February 3, 2026 • 36 mins
Nowadays, most everyone knows a classic Roald Dahl story — yet who knows the man himself? In the first part of this special two-part interview, the guys welcome Aaron Tracy, the award-winning creator of The Secret World of Roald Dahl, as he blasts beyond the bluster of headlines and hedgerows of civility— exposing, for better or worse, the true life of one of the world's most beloved authors.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the myth,
the legend, our very own Willy Wonka level super producer,
mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, Hello, Hello, Hello. The enthusiasm is killing me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Max. They call me Ben Bullen, our brother in arms,
our brother and podcast crime Noel is on an adventure,
but will be returning soon. In the meantime, Ridiculous Historians,
we have something incredibly special for you today. As you
may recall from some earlier episodes, we have long been
(01:07):
fascinated and in no small way disturbed by the life
and times of the legendary author Roald Dall. He has
written some of the most popular children's books in all
of Western canon. Excuse me. He was a strident anti semi.
He's a fighter ace, he was a legitimate spy. We
(01:28):
are not the only people who share this obsession with
the larger than life character. Today, folks, we are thrilled
to be joined with none other than the best selling writer, producer, podcaster,
the founder of Parallax, none other than Aaron Tracy, also
the creator of the new hit podcast The Secret World
(01:49):
of rold dng Eric, thank you so much for coming
on the show man.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh thanks for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm of
that intro. I hope I can live up to it.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Well, we hope that we can live up to your accolades,
because in our research for this now, I know it
can always be maybe a little bit embarrassing. So we're
not going to fan boy too much. But you have
quite a pro You're quite prolific. You have a ton
(02:27):
of work under your belts. We're going to talk about
some of your additional work as well. And I have
to admit, when I'm looking through your CV and your
bona fides, I thought, how does this guy do so
much stuff? And then I learned you also lecture at Yale.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Uh yeah, yeah, I've been teaching at Yale for a while.
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I mean, if you don't have a real job, like
I don't have a real job, right my job is
to sit around and write all day. You can get
a lot of writing done. I mean, it adds up
over time, so it definitely does not feel like a
lot to me. But you're sweet to say that I've
got a lot done.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh gosh, well, one of the one of the things
that we've got to get right into it, man. But
one of the things that amazes me so much about
your latest project is the depth of research, right, the thoroughness,
the objectivity. It's really like it's a cinematic audio documentary.
(03:30):
And I've got to ask, given all your previous work
and the amount of projects that you've done in the past,
across multiple genres, what drew you to Roll Dall in particular,
out of all the people that you could have done
a deep dive on.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I love writing true stories. I love writing about interesting
historical figures. I've written. I wrote a TV show about
Audrey Hepburn in the sixties. I wrote a show about Jagger.
Roll Dall is one of those figures kind of like
Hepburn and Jagger Hoover, who has, you know, a really
(04:10):
important place in the public consciousness. Like everybody knows him,
a lot of people have read him to go even further.
For a lot of people, he shaped their childhoods. But
nobody knows anything about the guy. I mean, he had
such a noisy life and so as I started researching
him and discovered all of these really strange chapters of
(04:34):
his life that I didn't know about. I just became
I became totally obsessed. I mean, the guy is most
famous for writing children's stories. Of course, he didn't start
writing them until his late forties, so he had all
these different lives before then, which all sort of informed
his later books.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, that was That was something I learned from you,
the idea of that sudden switch that shape in a
profession or vocation over time. And I can't wait to
get into it. One question that all of our audience
members are going to have for you directly, Aaron, is
do you have a favorite role doll book?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah? I love Matilda.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I probably came into this, came into the project with
Charlie and Chocolate Factory being my favorite. I love the
nineteen seventy one Gene Wilder movie. I used to, you know,
watch on VHS as a kid, and I still do
love that book. But Matilda rereading it for this project.
It's just such a good story. He's so good writing her.
(05:39):
It's such a sweet story. I mean, there's the sort
of typical doll gruesomeness that exists in all of his books,
of course, but I just I just think it's a
It's such a winner.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I love the point you're making about the gruesomeness, how
there seems to be a subtle thread of darkness that
a lot of kids don't necessarily clock on their first read.
It reminds me of another one of his books, not
not his most famous, but a book called George's Marvelous Medicine,
(06:14):
which is I would argue, a quintessential example of that
darkness through what is ostensibly whimsical work. I mean, folks,
if you haven't read it, go to your local bookstore
and get ready for a weird afternoon. It's a short story,
or it's a you know, it's a short work. It
is literally about an eight year old boy who tries
(06:36):
to kill his grandmother and accidentally makes her a giant.
Which I reread that one as as an adult several
years back, and I was kind of shocked that my
parents allowed me to have a copy of that. You know,
(06:56):
how do you how do you feel about because your father,
how do you feel about your kids reading role Doll?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah, I mean I'm a little bit torn. On the podcast,
I bring on a bunch of incredibly smart people to
have a discussion about whether or not it's okay to
allow kids, impressionable kids to read work by someone that
we now know is a bigot, is an anti semi.
(07:23):
I think it's a complicated thing. I can't really locate
the bigotry or the anti semitism on the page. I
think if I could, there'd be no question. Like I
just absolutely would not give him to my kids because
I can't. And some people say that they can see
some antisemitic tropes in the Witches. I'm not sure I
agree with that. But because I can't see it on
(07:44):
the page, is it hypocritical for me to sort of
deprive my kids of Doll's work when I don't deprive
myself of a lot of filmmakers and novelists who we
now know were total monsters. It's something I'm grappling with.
