Roald Dahl

by Jeremy Treglown

  This was the kind of work which the novelist C. S. Forester was in the United States to do. “Captain Hornblower,” as he was inevitably called, was in his forties. Sir Isaiah Berlin remembers him as a “nice, honest British patriot, who did a lot of work with his American admirers for England.”8 Forester asked Dahl to tell him his own story, so that he could write it up. Dahl thought it easier to put something on paper himself. The result was vivid and plainly written, if not without a literary pretension at plainness that showed he had been reading Hemingway. Forester was impressed and placed the piece in an influential American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared anonymously in August 1942 under the title “Shot Down over Libya.”

  The story was introduced as a “factual report on Libyan air fighting” by an unnamed RAF pilot “at present in this country for medical reasons”—a reference to Dahl’s troubles with his injured back, which were being treated by a surgeon friend of Charles Marsh’s in Texas. The narrator describes himself strafing enemy trucks while being pursued by Italian fighters: “Hell’s bells, what was that? Felt like she was hit somewhere. Blast this stick; it won’t come back. They must have got my tail plane and jammed my elevators.” His Hurricane crashes in flames. Much later, Dahl remembered that he hadn’t been shot down. Well, he said, the story had been edited and misleadingly captioned.9 But this contradicted another claim, that no one had touched a word. When, soon after the war ended, the piece was collected in a book, he tried to cover his tracks by rewriting it more factually—no Italian fighters, no battle. He then pretended that this version was the original one.10

  The incidents themselves, of course, weren’t entirely fictional. After Dahl had recovered from the worst of his accident injuries, he really had flown Hurricanes and shot at trucks, and was often pursued by enemy aircraft. In dramatizing all this, he began his career as an imaginative writer. He also considerably enhanced his status in Washington—that, and his already considerable sex appeal. Charles Marsh’s daughter Antoinette says, “Girls just fell at Roald’s feet. He was very arrogant with them, but he got away with it. That uniform didn’t hurt one bit—and he was an ace. I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year.” To his awed buddy Creekmore Fath, he was simply “one of the biggest cocksmen in Washington.”

  Women vastly outnumbered men in the wartime capital, but those who knew Dahl there—among them, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who had recently married Ernest Hemingway—agree with Antoinette Marsh that he was attractive by the standards of any time and place.11 Particularly, once again, to older women. The French actress Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier), with whom he was to become very close, was seven years his senior. And Clare Boothe Luce was thirteen years older than Dahl when she was placed beside him at an Embassy dinner.

  Mrs. Luce was powerful, enterprising, and crucial to British interests. She had been involved with the pro-British group Union Now since 1940. A journalist who had been in Belgium just before Dunkirk, and the Pacific just before Pearl Harbor, she was now a member of Congress. And of course she was married to Henry Luce, the owner of Time and Life. According to Creek-more Fath, she took instantly to the young Dahl, spent the whole evening talking to him, and gave him a lift home. Officials were discreetly encouraging, but after some days, more than encouragement was needed. In Fath’s words, Dahl told him:

  I am all fucked out. That goddam woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights. I went back to the Ambassador this morning, and I said, “You know, it’s a great assignment, but I just can’t go on.” And the Ambassador said, “Roald, did you ever see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII?” And I said “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says ‘The things I’ve done for England’? Well, that’s what you’ve got to do.”12

  At this distance, what comes across most vividly from the story is the atmosphere of a school dormitory ringing with boasts of sexual adventures during the past holidays. Sir Isaiah Berlin calls the anecdote “a wild flight of fancy: not untypical!” and says, “It is inconceivable that Halifax would have talked like that to anybody,” let alone to someone as unimportant as Dahl. But there was no shortage of supporting evidence for Dahl’s tales of sexual conquest. He showed Fath a Tiffany gold key which he had been given to the house of the Standard Oil heiress, Millicent Rogers, along with a gold cigarette case and lighter and what Fath describes as “all this stuff. And Roald loved it, absolutely loved it, and he showed you all this junk, you know.”

