Roald Dahl (27 page)

Broccoli starts to say, “What's going on?” I said, “He's the writer, leave him alone,” but Cubby got increasingly nervous.

Roald is in his country cottage. Five weeks to the start of shooting, the producer says, “I've got to have some pages”—terrible thing to say to a writer. So finally Roald sent some pages around. He'd hardly got through a third of the script. Cubby read it and went white. I said, “What do you think?” He said, “I think it's a piece of shit—Ken,” he says, “write
the fucking script.” So I hit the typewriter and I was still writing the day before we went on the floor. Every fucking word in that bloody script I wrote on my portable typewriter I bought in Maida Vale.

When a
New York Times
reporter visited the Pinewood Studios set in October 1967, the stricken Dahl was nowhere in evidence. Hughes made sure that his absence was noticed. “You 'aven't seen him around 'ere 'ave you?” the paper quoted him as asking rhetorically. “No. I had to rewrite the whole bleedin' scenario.'
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In a memorable and fair review, Pauline Kael was to describe
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
as “almost sadistically ill-planned.”
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It is hard to see why anyone should want to take credit for it, and Dahl himself was relieved to dissociate himself from the whole unhappy episode.
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(He never spoke to Ken Hughes again.) Almost all the reviews were bad, and several mentioned the fact that the film had been, as
The Hollywood Reporter
put it, “patched and retreaded throughout a long shooting schedule.”
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There was no secret about the troubles with the script, of which a
final
final rewrite had been undertaken by the James Bond veteran Richard Maibaum.
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But once again, while the result didn't please the critics, it was a box-office hit, and this time Dahl had a percentage—or a percentage of a percentage.

He built a swimming pool at Gipsy House and inundated the children with presents. In other ways, too, he spoiled them as much as the absentminded genius Potts in the movie—who, when his children don't want to go to school, tells them, “Oh well, it'll give the others a chance to catch up, won't it?” Valerie Eaton Griffith says, “If they were not happy at school, or if they did not want to do their homework, Roald would always say, ‘Don't bother.'” But as usual, he was divided in his behavior, and in a way which, whether or not they were aware of it at the time, left them permanently confused. When they wanted pocket money, he would often hand over twice as much as had
been asked for, but only after a homily about the importance of thrift.

Such indulgences must have been partly intended to make up to the children for the losses and disasters they had been through—and perhaps, also, for their father's own occasional moments of harshness. There was a similarly all-too-comprehensible duality in his behavior toward Patricia Neal. For example, there were the bridge games in which he would encourage her to take part. With a certain amount of tolerance on the part of the other players, and with someone to look over her shoulder, she enjoyed playing cards. But sometimes her husband would humiliate her. Barry Farrell remembered his telling her sharply, one Easter at the Bryces' at Moyns Park, “You must answer your partner with a bid if you've got some points in your hand. You do know how to count points, do you not?”
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However hard Dahl tried, he was too competitive to lower his game for her. “He
always
wanted a slam,” Valerie Eaton Griffith says. “Roald liked the top contract.”

The contracts he procured for Pat in the film business were even harder challenges, and more public ones. Again, they certainly helped her toward a fuller recovery, but Dahl never doubted that the only definition of that process was for her to return to exactly what she had been doing before. Yet, however successfully she could be coached into impersonating the old Patricia Neal, it was obvious that there were some things she would never be able to do again. She was still slightly lame, but more problematically, she found it very hard to remember lines, and sometimes just to utter them. During the three months' shooting of
The Subject Was Roses
in New York, Valerie Eaton Griffith worked as a prompter by day and a governess by night. At the hotel, she discouraged Neal from going out to parties and took her through her words over and over, night and morning. On the set, she held up “idiot boards” with Neal's lines written on them for her, or crouched behind sofas and whispered them to her.

