The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  Dahl grasped the lifeline Marsh threw him. It was not an offer he could refuse. Max Perkins, the editor who commissioned Some Time Never, had died six months before it was published, and Scribner’s had subsequently turned down his idea for a new collection of stories. While Dahl seldom let his debonair facade drop, Marsh could see that his protégé was floundering. Mindful of the young man’s pride, he approached the problem with unusual care and tact. Rather than offering Dahl another loan to tide him over, Marsh made noises about needing to get his estate in order and established a $25,000 trust fund in Roald’s name.

  Marsh also found Dahl a role in his entourage he knew he would enjoy, entrusting him to buy art and antiques for his new homes to replenish those lost in the divorce. Dahl had taste and a good eye and even with his meager resources had managed to acquire some very good paintings: Bonnards, Boudins, Cézanne watercolors, a Renoir, a Sisley, and a Degas seascape. His only problem was that it took him so long to finish a story, he would invariably have to sell the pictures six months after he bought them. Over the next few years, thanks in part to the booming postwar art market, he would locate a variety of treasures for both Marsh’s collection and his own. More often than not Marsh rewarded Dahl’s efforts by presenting him with a sculpture or painting he knew Dahl especially coveted.

  To help him get his career back on track, Marsh also pressed Ingersoll into service and asked him to make some helpful calls and provide guidance. “Charles got me, Harold Ross’s onetime editor at The New Yorker, to turn Roald in that direction, to start his post-war life as a writer,” recalled Ingersoll. “The macabre pieces that came from Roald’s depths were anything but typical ‘New Yorker material’ but they captured Ross’s enthusiasm instanta—and overnight Roald became a known New Yorker writer with a following of his own.”

  The New Yorker bought several stories in quick succession, including “Taste,” about a famous gourmet who bets that if he can correctly name his wealthy host’s rare wine, he will claim his young daughter’s hand in marriage; and “Skin,” about the gruesome dilemma facing an impoverished old man who is offered large sums for the painting that he had had tattooed on his back on a drunken dare in his youth, which has since become an extremely valuable and coveted work of art. When Knopf brought out a collection of his vengeful, teasing tales, Someone Like You, the New York Herald Tribune reported that there was “something like a cult” centering on the former RAF wing commander, whose new stories were notable for the strain of Lardner-like bitterness running through them. Most involved morbidly suspenseful plots about the punishment of greed and tied up with a nasty trick ending. Dahl told the paper, “It’s not true that I dislike people,” and he insisted his loathing was reserved for phonies and cheats. Still, some of his old admirers found the undercurrent of sadism and misanthropy disturbing. After a dinner with Dahl shortly after the publication of Someone Like You, Noël Coward observed, “the stories are brilliant and his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately, there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex. This is strange because he is a sensitive and gentle creature.”

  Being in New York was a tonic for Dahl. He reconnected with his band of wartime colleagues, and they immediately resumed their boisterous, ribbing banter. During the four years in England, he had forgotten how much he needed the consolation of friendship. It was also reassuring to know that he was not the only one who had gotten off to a bumpy start. After almost going broke, Ogilvy had sold the tobacco farm in 1948. Certain that a thirty-seven-year-old unemployed university dropout would never find employment, he had opened his own small advertising business and was using his public opinion expertise to target unsuspecting consumers. He had gotten a helping hand from his brother, Francis, a highly successful advertising executive in England, who saw that expansion and greater earnings lay in America. Together with a colleague, Robert Bevan of S. H. Benson, they arranged for David to set up their New York agency. Ogilvy decided he needed an American business partner and recruited Anderson Hewitt from the J. Walter Thompson Company’s Chicago office, and Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson and Mather was formed.

  Starting with only $6,000 in capital, no credentials, and no experience in advertising other than a finely honed sense of what made Americans tick, Ogilvy quickly built a reputation for originality and salesmanship. He played the part of the misplaced English country gentleman to the hilt. Much to his friends’ amusement, he took to dressing as if he had just come back from a long tramp in the woods and went around New York with a wool cape thrown over his British tweeds, striped shirts, and red suspenders. He was rarely seen without his trademark pipe in hand. “I’d got a gimmick—my English accent, which helped to differentiate me from the ordinary,” Ogilvy admitted in later years. With so many agencies and so much competition, his carefully created persona gave him a “terrific advantage.”