  Dahl was increasingly drawn to conspicuous wealth. He particularly, of course, liked conspicuous paintings and in this respect, as in others, wartime Washington must have seemed to him like El Dorado. Millicent Rogers’s house was a small museum of French Impressionism. So, too, was the Charles Marsh country mansion where Dahl and Creekmore Fath spent many of their weekends.

  Longlea stood in 800 acres of Virginia. Its chatelaine was Alice Glass, a much-photographed beauty in her late twenties, fond of music, good causes, and powerful men. It was she who had chosen the design of the house (Old English Manorial), found stonemasons capable of building it, and furnished it to look as though (Monets and Renoirs apart) it belonged in Renaissance Europe. The eighteen black servants and the champagne breakfasts, on the other hand, were more in the style of the house’s owner. Alice Glass was Charles Marsh’s mistress, but she was in love with one of his protégés, the callow young Lyndon Johnson, whom she often entertained at Longlea.

  Washington and its environs had become more than ever the social, as well as political, hub of the United States. For the rich, as the journalist David Brinkley recalls in Washington Goes to War, there seemed to be nowhere else to go.13 Foreign travel was impossible. And the capital’s attractions were augmented by an inpouring of rich European refugees and visiting statesmen. (“More kings are expected,” Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle wrote wearily in his journal. “They take so much time.”14) President Roosevelt added edge to the amusements by attacking “parasites,” and the “twenty-room mansions on Massachusetts Avenue,” which he thought they should have turned over to people more valuable to the war effort. One of his targets was Cissy Patterson, owner of the conservative Times-Herald. Another was the preposterously rich society hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean, a gold-mine heiress who in her last years used to encourage soldiers to pass around her biggest diamond and to photograph their girlfriends wearing it. It was in her house, according to Brinkley, that Dahl had a brush with one of the Times-Herald’s hard-line isolationist writers, Frank Waldrop. “Do you realize,” Dahl asked him when there was a pause in the conversation, “that if you were to go to England today there are men in your U.S. Eighth Air Force who would tear you limb from limb for the things you write?” Waldrop considered. “Well,” he said eventually, “I guess I won’t go to England.”15

  Dahl gradually came to know almost everyone. Creekmore Fath got him invited to the White House, where he first met Martha Gellhorn (who thought him “very, very attractive and slightly mad, which I attributed to hitting the ground”) and, through her, Ernest Hemingway. Ralph Ingersoll introduced him to the dramatist Lillian Hellman.16 Dahl joined a poker school where one of the regular players was Senator Harry Truman, to whom he lost the whole $1,000 he earned for his first story, or so he liked to say.17 When famous British authors came to town, it was Dahl who was deputed to look after them. Some of these—Noël Coward, among them, who thought Dahl very bright18—were working for the wartime intelligence agencies.

  To anyone, let alone a twenty-five-year-old who a year before was being shot at in the sky above Palestine, it would all have seemed like a fantasy. Dahl’s daughter Tessa thinks that it permanently turned his head. But he already had an exuberant imagination, one which he was unusually keen to share with other people.19 David Ogilvy remembers some of the yarns he told, half-pre
tending they were true. One was about a friend of his whose car had broken down in the Sinai Desert. According to the story, a rich man had taken him to his home and introduced him to his beautiful wife and daughter. In the night, a woman joined him in bed, but he couldn’t see her face because it was dark. The next day, as his host drove him back to the garage, he casually mentioned another daughter in the house, who would never emerge in daylight. “Why?” the guest asked. “Oh, because she has leprosy.” Dahl later wrote up the story as “The Visitor.” “It was fantastic!” the narrator says. “It was straight out of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm.”20

