Roald Dahl (10 page)

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.
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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.
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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,
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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 Disney
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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 October
²⁵
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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

So the scheme fizzled out. In the words of Richard Shale, one of the Disney Studio's historians, it was “by no means the only wartime project which failed to reach the screen, though it was surely the costliest.” Eventually, in 1943,
Walt Disney: The Gremlins
(
A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl
) was turned into a Disney picture book, published by Random House in the United States and by Collins in Australia and Great Britain. It was Dahl's first book.

Among all the obstacles which Disney had met, the question of ownership was the biggest. One claimant was Charles Graves,
author of a history of the RAF,
The Thin Blue Line
, published in 1941. He said he was the first to have mentioned gremlins in print and that he had subsequently been researching the subject for a book.
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Disney ought to pay him something, he argued, so that he could in turn pay those he had talked to. He wanted 500 guineas (then, $2,100), but was headed off by a tough letter from the Air Ministry, pointing out that the film's proceeds were earmarked for the RAF Benevolent Fund.
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This was also Disney's reply to another, more credible and angrier-seeming claimant. As early as the autumn of 1942, newspaper stories about the project reached Dahl's recent traveling companion, Douglas Bisgood.
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As they crossed the Atlantic together, Bisgood had entertained Dahl with his own version of the gremlin story. The Fifinellas, the Widgets, and the rest were, he now claimed in a strong letter to Disney,
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“family names which I claim as being my originals” and which he was putting into a book of his own. Bisgood wrote to Dahl, too,
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reminding him of all this. He took the opportunity to joke sourly about the contrast between Dahl's “pleasant appointment in America” and his own recent return to England, “ferrying a bomber over, which necessitated the risk of running into bands of hostile ‘Gremlins.'” He had tired of training new pilots in Canada, he said, and had volunteered to return to his fighter squadron, which was stationed near Aylesbury, close to Dahl's mother's new home. Bisgood didn't mention that while making a meteorological flight in bad weather, he had run into and single-handedly attacked three German bombers, sending one, burning, into the sea, an exploit for which he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Dahl brushed aside Bisgood's letter, telling Disney that while “Bissie … is without doubt an eminent Gremlinologist … I am quite sure that he will not cause any trouble.”
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(He didn't. Still flying for the RAF, he died soon after the end of the war.) Dahl had in any case always made it clear that the myth wasn't his own invention. Around the time that his book was published, at
least two others like it appeared:
Sh! Gremlins
by “H.W.” and
Gremlins on the Job
by Judy Varga. But it was Dahl's version that Disney made famous, and to Dahl that the popular credit soon went for having dreamed up not only the story but the very word “gremlins”—a claim he became increasingly willing to adopt.
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Isaiah Berlin remembers, “He initiated gremlins. That is to say, they were already there, in the Air Force, but he put them on the map. He was extremely conceited, saw himself as a creative artist of a high order, and therefore entitled to respect and very special treatment.”