Authors: Jennet Conant
Although nothing would replace the little girl they had lost, they were thrilled at the birth of another daughter, Ophelia, in May 1964. Dahl’s depression lifted. He managed to pick up the pieces of his life again and even took in stride the untimely death of his friend Ian Fleming, from a heart attack, that August. Months went by in calm, comforting monotony. Then during a stay in California while working on a film, Neal was felled by a series of cerebral hemorrhages, the last one massive. After undergoing surgery to remove the clots in her brain, she lay in a coma for days. As fate would have it, the aneurysm was preordained: it was a congenital weakness. It had always been just a matter of time. When she finally regained consciousness, Neal’s right side was completely paralyzed, and her memory, fine motor control, and power of speech were impaired. She was three months pregnant. She felt her belly, but “could not remember what the roundness meant.”
Again Dahl refused to give up without a fight. He took her back to Gipsy House and commandeered her rehabilitation, instituting a daunting regimen of physical therapy at the RAF military hospital nearby, followed by laps in the pool and lessons in everything from speech to reading and writing. With his deeply ingrained Nordic stoicism, Dahl could be a cruel taskmaster, and there were times when she hated him. Nevertheless the grueling daily routine worked, and she improved. Less than six months after her stroke, Neal gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Lucy.
Life
magazine sent a reporter to do a piece on her recovery or, as Neal put it, to profile “the Greek tragedians of Great Missenden.”
Through all this, Dahl, by necessity, had to keep writing, as he was now the family’s sole means of support. In an unexpected twist worthy of one of his own creations, his children’s books, which he had turned to again in the early 1960s to help pay the bills for his growing family, suddenly caught on.
James and the Giant Peach
became an international success and was followed in the same year by
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
which became an even bigger success, and was made into a movie. The books were blackly humorous, grotesque even, but enormously appealing to the young, in part because of their complete irreverence for authority. Dahl also took to writing screenplays, which he considered a “beastly job” and only did for the money. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, asked him to write the script for
You Only Live Twice
. That led to his doing an adaptation of Fleming’s fanciful novel
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. For the first time in his life, Dahl was not only making a living, he was earning large sums, and he gloried in his fame and fortune.
Still, he was in a hurry for his wife to go back to work, whether for her own good or to allow him a little respite. Neal felt in no shape to return to acting. Her speech was still slow and halting, and she had a limp and often stumbled. In her memoir, she maintains that Dahl badgered her into accepting the few roles she was offered, and there followed a string of forgettable films about women coping with illness and adversity. In 1972 Dahl negotiated a deal with David Ogilvy’s agency for Neal to serve as Maxim Coffee’s spokeswoman for a year. The campaign was a hit, and she was asked to do more, flying regularly to New York to shoot the commercials. Felicity Crosland, a freelance fashion coordinator for Ogilvy & Mather and a divorced mother of three, became a family friend and a fixture in their lives. Before long she also became Dahl’s mistress and in 1983, after a bitter tabloid divorce, his wife.
Dahl stayed in the garden shed where he wrote and never waivered from his routine. When the furor died down, he presented his new wife to the world as if his thirty-year union to Neal had never existed.
In a cookbook entitled
Memories with Food at Gipsy House,
written with Crosland and published posthumously, the family tree omits any mention of their previous spouses, so that Roald and Felicity appear to be the parents of all seven children. Despite his tempestuous personal life, he was remarkably productive, writing nine books of short stories in all and nineteen children’s books, many of which were best sellers and are now considered classics. In the mid-1980s he penned two brief, beautiful remembrances of his youth,
Boy
and
Going Solo
. Together he and Felicity turned his literary legacy into a lucrative cottage industry, repackaging stories and putting out cute cartoon versions of his stories. Last year approximately 10 million copies of his books sold in the United States and abroad.