  Inevitably, the much talked-of teller of fairy tales was soon invited to Hollywood. The project was to make a movie of the RAF legend of the gremlins, which Dahl had been turning into a story. The legend’s point was that anything which went technically wrong on RAF flying missions was caused, not by human error, but by supernatural malice. It was an innocent way of reducing tension between airmen and ground crews and seems to go back at least as far as the 1920s.21 It could also be limitlessly elaborated. Dahl’s version, originally entitled “Gremlin Lore” and written within months of his arrival in Washington, involves an imaginary world that would be Tolkien-like, except for the vigorous sexuality of its inhabitants. The gremlins have girlfriends called Fifinellas. Their offspring are Widgets. The pilots also encounter other gremlin mutants, including a high-altitude variety to which they give the name Spandules. Dahl’s story concerns the pilots’ successful efforts to win all these troublesome creatures over to their own side. It was The Gremlins, more than “Shot Down over Libya,” which publicly launched Dahl as an author. Even at the time it must have seemed strange that what had been occupying some of the idle hours of this confident, outgoing, ambitious young bachelor-about-town was a children’s story. The Gremlins is rooted in a mixture of English landscapes, schoolboy fiction, and Northern European mythology: in other words, in Dahl’s own childhood.

  As a serving officer, he was required to submit everything he wrote for approval by the British Information Services in New York. His first draft landed on the desk of Sidney Bernstein. In peacetime Bernstein was a movie entrepreneur. On July 1, 1942, he sent the story to his friend Walt Disney.

  Disney was having both a bad and a good war.22 His most successful films had made half their revenue in Continental Europe: Snow White, released in 1937, was a huge commercial success there and financed the move of the Disney studio to their present site in Burbank. But in the newly contracted market, Pinocchio and Fantasia, both released in 1940, lost money. On the other hand, there were plenty of opportunities for government-funded training films and propaganda. Most of these—like most of Disney’s output in general—were “shorts,” but the company was now preparing two full-length features: Saludos Amigos, designed to encourage good relations between North and South America, and Victory Through Air Power. Neither, of course, involved fairy tales, at least in the sense Walt Disney was used to. Dahl’s story, by contrast, seemed ideally suited to the studio’s gifts and expertise, and Disney immediately cabled both Dahl and Bernstein,23 saying that the author would be contacted by “our Mr. Feitel in Washington.”

  Feitel’s businesslike account of the meeting arrived at Burbank three days later. “Dahl is a young fellow,” he reported encouragingly, “and … does not regard himself as a professional writer.… Gremlin Lore has not been copyrighted, and is not in the hands of any literary agent.” Payment would have to be shared between Dahl and the RAF, but it was Feitel’s impression that he “would accept any reasonable deal on our usual basis.” There was just one problem. “The Gremlin characters are not creatures of his imagination as they are ‘well known’ by the entire R.A.F. and as far as I can determine no individual can claim credit. Therefore, I doubt that the name ‘Gremlin’ can be copyrighted.”

  The Disney machine now went into motion, acquiring rights to the story (subject to a supervisory clause required by the RAF), arranging rapid provision of illustrations for its appearance in Cosmopolitan that winter, and hiring Charlotte Clarke, who had made the original Mickey Mouse dolls, to do the same for the gremlins. To Dahl’s surprise, these figurines were later rented out for use in a magazine ad for Life Savers peppermints. He protested to Walt Disney24 about the likely damage to the characters’ mystique, but Disney patiently explained that this was all part of the business of establishing copyright.

  He wasn’t being entirely disingenuous. Various other gremlin projects were in the air. A literary agent wrote to Disney in October25 offering him a book called David and the Gremlins by another British writer, R. Sugden Tilley. Meanwhile, rival studios were working on similar films. The Disney brothers leaned hard on their competitors about this, promising to return the favor when it was needed. Warner Brothers duly removed the word “gremlins” from the titles of two films, including one originally entitled The Gremlins from the Kremlin, in which Russian elves sabotage Hitler’s plane when he decides to lead a bombing raid against Moscow.

  As part of the studio’s elaborate preparations, an article was sent under Walt Disney’s name to the RAF journal asking for firsthand accounts of gremlin sightings. The film project had been widely reported, so some such accounts were already coming in. Disney didn’t quite know what to make of them. His own attitude to the characters veered between leaden jocularity (“Do you suppose it would be possible to find one of the little fellows … and have him crated and shipped to California?”) and the more solemn credence accorded to the studio’s “creations.” No one in the company seems to have had a clear idea where truth ended and fantasy began. In a memo headed “Gremlin Research,” for example, one of Disney’s employees reported on a discussion with Dahl in the spirit of an anthropologist engaged in a particularly complex piece of fieldwork. Enlisted men in the RAF, he explained, “naturally come from all sections of England and Scotland,” so that “we could feature a wide variety of dialects.” And “While only flyers who have been in battle can actually see the Gremlins, the evidence of their handiwork can affect all members of the airfield staff.”26 Whether he knew it or not, Disney was much teased about this seeming credulity by his correspondents. Hearing of the project, the author Rayner Heppenstall, who was serving in the RAF delegation in Dayton, Ohio, wrote to him about his misgivings that the film might hurt gremlin sensitivities, with possible repercussions on the war effort—and even on the studio itself.27

