Roald Dahl (15 page)

There were other schemes. In May 1946 Dahl had written to Marsh in apocalyptic terms about the starvation in Continental Europe. Separate tours of inspection were arranged over a period of several years. Piled into a limousine, Dahl, the Marshes, and
assorted relations would race through the ravaged countryside, stopping occasionally so that Charles could send one of his party to find the local mayor and ask what was needed.
⁴⁶
It was on one of these philanthropic holidays, in 1951, that they went to Germany and visited Berchtesgaden, where, Dahl wrote, he sat in Hitler's mountaintop redoubt and indulged in fantasies of fame and triumph.
⁴⁷

Some years earlier, back in America, Marsh had dreamed a more realizable kind of dream. In the summer of 1946, he dictated a letter to Dahl from a car which was traveling, he boasted, at seventy miles per hour on the road from Monterey, California, to Laredo, Texas. He was interested in seeing what kind of trade could be done with Cyprus. He knew that the island was hungry, but it had a surplus of ancient vases. “I believe these folks … will take a pick and shovel and dig up a few more.… So if we can feed the folks over there with what we can sell over here, we might start something, particularly as there are no tariff charges on antiques coming into this country.”
⁴⁸

Marsh had already benefited from Dahl's instinct as a collector by commissioning him to find British antiques for him: a chess set used in Victorian times at Simpson's, the old eating house in the Strand; eighteenth-century tables and chairs bought from a dealer in Thame.
⁴⁹
Dahl also acted for his patron in purchases of paintings, and within five or six years built up a promising part-time career as a dealer in the bullish market for European art, acting on behalf of both Marsh and other wealthy friends. He had renewed his friendship with Matthew Smith, and spent many weekends in Paris with him, cruising the galleries by day and the red-light districts by night. Dahl found it difficult to get Smith to part with any of his own work,
⁵⁰
but by 1950 had persuaded him to move to a studio in Amersham. While Augustus John's daughter Poppet was decorating the place, Dahl stored fifty-four of his paintings in a spare bedroom at home. Charles Marsh paid a visit that August, and sent a note to Claudia, asking her to write a memo about an arrangement through which he
planned to buy a large number of the pictures without having to go through Smith's gallery, Tooth's. “It is all right for Smith to know what has been taken,” Marsh wrote, “but emphasize no sale until after his death.” Whatever Smith was told, it was a confusing business: he was old and in some ways timid, and although he complained about Tooth (because of the dealer's alleged rapacity, Smith and Dahl called him “Dog's Tooth”), and particularly about his failure to promote him in the United States, he stuck to the letter of their agreements. At one point he became convinced that Dahl had stolen one of his canvases. Dahl said he had simply taken it to have it framed, but the quarrel badly upset them both.
⁵¹

In the autumn of 1950, Dahl, the Marshes, and their friends Ivar Bryce and Ralph Ingersoll were involved together in various other transactions, one of them over a Rouault which Dahl priced at $6,000.
⁵²
He also negotiated on Marsh's behalf for a Vuillard.
⁵³
The following year, Dahl was enlisted to persuade Jacob Epstein (whom he had met through Matthew Smith) to sculpt Marsh. He also at some point made a trip to Switzerland, where he bought another Rouault—a cartoon of President Wilson—and a painting of a nude boy by Redon. These two cost him £190. When he took the Rouault out of its frame to transport it home, he found a self-portrait by the artist on the back.
⁵⁴