  By 1950 he had two major clients, Guinness and Wedgwood, two fusty British brands that he had helped to establish a new identity for the American market. The following year he scored his biggest hit by effectively popularizing stereotypes drawn from his years with British intelligence. The September 22, 1951, issue of The New Yorker carried an ad showing a dashing figure in a black eye patch, along with the slogan “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt.” The mysterious image of Baron George Wrangell, a Russian aristocrat (whose eyes were perfectly good) immediately caught the imagination of the public, along with the five paragraphs of inspired copy that included the word “ineffably.” The hugely successful ad campaign ended 116 years of obscurity for Hathaway and made Ogilvy famous overnight. The formula was so successful, he used it again in a campaign for Schweppes, featuring the company owner and veteran of Her Majesty’s navy commander Edward Whitehead, who called his beverage “curiously refreshing” and caused sales to skyrocket. Known as “the Ambassador from Schweppes,” Whitehead was a walking caricature of the priggish Foreign Office types whom Ogilvy had had to put up with during the war, and now he had his just revenge. The cheerful, red-whiskered commander was so popular, he became the most widely recognized Englishman in America after Churchill.

  Dahl also caught up with Bryce, who had been through another bruising divorce and was minus the beautiful wife and beautiful house in Jamaica. After digging himself out of that hole, England’s most indefatigable playboy had finally found a woman who made marriage worth his while. He was newly wed to Marie-Josephine (Jo) Hartford, the granddaughter of George Huntington Hartford, the founder of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the sister of A&P tycoon Huntington Hartford, and one of the richest women in the world. She was a big, beefy blonde, and in Dahl’s view decidedly plain, but wore the most fantastic jewels. She owned a number of homes, including a magnificent villa in Nassau, and kept a string of racehorses. Then there was Back Hole Hollow Farm, her country estate near Saratoga, on the border of Vermont and New York, where she kept more horses. The scale of her wealth was tremendous, quite staggering after the austerity of England, and she lavished enormous sums on her households, making them incredibly luxurious and inviting, not just for herself but also her guests. At her dinner parties, the food was always superb, the service perfection, and the choice greater than that found in most first-class restaurants.

  The Bryces had become the center of a rather swell social circle in New York, surrounding themselves with colorful European aristocrats and American millionaires, including “Honey” and Alex Hohenlohe, a former Texas showgirl who was married to an Austrian prince with a sporting lodge called Schloss Mittersill that catered to the idle rich, and Tommy Leiter, the hard-drinking scion of the Marshall Field fortune. Bryce’s cousin, Bunny Phillips, was also in town and had married Gina Wernher, a close friend of the queen’s, whose wealthy family was descended from the grand duke of Russia, brother of the czar. Dahl was simultaneously drawn to their moneyed set and repelled by it. “In the Bryce world,” he later sniffed, “all you needed was a dinner jacket and t
he ability to amuse people to make the grade.”

  In 1951 Bryce, who was in need of an occupation more than a job, invested in Ernest Cuneo’s new venture, the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a wire service and syndicator of well-known columnists and cartoonists. The agency had originally been formed by a group of newspapers to allow them to pool their resources when they needed to buy expensive serial rights to any really big book coming on the market. Cuneo’s plan was to buy the down-at-the heels company and restore it to its former glory. Cuneo and Bryce also bought a weekly paper, the Maryland News, and put their old pal Drew Pearson in charge of managing it. For the dissolute Bryce, it was a diverting if not particularly profitable pastime. “There was always something going on and interesting people to be met,” he recalled, “loveable old newsmen living on a shoestring, their reward and all they asked the by-line; celebrities of stage and screen who needed the friendship of the press; callers with original ideas; eccentrics.” After five years, his attention flagged and he sold his interest to Cuneo.

