My dear, sweet, troubled friend Tessa Dahl
As Roald Dahl’s daughter is arrested for theft, a writer who’s known her for years defends her
ONCE named one of the five most beautiful women in the world, but plagued by scandal, tragedy and increasing vulnerability, perhaps the greatest surprise about Tessa Dahl is just what fun she is in person.
The 60-year- old daughter of literary giant Roald, and mother of supermodel Sophie, Tessa has spent the decade or so that I have known her in and out of treatment for psychiatric issues which have proved a lifelong struggle.
Her spirited response to it all is generally to make mordant jokes about ‘lock-up loony bins’ and to describe her own situation with pitiless clarity and a distinctive barking laugh.
Our conversations were always private and must remain so, but to give a taste she once described the famous Dahl family as a ‘ club sandwich’ — packed with diverse substance and flavour. In this meal, Tessa told me, she stands duty as the ‘spiky toothpick’.
But even when she is spiky, she is also very sweet. During a breakdown in 1997 — her lowest point, where she was addicted to Valium, cocaine and alcohol and ended up in a wheelchair for a time — she said her family described her as ‘totally insane, incontinent but funny and sweet’.
Tessa has lived in the U.S. since 2005, where she was a popular member of the well-heeled community on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and kept a huge menagerie of parrots, pigs and numerous rescue cats and dogs.
Then around seven years ago she moved to Lincoln, Connecticut, to be within striking distance of the renowned McLean Psychiatric Hospital, made famous in the film Girl, Interrupted.
Flirting with Catholicism at the time, she enrolled in a nearby enclosed order of Benedictine nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis — until the Abbess took exception to some attendant publicity.
Diagnosed belatedly with bipolar disorder, in an interview in 2012, Tessa said: ‘I have a team [at McLean} . . . I have been going three times a week to see an addiction psychiatrist, a top psychiatrist, a psychopharmacologist, a social worker and I do dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) to help me communicate with modified emotions.’
HER
life is quiet and she lives modestly. She is believed to rely on a trust fund said to be administered by her two sisters, Ophelia and Lucy.
There is, of course, an enormous fortune from the Roald Dahl Literary Estate — money continues to pour in from books, which have sold over 250 million copies globally, and from stage and screen adaptations such as the hit show Matilda! and recent film of The BFG.
A cash flow problem might, in part, explain the latest headline-making event in Tessa’s life. As the Mail reported in Sebastian Shakespeare’s diary on Saturday, Tessa has been arrested in Connecticut and is set to appear in court this week on a charge of larceny (theft).
The charges arise from a stay at the Interlaken Inn in the town of Lakeville from October 27 to November 3 last year. She allegedly left without paying the bill of £3,970 she had run up.
Her lawyer says that the case was due to a misunderstanding, that the full amount has now been paid and he is expecting a ‘speedy resolution’.
Once again, Tessa’s family will have been called on to support her. She has had difficult relations with all of them — when her addictions were at their height they were advised to ‘detach with love’ rather than try to help her any more.
Her four children — Sophie, Clover, Luke and Ned — were largely raised by a nanny. Indeed, her youngest son barely saw his mother during his early years. ‘I have been a lousy mother,’ Tessa once said, bleakly.
And relations with her oldest child, Sophie, now 40, have been complicated by Sophie’s success — first as a model, then as an author and TV cook — and difficult in recent years.
Once they were very close, with Sophie paying bills for her mother’s rehab in 2003 and Tessa attending Sophie’s wedding to jazz musician Jamie Cullum in 2010. But they fell out badly soon afterwards.
Tessa said in 2012 that she was trying to rebuild relations with her family, however she would be the first to acknowledge that they have been driven to despair by her.
Highly intelligent and unnervingly perceptive, Tessa knows that hers should have been an enchanted life. Her late father Roald, author of such beloved classics as Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, is hailed as the greatest children’s writer in history. Her mother, to whom she bears a striking resemblance, was Oscarwinning actress Patricia Neal.
However, their family life was blighted by a series of tragedies. Tessa was just three when in 1960 she saw her baby brother Theo’s pram struck by a New York taxi, leaving him brain damaged.
Two years later, the Dahls’ eldest daughter, Olivia, seven, died of measles which she’d caught from Tessa. ‘I was like a poor substitute, because I had measles, too, but I lived on,’ Tessa told me. ‘I think what happened was that I spent the whole of the rest of my life trying to prove to my father that I was good.
‘ Everything I did, I did to please him — but in our family you got attention only if you were brain damaged or dead, or terribly ill. There was no reward for being normal.’
In 1965, her mother, 39 and pregnant, suffered a series of devastating strokes. Tessa believes her childhood has left her with post-traumatic stress disorder because her father declined therapy for her, instead having sedatives prescribed.
Tessa left school at 15 and embarked on some wild years of partying and affairs with actors David Hemmings and Peter Sellers. She was the toast of London in the Seventies and a staple of the gossip columns.
When she was 19, she had Sophie by actor Julian Holloway, but they split soon after.
There followed a long manic period, with more parties and spending sprees. She moved house 17 times, lived on an ashram in India and wrote a well-received novel, Working For Love, published in 1988.
She married twice, to businessman James Kelly, by whom she had Clover and Luke, and then to Australian Patrick Donovan. They separated when she was three months pregnant with son Ned.
In 1990, Roald died — the day after telling Tessa for the first time that he loved her — and it was then she began to ‘self-medicate’ with drugs and booze, leaving her children to be largely raised by nanny Maureen Noble.
TESSA wrote: ‘My father was a huge man, a giant. I craved his attention, his conversation, his love. We spoke every day. I didn’t realise that he had been my motivation.
‘After he died, I couldn’t get on with things any more. A hungry canyon opened inside me, which split my core. What emerged was dark and destructive.’
She added: ‘I was prescribed pain-killing pills, then injections. These short- term palliatives caused a metaphorical skid, and the more I tried to turn myself away from crashing, the more out of control I became.
‘I became involved in pointless, momentarily euphoric love affairs and spiralled towards madness . . . Nothing could compensate for the void my challenging father left.’
In 1997, after being declared bankrupt, Tessa attempted suicide with alcohol and drugs, saying: ‘I felt, rather over-romantically, as if I were a beautiful piece of porcelain that had been broken and mended too many times.’
Instead, she fell into a coma that left her paralysed for two years. Over the two decades that have followed, Tessa’s recovery has been long and slow, but she has never lost her spirirt.
She recently wrote a novella, The Graveyard Circus, which movingly alludes to her grief over her late mother, who died in 2010, and has a second novel titled, An Apology To Myself, she hopes to publish.
Her great hope has always been to find redemption with her family. ‘I am proud of my recovery. I am not proud of my near demise,’ she has said. ‘Manic depression is surmountable.
‘I sometimes miss the highs but I don’t miss the lows. I live with three lovely rescue dogs and four cats. I get huge satisfaction from having a four-legged family to welcome me when I get home and snuggle up with at night.
‘I don’t mind being “that crazy cat woman”. If I never fall in love again, it does not bother me. It has taken me so long to love myself.’