  Roald Dahl, meanwhile, had fun with Walt’s anxieties about the exact appearance of the gremlins—the subject of many grave conversations in Burbank. Disney wanted authenticity. But he also believed that whatever his studio drew automatically was so and not otherwise. Dahl would have none of this. He wrote him in October 1942, saying that he hoped that Disney had not made up his mind that gremlins did not wear bowler hats, because the omission of the hats in the studio’s preliminary drawings “did cause a little trouble.” Dahl pointed out that the mere fact that one of Disney’s artists drew a gremlin in a way that differed from “what he really looks like” would not cause every gremlin to alter itself so as to match the artist’s impression, any more than, if Disney drew elephants like horses, every elephant in the world would immediately turn into a horse.

  Time was passing, and on the other side of the world real pilots, British and American, were dropping from the sky in flames. In Britain, there were signs of popular irritation with publicity for the project, and when a story got around that Walt Disney was planning a personal trip to England to “research” it, the Observer commented dryly, “It will seem strange indeed to the future historians who, unravelling the tale of our troubled times, discover that in the critical year 1942, a distinguished American travelled five thousand miles in order to make a film about elves.”28 Whether or not he was influenced by such criticism, Disney stayed at home, and as 1942 drifted into 1943, his enthusiasm began to cool. American opinion polls were showing a marked dip in the popularity of war-related topics. Besides, if The Gremlins was to be made as
a full-length feature, it might be out of date by the time it was completed. It was already costing a lot of money: over $50,000 between July 1942 and April 1943. The studio’s scriptwriter alone expected $1,500 a week. Two complete scripts were prepared: one of 150 pages, for a full-length feature; another a third as long. They were picked over by teams of advisers (one script was sent out to forty-five different people, Dahl not among them), all of whom had comments to make. What should the title be? “Gremlin Gambols” was suggested, and “Gay Gremlins,” and “We’ve Got Gremlins.” The company’s legal counsel, Gunther Lessing, objected to a satirical episode involving Hitler: “Pure propaganda stuff which should not be indulged in here.” Questions were raised about audience appeal. Perce Pearce, who had been a sequence director on Snow White, said he had run into marketing problems in New York. He also had difficulty seeing how the gremlins could be made attractive without costing the air crews some loss of sympathy: “Basically, if these little guys are the pilots’ alibis for their own stupidity, dereliction of duty, neglect, then you are taking some of the glamour off the RAF, for me.”29 And there was the problem of technicality. Could the film be made in such a way as to appeal both to a general audience—“Aunt Bessy,” in studio parlance—and to professional airmen? Perhaps it should be turned into a safety-training movie aimed solely at the air forces. And so on.

  With his sense of humor and his cocksure enthusiasm, Roald Dahl was popular at Burbank. The Disney brothers both liked him and could see his potential, and the attraction was mutual. All his life, Dahl would tell stories of how, when he was only twenty-five, Walt Disney brought him to Hollywood, gave him the use of a car, and put him up in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Because he was tall and admired Kipling, Walt affectionately called him “Stalky.” His replies to Stalky’s letters, however, were becoming vague. July 2, 1943: “Let’s try to get together for a cocktail when I’m in New York.” December 18: “I was in Washington a couple of weeks ago and fully intended to see you while there, but was bedded with the grippe which shot my plans all to pieces.” To start with, the movie was going to be a full-length feature, part live action, part animation. Then it was going to be a cartoon short. Now Disney said he was having trouble getting his crews interested. If they ever hit upon the right angle, they would get in touch.