Roald Dahl (24 page)

The flight out was unusually tiring—a storm forced them to land in Labrador, where they waited, dressed for Southern California, in a temperature that felt like fifty below. From the moment of their late arrival, Neal was occupied with costume fittings, rehearsals, and the visits of countless old Hollywood friends. Kirwan, doubling as cook, secretary, and deputy nanny, was flabbergasted by her employer's reception in Hollywood: how busy and popular she was, and how fascinated everyone seemed by every detail of her life.

For the children, too, it was a starry existence: one which, to Tessa, helped to compensate for her feeling that she was always being compared unfavorably with her dead sister. Their Brentwood
house, rented from Martin Ritt, director of
Hud
and, most recently, of
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
, had a kidney-shaped pool. Theo had learned to swim while they were in Honolulu, but he was still prone to falls, and it was necessary to take special care of his head. Dahl busied himself with making the place safe for him, padding a stone pillar and other sharp surfaces.
¹³

He also finished a piece of fiction, which he asked Angela Kirwan to type. She still remembers it vividly. It was “a particularly horrid story about a gynecologist who had been in love with some woman who had gone off and married somebody else. She'd then come back to him, I can't remember why, twenty or thirty years later, widowed, and she was obviously menopausal, and he was absolutely beastly to her and just getting his own back on her, and she was having problems with lovemaking, and it had a
horrid
—like all of Roald's stories—but a
horrid
, twist to it. I remember, as a very innocent twenty-two-year-old, being absolutely shattered.”

Dahl hadn't given her any warning about the contents of “The Last Act.” “He liked to shock,” Angela Kirwan says, “so he probably would have been very happy shocking me.” But almost anyone would have been troubled by the way Anna's “problems with lovemaking” are anatomized by the gynecologist, Conrad, as he reaches the climax of his “bit of unfinished business” with her.
¹⁴
The menopausal Anna, whose husband has recently been killed in an accident, is in the middle of a prolonged breakdown when Conrad part seduces and then rapes her:

“No!” She was struggling desperately to free herself, but he still had her pinned.

“The reason it hurts,” he went on, “is that you are not manufacturing any fluid. The mucosa is virtually dry.…”

“Stop!”

“The actual name is senile atrophic vaginitis. It comes with
age, Anna. That's why it's called
senile
vaginitis. There's not much one can do …”

When Anna starts to scream, Conrad pushes her away and walks coolly from her hotel room. The End.

The story was bought by
Playboy
, where, over the years, Dahl was to publish almost as much as he ever had in
The New Yorker
(which turned it down
¹⁵
), and more than in any other magazine. It's hard to catch the tone of the
Playboy
pieces. They have a gothic archness which makes it seem beside the point to ask for more convincing dialogue and characterization, or a deeper moral sense. Part of the joke is to write about self-consciously “adult” matters in the voice of a schoolboy—but, of course, that was often Dahl's own voice, too:

Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy.
¹⁶

Is this high camp? Or is it just well aimed at male readers of limited subtlety? Whatever the tone, Dahl's book-loving friend Dennis Pearl didn't like it and had an argument with him about what he saw as a waste of his talent.
¹⁷
Pearl much preferred the sensitive, imaginative, warmer stories in his friend's first collection,
Over to You
, and thought that this was the kind of thing he should have been building on. Dahl told him that what mattered was to give readers what they wanted. Pearl—who was beginning to read Saul Bellow and John Updike—said, “Being a chap who only connects with literature through reading, I think that's wrong. You should write what
you
want to write. They'll read it if it's good.” But Dahl made it clear that he had to earn a living and that the
Playboy
type of story was what sold. Besides, he found it amusing to write that way.