And I'll also say, I mean, you asked me my
(08:05):
favorite book, you know, I immediately went to the children's
books Charlie and Chocolate Factory in Matilda. But Dahl also
wrote a ton of stuff for adults. He wrote a
novel called My Uncle Oswald, which is you know, hard
r rated. He wrote a bunch of short stories for
places like Playboy. He wrote lots of short stories for
(08:27):
The New Yorker. One of my favorites of his is
the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which was adapted by
Netflix recently, which is absolutely for adults. So, you know,
the guy absolutely wrote things that even if you're you're
not a parent, or you're looking for, you know, something
that you can just enjoy on your own. Uh, you
(08:48):
know you can find something in Doll.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah. That's that's amazing because I love the point you've
made in in the podcast and in several other interviews
where where you kind of establish that for the majority
of people who are aware of Roald Dahl, it's really
just two words on the cover of one of their
(09:11):
favorite childhood books. Right, we don't know very much about
the creator himself, and I have to applaud you for
not shying away from some of that deeply, you know, personally,
I believe deeply and profoundly disturbing stuff, those aspects of
(09:31):
his character that are inseparable from his identity as a
person and a writer. I also, on the point of writing,
I was astonished to learn from your research that Roald
Dahl had this entire other life as a screenwriter. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I mean I think like you, I'm a big movie
buff and fascinated by Hollywood in the sixties and seventies
and earlier, and so I didn't I didn't know this either.
I mean Dolluh. After his time in the war, Dall
went out to Los Angeles. He was flown out by
Walt Disney himself and put up at a at a
(10:14):
fancy Beverly Hills hotel and given a driver and given
a place to stay, all by Walt Disney because Disney
loved this story that Doll had written, called The Gremlins.
It was one of Doll's first stories, and it was
and people don't really read it today. It's sort of
it feels kind of like a you know, the reason
Doll wrote it is it's a bit of propaganda, uh,
(10:36):
to show American and British forces working together against Germany.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And it's it's very creative.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
It has nothing whatsoever to do, by the way, with
the Steven Spielberg produced classic The Grimlins.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He knew.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
That was my first question too when I when I
first stumbled on it. But Disney brought Doll out to
Los Angeles because he wanted to turn the Gremlins into
a movie. And this is when Disney was absolutely on top.
I mean, Disney had just come off snow White and
Dumbo and Bambi and so many of his classics. So
(11:14):
here's Doll at twenty six years old, being feted by you,
unquestionably the king of Hollywood. And it didn't quite work
out for Doll. Disney sort of started a writer's room.
He brought in animators, and he brought in a director
and all these different people and started a writer's room
with Doll. But Dall was just not someone at least
(11:38):
at twenty six, but he could certainly argue as he
got older too. He was not someone who wanted to collaborate.
He had a very personal vision. He wanted to control
the work. And so eventually Disney dropped the project and
Doll wasn't able to get it set up anywhere else.
But Doll still had the bug. He wanted to make movies,
so he continued to write. He wasn't always living in Hollywood,
(12:02):
but he went back to New York. He made lots
of trips to Los Angeles and he just wrote screenplay
after screenplay. Many of them just not working. He had
won with the director Robert Altman called Oh Death, where
is Thy Stingle Ling a Ling, which is a yeah,
(12:24):
it's a crazy title, but it came closest to actually
getting made to becoming Doll's first credit. And they started
filming in fact, and Gregory Peck was in the lead role,
but as sometimes happens, the head of the studio looked
at the dailies and just said this is not working
(12:45):
and shut down production. And so after all that, it
was another sort of failed credit for Doll, but he
didn't give up and he kept working and eventually he
found the perfect vehicle for himself, which is the fourth
James Bond movie. Dall was a spy for I six,
(13:06):
which we can talk about, and so yeah, that James
Bond movie was very much informed by his experiences in Washington.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
As we're moving through this, I would like, if it's
okay with you, Aaron, to emulate some of the formula
of your podcast, because one thing you do that I
think is superb is avoiding the straight up linear recounting
of born such and such, time lives and dies. And
(13:42):
I love how how you're jumping around in time and
theme in Oh thank you.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Who needs another cradle to the grave? Right, Like, what's
more boring that? I was just watching a documentary the
other day that that was just Cradles the Grave, and
it's like, yeah, there's even when you have a fantastic story,
there's just no surprises.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, And that's I think that that is a great
advantage in the structure of your creation here, because it
keeps going to sort of hook after hook with plot
twist after plot twist, and you have quite a well
established past and present as a screenwriter yourself now, Max
(14:25):
and Noel and yours truly here we are not screenwriters
by trade, but we know a lot of people in
the business, and it just seems incredibly challenging, right to
have to have so many projects that end up for
variables beyond our control, kind of languishing, even if it's
(14:47):
a really great story. I'm saying this mainly to ask
if Doll's experience in Hollywood when he was just twenty
six or so, is that something that is common to
a lot of screenwriters or did he get did he
get the especially dirty end of the stick there?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
No, it's incredibly common. My favorite quote about Hollywood is
by the Great New Yorker critic Pauline Kale. She said,
it's the only place where you can die of encouragement,
and that's just so true. People go out there, everybody
tells you how talented you are, Everybody wants to meet
with you, and it's like your next project is going
to go forward, and you know this is a done deal,
(15:28):
and this movie star is super interested. And there's something
obviously kind of nice about a town that is that
optimistic and hopeful. But it's incredibly hard when you're struggling
in your career and you keep getting your hopes up
and then they just get dashed. So this happens all
the time. And I think what's most interesting about dol
(15:51):
is that many of his heroes, the novelists who he
was trying to emulate, did the exact same thing. They
went to Hollywood and they struggled and they completely fell apart.
