Below are media mentions from The Independent Press Telegram, Long Beach, California, USA.
May 21, 1961
Source: The Internet Archive
ALL ‘STINKERS’
‘Way Out’ Host Hates People
by Dick Kleiner
NEW YORK (NEA)—Roald Dahl, host of CBS-TV’s “Way Out,” may prove to be New York’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock.
He long has been regarded as one of the top writers of macabre stories. . . . He says be likes to write them “to point out the rottenness of people.”
“They’re all stinkers, aren’t they? The women are just as bad as the men — in some cases, worse. Men are more aggressive—they like to fight—but women are more unscrupulous.”
Dahl has entered the hosting business out of necessity. . . . He prefers writing, especially short stores. . . .”I like to work slowly, do about three a year, after many false starts. I sell them and make perhaps $1,500 to $1,800 a year. It’s not very much but, you see, after a few years, the residuals begin to come in—one is bought for television, another goes into an anthology—and you find yourself with a steady $15,000 a year. Which is fine, isn’t it?”
He says h would have gone on being happy like that but his son was injured in an accident and the hospital and doctor bills are enormous. . . “So I passed the word to my agent that I would do other things and here I am. I don’t particularly enjoy it.”
October 30, 1966
Source: The Internet Archive
Pat Neal Makes Comeback
By Joan Deppa
GREAT MISSENDEN, Eng. (UPI) — It was that quiet time of day every mother looks forward to—when all the children are somehow occupied and she can have a moment to herself.
Patricia Neal is no exception, hut she had an exceptional project this particular day.
The Academy Award winning actress, who little more than a year and a half ago was stricken blind and dumb and paralyzed by three massive brain hemorrhages, was planning to study a film script and the mere fact that she could study it was a major triumph.
IN A rambling white farmhouse on the outskirts ol this tiny village some 30 miles from London, in the moments she can spure from her duties as wife and mother, the 40-year-old Kentucky-born actress is
quietly preparing for her comeback after an astonishing and courageous recovery.
“It’s very difficult for me to read aloud, but I can,” she said, showing no trace of the speech impediment that haunted her for months after the strokes. “I think I will be able to memorize enough lines for a film, although I doubt I’ll ever be able to act on stage again.
“Learning lines used to be so easy for me,” she said, breaking into a deep throaty laugh. “I used to be very good at names, too. Now l’d have te know you a long time before I’d remember yours.
“Do you notice my limp?” she asked.
She still drags her right leg slightly, but only slightly, a handicap the movie cameras could easily overlook.
THE TELEPHONE rang and at once Patricia Neal, actress, became Mrs. Roald Dahl, mother of a happy family of growing youngsters.
Tessa, 9, was on the line to tell her that she had to go to a Brownies meeting, but she’d left her uniform at home and a neighbor she was visiting would come to fetch it. The message was full of complications, like badges and purses and other miscellany so important to nine-year-olds.
Then Clara, the Hungarian girl who helps with the children and housework, returned from the village with the two youngest, Ophelia, 2½ and baby Lucy, born five months after her mother’s near fatal attack.
The telephone rang again. This time it was her son, Theo, 6, who was having tea with a neighbor.
PATRICIA NEAL, better known in these parts as simply Mrs. Dahl, looked rather pleased with herself when the confusion finally cleared and she could settle down for a quiet cup of tea.
“Do you think I could memorize lines?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.
The good humor with which she spoke belied the real drama of her question, just as her praise of son
Theo—”He’s such a bright little boy”—hid her real concern for the child who has had eight major brain operations since his carriage was hit by a taxicab in New York City when he was four months old.
“One eye’s not quite right and his writing’s not very good because he has to use his left hand, but he goes to the same school Tessa goes to and he was passed on to the next grade this year,” Miss Neal said.
“It’s possible he may have to have another operation to correct the eye.”
HER FIRST BORN child, Olivia, died at the age of seven from an attack of measles in 1962, just two years after Theo’s accident.
There is no attempt to forget that tragedy. A promising painting Olivia did shortly before her death hangs in the kitchen and Miss Neal still points it out with pride.
Twilight was coming on and husband-author Roald Dahl came in from the garden where he been puttering.
Immediately a gentle to and fro began that left little doubt that Dahl has been instrumental in guiding
his wife back to normality. His questions on the whereabouts of the children and other household odds and ends were designed to test her memory and she answered them in the same spirit.
BUT THEIR central concern on that particular night was Miss Neal’s final step to complete recovery, her comeback as an actress. Producers and directors are beginning to make the trek to Great Missenden to discuss projects with her.
“I must go over the script tonight,” she told her husband. He agreed firmly. Studio officials were coming to talk to her about it.
And the day the indomitable Patricia Neal would finally step before the cameras again did not seem very far away.
March 31, 1968
Source: The Internet Archive
From: Earl Wilson’s Broadway
Patricia Neal Looks at the World
NEW YORK — “Miss Neal, us we sit here in your dressing room and look around at the world today, what do you think of it?”
“That makes me laugh,” Patricia Neal said. “When I first regained consciousness again, I didn’t like being alive . . . not at all . . . that was for about a year and a half . . . then it was about November, I began to like it.”
“I mean with the LSD and marijuana and the sex-mad and the godless . . . you like it?”
Pat: “No, I don’t. But I forget that those people exist. I’ve never taken dope, but I smoke, and I take a little drink now and then . . . “
Miss Neal, who had been doing a scene at the CBS Studios on W. 26th St. for “The Subject Was Roses,” added, “Honestly, I’m astonished by what’s being done today by our young people — and also our old people.”
* * * *
“HOW DID YOU develop the intestinal fortitude that carried you through all your difficulties?”
“I don’t know. We’ve had so many tragedies. When Theo was hit, we were both very good, and when Olivia died, my husband almost went crazy and I don’t blame him. And then when I got ill, he was very good, and we are both a great deal stronger than we used to be.”
“Was there a religious force that carried you through it?”
“When Olivia died, I became very religious, and then I woke up. I no longer believed in God. I can’t tell you what happened. But in these three years since I now think that the world is fantastic — I think there is something somewhere . . . “
“You had three strokes in an hour and a half . . . ?”
“I don’t remember, but my husband” — Roald Dahl — “tells me I had a stroke while I was washing my
daughter Tessa . . . and then I think I had two in the hospital.”
“You credit your husband for the fact that you’re alive today?”
“And well I should! My husband is an astonishing man. He took one look at me and knew exactly what had happened and called exactly the right doctor. They operated on me that night . . . they had to . . . and thank God, I’m alive.”
* * * *
“HOW IS YOUR son Theo . . . he was hit by a taxi?”
“When he was three months old, he was being walked on Madison Ave., by a nurse. She put him in front of a taxi which was trying to go over a red light. The taxi hit my son Theo and wiped him all over Madison Ave, and hit a bus. Oh, he’s had so many operations, but he’s very good now. He’s seven, I think . . . I think!”
“You haven’t been affected?”
“No, I haven’t. I don’t know why, except that I don’t learn lines as easily as I did, and I have a limp, but I danced in this film — with my son — and they seemed to like it.”
“How do you cry in pictures? They say if you remember some tragedy in life, you can cry . . . is that true?”
“I don’t do it that way — but if I did, I guess i would have enough tragedies stored up to cry for 150 years.”