The Irregulars (40 page)

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.”