So they're these great stories about people like f Scott Fitzgerald,
who Dahl loved, the great novelist who actually loved movies,
(16:11):
Unlike some of the other novels who went out there
for the money. F Scott Fitzgerald loved movies and just
couldn't make it happen. He just screenwriting didn't come naturally
to him. He started drinking more and more. He ended
up really not getting his name on scripts that he,
you know, put work into, because he was completely rewritten
(16:34):
over and over again, and he eventually drank himself to death.
And the same thing is true of, you know, the
sort of the failures of other great novelists. Aldis Huxley
had a lot of trouble, Faulkner went out there and
had a lot of trouble. You could go on and on,
and it's it's easy to imagine that Doll could have
sort of fallen into the same hole after all the
(16:57):
years of struggle that he had trying to break into Hollywood,
but he refused. He had something inside of him that
allowed him to keep going and push past all the
failures and all the disappointments, which eventually led to the
James Bond screenplay, and then finding his perfect spiritual brother
(17:20):
in Hollywood, who is Alfred Hitchcock. They're just so similar
in tone and sensibility, and Dall eventually wrote a bunch
of stories for Hitchcock that Hitchcock turned into episodes of
his TV show.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Oh Wow, that's fascinating because you know, we're often tempted
in the modern era to think of historical figures as
existing somehow separate from the world of which they live.
You know, it's always surprising to learn that folks like
Alfred Hitchcock and Rule Doll not just got along, but
(17:58):
actually work together. That's that's something that I did not clock.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
At all.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Yeah, I mean, Doll has got to be I think
it's an extraordinary thing. He's got to be the only
guy who's ever written for both Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock,
I mean, two opposite dudes. But that's that's all. He
had an incredibly wide range, and Hitchcock was just so
just so natural to everything that that worked about Doll,
(18:27):
all the gruesomeness, all the darkness, all the surprising twist endings,
it all was was sort of perfect for Hitchcock, and
Hitchcock just fell in love with his work.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
And they they share a similar kind of gallows.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Humor, you know, absolutely not in a wink.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
And there's there's something we should also get back to,
just a thread in while we're talking about his time
in Hollywood and working in these established systems that can
be you know, quite brutal at times. I remember you
mentioned You and several other sources have mentioned a specific
(19:10):
issue he had about control in general, not just his
scripts in Hollywood, but his published works. He apparently mandated
that publishers treat his material as sacro sanct something like
don't even touch a comma or you'll get the crocodile,
whatever that means. Right. This leads us to a fairly
(19:32):
recent controversy that might be unfamiliar to some people. After
Doll passed away, his publisher, Puffin Books in twenty twenty three,
started making a lot of changes to his work, Like
I think censorship based on sensitivity readers who said, hey,
(19:53):
this is you know, discriminatory, this is racist, this is insensitive,
so on and so forth, or offensive just straight up defensive.
I think we don't be interested in your your take
on that. Did Puffin do the right thing? Or should
they have left it as is?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:12):
I certainly come down on the side of hating censorship, right,
Puffin should not have done this. Uh. And just to
be sort of clear about what they were doing, they
were they were removing words like fat and ugly. There
were even instances where they took out the words black
and white, regardless of what contexts they were in, because
(20:35):
you're right, they were they were being overly sensitive. We
were going through this this period in culture where everyone
was being just incredibly sensitive, and so lots of other
writers came to you know, doll. Doll of course had
had passed away, but a lot of writers came to
(20:55):
his defense and said, no, no, no, you cannot touch
the work. He would not have wanted these changes. We
see this a lot with with writers and filmmakers too.
I mean, I think of someone like George Lucas going
back in and changing things that happened in Star Wars
to sort of, you know, work with with modern day sensibilities,
(21:19):
and it's kind of always a bad idea. I think
the much better solution is to keep the work as is,
but try to provide context, right, try to have a
conversation with people about why some of these words might
be triggering or offensive. But just going in and taking
(21:42):
out the word fat or changing the word ugly to
something else, it just it undermines the work.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, yeah, I think as as a writer as well,
I'm severely tempted to to come down on the same
side as you or be on the same page there,
because when we hear things like a censorship controversy, we
assume it may be similar to you know, the old
(22:09):
Agatha Christie use of racial epithets or something very very
serious stuff. But that and ugly seems like they might
be fighting the wrong battle, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
And you bring up a good point. I mean, I
think that's one of the reasons that this issue, which
I explore on the podcast, is just so so media
and so interesting because the Agatha Christie story that you
brought up, she has a racial epithet in her title,
and I do think that it was a good idea
to get rid of that. They did that after her death,
and so she wasn't able to approve it. But if
(22:44):
they had not done that, if her state had not
done that, that book would absolutely be unreadable. You couldn't
sell it, you couldn't put it on shelves, which I
you know, agree with, we should not be selling it
with that title. And getting rid of the title changing
it does allow that extraordinary story to be you know,
I think it's still her most popular story. It allows
(23:06):
people to continue reading it, which is a great thing.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yeah, yeah, well said well, said, and uh with that,
with that mind, I have a little bit of an
anecdote to share with you that may be familiar to
a lot of our audience members.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
And before we do that, Ben, can I jump in
with a with a weird fact I got for us,
Aaron h you said that that Doll might have been
the only person you know of that wrote for Disney
and Hitchcock, which I found somebody else is mister four
to fifty one himself, Ray Bradberry with Walt Disney and
(23:44):
also wrote for Hitchcock Presents. It's funny because I used
the Google AI to help me, like start with the bread.
And they also said Robers Yeah exactly. Yeah, well, I
said Robert Stevenson, which is funny because that's not true.
