The Irregulars (7 page)

Disney acquired the rights to the story, with the British Air Ministry demanding final script approval, and royalties to be divided between Dahl and the RAF Benevolent Fund. Throughout that summer and early autumn, Dahl eagerly corresponded with Disney about their plans to turn his gremlin tale into a movie that would combine live action and cartoon animation, and he commented on photostats of early sketches in an attempt to help “overcome the difficulties you had in deciding what a Gremlin was like.” After much back-and-forth, Dahl was delighted to hear that Disney had decided that the project should be made “one hundred percent cartoon,” and he sent a quick note to Walt expressing his relief at the decision. Given the green light to make suggestions to the studio animators, Dahl could not stop himself and giddily boasted of his expertise. He presented himself as an expert “Gremlinologist,” and offered to travel to the West Coast to provide an accurate physical description of “the little men”—regulation green bowler hats, and so on—“because I really do know what they look like having seen a great number of them in my time.”

That fall
Newsweek, Time
, and
Life
all did stories on gremlins, tracing the origin of the name to the Old English word
greme,
meaning “to vex”—though according to some pilots, the bad-luck imps most often appeared after one too many Fremlin’s, a popular brand of beer—and offering various descriptions of their appearance and jaunty attire. Rumors that the head of Disney was working on a gremlins picture and planning to travel to England to hear fairy stories firsthand caused so much excitement that the British Air Ministry was deluged with inquiries. As the London
Observer
commented: “It will seem strange indeed to the future historians who, unraveling the tale of our troubled times, discover that in the critical year 1942, a distinguished American traveled five thousand miles in order to make a film about elves; elves which, admittedly, no one has ever seen.”

When gossip columns started reporting rumors of Walt Disney’s impending invasion of “Gremlinland,” Dahl’s superiors urged him to contact the studio head and find out if he was really headed for England. Dahl queried Walt, who telegraphed the air commodore that he was unable to get away due to pressure of work, but he wrote Dahl that that was the least of his problems. The studio was getting letters from all over England and Canada written by people who claimed not only to have seen gremlins but had very fixed ideas about what they looked like. Disney had also heard from one Flight Lieutenant Douglas Bisgood, an RAF pilot who had crossed the Atlantic with Dahl, who claimed that during the two-week journey he had regaled Dahl with many of his own gremlin tales. In his letter, Bisgood made it clear he felt that he had first claim to the gremlin family names. In the meantime, the studio’s research department had unearthed a number of books on the subject by British authors and was worried that they did not have exclusive rights to the gremlin legend. Disney did not want trouble. As he worried to Dahl in a letter in October: “We would want this film to be satisfactory to the RAF in every way. Our only concern is that we do not want someone to find petty faults or assume a picayunish attitude after the film is completed and thereby put us to considerable expense in making changes.”

In late November, Lord Halifax consented to his assistant air attaché working on the morale-boosting picture, and Dahl was granted a short leave to go to Los Angeles. His arrival in Hollywood was noted in the gossip columns, and Leonard Lyons quoted an earnest-sounding Dahl dutifully touting the party line, saying, “We’re doing this because the Gremlins are part of the RAF.” Dahl spent ten days living it up as a guest of the studio, which arranged for him to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel and provided him with a huge American car. To the twenty-six-year-old Dahl, everything about Disney’s Burbank operation was big and impressive, from the sprawling black-topped studio lot to Walt’s enormous office, where a stenographer took down every word uttered by the various parties present and typed them up afterward for the boss’s perusal.

While he was there, Dahl succeeded in thoroughly charming both Walt and Roy Disney, particularly Walt, who, upon discovering their shared fondness for Kipling, nicknamed the lanky airman Stalky, after a British schoolboy featured in a story by the same name. Dahl persuaded both Disney brothers that it made sense to bring out an illustrated book version of the gremlins in advance of the planned movie. Following the success of an article in the December
Cosmopolitan
featuring Dahl’s gremlins, accompanied by Disney’s colorful illustrations, he wrote Walt urging him not to delay the book any longer, as he had already been approached by a big publishing house in England and felt certain there would be other competitors entering the field, given how “the whole subject is gaining way to such an extent now.” He signed the letter, “Yours, Stalky.”

