Cold Open

It’s the evening of September 19th, 1940, in the skies above the Sahara Desert in east Libya; one year into World War II.

24-year-old British Pilot Officer Roald Dahl dips the wing of his fighter plane and searches the ground for his destination.

After joining the Royal Air Force last month, Roald received orders to support the squadron battling Italy for control of North Africa. Roald was assured that his squadron’s airbase was in this area. But as dusk falls, he can’t find it—and he’s almost out of fuel.

With one last check of the horizon, Roald realizes he’s going to have to land here, in the desert, and hope for the best.

Roald throttles back, swings his plane toward a flat area of sand, and descends to the ground.

As gently as possible, Roald touches down and applies the brake… but as he skids and shutters to a stop, one of his wheels hits a boulder concealed by the sand. The plane’s nose is pulled violently to the ground and Roald’s head snaps forward, hitting a sharp metal gunsight.

At the same time, the aircraft’s fuel tank ruptures and then ignites.

Now only semi-conscious, Roald uses the last of his energy to unclip his harness and try to crawl out of the cockpit.

Heaving himself out of the plane, Roald drops to the ground and then begins to hear bullets fly through the air. Confused and terrified Roald wonders if he stumbled onto an enemy position but then realizes it's his plane’s own machine guns that are firing off in the heat of the fire. All Roald can do is crawl a few yards away before he slumps into the sand, unconscious.

Roald will later learn that the location he was given for his squadron’s airbase was incorrect. His crash landing occurs in a no-man’s land between the British and Italian lines. But thankfully a British rescue party will get to him before he succumbs to his wounds. Although Roald survives the crash and returns to active duty, the aftereffects of his head injury will eventually end his flying career but incidentally kickstart his literary life, turning Roald into one of the world’s most popular children’s authors after the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on January 17th, 1964.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is January 17th, 1964: Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” Hits Bookshelves.

Act One

It’s early summer 1942, at a restaurant in Washington, DC; two years after Roald Dahl crashed his plane in North Africa.

Roald is sitting with another man, talking fast and with animated gestures, ignoring his plate of smoked salmon as he excitedly recounts his previous scrape with death.

A lot has happened since then. After five months convalescing following his crash-landing in the Sahara Desert, Roald was cleared for duty again. He became a fighter ace by shooting down five enemy planes over Greece and Egypt, but Roald was plagued by severe headaches resulting from the injuries sustained in his crash. As a result, he flew for less than a year before leaving active service and being sent to the US as an assistant attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. But today, Roald is leaving that bureaucracy behind, to be interviewed by a journalist who wants to write about the former fighter pilot’s desert crash and recovery for the Saturday Evening Post.

Roald laughs as he describes how he felt when his eyesight finally returned after several days of being blind. But his smile fades when he notices the journalist’s stressed demeanor and the messy scrawl on his notepad. Roald realizes he’s been talking so fast and excitedly that the journalist can’t keep up.

To make amends, Roald offers to quickly write up his wartime experiences himself. He’ll give his account to the journalist, who can use it to write his article. The relieved writer agrees to call the next day to pick it up.

So, that night, Roald spends about five hours at a desk, writing a detailed description of his crash-landing. But when the journalist reads Roald’s account, he’s astonished at how well-written it is. So, rather than alter a word, the journalist sends it to the newspaper and asks them to print it verbatim, with Roald credited as the writer.

A few weeks later, Roald’s article appears in print—but he discovers that the editor did not completely follow the journalist’s instructions. Several passages of the article have been rewritten to make it more sensational, and the article is given the misleading headline “Shot Down Over Libya,” despite no enemy shots being fired at Roald. But any unease Roald feels about his words being twisted disappears when he receives a check for $187—the equivalent of $3500 today. Not only is Roald now a published writer, he begins to think he might even earn a living from it.

Roald is inspired to write more, and he moves into composing fiction. Whenever he has time away from his responsibilities at the embassy, he works on a short story about little creatures with horns and long tails that sabotage airplanes and join the war against Nazi Germany.

Roald thinks he might submit the tale to a magazine. But first, he shows it to a British businessman who’s visiting Washington. When he reads it, this man loves the story. And with Roald’s permission, he sends it to a friend in California who might be interested in buying it: Walt Disney. Soon, Roald agrees to a deal with the Walt Disney Company and hands over the rights to the story that they plan to make into an animated movie called The Gremlins.

Over the next eighteen months, the Disney machine goes into overdrive. Roald visits the studios to help storyboard the movie. Disney arranges the publication of The Gremlins as an illustrated book. Charlie Chaplin and Spencer Tracy are among the Hollywood stars who dress as gremlins as part of the marketing effort.

But the project falls apart when Disney’s illustrators begin to make changes to the story. Remembering how uneasy he felt when the editor of the Saturday Evening Post altered his crash-landing article, Roald pushes back. He refuses to accept Disney’s revisions to The Gremlins. And Disney ends up canceling the production of the movie. But Roald doesn’t give up on his new creative pursuits.

After World War II ends, Roald will be demobilized by the RAF and return to England. With his military service over, Roald will forge a full-time career as a writer—but initially, with little success. Though he pens short stories, screenplays, and novels, none achieve much repute. Only when Roald’s agent suggests he try adapting his writing for a younger audience will Roald finally catch his break.

Act Two

It’s November 17th, 1962, at a cottage in Buckinghamshire, England; seventeen years after the end of World War II.

