Roald was staying at her apartment when he attended the New York premiere of Eagle Squadron, a propaganda movie, co-written by C S Forester, about US airmen who had volunteered to fight for the RAF before Pearl Harbor. His date for the evening was the actress Nancy Carroll, a 39-year-old divorcée, but at the party afterwards it was Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, the wife of the owner of Time and Life magazines, who caught Dahl’s eye. Mrs Luce, a reluctant Anglophile, quickly succumbed to the allure of the glamorous young air attaché, and Dahl did not return home that night.
“I got home to the house of my host at 9am the next morning,” he told his mother, “and failed to make my room without being seen to ruffle the bedclothes... I had to do a lot of talking to re-establish my reputation.”
Later, Creekmore Fath, a Texan lawyer prominent in politics, claimed that the embassy encouraged the liaison in the hope that Dahl would convert Mrs Luce to a more pro-British position, particularly on Dahl’s pet subject, post-war air freedom, which she had opposed in a recent speech in Congress. Two months later, Dahl told his mother that he was “working very hard” on her. “I hope to be able to make her change her views a little, and say something better next time she speaks.”
This “assignment” may have proved too much for him. According to Fath – who seems to have lapped up these stories – Dahl told Lord Halifax, then the British Ambassador in Washington, he was “all f----- out” because Luce “had screwed [him] from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights”. Halifax apparently told him it was his patriotic duty to return to her bed. Isaiah Berlin later dismissed this story as a “wild flight of fancy” that was typical of Dahl. He thought it “inconceivable” that Halifax would ever have talked like that. Berlin was right. But he had missed the point. For Dahl, its very improbability made the tale hilariously funny.