However humorous the intention, these stories—especially those collected as
Switch Bitch
(1974)—depend unmistakably on a repelled, vengeful, invasive attitude to sex. In “The Visitor,” Uncle Oswald finds he may have had sex with a leper. In “Bitch,” he is assaulted by a hideous woman to whom he himself has administered a powerful aphrodisiac. In “The Great Switcheroo,” two men engineer a means of going to bed with each other's wives without the women realizing. It took Dahl longer to run out of plots like these than out of the situations of his earlier fiction, but eventually they, too, dried up. More than twenty years later,
Playboy
published, under his name, a tale about a bookseller who blackmails the families of men whose deaths have recently been announced by sending them a bill for what he pretends were their recent purchases of pornographic books.
¹⁸
He is caught when he chooses a blind man as his victim. The situation is padded with long descriptions dwelling on the physical repulsiveness of the blackmailer and his woman accomplice and jokes at the expense of the English establishment types they prey on. All this is in the manner Dahl often slid into when he wasn't particularly trying—an infantile mix of exaggeration, greed, and adjectival vagueness (“a dozen Moroccan servants were laying out a splendid buffet lunch for the guests. There were enormous cold lobsters and large pink hams and very small roast chickens and several kinds of rice and about ten different salads”). But if the style is his own, the plot wasn't.
¹⁹
It belonged to a story by James Gould Cozzens, which first appeared under the title “Foot in It” in 1935, and later as “Clerical Error,” under which title it was included in a popular anthology in the early 1950s. Some readers wrote to
Playboy
drawing attention to the plagiarism, but their letters weren't published.
²⁰

While the forty-eight-year-old Dahl, wretched over his daughter's death, anxious about his maimed son, envious of his
wife's fame, desperate to get back into
The New Yorker
, was busy imagining a middle-aged gynecologist's revenge rape of the love of his youth, Patricia Neal went each day to the studio, put on a pair of trousers, and pretended to be a medical missionary in China “who scandalizes her Christian sisters with her worldliness—a morality that later allows her to save them by sacrificing herself to the ravages of a Mongol barbarian.”
²¹
7
Women
had begun filming. No one knew that Neal was pregnant—a worry when she found that her part required her to ride a donkey, but perhaps there was no connection between that and what happened at the end of the fourth day of shooting. She was helping the nanny with the children's baths when she felt a violent pain in her head. As she told Dahl about it, her eyes began to lose focus. Recent tragedies made him act with a decisiveness that was urgent even by his own imperious standards. He instantly telephoned a top Los Angeles neurosurgeon, Charles Carton, whom they had met socially and had informally consulted about Theo.

The call saved Neal's life. By the time her husband put the phone down, she was unconscious and vomiting, but an ambulance was racing to collect her and Carton was on his way to meet them at the hospital. She regained enough consciousness to ask, “Who is in this house? What are the names of the people in this house, please?”
²²
They were the last words she was to say for many weeks.

Neal had suffered two successive aneurysms—a form of stroke in which a congenitally weak place in the wall of an artery in the head is ruptured, allowing blood to jet into the soft brain tissue.
²³
A third stroke, the worst, happened while she was being x-rayed. Carton spent the whole night operating, using a saw to make a trapdoor into her left temple, removing a clot of hemorrhaged blood from between the brain and its coat, cutting into the left temporal lobe (which controls movement and speech) in order to remove another clot, clipping the aneurysm and spraying on plastic to reinforce the artery wall. Before he began, he didn't know
whether his patient would survive. When she did, he wasn't sure at first that he had done her a favor.

Tessa, who had seen her brother's accident and had been at home when Olivia was taken to the hospital to die, also saw her mother being carried away and was intensely involved in everything that followed. It was an appalling experience for the volatile child. Her father was continually at the hospital, and according to her own memories, she didn't see him for the next three or four days, or her mother for as many weeks. The gates were crowded with reporters and photographers. Eventually, when she was taken to see Pat, she was quite unprepared to find that her famous, beautiful, husky-voiced mother “could not talk, could not move her right side, had no hair, had a crooked mouth … wore an eye-patch and didn't even know how to say my name.”
²⁴
To Theo, by contrast, these horrors seemed familiar; perhaps even reassuring.