Convinced that the charismatic, self-dramatizing British pilot was a good investment, Disney agreed. In April 1943 the studio joined forces with Random House, and
The Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl
was published to glowing reviews. The
New York Times
awarded him honors for his moral fable about the self-destructiveness of mankind and hailed the young English author’s “remarkable adeptness at building up a tall tale in the American tradition.” After the book’s publication, Dahl was inundated with offers. When he returned to Hollywood to confer with Disney, his visit merited a gushing mention in Hedda Hopper’s column. “He was terribly pleased with the book’s success,” recalled Antoinette. “He got rather a big head about it, and was more arrogant than ever.”

Dahl was also riding high on reports that he was working on a full-length motion picture inspired by the writings and life philosophy of Henry Wallace. The film project was conceived of by Gabriel Pascal, an English producer famous for his brilliant screen adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion
and
Major Barbara
, after a chance meeting with Wallace and Dahl at Marsh’s R Street house. Pascal was there with his friend and partner, Erich Maria Remarque, the author of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, one of the best pieces of reportage about the First World War. Remarque had made so much money from the book’s publication that he was free to do anything he wanted, but the fame had apparently been too much for him, and he had retreated to southern France. After a long period of inactivity, Remarque had teamed up with Pascal to make an allegorical movie about the fight between “the children of light and darkness through the ages.” Wallace was very interested in their notion of illustrating the principle of liberty and spent many hours in deep discussion with the pair of filmmakers. By midnight, they were so simpatico, that they began laying plans to collaborate on the film together. They spent a long weekend at Marsh’s sprawling Virginia farm hammering out the details, and Dahl, with Lord Halifax’s approval, was assigned the task of coming up with a rough first treatment of the script.

When the picture deal was announced in the press, Pascal explained that the ambitious project would tackle “the problems facing all humanity in the reconstruction of the post-war world” and would “carry an inspirational message to all people from an American angle.” Describing Flight Lieutenant Dahl as “a great new writing talent,” Pascal told reporters that the pilot-author would be handing over his draft to “two or three prominent American authors,” so that the final script would bear several names. While he had given no thought to casting the central roles, he revealed that hundreds of children and youths would figure in the drama.

Marsh felt convinced that Dahl and the filmmakers were perfectly matched to their complex and provocative subject. To be sure, the cerebral vice president, an Iowa-born agronomist who had done pioneering work in developing new strains of corn and strawberries, was a singular character in American politics. A selfless and zealous reformer, he had overseen revolutionary change in the country’s farm policy as secretary of agriculture, constructed a huge new bureaucracy to administer its provisions, and spouted extremely liberal, unorthodox ideas about the economy, eliminating poverty, and how to best serve the public interest. A devout Episcopalian, Wallace was also usually spiritual for a politician, and his asceticism and morality set him apart from the more urbane, secular types in Washington. He was known as a prophet who wore many hats: he lectured on science, led seminars on religion, and authored pamphlets and books on everything from world trade to economic social justice. His popularity with western farmers, along with his outspoken attacks on Nazism and the dangers of a German victory, recommended him to Roosevelt, who selected him to be his vice president in 1940. Wallace was a controversial choice at the time, and the intervening years had done nothing to endear him to conservatives in Congress.

The news that the vice president’s global philosophy was going to reach the big screen made for splashy headlines in Washington and London. The tall, perpetually disheveled Wallace was beloved by many as the people’s candidate and a great liberal warrior. An idealist who saw himself as an agent of change, he frequently gave speeches outlining his ideas for chartering the future of the world when peace came, and his ideas had been widely circulated in newsreels. His Republican opponents, however, regarded him as a dangerous radical and immediately dismissed the proposed film as political propaganda. It did not escape their notice that the project was to be privately financed by Charles Marsh, the Texas newspaper publisher and staunch Democrat, whose real purpose they suspected was not making a movie so much as sending a message to voters. The conservative Washington
Times-Herald
opined that while Pascal might be able to “sugar coat his story and the Wallace ideologies,” it would be better if the filmmakers confined their politics to the conventional rostrums, warning that many on Capital Hill still saw red at the mention of Major Frank Capra’s
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, which was regarded as “a libel on the staid United States Senate.”