  Whenever Fleming was in New York, he could always be found in the company of Cuneo or the Bryces. Conveniently, Ernie had a country house a mile and a quarter from Black Hole Hollow Farm, so during the summers they all saw quite a lot of one another. Cuneo and Bryce had convinced Fleming to become European vice president of NANA, which essentially gave him unlimited expense account and an endless excuse to travel. Dahl had kept up with Fleming in London after the war, as well as in Jamaica, when he had visited Stephenson in the winter of 1948 at his house in Montego Bay. Lord Beaverbrook had bought a home, called Cromarty, eight hundred yards down the hill, and they had all dined together and talked of old times. Dahl and Fleming had not gotten on well because of Ian’s affair with Millicent Rogers, who also was also a regular visitor to the island. Their dalliance had reportedly not ended well, and the two men had words over it. At the time, Fleming was carrying on a long, tortured affair with Lady Anne Rothermere, the wife of the Daily Mail proprietor Esmond Rothermere, and Dahl, probably out of envy as much as principle, was piqued by his caddish behavior. When Anne later became pregnant, however, Fleming stepped up and did “the right thing.” After a quick divorce from Rothermere, Ian and Anne were married in Jamaica in March 1952. After a celebration at Goldeneye, complete with serenade by Noël Coward, they flew to Nassau, and then New York, to be feted by the Bryces.

  By the time Dahl and Fleming met up again in New York, they had long since patched up their friendship. Fleming never talked about his own literary ambitions but took an active interest in Dahl’s work, read everything he published, and always had words of praise. One evening at the Bryces, just as they were making their way into dinner, after a great many martinis, Fleming took Dahl aside and proposed the perfect murder plot: “Why don’t you have someone murder their husband with a frozen leg of mutton which she then serves to the detectives who come to investigate the murder?” Dahl liked the idea so much he used it as the basis of a grisly New Yorker story entitled “Lamb to the Slaughter,” which he published in 1952. Alfred Hitchcock later turned it into an episode for his television series. Fleming kept suggesting story ideas, some of them quite clever, but Dahl later maintained none of them quite fit his formula.

  Later, when Fleming limned his years in intelligence for Casino Royale, which he completed in early 1952 and published the following year, he was very self-deprecating and would always say, “Of course, I’m just playing about. My stuff is nothing, despicable stuff, but yours is literature.” According to Dahl, however, Fleming “never missed a trick.” Everything was grist for the mill. “A good fifty percent of the Bond thing—the luxury, the atmosphere—came directly from Bryce,” he recalled. Everything that interested Fleming eventually wound up in his books: Ivar (whose middle name was Felix) and Tommy Leiter were the basis for 007’s CIA counterpart Felix Leiter, while Hohenlohe and Schloss Mittersill (which was used by the Nazis for scientific research during the war) were the models for Ernst Blofeld and his hideout in the Alps.

  Cuneo became Fleming’s American tour guide, tutoring him on crime and taking him to nightclubs in Harlem to provide material for Live and Let Die. Fleming dedicated the book to him—“To Ernest Cuneo, Muse.” Cuneo later led him on expeditions to Chicago, Las Vegas, and California and was a main source of ideas, expertise, and arcane information for years to come. This offhand method of collaboration later came back to haunt Fleming, when he and Bryce were sued by two screenwriters, Steve McClory and Jack Whittingham, for not crediting their original ideas in their film version of Thunderball or in Fleming’s subsequent novel. After the case dragged on for ten days, Bryce decided to settle and put an end to the embarrassing headlines, and Fleming had little choice but to go along. Bryce footed the bill, but the expensive legal wrangle strained their friendship.

  In the meantime, Cuneo had married Margaret Watson, one of Stephenson’s handpicked BSC secretaries and a great favorite of Dahl’s from the old days. They had two babies and were blissfully happy. Once part of his intelligence fraternity, they now became extended family. Cuneo had become firm friends with Marsh, and they had embarked on a number of joint business ventures, including the purchase of Universal Newsreel. Another project was the acquisition of the palatial, five-story former Rockerfeller residence at 9 East 62nd Street, which had until recently served as the Iranian Embassy and which they remodeled to provide office space for themselves as well as gracious living quarters. Charles occupied an elegant duplex on the first and second floors, Ingersoll and his new wife were above, and Dahl was tucked away in a small apartment on the top floor.