Robert Stevenson and worked with Disney and a guy named
Robert Stevens worked with Hitchcock. But to the best of
(24:05):
my knowledge, or at least Google Ais knowledge, only Ray
bat Bradberry can join Doll in that distinction.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Wow, right, cool, that's I mean, that's a good company.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, and uh, Max, I think you've earned it.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Max.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
With the facts.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
That sneaking in the phone and peaceful in knowledge, it's
just for you right now.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Here with the fact.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
We have a sal que that plays the part where
I said, okay, don't worry, we have a sod que.
So uh, this is okay. So here's here's this, uh
anecdote that may be familiar to a lot of us.
We have we have co workers who are never stressed
about anything really uh. And it's because they were actual
(25:00):
veterans and saw war and saw colmback and so after
you've lived through events like that, you're a lot less
likely to worry too much about sending an email late. Right,
You've got a perspective, And I'm wondering. I'm wondering if
(25:20):
Doll's earlier experiences informed his perspective and his creative approach
to writing, which is just you know, my long winded
way of saying, please share the spy story, just a
little bit of the spy so people can't wait to
hear this.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
I mean, I think, like all writers, his experiences growing
up and his formative experiences as a twenty something unquestionably
informed the writing. It just has to for anyone that's
not just writing sort of genre fiction or and completely
removed from themselves, and even people who who think they
are doing that. I think the life experiences always get
(26:07):
onto the page. So for doll, Yeah, his twenties and
his thirties, before he ever wrote for children, were really
about a search for identity. He was trying to figure
out who he was. He was trying to figure out
what kind of man he was, and I think you
could even argue he was trying to figure out what
it meant to be a man. In his part of
the century, he grew up without a father. His father
(26:29):
died when he was three, and so that was the
first sort of formative experience of his life. When he
was just three years old, his father and his sister
died within three weeks of each other. So just gruesome,
just so incredibly sad. And then he got older and
he became a businessman. That was his first sort of
attempt to figure out who he was. He worked for
(26:51):
Shell Oil and they send him to Africa, and so
it was this incredible adventure. But he sort of grew
tired of it after a little while, and so he
decided to volunteer for the RAF, the Air Force during
the war, and he flew some harrowing combat missions and
that was an incredible adventure for him, but he kept
getting shot down, including one time that was a really
(27:14):
devastating crash in the Libyan desert that he barely walked
away from. And so it's time to figure out what's next,
his next sort of search for identity, and the powers
that be noticed that he was incredibly tall. He was
six foot six, incredibly handsome and dashing, a great storyteller,
(27:35):
incredibly charming. So they had a job for him. They
decided he should go work for British intelligence, so they
sent him to DC, where he was ostensibly working for
the British embassy, but in reality he was recruited into
a group called the Irregulars, which is this group headed
up by William Stevenson, who's sort of a legendary figure
(27:58):
in spy circles. They worked out of thirty Rockefeller Center
in New York where Sorry Night Live is tape now,
which is a really strange place for you know, a
top secret spy organization, but that's where they were, and
they had agents in New York and d C. Doll
started off in DC, like I said, and he was
(28:21):
working as a spy doing whatever needed to be done.
This was a time before America got into the war,
and so Churchill and Britain they're in their darkest hour.
Things are going horribly of course in the war, and
they would do anything to get America to come to
their side. So they were using outside the box ideas
(28:41):
to try to get, you know, the America to come
to their aid. And so one of those ideas was
start the irregulars. And so what the irregulars were doing
were you know, a lot of propaganda, a lot of
sort of really strange ideas that you could imagine Doll
and his fellow twenty somethings coming up with out at
(29:03):
a bar, you know, and George Shannon late at night,
like one of them was, they came up with this
idea to hire a psychic named Louis de Wall to
go around the country and tell everyone that he has,
you know, looked at the stars and the third Reich
he is determined is going to fall. And so it
(29:24):
made Americans feel more comfortable about getting into the war
because it was written in the stars that they were
going to win.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
And then sort of the most salacious, you know, arguably
most interesting thing that Dahl did for the regulars was
he was tasked with seducing the wives of powerful Americans
who were not yet on the Allied side. So one
of them was the wife of Henry Lose. Henry LuSE
(29:54):
was the most powerful man in media. He owned Time magazine,
and Life Magazine and Sports Illustrated, on and on, and
these magazines were printing a lot of anti British stuff,
which Churchill sort of could not allow because it was
not helping their cause of getting the Americans into the war,
(30:15):
and they couldn't really get through to Henry Loose. But
his wife was a different story. His wife was a
woman named Claire Booth Loose, which I love that sort
of whimsical name. It sounds like a name that Doll invented.
And she was incredibly formidable and influential in her own right.
Besides being married to Henry, she was also a Broadway playwright.
(30:38):
She wrote a play called The Women, which was adapted
twice for the movies. She was a war correspondent for
a Vanity Fair, and she worked for other magazines. She
was a great journalist. And then she ran for Congress
and won and became one of the few women in Congress.
And this is who Doll targeted, and Doll was successful.
(30:58):
They had a long term affair, with Doll's goal being
to sort of turn down the anti British rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Wow, it's okay, So that it itself already already feels
like a subplot in an amazing film, right startup spycraft
with the twenty year olds who who come up with
their best ideas three beers in or somebody.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I haven't even told you who was in this group.
I mean it was William Stephens said had an incredible
eye for talent, so he had Rolled Doll. He also
had Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond.
