Storyteller

by Donald Sturrock

  35

  Dahl and one of the antique mirrors he restored.

  36

  Roald Dahl in a publicity photograph for ’Way Out, the U.S. television series he presented in 1961.

  37

  Roald, Theo and a young friend laying flowers on the intricate alpine garden he had constructed around Olivia’s grave. On the headstone was carved the inscription “She stands before me as a living child.”

  38

  Roald, Theo and Ophelia playing in the garden of Gipsy House, 1965.

  39

  Roald and Pat working on Pat’s recovery. Though Dahl was one of the pioneers of intensive stroke recovery, he mostly left it to others to work with his wife while he got on with earning money and running the home.

  40

  Roald Dahl on the set of the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with the actors who played the Oompa-Loompas, 1970.

  41

  Roald outside Gipsy House with his pet goat Alma.

  42

  The Dahl Family outside Gipsy House in the early 1970s. Clockwise from left, Tessa, Roald, Theo, Pat, Ophelia, Lucy.

  43

  Felicity (Liccy) Crosland in the mid-1970s. To Tessa, it seemed she had “resurrected” the family.

  44

  Liccy in Minorca during her secret affair with Roald.

  45

  The Dahls and Croslands outside Brixton Register Office after Roald’s wedding to Liccy. From left to right, Lucy, Sophie (Tessa’s daughter, holding bouquet), Ophelia, Lorina, Charlotte, Neisha, Theo, Tessa, Liccy, Roald.

  46

  Roald and Liccy, ca. 1988.

  47

  Roald Dahl in his writing hut.

  48

  Dahl with Theo and kite, 1965.

  49

  Dahl with Quentin Blake and an early sketch of the BFG.

  50

  Dahl the storyteller reading to a group of enthralled children.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Explosions Are Exciting

  THOUGH HAPPIER WITH LICCY than he had been for many, many years, Roald nevertheless maintained a justified reputation in the final years of his life as an outspoken, immoderate and hot-tempered troublemaker. Before I met him for the first time in 1985, I was warned that he might be cantankerous. “Impossible” was I think the word my boss, Nigel Williams, used. I did indeed sense danger occasionally when things were not going quite right during the shooting of our program, but throughout both filming and editing, I was struck primarily by his humorous good temper. But there was always a sense that this approval was conditional: that if one put a foot wrong, things might change for the worse. When invited for dinner, every guest had to expect personal questions about sex, religion, money or politics; nothing was taboo. Almost any opinion could be aired at the table. In the end, however, Roald liked to have the last word. As Pat Neal would put it: “Success did not mellow my husband. Quite the contrary, it only enforced his conviction that although life was a two-lane street, he had the right of way.”1

  He was well aware of his own irascibility, complaining—albeit with wit—about the annoying trivia of daily life and occasionally venting his spleen about more serious issues that seemed to him to be unjust, usually without any thought of the consequences of his outbursts. “My faults and foibles are legion,” he had written as early as 1972. “I become easily bored in the company of adults. I drink too much whisky and wine in the evenings. I eat far too much chocolate. I smoke too many cigarettes. I am bad-tempered when my back is hurting. I do not always clean my finger-nails. I no longer tell my children long stories at bedtime. I bet on horses and lose money that way. I dislike Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and all the other Days and all the cards that people buy and send out. I hate my own birthday. I am going bald.”2 Over the next thirteen years he grumbled to The Times that schools no longer gave children homework; he questioned the efficiency of the X-ray machines at airports that did not detect his two steel hips; he argued that television companies rather than the athletes should boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and criticized the verbosity and stylistic longwindedness of “the President and 23 distinguished members of The Writer’s Guild.”3 And he sounded off in public about subjects that were rather more controversial—police brutality, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and the 1982 Lebanon War. In these contexts, he did not hesitate to air viewpoints that offended and sometimes alienated people. Propriety, diplomacy and sensitivity had no part in this discourse, nor did he appear to consider how damaging or hurtful to others his need to be provocative might appear. Everyone—even in his family—knew that his emotional fuse could be a short one and that, in the wrong mood, he could be pigheaded and wounding. His son Theo put it like this: “Dad had a good temper and he had a bad temper. He would tell you if he didn’t like something—just flat out. He had his feelings about everybody, opinions. It was either yes or no. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He liked breaking the rules, but he always liked to be right. He was a very self-opinionated man.”4

