February 16, 2026 • 40 mins
When tragedy strikes his family, Dahl is forced into a waking nightmare that transforms him from a struggling writer into an unlikely medical pioneer. In the process, he ends up saving the lives of thousands of children around the world. But just as one crisis ends, another begins, followed by several more in brutal succession. Yet somehow, out of this unimaginable darkness, something hopeful emerges.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we start the episode. One production note. In this episode,
we have a lot of quotes from Roald Dahl from
his interviews with Barry Ferrell. Rather than just have me
read them in my terrible British accent, we decided to
bring them to life, so we use an actor's performance
and some custom software to create a doll like voice. Okay,
now onto the episode. We've heard a lot about Roll
(00:25):
Dall so far. His days is a fighter pilot, his
work as a spy with The Irregulars, his screenwriting in Hollywood.
What if I told you that on his way to
becoming the most successful children's author ever, Dahl took a
quick little detour to become a world class neuroscientist. At
this point in the season, I feel like you might
actually believe me as you should. Here's Tom Solomon, a
(00:47):
doctor who knew Dall, speaking on Liverpool TV.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
In his life he did some amazing medical things. He
actually invented a neurosurgical device to treat watch on the
brain to treat hydroch for us, and the treatments leant
very good, so he invented a new one and it
was used around the world.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Thousands of children benefited.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Okay, then roll Doll the neuroscience engineer. I promise it's
an even crazier story than that doctor just alluded to.
But in order to really understand why it was necessary
for him to become an expert in the brain, I
got to tell you about Doll's kids. Of all the
masks that Doll tries on, this is going to be
his most challenging doting father. For my hard podcast Imagine
(01:35):
Entertainment and Parallax, I'm Marrion Tracy and this is the
Secret world of Role Dall Episode five. I didn't become
a father until after my career had sort of found
its footing, until I had some stability, which took a while,
because you know, I'm a writer. But when Dahl becomes
(01:57):
a dad, he's still trying to figure out his career,
to figure out what kind of writer he is. He
hasn't found his voice yet. He's still attempting adult fiction
in the vein of his heroes like Hemingway, Graham Green,
and C. S. Forrester. In other words, he's writing this muscular,
macho prose focused on action. His stories at this time
are also filled with the pretty explicit sexual adventures of
his heroes. If you've never read these stories and only
(02:20):
no Doll from his kids books, you will be shocked.
Start with my Uncle Oswald. It is raunchy, but here's
what I'm getting at. It takes Doll going on the
insane journey with his family that you're about to hear
for him to figure out who his natural audience is
and what kind of writer he is. In nineteen sixty,
(02:40):
Doll and Neil welcome their third child, Theo, their only son.
With two daughters already at home, Olivia and Tessa, Doll
is thrilled to finally have a boy. According to writer
Nadia Cohen, Doll writes pretty graphically about his excitement over
the babies boy parts that I'm not going to subject
you to here. I'll just say he compares it to
(03:01):
an exotic flower glowing with promise and leave it at that.
Dall immediately feels a special kinship with Theo, the only
boy in a family of sisters, just like Dahl had been.
Six weeks after Theo's birth, the family moves to New
York for the winter. Dahl explains what happens next to
Barry Ferrell, a journalist, to welcome back to a bunch
(03:21):
because he practically moves in with the family. During this period,
Farrell writes an entire book about what he witnesses. I
think Farrell was originally just hoping to write a cozy
Sunday profile, but ended up becoming embedded with the dolls,
like a war correspondent in a combat zone. So the
family is living in New York. Dall is struggling to
write his short stories while his wife pat Neil, is
(03:43):
on a break from shooting breakfast to Tiffany's. Dall tells
Ferrell what happens next.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
It was December fifth, nineteen sixty. We had a nurse
then Susan and Susan had THEO in his pram on
their way to pick up Olivia from her nursery school
two blocks from home, and a cab shot passed and
took the pram right out of Susan's hands. Susan dashed
(04:13):
across after it. The plan had flown forty feet through
the air and into the side of a boss.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
THEO was just four months old.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Tessa, three years old, is left standing alone on the
sidewalk as Susan rushes into the street. The police are
there within minutes and they rush them all to the hospital.
Neil is only a few blocks away when the accident happens.
She hears the sirens pass, but she has no idea
they're for her infant son. When she walks into their apartment,
the telephone is already ringing. As soon as she receives
(04:48):
the news, she hangs up and calls Doll at his office.
She doesn't have the full story, yet doesn't sound overly alarmed.
THEO has been hurt, she tells him. They say, not
too seriously, we have to go to the hospital. Dohl
throws on a coat and gets ready to leave, but
before he can get out the door, Susan calls from
the hospital, hysterical, saying, hurry, hurry, So then I knew
(05:10):
it was bad, Doll says, THEO is an emergency. When
we get there, Doll continues, they x ray him and
find lots of fractures, very critical shape, they say. In
her memoir, Neil goes even further, writing that the doctor
pulled them aside after examining THEO. He told them we
are doing everything we can, but he is going to die.
(05:32):
From that moment on, Neil essentially moves into the hospital,
living off stale coffee, sleeping in a chair beside her
son's bed, obsessed with the rhythms of his labored breathing
when he sleeps, which is a lot of the time.
Neil climbs two flights of stairs on unsteady legs to
another kind of visial. In an upstairs room at this
very same hospital is her old friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman,
(05:54):
who's keeping watch over Dashiell Hammett, the famous detective novelist
and her longtime romantic partner. He's dying lung cancer. It's
a really cruel symmetry. You might remember Hellman played matchmaker
for Doll o' neil by throwing that dinner party years ago.
That was the bright beginning of something in a beautiful
setting filled with brilliant writers and celebrities. Now the two
(06:14):
women are together again in the opposite of that glamorous setting,
no more fancy dresses, no makeup, just trapped in a
sterile Manhattan tower, terrified and grieving. But back to Dol.
He tells Ferrell about the dreadful special nurses that kept
getting called in to theo's room. One of these nurses
walks right in and before even attending to THEO. She
(06:37):
shows dollan Neil in newspaper clipping about the accident and says,
how thrilled she is to be assigned this case. This
is something Doll and Neil are going to have to
get used to. Unfortunately, Neil is a world famous movie star.
Her son being in an accident like this is huge
international news, and some of the nurses seem much more
interested in getting Neil's autograph than in paying attention to
her son. They seem downright distracted. One afternoon, Doll observes
(07:01):
a nurse giving THEO a dose of an anti convulsant,
and she's giving him a ton of it. Doll says,
isn't that rather a lot? Yeah, sir, no half an
ounce like it's supposed to be. She replies, calmly, well,
it was supposed to be a tenth of a gram.
Doll later explains, a hell of a lot less. Doctors
rush in and start to pump the stomach of this
(07:23):
poor four month old baby after the nurse's mistake. Despite
the comfort of having helmet and ham it right upstairs,
the Dolls decide to get the hell out of this hospital,
so they wrap THEO and blankets, pick him up in
their arms and just carry him out. All the doctors
are standing around, looking very worried and protesting, Doll says,
but their minds are made up to make matters worse.
(07:45):
It's a crazy snow day in New York. But then
Niel's longtime agent, Harvey Orkin, suddenly materializes with a car.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Doll continues, It was snowing like hell, and we were desperate.
But then Harvey suddenly materialized with a car, and he
drove very fast and very skillfully through the blizzard, with
cars skidding at odd angles all around us. I'd not
forgotten my ride, because here was Harvey, an unhappyish chap,
(08:14):
a wise, cracky fellow, a person I wasn't so keen on,
and who doubtlessly wasn't so fond of me. Yet there
was Harvey, still the sort of friend who would drive
through the snow for you in an emergency.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I love this, Dezel. Loyalty is such an important theme
in Doll's work. Think of Matilda and Miss Honey, Sophie
and the BFG Charlie and Grandpa Joe. You can just
feel how much it means to Doll that this guy,
this agent, who's not even a close friend, has nevertheless
shown up in a snowstorm to save them. Harvey drives
them to Presbyterian Hospital. I know it well, It's where
(08:52):
I had both of my kids. Here. The doctors evaluate
THEO and operate on him for a subdermal hematoma, which
is a kind of swelling cause by bleeding into the brain.
And they put it right, Dahl says, a huge, huge relief. Still,
THEO will stay in the hospital inside an oxygen tent
for the next two weeks. It's a terrible period. THEO
(09:12):
goes temporarily blind from cerebro spinal fluid accumulating around his brain,
which requires another operation. Remember he's only four months old.
