dominant, decision-making paterfamilias, who criticized others but was himself beyond reproach. On this his daughters all agreed. Their father was profoundly uncomfortable with the role or self-image of “the bad guy.” Now, however, he faced a dilemma. He had self-consciously created a legend around the rock of his marriage and the primacy of his family. But this story did not allow for the fact that, now that the immediate challenge of Pat’s recovery had begun to fade, Roald’s own dissatisfaction with the relationship was bubbling up once again. And this discontent was further compounded by Pat’s altered state. Family meant everything to him, but increasingly Roald found himself isolated and unhappy at the head of the unit he had fought so hard to preserve.
By the autumn of 1967, the complex cocktail of painkillers that comprised his medication was no longer able to deal with his worsening spinal and sciatic pain. His right arm had begun to pulse painfully, making writing difficult, and now his fingers had gone numb. Wally Saunders, his builder, reinforced his bed, so that his back could be better supported at night. But his condition did not improve. Eventually, his doctor persuaded him that he should have a laminectomy to ease the pain. The surgery on the vertebrae of his spine was performed at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford by the same surgeon who had treated him twenty-one years earlier. But it was problematic in the extreme. His wound became infected and would not stop bleeding—despite “massive blood transfusions and antibiotics.”8 Then the lining of his bowel broke down, and a painful fistula dev
eloped in the lower colon. After more than two weeks in hospital it became clear that Dahl would probably need a second operation to deal with the problems created by the first one.
His eighty-two-year-old mother usually managed to come to her son’s bedside whenever he was in hospital, but she too was now hospitalized after a series of minor strokes. Pat later wrote that she had tried to take his mother’s place by Roald’s side, but that he only closed his eyes, determined to “suffer in silence.”9 Sofie Magdalene remained in regular touch by telephone. On the morning of November 17, she called to see how Roald was feeling. It was the fifth anniversary of Olivia’s death. Mother and son chatted briefly. It was to prove their last conversation, for Sofie Magdalene died just a few hours later. Roald was distraught. He had no idea she was so near the end.10 In a poignant parallel with Only This—his wartime story about the psychic intimacy between a mother and her son, who is a bomber pilot—everyone’s focus had been on the son’s welfare, while it was the mother who was quietly dying. Despite her disabilities, she had supported her children to the end, helping Roald through each of his three crises, and living, like the heroine of his story, with “the deep conscious knowing that there was nothing else to live for except this.”11 Her loss seemed to mark the passing of an age.
Roald was too ill to attend the funeral. Her ashes were eventually taken back to Wales, where they were scattered next to her husband Harald’s grave in Radyr churchyard—more than forty-seven years after he died. Her loss was a profound one for Roald. She had remained his model for many of the things he valued most: skepticism, resilience, clearheadedness and an insatiable curiosity, combined with a certain nonconformist practicality and joyous sense of fantasy. Right to the end, he sought out her opinion and consulted her for advice. Her toughness and her lack of sentimentality made him feel strong. His sense of the psychic and mystical came from her, as did the instinctive kindness that lurked beneath the rather forbidding exterior. Above all, she had passed on to him her talent for storytelling. There is little doubt that the Norwegian grandmother in Dahl’s 1983 novel The Witches, “a wonderful storyteller … tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body … smothered in grey lace,”12 is his own literary tribute to her.
But at this point the extent of Roald’s illness meant that he could not properly mourn her passing. Barry Farrell felt he was just “too deeply engaged in his own survival” to do anything else. A second operation, to deal with the fistula, took place four days later, on November 21. Farrell visited him in hospital shortly afterwards and found him in a forlorn state, “held in traction by a canvas harness attached to a length of clothesline that ran through a pulley above his head to an eleven pound weight that dangled just by the bedstead.” He was desolate. “He had lost much of his weight and his face was like a death mask. The harness made red tracings under his cheeks, squeezing the skin into small grey pouches under each eye.” After several days in this condition, Roald returned home, “wearied and drastically subdued.”13 Two weeks later, he told Alfred Knopf that he was still “very fragile” and thought he would remain so for several weeks longer.14 It was a rude and unwelcome reminder of his own physical vulnerability. Perhaps from that moment onwards, he recognized that he could no longer rely on his own strength to hold his damaged family together.