In his declining years, Dahl was made to seem like a slightly grumpy English version of Mr. Rogers, complete with grandfatherly cardigan. His snide humor continued to get him into trouble, however, and a number of reckless remarks about Israel, expressed to interviewers and in written reviews, earned him a reputation for anti-Semitism. He grew bitter that he never received the knighthood he felt his work warranted, particularly his charitable endeavors in neurology, hematology, and literacy. Dahl never lost his taste for the good life acquired at Marsh’s elbow, demanding to the end that his publisher dispatch a Rolls-Royce to collect manuscripts from his home. He died of leukemia on November 23, 1990, at the age of seventy-four. Dahl appointed his second wife, who still resides at Gipsy House, executor of his literary estate. She reportedly divides half the income generated by his estate among his four children and uses her share to fund his charity, the Roald Dahl Foundation. In 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden.
Through all the vicissitudes of the postwar years, Dahl remained lifelong friends with his fellow spies. He never wrote about his time in the BSC, even after numerous books about Stephenson and Fleming delved into its activities in America, and both Ogilvy and Bryce penned jaunty memoirs. Dahl touched on his experiences in Washington only once, in an autobiographical short story called “Lucky Break,” in which he recounted his beginnings as a writer while employed at the British Embassy. Whatever secret oath they swore, Stephenson’s recruits remained fiercely loyal to him and stood by one another, even when luck played havoc with their lives, arbitrarily doling out mortal disasters and phenomenal successes. They saw less and less of one another as time went on but were never out of touch.
In July 1969, just a few days after Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, Dahl received a cable from his old boss, like a bolt out of the blue. It was in reference to an intelligence report he had filed in late 1944, stating that a government source had revealed a U.S. plan to plant the American flag on the surface of the moon. “It was a proper and accurate piece of information that I’d gotten,” recalled Dahl, but he had been told at the time that when his message was read in the New York office, it was greeted with hoots of laughter. “Then I got the telegram from Bermuda [where Stephenson ultimately retired] saying ‘Congratulations, you were right.’ You think of all the messages he got through the war years,” marveled Dahl, “and he remembered.”
When the television movie of
A Man Called Intrepid
came out in the spring of 1979, based on the best-selling biography and starring David Niven—who had done a few favors for Stephenson during the war and coincidentally played the part of James Bond in the film version of
Casino Royale
—the surviving members of the old gang all traded letters. Sir William, then a frail eighty-three, had recovered from a devastating stroke, and they wanted to congratulate him on making it that far and tease him a bit about his Hollywood fame. They were all in their final lap and given to cataloging complaints about their various aches and pains and looking back with nostalgia “on the days when we were in the summer of our lives,” as Cuneo wrote to “Intrepid,” still playing the part of the faithful aide-de-camp twenty-four years later. Quoting his favorite Spanish proverb, “No one can steal the dance you’ve danced,” he added, “For full lives, particularly the ones of world crises, which we shared, we must admit we’ve had a hell of a ball.”
ABBREVIATIONS
AH | Antoinette Marsh Haskell, oldest daughter of Charles Marsh, interview. |
BBB | David Ogilvy, |
BSI | Bickham Sweet-Escott, |
BOY | Roald Dahl, |
CF | Creekmore Fath, interview with author. |
CBC | The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Tuesday Night” documentary |
CMC | Charles Marsh correspondence with Roald Dahl, uncataloged family papers, viewed and quoted with permission of Marsh’s grandson and literary executor, Robert Haskell III. |
CMP | Charles E. Marsh Papers, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, University of Texas, Austin. |
ECP | Ernest L. Cuneo Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. |
ERP | Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. |
GS | Roald Dahl, |
HWD | Diaries of Henry Agard Wallace, 1935–1946, Special Collections, University of Iowa Library. |
LB | Roald Dahl, “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer,” 1977, in |
LBJ | Oral History Collection, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, University of Texas, Austin. |
NR | Adolf A. Berle, |
NYT | New York Times |
NYTBR | New York Times Book Review |
OH | Official History of the BSC British Security Coordination. |
QC | H. Montgomery Hyde, |
RDM | Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Archives, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England. |
RIP | Ralph Ingersoll Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Includes an unfinished memoir of Charles Marsh, |
WD | H. G. Nicholas, ed., |
WDA | Walt Disney Archive, Burbank, California. |
WP | Washington Post |
WTH | Washington Times-Herald |
YOLO | Ivar Bryce, |
PREFACE
“to do all that…”: OH.