  Liccy ascribed this moodiness and irascibility largely to his ill-health and, in particular, to the chronic back pain that dominated much of his daily life. But there was something more fundamental as well. Most people who knew him were struck at some point by what Sheila St. Lawrence described as Roald’s “overpowering personality,” and his “need to dominate.”5 When directed at those not strong enough to take it, however, this belligerent unconventionality could sometimes produce distressing consequences. His niece Lou Logsdail, for example, was once so angered by her uncle’s insensitive remarks about her father that she had to leave the dinner table, while Lesley O’Malley, who thought Roald was “more difficult with men than with women,” once fell victim to his love of subversion in a more playful way. Ophelia recalled her father “jazzing up” a dinner party when O’Malley foolishly declared she could always tell the difference between butter and margarine. Challenging her to a blind tasting, Roald disappeared into the kitchen, returning with two pieces of bread—“I’ve put butter on one and margarine on the other,” he told her. “Go on, tell us which is which?” O’Malley tasted both repeatedly and was eventually forced to admit that she was completely flummoxed. Roald then confessed mischievously that he had in fact put butter on both pieces of bread.6 Pam Lowndes described him to me as a guest who could be “rude … aggressive and abusive,” but reflected that he more than compensated for these faults with his refreshing lack of convention and engagingly “warped” sense of humor. “He didn’t temper anything … and he hadn’t any patience with people who couldn’t stand up to him,” she recalled, concluding fondly: “Gosh, he was an amusing man.”7

  Callie Ash, the Dahls’ South African cook and housekeeper in the mid-1980s, also tasted these extremes of behavior. On her first evening at Gipsy House, Roald—who had picked her up a few hours earlier from the station and carried her immensely heavy bags to the car—attacked her for being a privileged and exploitative white settler. Callie felt she was given no opportunity to point out to him that she had a very liberal family background. A few months later when her mother came to visit and brought with her two bottles of fine South African wine as a gift, Roald ostentatiously declared that they were piss, and poured them down the sink without tasting them. Yet, conversely, Callie soon found herself part of the Dahl pack, and felt treated by Roald “almost like a daughter.” When she was trying to gain British citizenship two years later, and needed to show the authorities that she had £150,000 of funds available, Roald calmly wrote her out a cheque for that amount and put it into her bank account, leaving it there for several years.

  Dahl’s neighbor, the diplomat and landowner Leonard Figg, recalled that although Roald could be uncivil in company, many of those to whom he was rude deserved it.8 Marian Goodman agreed, maintaining that generally Roald “bullied bullies,” but her husband felt that the “caustic and corrosive” aspects of Roald’s character stemmed largely from the fact that he had a “chip on his sho
ulder.”9 Dr. Goodman was surely right that this need to be controversial in public was exacerbated by Roald’s sense of irritation that sometimes he was not taken as seriously as he would have wished. Abandoning any desire to impress the establishment, he had settled therefore for the role of irritant, stirring up any consensus that seemed to him too complacent and delighting in being a thorn in the flesh of what he perceived as authority or received wisdom.

  Ophelia recalled, with a smile, that “there was always a lack of sophistication to my father’s arguments.”10 That was something that Marian Goodman too observed. She noticed his pugilistic desire to “take on” other male opponents. “He liked to shock,” she remembered, adding that he particularly enjoyed being combative with someone who was well known. She described a dinner party she had once hosted in New York where Roald was sitting next to the celebrated Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. After a few glasses of wine, Roald hazarded the opinion that photography was not a genuine art form. The comment seemed gratuitously provocative. An argument ensued and Eisenstaedt was eventually driven from the table. Years later, Lucy Dahl, by then living on Captiva Island, off the coast of Florida, introduced her father to a neighbor of hers, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, thinking they would get on well. “Dad ended up picking a fight with him about art,” she recalled. “The whole evening was a disaster.”11 Mrs. Goodman concluded philosophically that “Roald wasn’t always fair” and that he was “a very contradictory person.” Ophelia concurred, sensing that when her father was with “the person he loved most of all,” he was able to feel stronger and less vulnerable. However, she too reflected that, while he might have become cosier at home, he never lost his relish for getting involved in controversy, often without too much heed for any consequences.12