He had David Ogilvie, who had become the father of
modern advertising and the inspiration for Don Draper. He had
Noel Coward, the great playwright. So you got to picture
(31:50):
Noel Coward, Roll Doll, James Bond, and Don Draper all
just like hanging out in DC in their mid twenties,
all just incredibly gorgeous and dash.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
That's what it was like.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I'm struck by the psychic pitch, because, yeah, I think
it would probably it feels like that something like that
might even work to a degree here in the modern day,
in twenty twenty six, which is both astonishing and in
no small way kind of frightening. I've got to ask
(32:23):
you this though, erin so our spy mechanism, right, the
quote unquote juiciest part of this part of his noisy life,
And again I love that turn of phrase of yours.
Is him attempting to garner us support by seducing the
spouses of VIPs. Does that not seem like it could
(32:48):
backfire in a pretty powerful way, like if the affair
is exposed.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're You're absolutely right. It absolutely
could have. But Churchill's back was against the wall. I
mean is we've all seen the movies and listened to
the podcast and read the books like this was their
darkest hour. They were not going to survive the onslaught
by the Nazis, and so he was doing anything he
possibly could to try to get America into the war.
(33:17):
And so you're absolutely right that this was a gamble,
but luckily it's one that paid off.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Ah, folks, hold the phone, get your everlasting gob stoppers ready.
We made an audible call as we were having our
conversation with Aaron Tracy, the creator of the secret world
of Role Doll we realized this is a two barter
max because we just have so much more stuff we
(33:43):
want to.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Get to, right, I mean, this is just a great interview,
and you know, Aaron's is a fond of knowledge and
he's just so great telling the story that you know,
both you and me big role dollphans. So we can't
get enough of this stuff, especially the spy stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
I had to Yeah, I forget to ask you, what
what is your favorite rule doll book? Obviously you can
tell I love George's Marvelous Medicine.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Yeah, I mean I actually looked up the list because
I have to remember all of them. There's so many on there.
I'm gonna go with the BFG Big Friendly Giant. I
love that one as a kid. That's one of that.
I had my dad read me multiple times because it
was just like, this one's great, but in so many
obviously James and the Giant Peach, the what is the
Glass Elevator one? Oh yeah, yeah, Second, Charlie that that
(34:30):
one's under underrated, under hit.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yes, and and again Aaron and Max and I are
not joking about that. What did Aaron call it? That
somewhat gruesome nature? I called it a subtle darkness in
the works of Doll. With that mind, folks, we can
confirm to you that whatever age you are at, honestly
(34:58):
those books still slap. I'm just gonna say there a
lot of them are great on a reread, even as
an adult. Thank you for tuning in. Please check in
with us this coming Thursday when we will have part
two of the Secret World of World Doll with Aaron Tracy,
thanks to our super producer, none other than the Willy
Wonka podcasting mister Max Williams, and Max thanks to your
(35:23):
brother Alex Williams for composing the track. Noel will be
returning from his adventures very soon. In the meantime, you
know the score, my friend? Who else? Who else? Who
else do we think?
Speaker 4 (35:37):
Let's see, Let's thank Christopher Haciotis of Eves Jeffcoat here
in spirit, the people over at Ridiculous Crime, They're amazing.
Check them out.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Aj Bahamas Jacobs. We were talking about him a little
bit off air. His ears might be tingling, Doctor Rachel
Big Spinach Lance and of course two point three out
of five reluctant acknowledgement not quite a thank you to
(36:09):
the one and only Max.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
You got it.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
You gotta give them the shout.
Speaker 4 (36:12):
Out, oh the uh, the child getting sucked up the
tube or floating to the spinning ceiling. Fans of our podcast,
Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Hey a A the Wizard.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Thanks so much, folks, As as Noel always likes to say,
we'll see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the myth,
the legend, our very own Willy Wonka level super producer,
mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, Hello, Hello, Hello. The enthusiasm is killing me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Max. They call me Ben Bullen, our brother in arms,
our brother and podcast crime Noel is on an adventure,
but will be returning soon. In the meantime, Ridiculous Historians,
we have something incredibly special for you today. As you
may recall from some earlier episodes, we have long been
(01:07):
fascinated and in no small way disturbed by the life
and times of the legendary author Roald Dall. He has
written some of the most popular children's books in all
of Western canon. Excuse me. He was a strident anti semi.
He's a fighter ace, he was a legitimate spy. We
(01:28):
are not the only people who share this obsession with
the larger than life character. Today, folks, we are thrilled
to be joined with none other than the best selling writer, producer, podcaster,
the founder of Parallax, none other than Aaron Tracy, also
the creator of the new hit podcast The Secret World
(01:49):
of rold dng Eric, thank you so much for coming
on the show man.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Oh thanks for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm of
that intro. I hope I can live up to it.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Well, we hope that we can live up to your accolades,
because in our research for this now, I know it
can always be maybe a little bit embarrassing. So we're
not going to fan boy too much. But you have
quite a pro You're quite prolific. You have a ton
(02:27):
of work under your belts. We're going to talk about
some of your additional work as well. And I have
to admit, when I'm looking through your CV and your
bona fides, I thought, how does this guy do so
much stuff? And then I learned you also lecture at Yale.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Uh yeah, yeah, I've been teaching at Yale for a while.
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I mean, if you don't have a real job, like
I don't have a real job, right my job is
to sit around and write all day. You can get
a lot of writing done. I mean, it adds up
over time, so it definitely does not feel like a
lot to me. But you're sweet to say that I've
got a lot done.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Oh gosh, well, one of the one of the things
that we've got to get right into it, man. But
one of the things that amazes me so much about
your latest project is the depth of research, right, the thoroughness,
the objectivity. It's really like it's a cinematic audio documentary.
(03:30):
And I've got to ask, given all your previous work
and the amount of projects that you've done in the past,
across multiple genres, what drew you to Roll Dall in particular,
out of all the people that you could have done
a deep dive on.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I love writing true stories. I love writing about interesting
historical figures. I've written. I wrote a TV show about
Audrey Hepburn in the sixties. I wrote a show about Jagger.