“invisible fortress”: Stevenson,
Man Called Intrepid,
p. 101.
“man in Washington”: Troy,
Donovan and CIA,
p. 62.
“ignited controversies”: Troy,
Wild Bill and Intrepid
, p. 150.
“Truth is far too…”: Stafford,
Camp X
, p. 20.
CHAPTER 1: THE USUAL DRILL
“a rotten job”: CBC, Dahl, take 1–2.
“the ideal height”: GS, p. 82.
“was marvelous fun”: Ibid, p. 88.
“Who wants to be invalided home…”: Ibid., p. 116.
“palm-trees and coconuts…”: BOY, p. 175.
“very fit” and “fun”: GS, p. 204.
“She’ll probably have been…”: lbid., p. 205.
“flew down the steps…”: Ibid., p. 210.
“Oh no, sir…”: CBC, Dahl, take 3.
“wave of the future”: Steel,
Walter Lippman and the American Century
, p. 386.
“flung in at the deep end”: GS, p. 96.
“a most unimportant…”: CBC, Dahl, take 3.
“the inward excitement”: Astley,
The Inner Circle
, p. 85.
“[I’d] just come from the war…”: Ibid.
“unpredictable…”: BOY, p. 162.
“a very vivacious…”: Drew Pearson, Oral History Interview, LBJ.
“Charles was able…”: CF.
“Hawk-beaked Charles…”: RIP.
“Charles always had a group…”: CF.
“his wit…”: RIP.
“We all just adored him…”: AH.
“bit of divine…”: CMC.
“being not of this century”: Ignatieff,
Isaiah Berlin,
p. 111.
“very grand”: Treglown,
Roald Dahl
, p. 56.
“For Transmission to the King”: CMC.
“Roald could be like sand…”: Neal,
As I Am,
p. 166.
“In a game of one-upmanship…”: AH.
“I started nosing around…”: CBC, Dahl, take 1–2.
“It was a very strange…”: Peter Viertel, interview by author.
“I knew who he was…”: CBC, Dahl, take 1–2.
“I had been contacted…”: Ibid., take 3.
“For security reasons…”: BSI, p. 17.
“This meant that recruiting…”: Ibid., p. 32.
“I’d slip him a couple of bits…”: CBC, Dahl, take 3.
“an RAF uniform with wings…”: GS, p. 207.
CHAPTER 2: PIECE OF CAKE
“Becoming a writer…”:
NYTBR,
December 25, 1977.
“rare bird…been in combat”: LB, p. 195.
“detail, that’s what counts…”: LB, p. 197.
“You were meant…”: Ibid., p. 198.
“He [Donovan] was lying in bed…”: C. S. Forester letters, Thayer Hobson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
“progressively less realistic…”:
NYTBR
, December 25, 1977.
“It’s almost impossible…”:
Twilight Zone Magazine,
February 1983.
“
BELIEVE IT HAS
…”: WDA.
“overcome the difficulties…”: Ibid.
“Gremlinologist…because I really do…”: Ibid.
“It will seem strange…”:
Observer
(London), November 8, 1942, p. 6.
“We would want…”: WDA.
“We’re doing this…”:
WP,
November 18, 1942.
“the whole subject…”: WDA.
“remarkable adeptness…”:
NYT,
June 13, 1942.
“He was terribly pleased…”: AH.
“the problems facing all humanity…”:
NYT,
January 10, 1943.
“a libel on the staid…”:
WTH,
January. 11, 1943.
“Europeans who hate Hitler…”: HWD, memo from CM to HW, December 15, 1942.
“danger justified privilege”: Waugh,
The End of the Battle
.
“very, very attractive…”: Treglown,
Roald Dahl,
p. 61.
“man across the sea”:
The New Yorker
, May 2, 1942.
“isolation ends…”: Gabler,
Walter Winchell,
p. 294.
