Drawing on previously unpublished letters, Jennet Conant has written a comprehensive account of children’s author Roald Dahl’s raucous wartime exploits:
His conquests included Millicent Rogers, the glamorous heiress to a Standard Oil fortune; and Clare Boothe Luce, a right-wing congresswoman and the sexually frisky wife of the publisher of Time magazine.Dahl would later complain to friends that Boothe Luce, 13 years his senior, had left him “all f***** out” after three nights of bedroom capers.
“Dahl’s superiors watched his rake’s progress with grudging admiration,” Conant writes in The Irregulars, to be published in Britain on September 9. “A certain amount of hanky-panky was condoned, especially when it was for a good cause.”
Injured during training as an RAF pilot, Dahl fought in the Middle East before he was declared unfit to fly and was shipped to the Washington embassy in 1942. He immediately cut a swathe as a 6ft 6in battle-scarred pilot who was nonetheless horrified to find himself “in the middle of a cocktail mob in America”.