A process which might have seemed humiliating to an onlooker turned out to be a triumph. The performances of Neal and her co-star, Jack Albertson, were generally acclaimed, and each was nominated for, and he won, an Academy Award. (Albertson subsequently played Grandpa Joe in the film version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
.) Yet it wasn't that long ago when she had been unable either to walk or to talk. During the shooting, she loved being back in Manhattan among her old friends, who made a big fuss over her. And she told everyone how grateful she was to her husband for forcing her back to work.
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One weekend, he came to see her, and she was so keyed up that she couldn't concentrate on filming.
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Still, his regime continued to make outsiders uneasy. It was partly a matter of the publicity he, as well as she, was extracting from it all: magazine interviews, profiles on TV and radio, each one naturally mentioning his work as well as hers. And now he was turning the situation into one of his stories. Literally so. He had bought the film rights to a new novel,
Nest in a Falling Tree
, a romantic melodrama by Joy Cowley which he planned to adapt as a vehicle for Neal to star in. If MGM agreed to put up the money, the Dahls would work on a deferred-payment basis, taking their fees only when and if the movie became profitable.
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In various ways, Dahl based the screenplay on Neal's actual predicament. She plays Maura, a middle-aged woman recovering from a cerebral aneurysm, who works part-time in a Buckinghamshire hospital, helping children with impaired speech. (In one sequence, she is shown reading
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
.) The doctors would like Maura to do more of this work, but—here the film roughly follows the book—she is tied to a crippled mother, a blind old harridan with whom she lives in a run-down gothic mansion. Their existence revolves around the village and the church, a world of gossipy women, and, in Dahl's grotesquely off-key version, salacious old men in mackintoshes. Dahl has the villagers obsessed with the vicar's impending operation, maliciously rumored to be a sex change. The trouble
with hospitals, says one leering character, is that “one invariably comes away with something or other missing.” “They're just going to snip it off,” the vicar's wife innocently replies. “It's got a lot bigger lately, and that scares me.”

With an abrupt but temporary shift back to Joy Cowley's novel, a brutishly handsome boy called Billy arrives on a motorbike, having heard that the two women need an odd-job man. Although his story about himself is unconvincing, Maura's mother hires him and makes Maura give him her own bedroom. Maura inevitably falls in love with him, but the development of the relationship is undermined by the film's slowly revealing, and her eventually discovering, another of Dahl's additions to the plot: Billy is a serial sex killer. From here on, the film leaves behind both the book and the antics that have been superimposed on it, turning into a thriller-cum-sentimental-melodrama. We see Billy rape and kill both a local schoolteacher and Maura's mother's nurse. Will Maura herself be next? Unexpectedly, her kindness moves him to remorse, and he tells her his secret. They run away together, abandoning Maura's screaming mother in a hospital ward. The couple are seen walking on beaches at sunset and admiring young lambs, Neal in a variety of optimistic Shetland jerseys and tam o'shanters. But temptation returns to Billy, and in order to escape it, he throws himself off a cliff.

Films equally bad have been commercially successful, but this one flopped.
The Hollywood Reporter
called it “a lethargic although artfully photographed mess.”
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Variety
criticized its clichés and inconsistencies of motivation.
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Everyone made unfavorable comparisons with the recently revamped
Night Must Fall
. MGM let the film run for a while in New York, but it was never released in Britain, and neither Dahl, Neal, nor the director, Alastair Reid, ever saw any money from it. Even as an exercise for Patricia Neal, it couldn't have been called a success. In the film's all-English context, her accent isn't convincing, and there were embarrassing rows over passages in Dahl's script, which Reid and his editor cut on the grounds that she was having
difficulty speaking them. Dahl used his power with MGM to force Reid to reinstate a few lines, but when
The Night Digger
was released, he once again publicly dissociated himself from it.

With hindsight, the project's failure was predictable and arguably resulted from nothing worse than misjudgment of various kinds on Dahl's part. His experience of screenplays was more limited than might at first have appeared to his partners, because much of the previous work of this sort attributed to him had either been started or rescued by more seasoned scriptwriters. He had meant well, but had taken on more than he proved able to manage.