Each operation is incredibly dangerous. Neil somehow stays relatively calm
through it all. She has a kind of strength you
could only step back from and admire. Doll later gushes
about his wife. THEO finally gets released from the hospital
(09:45):
right before Christmas. He goes home, but he's a bunch
of terrifying stepbacks, according to Dennison, including a build up
of cerebro spinal fluid pressing on the brain that renders
him silent, unseen, unmoving. Every time there's this build up
of food, they have to hurry him back to the
hospital for the fluid to be drained, and of course
this puts THEO at risk of blindness, brain damage, and death.
(10:08):
Doctors try to prevent further fluid build up with a
drainage tube, but the tube keeps getting blocked, making another
operation necessary, and with every operation the stakes are raised
and the chances lesson of restoring theo's sight and brain function.
Neil says, whenever they take THEO back in for surgery,
he looks up at us with those huge, desolate, bewildered
eyes that ask, why are you doing this to me again?
(10:34):
THEO has eight operations in thirty months, all before he's
three years old, and it's almost all due to the
inability of this tube to work. I think in a
lot of partnerships, when one person becomes pessimistic or feels
defeated about something, the other person just naturally becomes more
optimistic and upbeat. I've definitely experienced this over the years
(10:56):
in writing partnerships. While Neil may be showing a ton
of strength, THEO, she's genuinely not sure if he's going
to make it through all this so Dall takes the
opposite outlook. According to Dennison, Again, Dall sets aside any
assumption that THEO will die. He just puts it out
of his mind and sets out to find a way
to save him. Doll's sole focus becomes this tube that
(11:17):
keeps failing. He writes, I couldn't believe that with everything
science had come up with, they couldn't produce one little
clogproof tube. That little clogproof tube becomes his life's mission.
But what the hell does a writer know about medical tubes?
Without any medical expertise, a drawn Dall relies on his
(11:38):
creativity instead. But where to begin. His first call is
to doctor Kenneth Till, a pediatric neurosurgeon who's been in
charge of THEO at the hospital. Till can help with
the science, but they need someone else, to someone who
can help with the design. In a very inspired, very creative,
very dolly in move, Doll decides to call a toy maker.
(12:00):
He knows Stanley Wade. Doll had once bought model airplanes
from Wade for his nephew, and he remembers how ingenious
Wade was with tiny instruments. Together the three of them,
Doll Till and Wade spend hours in Doll's living room
brainstorming ideas. It's not that different from the writer's room
in la where Walt Disney first taught Doll how to
(12:21):
collaborate years ago. They throw ideas on the board, rejecting
ones that don't work and building on those that do.
They take breaks to play pool, They snack, they laugh,
They pour coffee down their throats by the gallon. In hindsight,
what they come up with seem so obvious, but no
one had done it before. For instance, until that moment,
all of these tubes were made of plastic, which was
(12:42):
expensive and hard to sterilize. Doll and his two partners
swapped out the plastic for stainless steel, which made the
device more durable and also way easier to disinfect and
prevent infections. They also changed the designs slightly to give
the tube a bigger surface area, which prevented fluid from
flowing back into the brain and eating blackage. Again, sounds obvious,
(13:03):
but no one had ever come up with a design
that reduced the risk of blockage before. I don't know
if it's the special alchemy of these three specific men
with their very different skill sets or the urgency. Doll
feels to get this done quickly to save his son.
But together, Doll, Till and Wade come up with a
better tube than has ever existed. Can I just stop
(13:23):
for a second here to say, Oh my God? With
absolutely no training, Doll wills himself to come up with
this breakthrough device in order to save theo his only son.
Is that not the greatest thing you've ever heard? His
poor infant son is dying. Nothing is working, and instead
of just throwing his hands up, he literally invents the solution.
It takes two years for them to build it, which
(13:45):
is roughly forty thousand years fewer than it would have
taken me. The Wade Doll Till valve name for its
three innovators, is so successful that it soon gets manufactured globally.
Dall insists they not make a profit on it in
order to be able to distribute it cheaply. According to
the National Library of Medicine at NIH, the device is
(14:06):
estimated to have been used in two to three thousand
children worldwide in the two years after they came up
with it. It's especially useful in developing nations, where medical
devices like this mean the difference between life and death.
Not to take us off topic, but a quick aside
just to say that I did a bunch of research
around this, and the only similar example I've found of
(14:27):
anything like this ever happening a breakthrough medical device getting
created by someone without medical training is exactly one year later,
a guy named Paul Winchell, a TV actor who appeared
in lots of sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and The
Beverly Hillbillies and was the original voice of Tigger and
Winnie the Pooh. He co creates the first artificial heart.
I have nothing more to say about that except what
(14:49):
the hell was happening in the sixties for Dahl. Creating
the tube is another incredible feat in a life full
of them. I think each of these accomplishments was only
possible because of the one that came before. They all
built on each other. When Doll was recruited into the
Irregulars in his twenties without any espionage training, he didn't
know what he was doing, but in a matter of
(15:10):
months he was hanging out with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
When he decided to write movies, he was completely clueless,
but soon he was on top of Hollywood, working with
Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. When you go through life
like that with no apparent ceiling to what's possible, with
life constantly reinforcing your crazy ambitions, you must start to
feel like nothing is out of reach. So when no
(15:31):
device exists to help cure your infant son, you don't
go to church and pray. You call a doctor and
a toymaker you know, and say let's get to work. Doll,
of course, later puts all of this into his writing.
The lead character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is partly
based on the toymaker Wade, and Willy Wonka has parts
(15:51):
of all three men, an innovating scientist, a creative genius,
a toy making savant. But instead of torturing children like
Wonka does, Doll and his buddies build a device to
save them.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Invention, my dear friends, is ninety three percent per aspiration,
six percent electricity, four percent evaporation, and two percent.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
But a Scotch ripple that's one hundred and five percent. That's,
of course, the line from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
But Doll isn't yet ready to write that he's still
a few years away from dreaming wanka up. He's still
writing for the wrong audience, namely adults, and it's not
going well. Doll's creative frustration start bleeding into his home life,
adding strain to a family already fractured by theo's accident.
(16:37):
But if he thinks the pressures are intense right now,
they're nothing compared to what's lying right around the corner.
Doll o'niel's second oldest daughter, Tessa, sums up what's about
to happen well when she says, theirs was a family
that quote toppled unwittingly over the edge of a jagged
cliff face into a canyon of darkness, which was filled
with such sadness, such total devastation, that we would never recover. Yeah,
(17:01):
get ready. Olivia is Dall o'nil's first born. It's now
November nineteen sixty two, a little less than two years
after Theo's accident. The family has left New York and
(17:22):
is living in England. Now, Olivia comes home with a
note from the headmistress of her elementary school warning of
a measles outbreak. She's seven years old. Doll Emil's first thought,
of course, is about THEO. After what he's been through,
they can't risk him getting the virus under any circumstances.
Vaccines against the disease are still pretty uncommon in this era,
(17:43):
and doses are unlimited supply. But pulling some strings, Meal
is able to obtain the vaccine for THEO, which means Olivia,
who's perfectly healthy, doesn't get any protection. And of course
Olivia contracts measles. It does seem like a terrible case
at first, but here's doll on what happens next.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
One morning, when Olivia was well on the road to recovery,
I was sitting on her bed showing her how to
fashion little animals out of colored pipe cleaners, And when
it came to her turn to make one herself, I
noticed that her fingers in her mind were not working together,
and she couldn't do anything.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
How are you feeling all right, I asked her. I
feel all sleepy, she said. In an hour she was unconscious,
and in twelve hours she was dead.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
In such a cruel mirror to his own childhood, Olivia
is seven when she dies, the same age Doll's older sister,
Astri was when she died. The defining moment of Doll's childhood,
repeated again in his adulthood. In Doll's memoir Boy, he
writes about Astri she was far and away my father's favorite.
He says he adored her beyond measure, and her sudden
(19:05):
death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. Dall's father
was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went
down in pneumonia a few weeks after Astrey died, he
didn't care whether or not he survived. Doll writes, a
patient had to fight to survive. My father refused to fight.
He was thinking, I am quite sure of his beloved daughter,
(19:29):
and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So
he died too. He was fifty seven years old. My
mother had now lost a daughter and a husband, all
in the space of a few weeks. Heaven knows what
it must have felt like to be hit with a
double catastrophe like this, Doll finishes, which is such a
strange turn of phrase, because, of course Dall was hit
with it too. He was three years old. So the
(19:54):
big question right now for Doll can he be stronger
than his father? Was? He genuine he doesn't know the answer.
He becomes lost. He begins drinking more and taking more
painkillers for his old back injury from the plane crash.