  Tessa’s school friend Amanda Conquy remembered Roald possessing an almost adolescent desire to annoy. There was a lot of “sitting around and talking at Gipsy House,” she told me, in an atmosphere that was “terrifically gossipy.” Occasionally, the mood would change and Roald would start to pick fights, becoming “awkward” and “cussed,” although usually “in a playful way … very childlike really.”13 To Conquy, much of it seemed lighthearted. She recalled a summer holiday spent with the family in Norway when she was twelve, where Roald ostentatiously sent the soup back twice in the restaurant of the hotel they were staying in because it was not hot enough. Even as a six-year-old, Ophelia found the incident profoundly embarrassing. “Emboldened by alcohol,” she remembers her father advancing toward the offending waiter and pushing his bowl of asparagus soup aggressively into the man’s chest, so that the pale green liquid slopped over the rim and onto his starched white shirt. The waiter, “shocked and humiliated” by such belligerence, retreated into the kitchen. Roald, as Conquy recalled the incident, returned to the table with a grin and told the kids that, in the kitchen, the staff would all be spitting into the soup as they reheated it.

  Restaurants often seemed to provoke this confrontational aspect of his personality. With Liccy in France, he once sent back some crème fraiche, insisting (despite her repeated assurances to the contrary) that the cream was off. Most spectacularly, he once stood up in the middle of dinner at the Curzon House Club and silenced the entire restaurant, announcing to the diners that the club, which had recently changed hands, had been vulgarized and was going to the dogs. Two bodyguards marched him out of the building.

  In this context, Roald’s behavior was perhaps no more than boorishness exacerbated by alcohol, something Lucy acknowledged when she recalled that it was drink that always made him lose his “inner governor.” These were the times when Roald was, as his three-year-old son Theo once called him, “just a wasp’s nest.”14 Tessa, who was with her father that evening in the Curzon House Club, recalled that he was not so much angry as “rather pleased with himself” when he sat down after his tirade. She thought he had made the scene simply to impress her rich Greek boyfriend. Possibly his behavior was also a reflection of both the “anarchy” and the “delight in notoriety” his publisher Rayner Unwin recalled. Reflecting on the paradox that Dahl seemed in an instant able to switch from being absolutely charming to absolutely intolerable, Unwin reckoned that when he decided to leave Allen & Unwin over Danny The Champion of the World, the root cause was probably the fact that they simply were not “giving him enough attention.” Unwin was quite sanguine about the parting, reflecting that he had gone into the relationship with his eyes open, fully aware of Dahl’s reputation as a “difficult” author.15

  Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape, where Dahl subsequently moved, thought this decision was largely to do with the fact that Cape had a specialist children’s department, which Allen & Unwin did not. But the fact that Jonathan Cape had offered Dahl an outstandingly good royalty on hardback copies of his books and that Maschler was a neurotic extrovert, who overtly celebrated his new author’s “enormous zeal for life,” doubtless also helped sway Roald’s decision Cape’s way. In this case, the transition was managed with the minimum of bad feeling. Dahl’s fallout with Alfred Knopf in the early 1980s was a much more sour and drawn-out affair.

  When the sixty-eight-year-old Knopf sold his publishing company to Random House in 1960, he negotiated a deal whereby he stayed on for five years as editor-in-chief, before officially retiring. He left the running of his imprint first in the experienced hands of Bob Bernstein, then forty-three, who became president and CEO of Random House the following year, and was himself succeeded, in 1968, by a brilliant young editor who had arrived from Simon & Schuster called Bob Gottlieb. Gottlieb was earnest, bushy-haired, and he possessed a formidable intellect. Bernstein described him as “one of the great editors of our time … with judgment, brains and speed.”16 He would go on to become editor of The New Yorker.