There was a steady improvement in his fortunes during these years, a reward partly for sheer hard work and partly just for his friendship with Marsh, kept up in frequent letters but also on their working holidays together. Dahl not only accompanied his patron on his frequent trips to Europe but made several visits to Jamaica, where Marsh owned a resort at Ochos Rios, near Kingston, and where Ivar Bryce, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, and other friends had houses. Charles and Roald were still like teenagers together, alternating between intense, sometimes maudlin discussions on the state of the world and schoolboy jokes which ran on for years. There was what they called the “Joy Through Length Project” and its parallel investigation into bowleggedness
in women. There was a plot to seduce a royal lady-in-waiting as a means of persuading the Queen to advertise Pond's face cream. They fantasized that a famous Russian pianist was a spy, passing coded messages through his playing; and that Interpol was conducting an investigation into Marsh's private life. (One piece of evidence was a story published in the
Evening Standard
about a feminist conference, where one of the speakers was “Miss Charlotte ‘Charlie' Marsh, of Chelsea, S.W.—known in the pre-1914 campaign as the ‘beauty' of the suffragette movement.”)
⁵⁵
On a trip to France with Dahl and Matthew Smith, Marsh handed wine waiters his personal corkscrew, which was shaped like a penis. When the cork was drawn, Marsh would insist that the waiter and everyone else sniff it.
⁵⁶
It was in Paris, too, that Dahl and his brother-in-law Leslie Hansen put cards in the windows of bistros on the Left Bank announcing that a wealthy American businessman needed a secretary to go with him to the United States. Applicants were directed to the Hôtel Meurice, in the rue de Rivoli, which had to close its doors against the impoverished French girls who formed a queue around the block.

Meanwhile, Marsh was planning more substantial ways of helping his protégé financially. He set up a trust in Dahl's name, with investments in the Marsh oil companies worth $25,000.
⁵⁷
In the summer of 1950, Dahl organized a business trip to Scandinavia, where they visited Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki. During it, the deal first mooted by Dahl four years earlier was finally agreed on, and Marsh's Public Welfare Foundation put $10,000 into a Dahl-family forestry operation in Norway. Marsh made it clear that he didn't want any of the money back.
⁵⁸
In return, Dahl was able to scratch his patron's back, not only by acting as an agent for his art collection, but by introducing him as an investor in various business projects, including the purchase of Universal Newsreel by another OSS acquaintance, a lawyer and entrepreneur named Ernest Cuneo.

He was also now beginning to do well on his own account, as a writer. In April 1948, he had written that he was worried that
he “was going through a non-money-making period.”
⁵⁹
Almost immediately, things had begun to look up. There were the deals with
Collier's
and the BBC, and his rueful acceptance of the
Ladies' Home Journal
commission. Now, in May 1949, he sold for the first time a story to
The New Yorker
. This was not “Taste,” as Dahl later remembered, but “The Sound Machine,” another fantasy about obsession: a man's belief that he can hear noises made by plants, and his anxiety over their suffering. The story had been rejected by the BBC—evidence that he was better appreciated in the United States than at home.

More confirmation of that followed.
Collier's
bought “Poison,” the story about an imaginary snake. In August 1951, it was the turn of “Taste” to be sold to
The New Yorker
. The next month Dahl had dinner with Lillian Hellman, who was staying at Claridge's. She told him tearfully about the plight of her lover, the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, imprisoned as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious purge on “un-American activities.” Dahl's main concern was that this would turn the socialist Hellman “more and more against her own country.”
⁶⁰

It was a country about which, for the moment, he didn't want to hear anything bad. He had applied for, and had just been given, a permanent American visa. His work was doing well there, whereas in Britain its only steady-seeming patron, the BBC, had lost interest. In New York he felt that he could move among literary people on equal terms.
⁶¹
The muddy charms of Buckinghamshire had temporarily faded. He wanted to get back to sophistication and wealth.

Perhaps, too, even Dahl sensed what Martha Gellhorn had seen, that life with his mother, and so close to his sisters, was not entirely good for a bachelor. But if he was escaping one family, he immediately moved back in with another. The Marshes had room for him in their New York house. At present, they were in Europe, and he asked if he might join them on the return voyage. The sooner the better, he said. “Any boat any date is all right with me.”
⁶²

6

Yakety Parties

Dashiell Hammett was in jail from July to December 1951. Among the women who missed him was Patricia Neal, an ambitious young actress whose first Broadway role had been in Lillian Hellman's
Another Part of the Forest
, in 1946. That was how Hammett had met her.
¹
He took to turning up daily at the rehearsals, usually drunk. She was twenty: tall, with unspoiled, country-girl good looks that would have been bland but for her high, wide cheekbones—so wide that
New Yorker
critic Brendan Gill said later, “The camera can sort of
pan across
a face of that kind.”
²
Hammett couldn't disguise how attractive he found her, but with Lillian Hellman he did his best to. “Pat's an awfully pretty girl,” he told her, “if you don't look at her hands and feet and can ignore that incredible carriage. She's very much the earnest future star at the moment and thus not too entirely fascinating if you don't think her career the most important thing in the world.”
³