It happened so swiftly that one didn't have time to
prepare for it. Doll writes, I was in a kind
of daze, I suppose, and morbid thoughts kept after me.
(20:16):
That kind of thought can run you down, you know,
worrying about fate and the meaning of things. I couldn't
do any writing, and that went on for about a
year and a half. According to Dennison, Doll's only recourse
is to try to figure out exactly what happened to Olivia.
Maybe he can invent something that will help others in
the same situation, like the medical tube he made for THEO.
(20:38):
He remembers that Olivia strangely hadn't had a reaction to
her smallpox vaccinations years before, meaning she seemed naturally immune
to that disease. Huh, maybe there was a connection between
that and her measle's reaction. He begins writing letters to
specialists around the globe. He is desperate for answers. Dall
tells Barry Ferrell.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I got the idea that the must be some way
of finding out in advance if a child is susceptible
to this. I wanted to set up a careful investigation,
and I was prepared to get in touch with every
parent of every child in this country who had had
severe complications from measles. I thought of drawing up a
questionnaire and correlating the answers. But by then the inoculation
(21:19):
against measles had become more common in England, so the
problem had been very largely erased.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Still, Dahl seems hell banned on blaming himself for Olivia's death.
After Theo's accident on the Upper East Side, Dal O'Neil
had decided to get the hell out of Manhattan.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Normally we would have been in New York in November,
but after the accident we said, let's get out of
this place where children are hit by taxi cabs, and
we moved our permanent household to England. Of course, Olivia
wouldn't have died if we had stayed in New York.
They had the inoculations there, but here in England they
(21:56):
weren't available them.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Meal's strategy to deal with all this grief is through religion,
finding solace in her Southern Protestant upbringing. But Doll is
dismissive of nearly all religious beliefs, comparing them to superstition.
I don't have those feelings at all, he writes, though
he does confess to having moments of wondering how so
much misfortune could befall one family. But Doll doesn't see
it as a curse or, as he puts it, a
(22:19):
doom coming down on us. He just thought, how odd.
I don't think I'm capable of taking it beyond that,
Superstition is something one grows out of. You try avoiding
all the cracks in the pavement, or you touch all
the posts in the fence, but then you find out
later that it doesn't help. You find out that it's
not going to make a bit of difference if you
step on the cracks or not. I think I just
realized subconsciously that if you start thinking about bad luck,
(22:41):
you're starting to weaken. The great thing is to keep going.
Whatever happens, Doll finishes, so unlike his father, Doll decides
to live. He becomes the embodiment of that famous Samuel
Beckett phrase, you must go on. I can't go on.
I'll go on. Tessa meanwhile, needs her parents help to
(23:05):
this poor girl. She watched her brother's accident from the sidewalk,
and now her older sister is dead. She's understandably struggling.
The Dolls take her to see Anna Freud, a pioneering
psychoanalyst and the youngest daughter of Sigmund. Anna suggests family
therapy for the Dolls, but Roled refuses. His writing still
isn't going well and he doesn't want to take any
(23:26):
chances of losing his edge. He says he seemed too
many writers who could never create anymore after they had
all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes. No therapy
for him, but Doll does need to find something, something
that will give his life meaning again. He tells Barry
Ferrell that there was something that had a huge influence
on him during the war. It was called Mcrobert's Reply.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Lady McRobert was a fine Scottish woman with a manor house,
and she had three sons, all an the raf all pilots,
and all of them killed one after the other in
nineteen forty one. Lady McRobert, upon hearing this news, gave
a tremendous sum of money to pay for the cost
of a sterling bomber, and when that plane was built,
(24:11):
she had painted on it. Lady Mcrobert's reply, I can
remember being moved by that. It was something really dauntless.
You simply cannot defeat such people.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Doc comes up with his own version of this. He
dedicates his masterpiece, The BFG, to Olivia. The book was
inspired by a story he would tell Olivia at night
while she fell asleep. Now millions of other children benefit
from it. It's not exactly a sterling bomber to avenge
his child's death, but it is his own defiant reply
to loss, transforming grief into wonder, ensuring that while one
(24:49):
little girl's laughter was silenced, countless others will echo thanks
to the pages he writes in her memory. Okay, it's
nineteen sixty five. Now Dahl has lost a daughter. He
has a son who's in and out of the hospital.
His writing is not going well. He still hasn't found
his voice or his audience. But at least he's got
(25:09):
his wife right again. Hold on tight. Just a few
years after Olivia's death, Neil lands a huge acting job.
It's the lead in a studio film being directed by
one of Hollywood's All Time Legends four time Best Director
winner John Ford.
Speaker 6 (25:25):
Back in the sixties, Orson Welles was interviewed and one
of the questions he was asked was who his favorite
American directors were. He said, well, I prefer the old masters,
by which I mean john Ford, john Ford and John Ford.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That was director of Peter Bugdanovich from a documentary called
Directed by John Ford. The movie Ford wants Patrician Neil
to star in will be his final film. He's retiring,
even though he's less than a decade removed from some
of his best work, like The Searchers and The Man
Who Shot Liberty Violence. Neil is ecstatic to work with Ford,
and it's maybe the only gig she would have said
yes to right now, because, in addition to everything else
(26:01):
going on with her family, she's just discovered she's three
months pregnant. Neil brings Doll and the kids out to
LA for the shoot. She's hoping, praying it'll be a
comforting change of scenery for the grieving family. Neil arranges
for all of them to stay in director Martin Ritt's house.
Years earlier, Ritt directed Neil to an Oscar in hud
(26:22):
By this point, his career has been derailed by the
Hollywood Blacklist for being a suspected communist. One look at
his crazy mansion of the Palisades, though, and you know
this guy isn't totally opposed to capitalism, writ and his
family are abroad, so Neil, Doll and the kids have
it all to themselves. When they arrive in La It's February.
(26:44):
Neil begins filming. Four days into the shoot, she has
the afternoon off. She comes home to give Tessa a bath. Suddenly,
out of nowhere, Neil feels a searing headache. Come on,
headache isn't even the right word. It's like a knife
in her skull. Later writes, she collapses to the floor
next to the bathtub. Dol happens to be in the bedroom,
(27:08):
so he hears the thud and comes rushing in. He
finds Neil unconscious. He quickly pulls poor Tessa out of
the tub. She's crying her eyes out looking at her
mom unconscious on the floor. Doll's panic only lasts a moment.
He's been here before. Almost an autopilot, Doll flies into action.
He's ready for this. THEO and Olivia have prepared him first,
(27:32):
he calls an ambulance, then quickly calls doctor Charles Carton,
a neurosurgeon who consulted on THEO. It's kind of an
amazing twist of fate. Only because of Theo's accident does
Doll have the home phone number of one of the
best neurosurgeons in the world. Thanks to Doll's quick thinking,
they're a UCLA medical center within twenty minutes of Neil
falling in the bathroom. Doctor Carton arrives at the same
(27:55):
time they do. He instantly takes charge, ordering tests and
X rays. Lead aprons are placed over Neil's belly to
protect the unborn child. Later, a TV movie will be
made about all this. I'm afraid it's what I suspected.
Here's the moment from the film. It's an enterrannial hemorrhage,
a stroke. If we had another.
Speaker 7 (28:13):
Hemorrhage just now research sad happened while we were X
raying in the same place.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Yes, yes, I know.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Unfortunately, you're familiar with the brain because of Theo's accident
in New York.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Another emergency involving the brain. It's almost too hard to believe. First,
in his twenties, Doll had brain damage from his plane
crash in the war. Later, his mentor, Charles Marsh died
from brain inflammation from a mosquito bite. Then theo got
a brain injury from being hit by a taxi. Olivia
died from brain inflammation from the measles, and now Neil
(28:47):
has had a brain aneurysm. What on Earth? Doctor Carton
bluntly tells dol not to be optimistic. Without surgery, Neil
will definitely die, but she's unlikely to survive the surgery,
(29:09):
and if she does survive, she'll have severe complications for
the rest of her life. Dahl has to decide what
to do. He tells the doctor to do the surgery.
So Carton and six other doctors operate on Neil for
the next seven hours. They cut a four x six
trap door in her head to remove the blood clots
(29:29):
in her brain. After the seven hours, the surgery is successful,
which is sort of shocking even to the doctors. Neil
will live, but they're sure she'll never be herself again.
Here's Dahl recounting it all to BBC. One legend, Michael Parkinson.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
I said to Charlie Carton, the surgeon, I said, well,
She's going to live now, isn't she? He said, yes,
she is. With that, I'm not sure how Tianya will
favor you see, which is the right thing to say?