Patricia Neal's friend the actress Betsy Drake visited her on the night of the operation and saw her immediately after it. Drake says that Neal “looked as though she was in a storm at sea.” Dahl quickly assumed the role of ship's captain, jettisoned needless cargo in the form of superfluous flowers and messages sent by well-wishers, and repelled visitors whom he didn't like—including some of his in-laws. Those whom he let in were horrified by what they found. But slowly, Neal came back to consciousness. Through some strange quirk of the brain's organization, the words of poetry and songs are stored separately from other forms of communication, so she could sing. And gestures enabled her to indicate when she felt the most important of her needs: to smoke. But her head was shaved, her face screwed up, her paralyzed leg had to be supported by a caliper, and when words began to come back to her, they were usually gibberish. She called a cigarette an “oblogon,” a martini a “red hair dryer” or a “sooty swatch.”
²⁵
She was still pregnant.

In March 1965, a month after she had gone into the hospital, Neal was taken home to the Ritts' house. Large numbers of friends managed to get through the vetting process, among them Lillian Hellman, Cary Grant, Margaret Leighton, Donald Pleasence, Hope Preminger, and John Ford. Another visitor was Anne Bancroft, who had won a British Film Academy award for the part Neal had turned down in
The Pumpkin Eater
and now stepped into her role in 7
Women
.

A star was ill, and Angela Kirwan thought that some of the visitors came just to say they had been there. But others—particularly Betsy Drake, Mildred Dunnock, and Marian and Ed Goodman—were persistent and helpful. As the weeks went by, Dahl began to see that such goodwill might be translated into something of lasting practical value. With physiotherapy, Neal was beginning to walk, but as far as her powers of communication were concerned, she needed to retrace much of her development since childhood. Although some simple grammatical structures were returning to her, her vocabulary was cruelly limited and still often jumbled. According to the doctors, the early months would be all-important. Dahl's approach was, first, to announce that his wife would make a one hundred percent recovery, and then to set about goading her into it. Those who already disliked him saw his strategy as of a piece with his usual domineering behavior. One describes it as somewhere between that of a dog trainer and a traffic cop.
²⁶
It was his custom, another says, to humiliate people in front of others: that is how he treated Pat.
²⁷
But some, closer to him, were more sympathetic about the strain he was under and remember how his mood could swing from rigid control to open vulnerability.
²⁸
This was Southern California in the mid-1960s. If authoritarianism had not disappeared, it was certainly out of style. When, within two months of her stroke, Neal was pushed by Dahl to go out to dinner and to struggle with the same food as everyone else, many of her friends were scandalized. Undeterred, he began to make plans for a press conference before their return to England in
May. He coached his wife in her lines: “I feel fine. The baby will be fine. I'll be back to work in one year.” But for all her public optimism, Pat mostly felt exhausted, frustrated, and miserable.

There were two new members of the returning household. Dahl had persuaded a nurse from the UCLA Medical Center to come back to England with them, bringing a friend to help her. The Marshes' foundation paid everyone's fares. At Heathrow, all the Dahl sisters were there to meet them, and Roald promptly resumed charge of the tribe. “I called in no doctors,” he later wrote; it was a matter that had to be sorted out by the family, alone.
²⁹
Pat's speech was not all that was affected. She could not read or write, or do even the simplest sums. She was listless and prone to bouts of deep depression. “Unless I was prepared to have a bad-tempered, desperately unhappy nitwit in the house,” her husband recalled, “some very drastic action would have to be taken at once.” The National Health Service speech therapist could offer no more than two half-hour sessions per week. Dahl persuaded his sisters and various local friends—the Kirwans and a dozen others—to take part in a relay. Pat was to have six hour-long lessons a day, each with a different volunteer. Members of the team also took turns with the children, the cooking, and the housework.