Roll Dall is one of those figures kind of like
Hepburn and Jagger Hoover, who has, you know, a really
(04:10):
important place in the public consciousness. Like everybody knows him,
a lot of people have read him to go even further.
For a lot of people, he shaped their childhoods. But
nobody knows anything about the guy. I mean, he had
such a noisy life and so as I started researching
him and discovered all of these really strange chapters of
(04:34):
his life that I didn't know about. I just became
I became totally obsessed. I mean, the guy is most
famous for writing children's stories. Of course, he didn't start
writing them until his late forties, so he had all
these different lives before then, which all sort of informed
his later books.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, that was That was something I learned from you,
the idea of that sudden switch that shape in a
profession or vocation over time. And I can't wait to
get into it. One question that all of our audience
members are going to have for you directly, Aaron, is
do you have a favorite role doll book?
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah? I love Matilda.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I probably came into this, came into the project with
Charlie and Chocolate Factory being my favorite. I love the
nineteen seventy one Gene Wilder movie. I used to, you know,
watch on VHS as a kid, and I still do
love that book. But Matilda rereading it for this project.
It's just such a good story. He's so good writing her.
(05:39):
It's such a sweet story. I mean, there's the sort
of typical doll gruesomeness that exists in all of his books,
of course, but I just I just think it's a
It's such a winner.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I love the point you're making about the gruesomeness, how
there seems to be a subtle thread of darkness that
a lot of kids don't necessarily clock on their first read.
It reminds me of another one of his books, not
not his most famous, but a book called George's Marvelous Medicine,
(06:14):
which is I would argue, a quintessential example of that
darkness through what is ostensibly whimsical work. I mean, folks,
if you haven't read it, go to your local bookstore
and get ready for a weird afternoon. It's a short story,
or it's a you know, it's a short work. It
is literally about an eight year old boy who tries
(06:36):
to kill his grandmother and accidentally makes her a giant.
Which I reread that one as as an adult several
years back, and I was kind of shocked that my
parents allowed me to have a copy of that. You know,
(06:56):
how do you how do you feel about because your father,
how do you feel about your kids reading role Doll?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah, I mean I'm a little bit torn. On the podcast,
I bring on a bunch of incredibly smart people to
have a discussion about whether or not it's okay to
allow kids, impressionable kids to read work by someone that
we now know is a bigot, is an anti semi.
(07:23):
I think it's a complicated thing. I can't really locate
the bigotry or the anti semitism on the page. I
think if I could, there'd be no question. Like I
just absolutely would not give him to my kids because
I can't. And some people say that they can see
some antisemitic tropes in the Witches. I'm not sure I
agree with that. But because I can't see it on
(07:44):
the page, is it hypocritical for me to sort of
deprive my kids of Doll's work when I don't deprive
myself of a lot of filmmakers and novelists who we
now know were total monsters. It's something I'm grappling with.
And I'll also say, I mean, you asked me my
(08:05):
favorite book, you know, I immediately went to the children's
books Charlie and Chocolate Factory in Matilda. But Dahl also
wrote a ton of stuff for adults. He wrote a
novel called My Uncle Oswald, which is you know, hard
r rated. He wrote a bunch of short stories for
places like Playboy. He wrote lots of short stories for
(08:27):
The New Yorker. One of my favorites of his is
the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which was adapted by
Netflix recently, which is absolutely for adults. So, you know,
the guy absolutely wrote things that even if you're you're
not a parent, or you're looking for, you know, something
that you can just enjoy on your own. Uh, you
(08:48):
know you can find something in Doll.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah. That's that's amazing because I love the point you've
made in in the podcast and in several other interviews
where where you kind of establish that for the majority
of people who are aware of Roald Dahl, it's really
just two words on the cover of one of their
(09:11):
favorite childhood books. Right, we don't know very much about
the creator himself, and I have to applaud you for
not shying away from some of that deeply, you know, personally,
I believe deeply and profoundly disturbing stuff, those aspects of
(09:31):
his character that are inseparable from his identity as a
person and a writer. I also, on the point of writing,
I was astonished to learn from your research that Roald
Dahl had this entire other life as a screenwriter. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I mean I think like you, I'm a big movie
buff and fascinated by Hollywood in the sixties and seventies
and earlier, and so I didn't I didn't know this either.
I mean Dolluh. After his time in the war, Dall
went out to Los Angeles. He was flown out by
Walt Disney himself and put up at a at a
(10:14):
fancy Beverly Hills hotel and given a driver and given
a place to stay, all by Walt Disney because Disney
loved this story that Doll had written, called The Gremlins.
It was one of Doll's first stories, and it was
and people don't really read it today. It's sort of
it feels kind of like a you know, the reason
Doll wrote it is it's a bit of propaganda, uh,
(10:36):
to show American and British forces working together against Germany.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And it's it's very creative.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
It has nothing whatsoever to do, by the way, with
the Steven Spielberg produced classic The Grimlins.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He knew.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
That was my first question too when I when I
first stumbled on it. But Disney brought Doll out to
Los Angeles because he wanted to turn the Gremlins into
a movie. And this is when Disney was absolutely on top.
I mean, Disney had just come off snow White and
Dumbo and Bambi and so many of his classics. So
(11:14):
here's Doll at twenty six years old, being feted by you,
unquestionably the king of Hollywood. And it didn't quite work
out for Doll. Disney sort of started a writer's room.
He brought in animators, and he brought in a director
and all these different people and started a writer's room
with Doll. But Dall was just not someone at least
(11:38):
at twenty six, but he could certainly argue as he
got older too. He was not someone who wanted to collaborate.