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Isn't heal? Because they odds are it's a vegetable?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Well they oh, yes, with that kind of brand, Abby.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It really shakes me up when Dahl says it's a vegetable,
as if he has to emotionally distance himself from her
by making her an object. The family does its best
to keep a low profile during this impossible time, but
Neil is only two years removed from winning Best Actress.
She's one of the most famous movie stars in the
(30:27):
world at the height of her powers. And then on
February twenty second, Variety runs a story with the banner
headline film actress Patricia Neil dies at thirty nine. Only
problem is she's not dead. Reporters, fans, and photographers swarm
the hospital for the ten days after the surgery. Neil
(30:52):
remains at a coma doll has to just sit and
wait to find out what his wife will be like
when she wakes up. But over that week and a
half he makes a decision. He decides it doesn't matter
what her abilities are. When she wakes up, He's gonna
will her back to her old self no matter what.
For all of Dall's character faults, he's an amazing caretaker
in times of crisis. During her coma, Doll remains at
(31:14):
his wife's bedside all day, every day, leaving only to eat,
see the kids, or catch a few hours of sleep.
And when she wakes up, his work begins. He's determined
to get his children their mother back. It's hard not
to imagine that this is what Doll wishes his mother
had done for his father when he was three years old.
If his mother had had Doll's forceful nature, his stubbornness,
(31:36):
his arrogance, might she have forced his dad to beat
his pneumonia and depression and live so the Doll could
have grown up with the father. Neil remains in the
hospital for over a month, a few days longer than
Theo's day. In the beginning, she can barely speak, and
she doesn't seem to remember words or names or events.
But Dol won't permit that to last. It's his new
(31:59):
version of creating Theo's tube. He's going to fix Neil himself.
As Dennison writes that Pat should recover and recover fully.
Became Rold's obsessive concern. More than any doctor, nurse, or therapist,
rolled dominated the steps of Pat's recovery. When Dahl finally
takes his wife home, her right leg is in a
(32:19):
brace and she has a patch over one eye. He
quickly hires a nurse, a physiotherapist, and a speech therapist.
Doctors warn him that more than an hour per day
of therapy is too much for Neil. But with no
formal medical or therapeutic training himself, just an unshakable belief
that he knows what's right, Dahal rejects their advice and
creates a rigorous schedule for his wife all day, every day.
(32:43):
Their friends who visit are shocked at Doll's militaristic attitude.
He seems to be torturing Neil. He becomes unrelenting, forcing
her to do speech therapy five hours a day. The
only thing that keeps Neil going is looking at theo
seeing how well he's doing, which convinces her of the
brains of to heal itself. But of course it's still
(33:03):
an impossible struggle for Neil. She can barely speak or move.
She has no agency. She cries all the time as
her speech comes back and fits and starts. She blows
up at Doll constantly, and she asks Barry Ferrell, the
journalist who's covering all this and who's become one of
her best friends, how to commit suicide. Farrell, who's just thirty,
(33:24):
is totally freaked out by this world famous actress asking
him these questions. He doesn't know whether he should tell
Doll or not. It turned out not to matter, because
one night at dinner, Ferrell explains pat mentioned suicide in
front of Rold and some guests, making her usual joke
about not knowing how she had drunk a bit too
much wine, and the laughter that spilled out of her
as she spoke sounded wild and demented. Well, if that's
(33:47):
all that's sopping you, your problems are solved, Doll tells
her in front of everyone. We've got knives in the
kitchen that will do you up fine, and there are
my razor blades upstairs or else. You can lock yourself
in the car and turn on the engine, and before
you know it, Bob's your uncle. Nothing to it. Making
a joke of it is, of course, Doll's way to cope,
and then he finds another way, turning it into his fiction.
(34:09):
Here's Doll explaining to Michael Parkinson.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Again when she started to pick up words, she made
them up, and I made her list them once. I
don't know where they asked. You'd just once say you'll
drive me crazy. She used to say, you'll jake my
de Arbels. It is a spindle phrase. She used to
call it a dry martini, a red screwdriver.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Dolls taking notes on all of his wife's funny, strange
turns of phrase, and it's going to put them into
the mouth of the BFG. If you haven't read that
book in a while. Here's a typical speech by the
giant from Steven Spielberg's adaptation.
Speaker 8 (34:44):
And then there would be a great rumple dumpish, wouldn't they,
And all the human beans would be rummaging and whiffling
from the jarant what you saw and getting wildly excited.
And then they'd be locking me up in a cage
and to be looked at with all the squiggling, you know,
hippo dumplings and crocodilen dilly's and jiggy rabs, and then
(35:05):
there would be a joy gantious looksy joint hunt for
all of the boys.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I liked how that very unique speech pattern is part
of what makes the BFG one of the most indelible
characters ever put to print, And it comes right out
of his wife's stroke. On the one hand, it's not
Doll's most attractive trait to poke fun at his ill
wife's limitations. On the other, turning what must have been
intense private pain into his art is what all great
(35:31):
artists have always done. It just comes off a little
more comical in Doll's case, but he does make the
bfg's wordplay sympathetic, at least, like when he has him say,
please understand that I cannot be helping it if I
sometimes is saying things a little squiggly words, is oh,
such a twitch tickling problem to me. For Neil, of course,
it was much more terrifying than funny. Here she is
(35:52):
years later on Fresh Air speaking to Terry Gross.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
I didn't even know one word from the other when
I first became conscious. My son he used to give
me reading lessons. You know. He would say cat and dog.
I mean they'd be written because he had had to
have those cards when he was young. I didn't even
know what that meant. I knew what nothing meant. You
(36:17):
have no idea when your brain is operating on me,
you have no brain. It's sad.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
As you can hear from that clip, Neil did make
the amazing recovery that her husband insisted on. What maybe
most miraculous about the entire ordeal is that despite the
intense trauma Neil goes through, she somehow doesn't lose the pregnancy.
She was three months long when the stroke happened. In
the first week of August, Neil gives birth to their
fifth and final child, a happy, perfectly healthy baby girl, Lucy,
(36:50):
and life continues. Neil's good buddy, the actress Anne Bancroft,
steps into her role on the John Ford film and
comes by the house all the time, often with her
husband mel Brooks. Not for nothing, but knowing what we
do now about dolls feelings about Jews, there is no
amount of money I wouldn't pay to just watch him
interact with mel Brooks. Lots of Neil's friends come by
(37:12):
to see her during this period. Frank Sinatra shows up
with a stack of records, Judy Garland brings flowers, Carrie
Grant and john Ford come for coffee, Robert Altman drops
by to cook dinner for the family. Dahl's nutty rehab
program for his wife has worked. It's an incredible comeback story,
and Neil has offered tons of jobs. According to Cohen,
Mike Nichols offers her one of the most iconic roles
(37:34):
in cinema history, the part of Missus Robinson, opposite Dustin
Hoffman and the Graduate. But Neil doesn't think she's ready
for such a heavy lift, and the role goes again
to her pal An Bancroft. Instead, Neil takes on some
commercials for pain relievers, easy gigs, which speak to her recovery.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
You can't let a simple headache interfere with the joy
of life get in the way of your day. The
joys of this world belong to the bjas. Let ann
to help you bite headache pain and win well.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
The commercials pay well. The bills for Neil's medical care
are astronomical. Her insurance with the screen actor's Guil covers some,
but with Doll's insistance on round the clock rehab expenses
are adding up, and without Neil fully back at work,
Doll has to become the breadwinner. Doll tries to figure
out how he can start making some real money. He
(38:25):
shifts gears. Doll has always gotten a lot of pleasure
out of making up stories for his kids, and with
Olivia and Theo's accidents, his kids have been on his
mind non stop for several years now. He decides to
try an experiment. He takes one of his old stories
for adults, William and Mary, about a troubled marriage, and
more or less rewrites it for kids. It's a strange
idea for a children's story, but it's about to become
(38:46):
about a million times more successful in that forum than
it ever was for adults. He does the same thing
with another one of his adult stories, fifty Thousand frog Skins,
and again it becomes a classic. It took Dahl going
through everything you just heard with his wife and especially
with his children for him to finally find his voice.
(39:09):
Doll is about to get everything he's ever wanted become
one of the richest, most famous, most successful men in
the world. We'll hear all of that in our next episode,
and we'll also hear how he basically does everything he
possibly can to screw it all up. The secret world
(39:31):
of Role Dall is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax
Studios for iHeart Podcasts. Created and written by me Aaron Tracy,
produced by Matt Schrader. Post production by wind Hill Studios,
with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips.
Editing by Ryan Seton, Music by a PM. Executive producers
(39:54):
Nathan Cloke, Karl Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Treece.