Pat was never going to provide the help and support he needed. Ten-year-old Tessa, who since her mother’s illness felt she had shouldered much of the daily responsibility for looking after her siblings, described her mother as “helpless” and “hard to live with. … She threw tremendous tantrums, and she was very self-involved. She was still a movie star.”15 The household seemed happier and more relaxed when she was away on a television assignment, a speaking engagement or a lecture tour. In 1969, on their annual holiday to Norway, Roald was again hospitalized—this time with severe nosebleeds after a sinus operation. His nostrils were plugged with wads of lint “the size of frankfurters.” And he was in agony. “I’m ready to write a new Beginner Book,” he told his publisher Bob Bernstein with bitter humor. “It will be called Hospital Nightmares. It will start … ‘Let me tell you some of the really horrible things that can happen to you when you grow up …’ ”16 Pat came to see him in the hospital ward and brought him some grapes in an attempt to cheer him up. He threw them out the window. She wrote later that she should have realized then that Roald was already growing tired of her.17
Three years later, in 1972, Pat was making a commercial for Maxim’s Coffee. A thirty-three-year-old stylist called Felicity “Liccy” Crosland had been hired by the production company to be responsible for her wardrobe. Liccy was, and still is, a striking beauty—her father’s Indian blood immediately apparent in her raven hair, olive eyes and Mediterranean complexion. She was also an English Roman Catholic aristocrat, whose mother, Elizabeth Throckmorton, had been a descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Elizabeth I who married Sir Walter Raleigh. Her mother defied family convention by marrying a young doctor—later a brilliant thoracic surgeon—whose family hailed from Mangalore in India. His name was Alphonsus Liguori d’Abreu. Liccy herself had married at the age of twenty-one and given birth to three children before she was twenty-five. But her marriage was an unhappy one, and following a separation, in 1973 she divorced, losing custody of her three “girlies”—Neisha, twelve, Charlotte eleven and Lorina ten. She was now supporting herself by working in film commercials.
Liccy’s easy charm, her elegance and her pragmatic gaiety were already widely celebrated in the industry, and her director, Adrian Lyne, had asked her to take special care of his “difficult” star and in particular to help sort out her wardrobe. Liccy drove down to Gipsy House uncertain what to expect. She had little idea who Roald Dahl was—although the first line of the script acknowledged the popular reputation he had already acquired. “My husband is a very demanding man,” Pat confesses to the camera, as it zooms in on her preparing coffee in the kitchen. It was eleven o’clock in the morning when she arrived and Pat was already drinking a Bloody Mary. She and Liccy discussed her clothes, and an hour or so later Roald returned for lunch. He had been out with Tessa collecting a new car. As soon as he saw Liccy, he experienced a violent and dramatic coup de foudre. No words were uttered and barely a look exchanged. It was the same with Liccy, who immediately found his presence “electric.” For the battle-hardened fifty-six-year-old author, it was “love at first sight.”18
Pat had no idea at all what a fire was burning under her nose. She remembered Liccy as a good-looking and hardworking professional who seldom left her side during the shoot. She responded warmly to the younger woman’s humor, warmth and her exceptional eye for decor and clothing, and enjoyed her company. Liccy recalled that, the day before the shoot, she went to Pat’s hotel to do a final fitting. Afterwards, Roald helped carry her bags to the elevator. Trying to be polite, she pretended that she had read some of his books and told him she particularly enjoyed one called “Someone You Like.” He did not correct her mistake, but asked her instead whether she wanted to join them for dinner that evening. Liccy told him she was too busy to accept. A few weeks later, she got another call from Roald inviting her down to Gipsy House for dinner and asking her whether she would mind giving Francis Bacon a lift as well. Liccy accepted the invitation with alacrity, but was devastated when she had to call and cancel because of unexpected filming commitments. After she returned, she invited Roald and Pat to dinner at her Battersea flat, where the other guests were Hugh Hudson, Ridley Scott, and her father.19 Over supper, Roald asked Pat’s permission to have dinner with Liccy at some point in the future, while Pat was away on location.
Pat would later maintain that Liccy “ingratiated herself” into their affections and that, because “she knew how to please,”20 she was able to steal Roald away. “She wanted him and knew how to get him,”21 she told me. The truth was that Roald made almost all the running. Liccy had felt a spark shoot between them and been excited by the “twinkle in his eye,” but sh
e had no idea what a profound effect she had had on him, until she went filming in Paris with Hugh Hudson a few weeks later. Roald had asked her, apparently quite innocently, whether she would mind picking up an umbrella he had left at the home of his old friend, Annabella Power. Annabella had remained a confidante since he met her during the war, and she and Roald always had fun when they got together in New York, Los Angeles, Paris or London. In Manhattan, he had once sneaked her into Gloria Vanderbilt’s house while Vanderbilt was away, and the two of them had behaved “like naughty schoolboys.”22 Over the years, she had watched with a wry smile as women ran to him and were mostly rebuffed. She also listened sympathetically when Roald told her about his marriage problems. Liccy, however, had no idea of any of this past history. She simply thought she was running an errand. So she called Annabella one day after the shoot was over, and arranged to collect the umbrella.
She was walking into a setup, which she almost ruined by bringing along Hugh Hudson, because he was a fan of Annabella’s and curious to meet her. In the end, however, she went alone. Inside her apartment, Annabella explained that Roald had written to her about his feelings. “He cannot stop thinking about you,” she confided. “He’s madly in love with you. He thinks you are the most wonderful person in the world.”23 When I interviewed Liccy, who despite just turning seventy still possesses an energy and joie de vivre that would startle a twenty-year-old, she was at pains to let me know that, at this point, nothing had happened between them. “We hadn’t even kissed.” When she finally asked about the umbrella, Annabella smiled slyly and replied, “What umbrella?” Back in London, Roald took her out to dinner at the Curzon House Club. Afterwards, in the car, they kissed for the first time and Roald told her he wanted to make love to her. It was the start of a ten-year affair that would culminate in divorce for Pat and marriage for Liccy.
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