This was written from Hollywood, where Neal had been hired by Warner Brothers after her Broadway success. Hammett took her out to dinner a lot there and heard what he didn't already know of the story of her life. She was much talked about, not least because she had begun a long affair with Gary Cooper, with
whom she co-starred in King Vidor's film version of Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead
(best remembered for a scene in which Neal watches longingly while Cooper drives a pneumatic drill into a rock). It was the second film she made. The first was
John Loves Mary
, with Ronald Reagan and Jack Carson.

She worked with Reagan several times, including on
The Hasty Heart
, which was shot in England. Reagan found postwar conditions there so grim, even at the Savoy, that he had his steaks flown in from New York—a story which encapsulates something not only about Hollywood but about Anglo-American differences in general. After she had lived in England for the better part of twenty-five years, Patricia Neal still wrote of her days at Elstree in the terms of someone who had spent a period as a voluntary entertainer in a Third World refugee camp.
⁴
Her Warner Brothers salary was set on a scale rising from $1,250 to $3,750 per week: in England at the time, that was enough to live on for twelve months.

Patsy Neal, as she was christened, liked what money could buy. Her autobiography,
As I Am
(1988), is among other things a catalogue of fur coats and necklaces, and she talks frankly of how in her earliest days she got around her father for presents. He was a manager for the Southern Coal and Coke Company in Packard, Kentucky, the son of a tobacco plantation owner, and a member of the fifth generation of his family to live in the Old South. Her mother was the daughter of the town doctor, German by origin. They were unsophisticated people, but comfortably off: a telephone, plenty of toys, ready cash from Pappy, and holidays on his Virginia farm. In 1929, when she was three, the family moved to a bigger town, Knoxville, Tennessee. It was at school there that her theatrical ambitions were first encouraged. She went on to Northwestern University and was a big success as a student but, after her father's early death, left to pursue her ambitions in New York. There she met Eugene O'Neill, the first of several famous men who would fall for her, most of them married and ranging from middle-aged to elderly.
Before she was twenty-one, she had been taken to lunch by Richard Rodgers, pursued by David O. Selznick, had turned down one Broadway role in favor of another, and had made the cover of
Life
.

The affair with Gary Cooper began in 1947. By 1950, his wife, “Rocky,” had found out and joined battle. (On one occasion, Neal received a telegram: I
HAVE HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH OF YOU
.
YOU HAD BETTER STOP NOW OR YOU WILL BE SORRY. MRS. GARY COOPER
.
⁵
) Eventually, it was Rocky who won, but not before her husband had made Pat pregnant and persuaded her to have an abortion, letting her know about the arrangements with the memorable words “Our appointment is tomorrow afternoon.”
⁶

It was a wretched time. Neal longed for a child. The gossip columnists called her the woman who was breaking up the Coopers' marriage, which she only wished she could manage to do. Warner Brothers did not renew her contract, and when she moved to Fox, they lent her out to other film companies. Concentrating once again on her stage career, she appeared in 1951 in T. S. Eliot's new play,
The Cocktail Party
, which Cooper called “the Yakety Party.” All she remembers about it is that she was the character (Celia) who has “long, mystical speeches” and “ends up crucified on an anthill in Africa.”
⁷
Then Cooper developed an ulcer. His mother told Neal that she was to blame. Guilty and scared, Neal called him to say that it was all over. He didn't ring back.

This was around the time of Dashiell Hammett's imprisonment and of Dahl's dinner in London with Lillian Hellman. Hellman's play
The Children's Hour
, about two teachers suspected of being lesbian lovers, was about to be revived. Neal successfully auditioned. Shortly before rehearsals began, Hellman asked her to a dinner party. One of the guests was Roald Dahl, who had just moved to New York.