Additional voice performances and recreation by Mark Henry Phillips and
eleven Laps. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to
rate and review The Secret World of Role Dall on
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Copyright twenty
(40:15):
twenty six Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax
Before we start the episode. One production note. In this episode,
we have a lot of quotes from Roald Dahl from
his interviews with Barry Ferrell. Rather than just have me
read them in my terrible British accent, we decided to
bring them to life, so we use an actor's performance
and some custom software to create a doll like voice. Okay,
now onto the episode. We've heard a lot about Roll
(00:25):
Dall so far. His days is a fighter pilot, his
work as a spy with The Irregulars, his screenwriting in Hollywood.
What if I told you that on his way to
becoming the most successful children's author ever, Dahl took a
quick little detour to become a world class neuroscientist. At
this point in the season, I feel like you might
actually believe me as you should. Here's Tom Solomon, a
(00:47):
doctor who knew Dall, speaking on Liverpool TV.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
In his life he did some amazing medical things. He
actually invented a neurosurgical device to treat watch on the
brain to treat hydroch for us, and the treatments leant
very good, so he invented a new one and it
was used around the world.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Thousands of children benefited.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Okay, then roll Doll the neuroscience engineer. I promise it's
an even crazier story than that doctor just alluded to.
But in order to really understand why it was necessary
for him to become an expert in the brain, I
got to tell you about Doll's kids. Of all the
masks that Doll tries on, this is going to be
his most challenging doting father. For my hard podcast Imagine
(01:35):
Entertainment and Parallax, I'm Marrion Tracy and this is the
Secret world of Role Dall Episode five. I didn't become
a father until after my career had sort of found
its footing, until I had some stability, which took a while,
because you know, I'm a writer. But when Dahl becomes
(01:57):
a dad, he's still trying to figure out his career,
to figure out what kind of writer he is. He
hasn't found his voice yet. He's still attempting adult fiction
in the vein of his heroes like Hemingway, Graham Green,
and C. S. Forrester. In other words, he's writing this muscular,
macho prose focused on action. His stories at this time
are also filled with the pretty explicit sexual adventures of
his heroes. If you've never read these stories and only
(02:20):
no Doll from his kids books, you will be shocked.
Start with my Uncle Oswald. It is raunchy, but here's
what I'm getting at. It takes Doll going on the
insane journey with his family that you're about to hear
for him to figure out who his natural audience is
and what kind of writer he is. In nineteen sixty,
(02:40):
Doll and Neil welcome their third child, Theo, their only son.
With two daughters already at home, Olivia and Tessa, Doll
is thrilled to finally have a boy. According to writer
Nadia Cohen, Doll writes pretty graphically about his excitement over
the babies boy parts that I'm not going to subject
you to here. I'll just say he compares it to
(03:01):
an exotic flower glowing with promise and leave it at that.
Dall immediately feels a special kinship with Theo, the only
boy in a family of sisters, just like Dahl had been.
Six weeks after Theo's birth, the family moves to New
York for the winter. Dahl explains what happens next to
Barry Ferrell, a journalist, to welcome back to a bunch
(03:21):
because he practically moves in with the family. During this period,
Farrell writes an entire book about what he witnesses. I
think Farrell was originally just hoping to write a cozy
Sunday profile, but ended up becoming embedded with the dolls,
like a war correspondent in a combat zone. So the
family is living in New York. Dall is struggling to
write his short stories while his wife pat Neil, is
(03:43):
on a break from shooting breakfast to Tiffany's. Dall tells
Ferrell what happens next.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
It was December fifth, nineteen sixty. We had a nurse
then Susan and Susan had THEO in his pram on
their way to pick up Olivia from her nursery school
two blocks from home, and a cab shot passed and
took the pram right out of Susan's hands. Susan dashed
(04:13):
across after it. The plan had flown forty feet through
the air and into the side of a boss.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
THEO was just four months old.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Tessa, three years old, is left standing alone on the
sidewalk as Susan rushes into the street. The police are
there within minutes and they rush them all to the hospital.
Neil is only a few blocks away when the accident happens.
She hears the sirens pass, but she has no idea
they're for her infant son. When she walks into their apartment,
the telephone is already ringing. As soon as she receives
(04:48):
the news, she hangs up and calls Doll at his office.
She doesn't have the full story, yet doesn't sound overly alarmed.
THEO has been hurt, she tells him. They say, not
too seriously, we have to go to the hospital. Dohl
throws on a coat and gets ready to leave, but
before he can get out the door, Susan calls from
the hospital, hysterical, saying, hurry, hurry, So then I knew
(05:10):
it was bad, Doll says, THEO is an emergency. When
we get there, Doll continues, they x ray him and
find lots of fractures, very critical shape, they say. In
her memoir, Neil goes even further, writing that the doctor
pulled them aside after examining THEO. He told them we
are doing everything we can, but he is going to die.
(05:32):
From that moment on, Neil essentially moves into the hospital,
living off stale coffee, sleeping in a chair beside her
son's bed, obsessed with the rhythms of his labored breathing
when he sleeps, which is a lot of the time.
Neil climbs two flights of stairs on unsteady legs to
another kind of visial. In an upstairs room at this
very same hospital is her old friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman,
(05:54):
who's keeping watch over Dashiell Hammett, the famous detective novelist
and her longtime romantic partner. He's dying lung cancer. It's
a really cruel symmetry. You might remember Hellman played matchmaker
for Doll o' neil by throwing that dinner party years ago.
That was the bright beginning of something in a beautiful
setting filled with brilliant writers and celebrities. Now the two
(06:14):
women are together again in the opposite of that glamorous setting,
no more fancy dresses, no makeup, just trapped in a
sterile Manhattan tower, terrified and grieving. But back to Dol.
He tells Ferrell about the dreadful special nurses that kept
getting called in to theo's room. One of these nurses
walks right in and before even attending to THEO. She
(06:37):
shows dollan Neil in newspaper clipping about the accident and says,
how thrilled she is to be assigned this case. This
is something Doll and Neil are going to have to
get used to. Unfortunately, Neil is a world famous movie star.
Her son being in an accident like this is huge
international news, and some of the nurses seem much more
interested in getting Neil's autograph than in paying attention to
her son. They seem downright distracted. One afternoon, Doll observes
(07:01):
a nurse giving THEO a dose of an anti convulsant,
and she's giving him a ton of it. Doll says,
isn't that rather a lot? Yeah, sir, no half an
ounce like it's supposed to be. She replies, calmly, well,
it was supposed to be a tenth of a gram.
Doll later explains, a hell of a lot less. Doctors
rush in and start to pump the stomach of this
(07:23):
poor four month old baby after the nurse's mistake. Despite
the comfort of having helmet and ham it right upstairs,
the Dolls decide to get the hell out of this hospital,
so they wrap THEO and blankets, pick him up in
their arms and just carry him out. All the doctors
are standing around, looking very worried and protesting, Doll says,
but their minds are made up to make matters worse.
(07:45):
It's a crazy snow day in New York. But then
Niel's longtime agent, Harvey Orkin, suddenly materializes with a car.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Doll continues, It was snowing like hell, and we were desperate.
But then Harvey suddenly materialized with a car, and he
drove very fast and very skillfully through the blizzard, with
cars skidding at odd angles all around us. I'd not
forgotten my ride, because here was Harvey, an unhappyish chap,
(08:14):
a wise, cracky fellow, a person I wasn't so keen on,
and who doubtlessly wasn't so fond of me. Yet there
was Harvey, still the sort of friend who would drive
through the snow for you in an emergency.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I love this, Dezel. Loyalty is such an important theme
in Doll's work. Think of Matilda and Miss Honey, Sophie
and the BFG Charlie and Grandpa Joe. You can just
feel how much it means to Doll that this guy,
this agent, who's not even a close friend, has nevertheless
shown up in a snowstorm to save them. Harvey drives
them to Presbyterian Hospital. I know it well, It's where
(08:52):
I had both of my kids. Here. The doctors evaluate
THEO and operate on him for a subdermal hematoma, which
is a kind of swelling cause by bleeding into the brain.
And they put it right, Dahl says, a huge, huge relief. Still,
THEO will stay in the hospital inside an oxygen tent
for the next two weeks. It's a terrible period. THEO
(09:12):
goes temporarily blind from cerebro spinal fluid accumulating around his brain,
which requires another operation. Remember he's only four months old.
Each operation is incredibly dangerous. Neil somehow stays relatively calm
through it all. She has a kind of strength you
could only step back from and admire. Doll later gushes
about his wife. THEO finally gets released from the hospital
(09:45):
right before Christmas. He goes home, but he's a bunch
of terrifying stepbacks, according to Dennison, including a build up
of cerebro spinal fluid pressing on the brain that renders
him silent, unseen, unmoving. Every time there's this build up
of food, they have to hurry him back to the
hospital for the fluid to be drained, and of course
this puts THEO at risk of blindness, brain damage, and death.