He had a very personal vision. He wanted to control
the work. And so eventually Disney dropped the project and
Doll wasn't able to get it set up anywhere else.
But Doll still had the bug. He wanted to make movies,
so he continued to write. He wasn't always living in Hollywood,
(12:02):
but he went back to New York. He made lots
of trips to Los Angeles and he just wrote screenplay
after screenplay. Many of them just not working. He had
won with the director Robert Altman called Oh Death, where
is Thy Stingle Ling a Ling, which is a yeah,
(12:24):
it's a crazy title, but it came closest to actually
getting made to becoming Doll's first credit. And they started
filming in fact, and Gregory Peck was in the lead role,
but as sometimes happens, the head of the studio looked
at the dailies and just said this is not working
(12:45):
and shut down production. And so after all that, it
was another sort of failed credit for Doll, but he
didn't give up and he kept working and eventually he
found the perfect vehicle for himself, which is the fourth
James Bond movie. Dall was a spy for I six,
(13:06):
which we can talk about, and so yeah, that James
Bond movie was very much informed by his experiences in Washington.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
As we're moving through this, I would like, if it's
okay with you, Aaron, to emulate some of the formula
of your podcast, because one thing you do that I
think is superb is avoiding the straight up linear recounting
of born such and such, time lives and dies. And
(13:42):
I love how how you're jumping around in time and
theme in Oh thank you.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Who needs another cradle to the grave? Right, Like, what's
more boring that? I was just watching a documentary the
other day that that was just Cradles the Grave, and
it's like, yeah, there's even when you have a fantastic story,
there's just no surprises.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, And that's I think that that is a great
advantage in the structure of your creation here, because it
keeps going to sort of hook after hook with plot
twist after plot twist, and you have quite a well
established past and present as a screenwriter yourself now, Max
(14:25):
and Noel and yours truly here we are not screenwriters
by trade, but we know a lot of people in
the business, and it just seems incredibly challenging, right to
have to have so many projects that end up for
variables beyond our control, kind of languishing, even if it's
(14:47):
a really great story. I'm saying this mainly to ask
if Doll's experience in Hollywood when he was just twenty
six or so, is that something that is common to
a lot of screenwriters or did he get did he
get the especially dirty end of the stick there?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
No, it's incredibly common. My favorite quote about Hollywood is
by the Great New Yorker critic Pauline Kale. She said,
it's the only place where you can die of encouragement,
and that's just so true. People go out there, everybody
tells you how talented you are, Everybody wants to meet
with you, and it's like your next project is going
to go forward, and you know this is a done deal,
(15:28):
and this movie star is super interested. And there's something
obviously kind of nice about a town that is that
optimistic and hopeful. But it's incredibly hard when you're struggling
in your career and you keep getting your hopes up
and then they just get dashed. So this happens all
the time. And I think what's most interesting about dol
(15:51):
is that many of his heroes, the novelists who he
was trying to emulate, did the exact same thing. They
went to Hollywood and they struggled and they completely fell apart.
So they're these great stories about people like f Scott Fitzgerald,
who Dahl loved, the great novelist who actually loved movies,
(16:11):
Unlike some of the other novels who went out there
for the money. F Scott Fitzgerald loved movies and just
couldn't make it happen. He just screenwriting didn't come naturally
to him. He started drinking more and more. He ended
up really not getting his name on scripts that he,
you know, put work into, because he was completely rewritten
(16:34):
over and over again, and he eventually drank himself to death.
And the same thing is true of, you know, the
sort of the failures of other great novelists. Aldis Huxley
had a lot of trouble, Faulkner went out there and
had a lot of trouble. You could go on and on,
and it's it's easy to imagine that Doll could have
sort of fallen into the same hole after all the
(16:57):
years of struggle that he had trying to break into Hollywood,
but he refused. He had something inside of him that
allowed him to keep going and push past all the
failures and all the disappointments, which eventually led to the
James Bond screenplay, and then finding his perfect spiritual brother
(17:20):
in Hollywood, who is Alfred Hitchcock. They're just so similar
in tone and sensibility, and Dall eventually wrote a bunch
of stories for Hitchcock that Hitchcock turned into episodes of
his TV show.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Oh Wow, that's fascinating because you know, we're often tempted
in the modern era to think of historical figures as
existing somehow separate from the world of which they live.
You know, it's always surprising to learn that folks like
Alfred Hitchcock and Rule Doll not just got along, but
(17:58):
actually work together. That's that's something that I did not clock.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
At all.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Yeah, I mean, Doll has got to be I think
it's an extraordinary thing. He's got to be the only
guy who's ever written for both Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock,
I mean, two opposite dudes. But that's that's all. He
had an incredibly wide range, and Hitchcock was just so
just so natural to everything that that worked about Doll,
(18:27):
all the gruesomeness, all the darkness, all the surprising twist endings,
it all was was sort of perfect for Hitchcock, and
Hitchcock just fell in love with his work.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
And they they share a similar kind of gallows.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Humor, you know, absolutely not in a wink.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
And there's there's something we should also get back to,
just a thread in while we're talking about his time
in Hollywood and working in these established systems that can
be you know, quite brutal at times. I remember you
mentioned You and several other sources have mentioned a specific
(19:10):
issue he had about control in general, not just his
scripts in Hollywood, but his published works. He apparently mandated
that publishers treat his material as sacro sanct something like
don't even touch a comma or you'll get the crocodile,
whatever that means. Right. This leads us to a fairly
(19:32):
recent controversy that might be unfamiliar to some people. After
Doll passed away, his publisher, Puffin Books in twenty twenty three,
started making a lot of changes to his work, Like
I think censorship based on sensitivity readers who said, hey,
(19:53):
this is you know, discriminatory, this is racist, this is insensitive,
so on and so forth, or offensive just straight up defensive.