Perhaps this is all that lies behind the slight edginess that comes into the manner of some of the people involved when you mention
The Night Digger
. Yet there is something more than uncomfortable about the ways in which Dahl had altered the story for his wife. However well she had recovered, what did he suppose she would feel about the new scene in which the crippled mother is casually abandoned? Or about the fact that such tension as the plot has comes from the prospect that the character she plays seems likely to be both raped and murdered by her lover? Reid found Dahl's behavior exceedingly distasteful. “He was a bully, a big, overpoweringly enormous guy. He would make [Pat] repeat things in front of people, and treat her like a child. It must have been completely humiliating for her. And he used to talk about her, not exactly behind her back, but as if she wasn't there.” Reid concedes what those closer to Dahl emphasize more, that he may have acted like this in order to “provoke a spark,” but says it seemed as though he liked doing it.
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Dahl's work on
The Night Digger
more or less coincided with a falling out between him and another film director, Mel Stuart, who was making the film version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Dahl had contracted to write his own adaptation, and for a time, the two projects overlapped. He was in Hollywood
without Pat, both finishing his screenplay for the children's movie and raising money for
The Night Digger
. Alastair Reid was there, too, busy with a different film, and they shared a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Although Dahl was always rude about Hollywood people, Reid noticed that he seemed to enjoy their company well enough. He knew everybody and everybody knew him—less as a scriptwriter, perhaps, than as Patricia Neal's husband, but also now as a famous children's author. Reid says that kids followed Dahl around in the street as if he was the Pied Piper. He also had in tow a glamorous girlfriend who was staying at the same hotel—the daughter, it was said, of a Chicago gangster.

Dahl and Reid drank and gossiped together, and Reid, then in his early thirties, still remembers the older man's wartime anecdotes: how he had been shot in the back by bullets from his own crashed airplane; how Winston Churchill had asked him personally to spy on Roosevelt, who was a deep admirer of his writing; and how MI6 had instructed him to eliminate a double agent, which he did by pushing him off a ship in mid-Atlantic. Meanwhile, though, Mel Stuart was unhappy with the progress of Dahl's script for
Charlie
and, without telling the author, brought in a young unknown named David Seltzer to rewrite it.
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Stuart says he wanted the story to be treated more “realistically,” although it is hard to see what this means in relation to the final product, which is unabashedly and enjoyably fantastic. Some of the changes reflected a concern for the sensitivities of a more racially mixed audience than Dahl had had in mind—the film's Oompa-Loompas, for example, are not only no longer black but orange with green hair. (It was for similar reasons that the title was altered to
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
—“Charlie” being Afro-American slang for a white man. The change was explained in publicity handouts as reflecting an in fact nonexistent expansion of Wonka's role.) But other alterations were made simply to add to the fun.

Dahl had returned to Great Missenden by the time he learned
that David Seltzer was—in Hollywood parlance—“writing behind” him. He was so incensed that, in order to appease him, Stuart had to fly to England from Germany, where
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
was being shot. But the new script stayed. Apart from the additional episodes, Seltzer had redrafted much of the existing dialogue, had given Willy Wonka a taste for literary quotation (“All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”), and provided a new ending. Mr. Wonka tells Charlie not to forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he had ever wanted. When Charlie asks, “What happened?” he tells him, “He lived happily ever after.” Dahl hated this, although it seems to fit the story well enough.

Seltzer was not given an on-screen credit for his work (the screenplay is simply attributed to Roald Dahl), but the film helped to launch him on a highly commercial Hollywood career, one of whose successes would be the award-winning
The Omen
, with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. As Mel Stuart proudly says now, “He turned out to be as talented as he really was.”
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The implication seems to be that, in Hollywood's terms, Roald Dahl was less talented than he was turning out. The combination of
The Night Digger
and his attempt to adapt
Charlie
in effect brought an end to his career as a scriptwriter. By the time other such offers began to come his way, even he felt rich enough to refuse them.