(10:08):
Doctors try to prevent further fluid build up with a
drainage tube, but the tube keeps getting blocked, making another
operation necessary, and with every operation the stakes are raised
and the chances lesson of restoring theo's sight and brain function.
Neil says, whenever they take THEO back in for surgery,
he looks up at us with those huge, desolate, bewildered
eyes that ask, why are you doing this to me again?
(10:34):
THEO has eight operations in thirty months, all before he's
three years old, and it's almost all due to the
inability of this tube to work. I think in a
lot of partnerships, when one person becomes pessimistic or feels
defeated about something, the other person just naturally becomes more
optimistic and upbeat. I've definitely experienced this over the years
(10:56):
in writing partnerships. While Neil may be showing a ton
of strength, THEO, she's genuinely not sure if he's going
to make it through all this so Dall takes the
opposite outlook. According to Dennison, Again, Dall sets aside any
assumption that THEO will die. He just puts it out
of his mind and sets out to find a way
to save him. Doll's sole focus becomes this tube that
(11:17):
keeps failing. He writes, I couldn't believe that with everything
science had come up with, they couldn't produce one little
clogproof tube. That little clogproof tube becomes his life's mission.
But what the hell does a writer know about medical tubes?
Without any medical expertise, a drawn Dall relies on his
(11:38):
creativity instead. But where to begin. His first call is
to doctor Kenneth Till, a pediatric neurosurgeon who's been in
charge of THEO at the hospital. Till can help with
the science, but they need someone else, to someone who
can help with the design. In a very inspired, very creative,
very dolly in move, Doll decides to call a toy maker.
(12:00):
He knows Stanley Wade. Doll had once bought model airplanes
from Wade for his nephew, and he remembers how ingenious
Wade was with tiny instruments. Together the three of them,
Doll Till and Wade spend hours in Doll's living room
brainstorming ideas. It's not that different from the writer's room
in la where Walt Disney first taught Doll how to
(12:21):
collaborate years ago. They throw ideas on the board, rejecting
ones that don't work and building on those that do.
They take breaks to play pool, They snack, they laugh,
They pour coffee down their throats by the gallon. In hindsight,
what they come up with seem so obvious, but no
one had done it before. For instance, until that moment,
all of these tubes were made of plastic, which was
(12:42):
expensive and hard to sterilize. Doll and his two partners
swapped out the plastic for stainless steel, which made the
device more durable and also way easier to disinfect and
prevent infections. They also changed the designs slightly to give
the tube a bigger surface area, which prevented fluid from
flowing back into the brain and eating blackage. Again, sounds obvious,
(13:03):
but no one had ever come up with a design
that reduced the risk of blockage before. I don't know
if it's the special alchemy of these three specific men
with their very different skill sets or the urgency. Doll
feels to get this done quickly to save his son.
But together, Doll, Till and Wade come up with a
better tube than has ever existed. Can I just stop
(13:23):
for a second here to say, Oh my God? With
absolutely no training, Doll wills himself to come up with
this breakthrough device in order to save theo his only son.
Is that not the greatest thing you've ever heard? His
poor infant son is dying. Nothing is working, and instead
of just throwing his hands up, he literally invents the solution.
It takes two years for them to build it, which
(13:45):
is roughly forty thousand years fewer than it would have
taken me. The Wade Doll Till valve name for its
three innovators, is so successful that it soon gets manufactured globally.
Dall insists they not make a profit on it in
order to be able to distribute it cheaply. According to
the National Library of Medicine at NIH, the device is
(14:06):
estimated to have been used in two to three thousand
children worldwide in the two years after they came up
with it. It's especially useful in developing nations, where medical
devices like this mean the difference between life and death.
Not to take us off topic, but a quick aside
just to say that I did a bunch of research
around this, and the only similar example I've found of
(14:27):
anything like this ever happening a breakthrough medical device getting
created by someone without medical training is exactly one year later,
a guy named Paul Winchell, a TV actor who appeared
in lots of sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and The
Beverly Hillbillies and was the original voice of Tigger and
Winnie the Pooh. He co creates the first artificial heart.
I have nothing more to say about that except what
(14:49):
the hell was happening in the sixties for Dahl. Creating
the tube is another incredible feat in a life full
of them. I think each of these accomplishments was only
possible because of the one that came before. They all
built on each other. When Doll was recruited into the
Irregulars in his twenties without any espionage training, he didn't
know what he was doing, but in a matter of
(15:10):
months he was hanging out with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
When he decided to write movies, he was completely clueless,
but soon he was on top of Hollywood, working with
Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. When you go through life
like that with no apparent ceiling to what's possible, with
life constantly reinforcing your crazy ambitions, you must start to
feel like nothing is out of reach. So when no
(15:31):
device exists to help cure your infant son, you don't
go to church and pray. You call a doctor and
a toymaker you know, and say let's get to work. Doll,
of course, later puts all of this into his writing.
The lead character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is partly
based on the toymaker Wade, and Willy Wonka has parts
(15:51):
of all three men, an innovating scientist, a creative genius,
a toy making savant. But instead of torturing children like
Wonka does, Doll and his buddies build a device to
save them.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Invention, my dear friends, is ninety three percent per aspiration,
six percent electricity, four percent evaporation, and two percent.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
But a Scotch ripple that's one hundred and five percent. That's,
of course, the line from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
But Doll isn't yet ready to write that he's still
a few years away from dreaming wanka up. He's still
writing for the wrong audience, namely adults, and it's not
going well. Doll's creative frustration start bleeding into his home life,
adding strain to a family already fractured by theo's accident.
(16:37):
But if he thinks the pressures are intense right now,
they're nothing compared to what's lying right around the corner.
Doll o'niel's second oldest daughter, Tessa, sums up what's about
to happen well when she says, theirs was a family
that quote toppled unwittingly over the edge of a jagged
cliff face into a canyon of darkness, which was filled
with such sadness, such total devastation, that we would never recover. Yeah,
(17:01):
get ready. Olivia is Dall o'nil's first born. It's now
November nineteen sixty two, a little less than two years
after Theo's accident. The family has left New York and
(17:22):
is living in England. Now, Olivia comes home with a
note from the headmistress of her elementary school warning of
a measles outbreak. She's seven years old. Doll Emil's first thought,
of course, is about THEO. After what he's been through,
they can't risk him getting the virus under any circumstances.
Vaccines against the disease are still pretty uncommon in this era,
(17:43):
and doses are unlimited supply. But pulling some strings, Meal
is able to obtain the vaccine for THEO, which means Olivia,
who's perfectly healthy, doesn't get any protection. And of course
Olivia contracts measles. It does seem like a terrible case
at first, but here's doll on what happens next.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
One morning, when Olivia was well on the road to recovery,
I was sitting on her bed showing her how to
fashion little animals out of colored pipe cleaners, And when
it came to her turn to make one herself, I
noticed that her fingers in her mind were not working together,
and she couldn't do anything.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
How are you feeling all right, I asked her. I
feel all sleepy, she said. In an hour she was unconscious,
and in twelve hours she was dead.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
In such a cruel mirror to his own childhood, Olivia
is seven when she dies, the same age Doll's older sister,
Astri was when she died. The defining moment of Doll's childhood,
repeated again in his adulthood. In Doll's memoir Boy, he
writes about Astri she was far and away my father's favorite.
He says he adored her beyond measure, and her sudden
(19:05):
death left him literally speechless for days afterwards. Dall's father
was so overwhelmed with grief that when he himself went
down in pneumonia a few weeks after Astrey died, he
didn't care whether or not he survived. Doll writes, a
patient had to fight to survive. My father refused to fight.
He was thinking, I am quite sure of his beloved daughter,
(19:29):
and he was wanting to join her in heaven. So
he died too. He was fifty seven years old. My
mother had now lost a daughter and a husband, all
in the space of a few weeks. Heaven knows what
it must have felt like to be hit with a
double catastrophe like this, Doll finishes, which is such a
strange turn of phrase, because, of course Dall was hit
with it too. He was three years old. So the
(19:54):
big question right now for Doll can he be stronger
than his father? Was? He genuine he doesn't know the answer.
He becomes lost. He begins drinking more and taking more
painkillers for his old back injury from the plane crash.
It happened so swiftly that one didn't have time to
prepare for it. Doll writes, I was in a kind
of daze, I suppose, and morbid thoughts kept after me.