Dahl was delighted with all the attention, as well as the promise of additional film work. The whole deal had been put together with enormous haste, as Pascal had been in Washington only briefly on assignment for the Office of War Information (OWI) and had to return to London in a fortnight. He had flown back with the playwright Maxwell Anderson, whose war drama
The Eve of St. Mark
he was to direct on the London stage. The British production was being sponsored by the OWI and featured an English cast, with the exception of a few key American roles, which Pascal, with patriotic flourish, announced he would be filling with performers from U.S. Army units stationed in England. Pascal had a number of other projects on his schedule, including a long-delayed film of Paul Gallico’s
The Snow Goose
, one of two pictures he owed under his United Artists contract. Before leaving Washington, he had also arranged with Halifax for Dahl to be permitted to work on a script of
The Snow Goose
, which he hoped to film in England, Canada, and the United States.

If possible, Marsh was even more excited about the project than Dahl. He was very taken with Pascal, who was born in Transylvania—he claimed to be three-eighths Hungarian, one-eighth Basque, and one-half Italian—and had an equal capacity for liquor and tall tales and told mesmerizing stories about everything from the monks of Assisi to George Bernard Shaw and Toscanini. Remarque, who was from Westphalia, Germany, was also a wonderful raconteur and told a story of being stationed in France during World War I. It was the custom of the Prussian officer in charge to hold a drinking contest each evening, with the major taking only a sip from his glass while the others were required to drain the contents. This went on all night, and every time someone fell under the table, they were wrapped up in one of the rugs and stood in the corner until everyone in the room save one was bound up in a rug. When it was down to the major and himself, the then-seventeen-year-old Remarque had dared the officer to match him glass for glass. The major finally succumbed, and Remarque had to struggle to roll him up in a rug and prop him in the corner. He told them that afterward he just sat at the table for an hour and a half before unbundling everyone.

Marsh was suitably impressed and judged Remarque to be the real thing. He was so enthusiastic about their project that in addition to putting up all the money and offering his Virginia farm as a possible location for filming, he started bombarding Dahl with suggestions. Marsh proposed bringing in his refugee friend Erich Leinsdorf, an Austrian composer and conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, to write the score. Leinsdorf had escaped Nazi Germany, and Marsh thought the perfect advance publicity for the movie would be that this ensemble of “Europeans who hate Hitler” had combined their talents to produce the movie of “The Common Man in War and Peace.”

Dahl was now a very busy writer and on his way to becoming a very well-known, well-connected man about town in Washington. He frequently made the local society columns for being one of the luminaries at a British Embassy function or war relief fund-raiser, or for serving as one of the distinguished “patrons under 30” at special concert series for the young people in the nation’s capital. He developed a wide range of contacts, becoming pals with Bernard Baruch, a millionaire and influential presidential adviser, who happened to be a bridge-playing crony of Marsh’s Texan pals Jesse Jones and Will Clayton. Dahl, who could not resist any form of cards, had already joined a poker school and managed to lose his first magazine paycheck—the whole $900—to Harry Truman, a senator from Missouri.

Dahl’s tales of derring-do had made him a distinctly glamorous figure. His byline was appearing in the best American magazines, and he enjoyed the same respect—even reverence—reserved for the better-known war correspondents of the day. He made friends with writers and reporters whose skill and reputation far outstripped his own modest achievements, but they accepted him as a veteran whose record of courage they admired. In time of war, the British writer Evelyn Waugh once noted, “danger justified privilege,” and Dahl’s recompense for having fought on the front lines was ready admission into the most vaunted circles in Washington. Creekmore Fath took him along to the White House, where he met the bright, blond Martha Gellhorn, famous for her war dispatches for
Collier’s
and recent marriage to Hemingway. Gellhorn, who was obsessed with the war in Europe, was immediately interested in Dahl’s RAF connections as she was always planning the next story that would get her back to the front. Her first impression of Dahl, she recalled, was of someone “very, very attractive and slightly mad,” which she attributed to his “hitting the ground.”