"He made sure I was aware that he was taking me to one of the finest Italian restaurants in New York. He knew the owner..."

"... who was John Huston’s father-in-law. He was acquainted with just about everybody. And he was interested in everything. He spoke of paintings and antique furniture and the joys of the English countryside. He was as charming that evening as he had been rude the first time we met. I remember his taking a sip of wine and looking at me for a long moment through the candlelight. 'I would rather be dead than fat,' he said."

Wrote Patricia Neal — the actress and Roald Dahl's first wife —  about her first date with Dahl, quoted in "Making It Big/In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors"  (NYRB).

Not long thereafter, she learned that “one of Roald Dahl’s great assets was his desire never to leave a female unfulfilled,” and while this, and the prospect of a household full of children, seemed to be enough for her, her crowd of New York writers and actors were unimpressed when he proposed marriage with a ring on credit from one of his wealthier friends. (He had recently lost his entire inheritance on a bad stock tip.)

“I think he’s a very silly dull fellow,” wrote Dashiell Hammett, one of several people who had told Neal flat out that accepting Dahl would be a grave error. “The ring isn’t bad looking, though, and I told her I was glad she was getting that out of it because she didn’t look as if she was getting much else.”

Much more at the link, with an interesting emphasis on Dahl's use of bigness and smallness. The essay begins with a summary of a story Dahl published in Playboy in 1974:

The story’s plot is a plot, a conspiracy by an English rake and raconteur, Oswald Cornelius, to remove the corrupt American president from office by inducing him to rape a woman during a live television broadcast. How? By having him inhale a top-secret perfume called Bitch, a fragrance made from sexual stimulants so intoxicating that any man who smells it will proceed to have wild and possibly—no, probably—nonconsensual sex with the first woman he sees....

There's a scene where the main character's penis grows "three feet long and thick to match" and keeps growing while rest of him shrinks smaller and smaller.

"Bigger and bigger grew my astonishing organ, and it went on growing, by God, until it had enveloped my entire body and absorbed it within itself. I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come."

Perpendicular to the floor, I had to stop and think. It's a little difficult to visualize. The article-writer paraphrases: "Determined to bring down Tricky Dick, Oswald grows up, up, up into an even trickier one, lusty and fleet-footed." I understand the intended cleverness, but I'm having trouble seeing this character. It has feet?