(20:16):
That kind of thought can run you down, you know,
worrying about fate and the meaning of things. I couldn't
do any writing, and that went on for about a
year and a half. According to Dennison, Doll's only recourse
is to try to figure out exactly what happened to Olivia.
Maybe he can invent something that will help others in
the same situation, like the medical tube he made for THEO.
(20:38):
He remembers that Olivia strangely hadn't had a reaction to
her smallpox vaccinations years before, meaning she seemed naturally immune
to that disease. Huh, maybe there was a connection between
that and her measle's reaction. He begins writing letters to
specialists around the globe. He is desperate for answers. Dall
tells Barry Ferrell.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I got the idea that the must be some way
of finding out in advance if a child is susceptible
to this. I wanted to set up a careful investigation,
and I was prepared to get in touch with every
parent of every child in this country who had had
severe complications from measles. I thought of drawing up a
questionnaire and correlating the answers. But by then the inoculation
(21:19):
against measles had become more common in England, so the
problem had been very largely erased.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Still, Dahl seems hell banned on blaming himself for Olivia's death.
After Theo's accident on the Upper East Side, Dal O'Neil
had decided to get the hell out of Manhattan.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Normally we would have been in New York in November,
but after the accident we said, let's get out of
this place where children are hit by taxi cabs, and
we moved our permanent household to England. Of course, Olivia
wouldn't have died if we had stayed in New York.
They had the inoculations there, but here in England they
(21:56):
weren't available them.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Meal's strategy to deal with all this grief is through religion,
finding solace in her Southern Protestant upbringing. But Doll is
dismissive of nearly all religious beliefs, comparing them to superstition.
I don't have those feelings at all, he writes, though
he does confess to having moments of wondering how so
much misfortune could befall one family. But Doll doesn't see
it as a curse or, as he puts it, a
(22:19):
doom coming down on us. He just thought, how odd.
I don't think I'm capable of taking it beyond that,
Superstition is something one grows out of. You try avoiding
all the cracks in the pavement, or you touch all
the posts in the fence, but then you find out
later that it doesn't help. You find out that it's
not going to make a bit of difference if you
step on the cracks or not. I think I just
realized subconsciously that if you start thinking about bad luck,
(22:41):
you're starting to weaken. The great thing is to keep going.
Whatever happens, Doll finishes, so unlike his father, Doll decides
to live. He becomes the embodiment of that famous Samuel
Beckett phrase, you must go on. I can't go on.
I'll go on. Tessa meanwhile, needs her parents help to
(23:05):
this poor girl. She watched her brother's accident from the sidewalk,
and now her older sister is dead. She's understandably struggling.
The Dolls take her to see Anna Freud, a pioneering
psychoanalyst and the youngest daughter of Sigmund. Anna suggests family
therapy for the Dolls, but Roled refuses. His writing still
isn't going well and he doesn't want to take any
(23:26):
chances of losing his edge. He says he seemed too
many writers who could never create anymore after they had
all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes. No therapy
for him, but Doll does need to find something, something
that will give his life meaning again. He tells Barry
Ferrell that there was something that had a huge influence
on him during the war. It was called Mcrobert's Reply.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Lady McRobert was a fine Scottish woman with a manor house,
and she had three sons, all an the raf all pilots,
and all of them killed one after the other in
nineteen forty one. Lady McRobert, upon hearing this news, gave
a tremendous sum of money to pay for the cost
of a sterling bomber, and when that plane was built,
(24:11):
she had painted on it. Lady Mcrobert's reply, I can
remember being moved by that. It was something really dauntless.
You simply cannot defeat such people.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Doc comes up with his own version of this. He
dedicates his masterpiece, The BFG, to Olivia. The book was
inspired by a story he would tell Olivia at night
while she fell asleep. Now millions of other children benefit
from it. It's not exactly a sterling bomber to avenge
his child's death, but it is his own defiant reply
to loss, transforming grief into wonder, ensuring that while one
(24:49):
little girl's laughter was silenced, countless others will echo thanks
to the pages he writes in her memory. Okay, it's
nineteen sixty five. Now Dahl has lost a daughter. He
has a son who's in and out of the hospital.
His writing is not going well. He still hasn't found
his voice or his audience. But at least he's got
(25:09):
his wife right again. Hold on tight. Just a few
years after Olivia's death, Neil lands a huge acting job.
It's the lead in a studio film being directed by
one of Hollywood's All Time Legends four time Best Director
winner John Ford.
Speaker 6 (25:25):
Back in the sixties, Orson Welles was interviewed and one
of the questions he was asked was who his favorite
American directors were. He said, well, I prefer the old masters,
by which I mean john Ford, john Ford and John Ford.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That was director of Peter Bugdanovich from a documentary called
Directed by John Ford. The movie Ford wants Patrician Neil
to star in will be his final film. He's retiring,
even though he's less than a decade removed from some
of his best work, like The Searchers and The Man
Who Shot Liberty Violence. Neil is ecstatic to work with Ford,
and it's maybe the only gig she would have said
yes to right now, because, in addition to everything else
(26:01):
going on with her family, she's just discovered she's three
months pregnant. Neil brings Doll and the kids out to
LA for the shoot. She's hoping, praying it'll be a
comforting change of scenery for the grieving family. Neil arranges
for all of them to stay in director Martin Ritt's house.
Years earlier, Ritt directed Neil to an Oscar in hud
(26:22):
By this point, his career has been derailed by the
Hollywood Blacklist for being a suspected communist. One look at
his crazy mansion of the Palisades, though, and you know
this guy isn't totally opposed to capitalism, writ and his
family are abroad, so Neil, Doll and the kids have
it all to themselves. When they arrive in La It's February.
(26:44):
Neil begins filming. Four days into the shoot, she has
the afternoon off. She comes home to give Tessa a bath. Suddenly,
out of nowhere, Neil feels a searing headache. Come on,
headache isn't even the right word. It's like a knife
in her skull. Later writes, she collapses to the floor
next to the bathtub. Dol happens to be in the bedroom,
(27:08):
so he hears the thud and comes rushing in. He
finds Neil unconscious. He quickly pulls poor Tessa out of
the tub. She's crying her eyes out looking at her
mom unconscious on the floor. Doll's panic only lasts a moment.
He's been here before. Almost an autopilot, Doll flies into action.
He's ready for this. THEO and Olivia have prepared him first,
(27:32):
he calls an ambulance, then quickly calls doctor Charles Carton,
a neurosurgeon who consulted on THEO. It's kind of an
amazing twist of fate. Only because of Theo's accident does
Doll have the home phone number of one of the
best neurosurgeons in the world. Thanks to Doll's quick thinking,
they're a UCLA medical center within twenty minutes of Neil
falling in the bathroom. Doctor Carton arrives at the same
(27:55):
time they do. He instantly takes charge, ordering tests and
X rays. Lead aprons are placed over Neil's belly to
protect the unborn child. Later, a TV movie will be
made about all this. I'm afraid it's what I suspected.
Here's the moment from the film. It's an enterrannial hemorrhage,
a stroke. If we had another.
Speaker 7 (28:13):
Hemorrhage just now research sad happened while we were X
raying in the same place.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Yes, yes, I know.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
Unfortunately, you're familiar with the brain because of Theo's accident
in New York.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Another emergency involving the brain. It's almost too hard to believe. First,
in his twenties, Doll had brain damage from his plane
crash in the war. Later, his mentor, Charles Marsh died
from brain inflammation from a mosquito bite. Then theo got
a brain injury from being hit by a taxi. Olivia
died from brain inflammation from the measles, and now Neil
(28:47):
has had a brain aneurysm. What on Earth? Doctor Carton
bluntly tells dol not to be optimistic. Without surgery, Neil
will definitely die, but she's unlikely to survive the surgery,
(29:09):
and if she does survive, she'll have severe complications for
the rest of her life. Dahl has to decide what
to do. He tells the doctor to do the surgery.
So Carton and six other doctors operate on Neil for
the next seven hours. They cut a four x six
trap door in her head to remove the blood clots
(29:29):
in her brain. After the seven hours, the surgery is successful,
which is sort of shocking even to the doctors. Neil
will live, but they're sure she'll never be herself again.
Here's Dahl recounting it all to BBC. One legend, Michael Parkinson.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
I said to Charlie Carton, the surgeon, I said, well,
She's going to live now, isn't she? He said, yes,
she is. With that, I'm not sure how Tianya will
favor you see, which is the right thing to say?
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Isn't heal? Because they odds are it's a vegetable?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Well they oh, yes, with that kind of brand, Abby.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It really shakes me up when Dahl says it's a vegetable,
as if he has to emotionally distance himself from her
by making her an object. The family does its best
to keep a low profile during this impossible time, but
Neil is only two years removed from winning Best Actress.