“The conduct of…”: OH.
“Of course, my father knew…”: AH.
“I want this message…”: RIP.
“staccato, disjointed…”: Treglown,
Roald Dahl,
p. 280.
“You woke me…”: CMC.
“airplane of the future”: HWD.
“persona non grata”: Ibid.
“is our best…”: CMC.
“Eden is respected…”: Ibid.
“Berle may go to England…”: Ibid.
“that menace”: Brown,
Secret Life of Menzies,
p. 482.
“crazy”: Culver and Hyde,
American Dreamer,
p. 342.
“Henry Wallace is now…”:
NYT,
October 12, 1941.
“With no source as frank…”: RIP.
CHAPTER 3: ENTHUSIASTIC AMATEURS
“this mythical, magical name…”: CBC, Dahl, take 3.
“hiding in the back…”: Ibid.
“He [Stephenson] had such immense…”: Ibid.
“to establish relations on the highest…”: Troy,
Donovan and CIA
, p. 34.
“Sir William did not want to make…”: Troy,
Wild Bill and Intrepid
, p. 39.
“broken-down boarding house”: Ibid., p. 63.
“A true top-level operator…”: Philby,
Silent War,
p. 73.
“Realizing what a task…”: CBC, Dahl, take 1–2.
“that gang at Broadway”: Brown,
Secret Life of Menzies,
p. 263
“thumb-twiddlers…”: Stevenson,
Man Called Intrepid
, p. 99.
“to do all that was not being done…”: OH.
“Six months before…”: Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins,
p. 270.
“indefinite”: Troy,
Donovan and CIA,
p. 34.
“cramped and depressing”: QC, p. 35.
“Our best information…”: Downes,
Scarlet Thread,
p. 61.
“threat to the American way…”: QC, pp. 80–82.
“It is unlikely…”: OH.
“He was small…”: Coward,
Future Indefinite
, p. 167.
“I waited in this…”: Hoare,
Noël Coward,
p. 310.
“I was to go as an entertainer…”: Coward,
Letters,
p. 403.
“It took eleven secretaries…”: BBB, p. 90.
“a man of few words…”: Pearson,
Life of Fleming
, p. 98.
“by far the largest”: CBC.
“one of the great secret agents…”: Hyde,
Room 3603,
pp. x–xi.
“the chocolate sailor”: Pearson,
Life of Fleming,
p. 84.
“innumerable services…”: Hyde,
Room 3603,
p. xii.
“with the air…”: Pearson,
Life of Fleming
, p. 97.
“It is certainly a bit difficult…”: Astor Letters to FDR, April 1940, Roosevelt Papers.
“real object”: Troy,
Donovan and CIA
, p. 33.
“read history backwards…”: Troy,
Wild Bill and Intrepid,
p. 44.
“supplying our friend…”: QC, p. 152.
“pressed his view”: Troy,
Wild Bill and Intrepid,
p. 67.
“the earliest collaborator…”: Ibid.
“$3,000,000 to play with…”: McLachlan,
Room 39,
p. 230.
“Ian got on well…”: Ibid.
“splendid American”: Hyde,
Room 3603
, p. xi.
“original charter of the OSS”: Pearson,
Life of Fleming,
pp. 101–2.
“my memorandum…the cornerstone…”: Ibid.
“as a sort of imaginary exercise…”: Ibid.
“[He] must have trained powers…”: Lycett,
Ian Fleming
, p. 130.
“if you are willing…”: YOLO, p. 50.
“the dreadful responsibility…”: Ibid., p. 52.
“jealousies and petty rivalries…”: Ibid., p. 61.
“If you felt”: Mahl,
Depererate Deception
, p. 55.
“The obvious aggrandizement…”: YOLO, p. 65.
“Were a German map…”: Ibid.
“the Reich’s chief”: Ibid.
“I have in my…”: Weber, “‘Secret Map’ Speech.”
“a sky-high reputation…”: Ibid.
“The item was made…”: YOLO, p. 67.
“on our guard” and “false scares”: Weber, “‘Secret Map’ Speech.”