  Marsh involved Dahl in his myriad business plans and schemes, and even in his declining years, his prodigious energy and zest for life were contagious. His optimism was quintessentially American, and he remained convinced that there was no problem that a combination of hard work and money could not solve. Finished with politics—he had broken with Wallace, who in 1948 ran for president as part of a third-party Progressive platform, which was endorsed by the Communist Party—Marsh decided to spend his remaining time on earth exercising what he called his “humanitarian instincts.” In the years after the war, he had been profoundly moved by the poverty and scarcity he saw in Europe, and he wanted to find a way as a private citizen to help meet those urgent needs, coming up with a small-scale version of the Lend-Lease aid he had earlier helped foster. It began, in typical fashion, as a spur-of-the-moment gesture while traveling with Dahl in Norway in the spring of 1946. Marsh started giving away money to poor laborers they met on the roads, at times literally jumping out of the limousine to make cash “handouts,” or turning to Claudia and commanding, “Right, give him $200,” as the astonished locals looked on. On that trip, Marsh’s benevolence also extended to Dahl’s relatives. After Roald made the case that his family’s timber business might be able to help the American publisher’s newspaper business by supplying badly needed paper, Marsh wired $10,000 to keep the struggling operation going.

  In England, where Charles and Claudia often traveled to visit Dahl in the late 1940s, Marsh’s grants became larger and more frequent. Since Dahl’s first visit home after the war, Marsh had been sending money as directed, in one case arranging for the parish rector in Limehouse, East London, to identify two hundred of the neediest families to receive a $200-a-month stipend for six months from the wealthy American. The parish was quickly overwhelmed with demand, and for political reasons Dahl wrote Marsh requesting that the project be extended to the neighboring village of Rotherhithe. Dahl’s letters were filled with details of the appalling conditions in the countryside, and Marsh, whose new cattle farm in Virginia was already producing a considerable income, sent surplus apples and other foods that were in short supply in England. When he sent a supply of vitamins, however, which Dahl had earlier sought for his mother, his generosity met with scorn. Dahl wrote back that simple country folk “do not give a fuck for vitamins” and would not take them even if told they were aphrodisiacs. Marsh persi
sted in his humanitarian endeavors, and over time it became clear that what had begun as a charitable impulse needed to be organized as a permanent philanthropy. The Public Welfare Foundation, which Marsh first conceived of in 1945—he cavalierly announced that he intended to give all his money away and “die broke”—was formally established in Texas in 1947. Two years later, with the help of newly elected Senator Lyndon Johnson, it received tax exemption status.

  Taking a leaf out of Stephenson’s book, Marsh employed a network of “agents” to carry out his philanthropic work, recruiting friends and acquaintances around the world to give away his money to needy individuals and projects. Dahl, of course, was one of the first of these well-funded agents, though the ranks swelled to more than 130 and came to include everyone from Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi to Noël Coward and to Clare Boothe Luce.* Ingersoll recalled that his recruitment style was typically capricious: “If he chanced upon a man or woman whose face he liked he asked a single direct question, ‘Do you know anyone who needs money?’ From the questionee’s reaction, he made up his mind, instantly.” The list of agents extended to a taxi driver in New York, a jewel merchant in India, and a travel agent in Thailand. He would simply instruct Claudia to take their name and put them down for small monthly checks of $10 to $200.

  Throughout the latter period of Marsh’s life, Dahl was his constant companion and muse, traveling with him on business trips and pleasure cruises as well as frequent sun-seeking getaways to Jamaica. When the hotel they frequented on the north side of the island burned to the ground, Marsh spotted a business opportunity that would benefit both himself and the local economy. He took out a ninety-year lease on a beautiful stretch of beachfront property and set about building a gracious new facility that would serve as their winter retreat and provide work and decent wages for the community year-round. Marsh appointed his son John overseer, and the new Mediterranean-style hotel was designed to his specifications, with thirteen bedrooms, each with a big balcony facing the ocean. They decided to call it the Jamaica Inn, borrowing the name from the best-selling Daphne du Maurier novel. Dahl wrote his mother that Marsh’s new hotel was “lovely” and the perfect paradise retreat. Noël Coward’s place, Blue Harbor, was only fifteen miles away in Porta Maria, and he frequently joined them for dinner.