She's one of the most famous movie stars in the
(30:27):
world at the height of her powers. And then on
February twenty second, Variety runs a story with the banner
headline film actress Patricia Neil dies at thirty nine. Only
problem is she's not dead. Reporters, fans, and photographers swarm
the hospital for the ten days after the surgery. Neil
(30:52):
remains at a coma doll has to just sit and
wait to find out what his wife will be like
when she wakes up. But over that week and a
half he makes a decision. He decides it doesn't matter
what her abilities are. When she wakes up, He's gonna
will her back to her old self no matter what.
For all of Dall's character faults, he's an amazing caretaker
in times of crisis. During her coma, Doll remains at
(31:14):
his wife's bedside all day, every day, leaving only to eat,
see the kids, or catch a few hours of sleep.
And when she wakes up, his work begins. He's determined
to get his children their mother back. It's hard not
to imagine that this is what Doll wishes his mother
had done for his father when he was three years old.
If his mother had had Doll's forceful nature, his stubbornness,
(31:36):
his arrogance, might she have forced his dad to beat
his pneumonia and depression and live so the Doll could
have grown up with the father. Neil remains in the
hospital for over a month, a few days longer than
Theo's day. In the beginning, she can barely speak, and
she doesn't seem to remember words or names or events.
But Dol won't permit that to last. It's his new
(31:59):
version of creating Theo's tube. He's going to fix Neil himself.
As Dennison writes that Pat should recover and recover fully.
Became Rold's obsessive concern. More than any doctor, nurse, or therapist,
rolled dominated the steps of Pat's recovery. When Dahl finally
takes his wife home, her right leg is in a
(32:19):
brace and she has a patch over one eye. He
quickly hires a nurse, a physiotherapist, and a speech therapist.
Doctors warn him that more than an hour per day
of therapy is too much for Neil. But with no
formal medical or therapeutic training himself, just an unshakable belief
that he knows what's right, Dahal rejects their advice and
creates a rigorous schedule for his wife all day, every day.
(32:43):
Their friends who visit are shocked at Doll's militaristic attitude.
He seems to be torturing Neil. He becomes unrelenting, forcing
her to do speech therapy five hours a day. The
only thing that keeps Neil going is looking at theo
seeing how well he's doing, which convinces her of the
brains of to heal itself. But of course it's still
(33:03):
an impossible struggle for Neil. She can barely speak or move.
She has no agency. She cries all the time as
her speech comes back and fits and starts. She blows
up at Doll constantly, and she asks Barry Ferrell, the
journalist who's covering all this and who's become one of
her best friends, how to commit suicide. Farrell, who's just thirty,
(33:24):
is totally freaked out by this world famous actress asking
him these questions. He doesn't know whether he should tell
Doll or not. It turned out not to matter, because
one night at dinner, Ferrell explains pat mentioned suicide in
front of Rold and some guests, making her usual joke
about not knowing how she had drunk a bit too
much wine, and the laughter that spilled out of her
as she spoke sounded wild and demented. Well, if that's
(33:47):
all that's sopping you, your problems are solved, Doll tells
her in front of everyone. We've got knives in the
kitchen that will do you up fine, and there are
my razor blades upstairs or else. You can lock yourself
in the car and turn on the engine, and before
you know it, Bob's your uncle. Nothing to it. Making
a joke of it is, of course, Doll's way to cope,
and then he finds another way, turning it into his fiction.
(34:09):
Here's Doll explaining to Michael Parkinson.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Again when she started to pick up words, she made
them up, and I made her list them once. I
don't know where they asked. You'd just once say you'll
drive me crazy. She used to say, you'll jake my
de Arbels. It is a spindle phrase. She used to
call it a dry martini, a red screwdriver.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Dolls taking notes on all of his wife's funny, strange
turns of phrase, and it's going to put them into
the mouth of the BFG. If you haven't read that
book in a while. Here's a typical speech by the
giant from Steven Spielberg's adaptation.
Speaker 8 (34:44):
And then there would be a great rumple dumpish, wouldn't they,
And all the human beans would be rummaging and whiffling
from the jarant what you saw and getting wildly excited.
And then they'd be locking me up in a cage
and to be looked at with all the squiggling, you know,
hippo dumplings and crocodilen dilly's and jiggy rabs, and then
(35:05):
there would be a joy gantious looksy joint hunt for
all of the boys.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I liked how that very unique speech pattern is part
of what makes the BFG one of the most indelible
characters ever put to print, And it comes right out
of his wife's stroke. On the one hand, it's not
Doll's most attractive trait to poke fun at his ill
wife's limitations. On the other, turning what must have been
intense private pain into his art is what all great
(35:31):
artists have always done. It just comes off a little
more comical in Doll's case, but he does make the
bfg's wordplay sympathetic, at least, like when he has him say,
please understand that I cannot be helping it if I
sometimes is saying things a little squiggly words, is oh,
such a twitch tickling problem to me. For Neil, of course,
it was much more terrifying than funny. Here she is
(35:52):
years later on Fresh Air speaking to Terry Gross.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
I didn't even know one word from the other when
I first became conscious. My son he used to give
me reading lessons. You know. He would say cat and dog.
I mean they'd be written because he had had to
have those cards when he was young. I didn't even
know what that meant. I knew what nothing meant. You
(36:17):
have no idea when your brain is operating on me,
you have no brain. It's sad.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
As you can hear from that clip, Neil did make
the amazing recovery that her husband insisted on. What maybe
most miraculous about the entire ordeal is that despite the
intense trauma Neil goes through, she somehow doesn't lose the pregnancy.
She was three months long when the stroke happened. In
the first week of August, Neil gives birth to their
fifth and final child, a happy, perfectly healthy baby girl, Lucy,
(36:50):
and life continues. Neil's good buddy, the actress Anne Bancroft,
steps into her role on the John Ford film and
comes by the house all the time, often with her
husband mel Brooks. Not for nothing, but knowing what we
do now about dolls feelings about Jews, there is no
amount of money I wouldn't pay to just watch him
interact with mel Brooks. Lots of Neil's friends come by
(37:12):
to see her during this period. Frank Sinatra shows up
with a stack of records, Judy Garland brings flowers, Carrie
Grant and john Ford come for coffee, Robert Altman drops
by to cook dinner for the family. Dahl's nutty rehab
program for his wife has worked. It's an incredible comeback story,
and Neil has offered tons of jobs. According to Cohen,
Mike Nichols offers her one of the most iconic roles
(37:34):
in cinema history, the part of Missus Robinson, opposite Dustin
Hoffman and the Graduate. But Neil doesn't think she's ready
for such a heavy lift, and the role goes again
to her pal An Bancroft. Instead, Neil takes on some
commercials for pain relievers, easy gigs, which speak to her recovery.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
You can't let a simple headache interfere with the joy
of life get in the way of your day. The
joys of this world belong to the bjas. Let ann
to help you bite headache pain and win well.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
The commercials pay well. The bills for Neil's medical care
are astronomical. Her insurance with the screen actor's Guil covers some,
but with Doll's insistance on round the clock rehab expenses
are adding up, and without Neil fully back at work,
Doll has to become the breadwinner. Doll tries to figure
out how he can start making some real money. He
(38:25):
shifts gears. Doll has always gotten a lot of pleasure
out of making up stories for his kids, and with
Olivia and Theo's accidents, his kids have been on his
mind non stop for several years now. He decides to
try an experiment. He takes one of his old stories
for adults, William and Mary, about a troubled marriage, and
more or less rewrites it for kids. It's a strange
idea for a children's story, but it's about to become
(38:46):
about a million times more successful in that forum than
it ever was for adults. He does the same thing
with another one of his adult stories, fifty Thousand frog Skins,
and again it becomes a classic. It took Dahl going
through everything you just heard with his wife and especially
with his children for him to finally find his voice.
(39:09):
Doll is about to get everything he's ever wanted become
one of the richest, most famous, most successful men in
the world. We'll hear all of that in our next episode,
and we'll also hear how he basically does everything he
possibly can to screw it all up. The secret world
(39:31):
of Role Dall is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax
Studios for iHeart Podcasts. Created and written by me Aaron Tracy,
produced by Matt Schrader. Post production by wind Hill Studios,
with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips.
Editing by Ryan Seton, Music by a PM. Executive producers
(39:54):
Nathan Cloke, Karl Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Treece.
Additional voice performances and recreation by Mark Henry Phillips and
eleven Laps. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to
rate and review The Secret World of Role Dall on
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Copyright twenty
(40:15):
twenty six Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax
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