  Roald was initially bowled over by both men. He liked the way Bernstein handled him, praising him for being “a sly fellow and a great persuader.”17 He also admired his shrewd business acumen, manifested, for example, by his aggressive pursuit of Hershey’s over merchandising for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When Bernstein and his wife Helen came to London, Dahl took them both gambling at the Curzon House Club and taught them how to play blackjack. He gave them a valuable Henry Moore lithograph as a present and arranged for them to go and meet the sculptor at his home in Hertfordshire. Bernstein remembered Roald at that time as “charming and wonderful.”18 Gottlieb went further. He thought his boss “worshipped” Dahl.

  Gottlieb was more reserved, but he too was at first enchanted by his new author—despite the stresses of having to deal with Alfred Knopf, who had decided to stay on in the building although he no longer had any editorial responsibilities. To Gottlieb, old Knopf seemed less like a legend and more like a bully. He likened his own professional situation to “having King Lear in the kitchen.”19 There was little love lost between them. Furthermore, Gottlieb—who was not a children’s editor—was compelled to take on the editing of Roald’s books. This was partly because Dahl was a special favorite of Knopf’s, and also because Bob Bernstein was worried that Roald would be offended if he worked with anyone lower down the hierarchy. Gottlieb recalled that no one in the juvenile division at Knopf particularly wanted to work with Dahl, anyway.

  To begin with, everything went smoothly. Roald was excited by Gottlieb’s intellectual zip, describing him admiringly in correspondence as “that splendid man Gottlieb,”20 and exuberantly celebrating the birth of his editor’s child, “the Gottlieblich Gottliebling Gottliebchen.”21 Gottlieb too found it “fun” working with Dahl and was aware that his new author, at least for the moment, adored him.22 When he and Maria Tucci visited Gipsy House, she found the place captivating—“quite magical.”23

  But Dahl’s business relationship with Bob Bernstein was starting to come under strain, as he tried to push up his initial per book royalty share on Fantastic Mr. Fox from 10 percent to 15 percent. He first presented this proposal directly to Fabio Coen, who was in England on a business trip—ambushing Co
en after he had enjoyed “a good supper” at Gipsy House and Pat had gone upstairs to bed. “He fell off his chair,” Roald told Mike Watkins, “picked himself up again, wiped his forehead, took a deep breath and said this was impossible.” Roald then offered him another alternative: he would make the same arrangement that he had made with Rayner Unwin—a 50:50 share of all risk and a 50:50 split of all profits. At this suggestion, Coen, so Roald described it, became like Violet Beauregard in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His face “became magenta and he began to splutter.”24 Coen returned to New York to relay the proposal back to his boss. During May 1969, Bernstein and Dahl tussled out the deal by letter in a negotiation that was testy but by no means abusive, as they exchanged detailed figures and forecasts. Much of this negotiation was conducted directly between Dahl and his publishers—and from now onwards, this would often be the pattern. Murray Pollinger told me he found it “a joy” working with Roald, “because he was such a sharp businessman. He knew what he wanted. He was tricky, he was very good at tactics.”25

  At the beginning of June 1969, the negotiation appeared to be drawing to a close. Bernstein made what appeared to be a final offer. “I’m sorry you doubt my figures,” he told Roald. “Despite the fact that you doubt them, they are accurate. These are the terms we can offer.” He concluded on a lighter note, informing Dahl that he and his wife would probably be coming to Britain in the autumn and would be “delighted to visit you even if you’re sulking and writing for Harper’s.”26 Bernstein thought this would settle the matter. He felt that Dahl had made significant gains and that his loyalty to Knopf would lead him to accept the offer. However, he underestimated his opponent’s love of gambling and was shocked when Dahl stuck to his guns and told Bernstein he was formally going to withdraw Fantastic Mr. Fox from Knopf at the beginning of July unless his terms were accepted.