Roald Dahl perches on the edge of his seven-year-old daughter Olivia’s bed. He laughs as he tries to twist a colorful pipe cleaner into the shape of an animal.

After the war, Roald became a journeyman writer, earning a small and irregular income. But he had no financial worries, thanks to his marriage to Hollywood actress Patricia Neal. The couple met at a New York dinner party in 1951 and got married two years later. Ever since then, they’ve split their time between the United States and their cottage in England, and Patricia has carried on being the breadwinner.

But recently, Roald has begun to enjoy some professional success. Last year, following a suggestion from his agent, Roald published his first children’s book: James and the Giant Peach. It was better received than most of his other works, so Roald is now working on a second children’s book: Charlie’s Chocolate Boy. But today, Roald has taken a break from writing to entertain his eldest daughter, who’s recovering from a bout of measles.

Roald shows Olivia the animal he’s made from the pipe cleaner. It’s supposed to be a giraffe, but admits it looks more like a dog. Olivia smiles weakly. She starts trying to make her own animal. But her fingers fumble and she struggles. Roald’s brow furrows as he asks Olivia whether she’s okay and his daughter replies that she feels really tired.

As Roald anxiously watches her for the next few minutes, he realizes it’s more serious than that. His daughter's condition rapidly worsens and Olivia loses consciousness. Roald phones for an ambulance, but it’s too late. Within only a few hours, Olivia dies in hospital. A postmortem reveals she had developed a neurological complication, a rare inflammation of the brain caused by the measles virus.

Olivia’s death plunges Roald into grief. He begins drinking heavily to numb the pain and he increases the dose of the medicine he takes for back pain from his wartime crash-landing. When he's not in bed he spends hours each day at Olivia’s grave in the nearby churchyard.

Weeks later, with the pain of Olivia’s death as strong and fresh as ever, Roald makes his way to a hut in his garden. This is his writing sanctuary, a place where he works with no distractions. Roald hasn’t stepped foot in here since Olivia died, but today, he tries to resume his old writing rituals. He places a flask of coffee on the desk. He closes the blinds. Then, he opens a green-covered notebook and begins writing.

For the next few hours, Roald describes Olivia’s last day, her sudden deterioration, the rush to the hospital, and the last moments he spent with her. When he’s finished, Roald puts the notebook in a drawer having no intention of letting anybody see what he’s just written. This is just his private way of working through his grief.

And the next time Roald returns to his writing hut, he brings a framed painting of Olivia and hangs it on a wall. Usually, Roald won’t allow anything in the hut that might distract him but the painting gives him the motivation to resume work on Charlie’s Chocolate Boy.

Gradually, Roald refines the plot, determined to make it the kind of book that seven-year-old Olivia would have loved to read. The original version had a mischievous Charlie visit a chocolate factory, only to be sucked into a machine and turned into chocolate himself. Roald ditches that plot almost entirely. Instead, he has Charlie find a golden ticket, eligible for admission to a chocolate factory run by an elusive genius, Willy Wonka. This new version of Charlie is modeled on Olivia—he’s polite, well-mannered, and his good behavior is rewarded in the book’s ending.

Roald renames his more positive and life-affirming story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it’s released to the public on January 17th, 1964. And thanks to Roald’s existing relationship with an American publisher, the story hits shelves first in the United States, where it proves immediately popular. The initial print run of 10,000 books sells out in a month, and the publisher rushes to get more copies into bookstores.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will become so popular that it will catch the attention of Hollywood. But as with his first experience with movie executives, Roald will find the process of making a film a frustrating one.

Act Three

It’s spring 1971, at the Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles, California; seven years after the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Roald Dahl is watching a rough cut of a movie version of his wildly popular children’s book. It should be an exhilarating experience, but unfortunately, Roald isn’t enjoying it at all.

In the years since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released in print, Roald has become a writer in demand—and not just for children’s literature. Roald has also written the screenplays for Hollywood movies You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But both times, he was disappointed by major revisions to his scripts.

Today, Roald realizes that the same thing is happening again. He becomes increasingly annoyed as he identifies huge changes that the director has made to Roald’s screenplay.

And as the screening comes to an end, Roald’s anger bubbles over. The dialogue in the last scene is completely different to what he wrote in the screenplay. But what frustrates Roald most is that the movie shifts the focus away from Charlie, the character he lovingly based on his own daughter, and instead fixates on Willy Wonka. Even the title of the movie has been altered to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And Gene Wilder’s all be a brilliant portrayal of the eccentric factory owner still isn’t what Roald had in mind when he wrote the book.

After leaving the studios angry, Roald writes to his agent and disowns the film. He also comes to a decision. In the future, Roald will have nothing to do with Hollywood. Instead, he’ll focus on what he does best: writing children’s books.

Roald will compensate for the disappointment of the movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by writing a sequel—Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator—and he’ll write another eleven children’s books over the next twenty years.

Today, more than 300 million copies of Roald’s books have been sold, making him one of the world’s best-selling children’s authors. And despite Roald’s own protestations, two more Hollywood movies have been inspired by his most popular work—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory— a book which shot Roald Dahl to fame after it was first published on January 17th, 1964.

Outro

Next on History Daily. January 18th, 1778. Captain James Cook becomes the first European to travel to the Hawaiian Islands, but his journey has deadly consequences.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mischa Stanton.

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Reeves.

Executive Producers are Alexandra Currie-Buckner for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.