I think we don't be interested in your your take
on that. Did Puffin do the right thing? Or should
they have left it as is?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:12):
I certainly come down on the side of hating censorship, right,
Puffin should not have done this. Uh. And just to
be sort of clear about what they were doing, they
were they were removing words like fat and ugly. There
were even instances where they took out the words black
and white, regardless of what contexts they were in, because
(20:35):
you're right, they were they were being overly sensitive. We
were going through this this period in culture where everyone
was being just incredibly sensitive, and so lots of other
writers came to you know, doll. Doll of course had
had passed away, but a lot of writers came to
(20:55):
his defense and said, no, no, no, you cannot touch
the work. He would not have wanted these changes. We
see this a lot with with writers and filmmakers too.
I mean, I think of someone like George Lucas going
back in and changing things that happened in Star Wars
to sort of, you know, work with with modern day sensibilities,
(21:19):
and it's kind of always a bad idea. I think
the much better solution is to keep the work as is,
but try to provide context, right, try to have a
conversation with people about why some of these words might
be triggering or offensive. But just going in and taking
(21:42):
out the word fat or changing the word ugly to
something else, it just it undermines the work.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, yeah, I think as as a writer as well,
I'm severely tempted to to come down on the same
side as you or be on the same page there,
because when we hear things like a censorship controversy, we
assume it may be similar to you know, the old
(22:09):
Agatha Christie use of racial epithets or something very very
serious stuff. But that and ugly seems like they might
be fighting the wrong battle, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
And you bring up a good point. I mean, I
think that's one of the reasons that this issue, which
I explore on the podcast, is just so so media
and so interesting because the Agatha Christie story that you
brought up, she has a racial epithet in her title,
and I do think that it was a good idea
to get rid of that. They did that after her death,
and so she wasn't able to approve it. But if
(22:44):
they had not done that, if her state had not
done that, that book would absolutely be unreadable. You couldn't
sell it, you couldn't put it on shelves, which I
you know, agree with, we should not be selling it
with that title. And getting rid of the title changing
it does allow that extraordinary story to be you know,
I think it's still her most popular story. It allows
(23:06):
people to continue reading it, which is a great thing.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yeah, yeah, well said well, said, and uh with that,
with that mind, I have a little bit of an
anecdote to share with you that may be familiar to
a lot of our audience members.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
And before we do that, Ben, can I jump in
with a with a weird fact I got for us,
Aaron h you said that that Doll might have been
the only person you know of that wrote for Disney
and Hitchcock, which I found somebody else is mister four
to fifty one himself, Ray Bradberry with Walt Disney and
(23:44):
also wrote for Hitchcock Presents. It's funny because I used
the Google AI to help me, like start with the bread.
And they also said Robers Yeah exactly. Yeah, well, I
said Robert Stevenson, which is funny because that's not true.
Robert Stevenson and worked with Disney and a guy named
Robert Stevens worked with Hitchcock. But to the best of
(24:05):
my knowledge, or at least Google Ais knowledge, only Ray
bat Bradberry can join Doll in that distinction.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Wow, right, cool, that's I mean, that's a good company.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, and uh, Max, I think you've earned it.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Max.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
With the facts.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
That sneaking in the phone and peaceful in knowledge, it's
just for you right now.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Here with the fact.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
We have a sal que that plays the part where
I said, okay, don't worry, we have a sod que.
So uh, this is okay. So here's here's this, uh
anecdote that may be familiar to a lot of us.
We have we have co workers who are never stressed
about anything really uh. And it's because they were actual
(25:00):
veterans and saw war and saw colmback and so after
you've lived through events like that, you're a lot less
likely to worry too much about sending an email late. Right,
You've got a perspective, And I'm wondering. I'm wondering if
(25:20):
Doll's earlier experiences informed his perspective and his creative approach
to writing, which is just you know, my long winded
way of saying, please share the spy story, just a
little bit of the spy so people can't wait to
hear this.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
I mean, I think, like all writers, his experiences growing
up and his formative experiences as a twenty something unquestionably
informed the writing. It just has to for anyone that's
not just writing sort of genre fiction or and completely
removed from themselves, and even people who who think they
are doing that. I think the life experiences always get
(26:07):
onto the page. So for doll, Yeah, his twenties and
his thirties, before he ever wrote for children, were really
about a search for identity. He was trying to figure
out who he was. He was trying to figure out
what kind of man he was, and I think you
could even argue he was trying to figure out what
it meant to be a man. In his part of
the century, he grew up without a father. His father
(26:29):
died when he was three, and so that was the
first sort of formative experience of his life. When he
was just three years old, his father and his sister
died within three weeks of each other. So just gruesome,
just so incredibly sad. And then he got older and
he became a businessman. That was his first sort of
attempt to figure out who he was. He worked for
(26:51):
Shell Oil and they send him to Africa, and so
it was this incredible adventure. But he sort of grew
tired of it after a little while, and so he
decided to volunteer for the RAF, the Air Force during
the war, and he flew some harrowing combat missions and
that was an incredible adventure for him, but he kept
getting shot down, including one time that was a really
(27:14):
devastating crash in the Libyan desert that he barely walked
away from. And so it's time to figure out what's next,
his next sort of search for identity, and the powers
that be noticed that he was incredibly tall. He was
six foot six, incredibly handsome and dashing, a great storyteller,
(27:35):
incredibly charming. So they had a job for him. They
decided he should go work for British intelligence, so they
sent him to DC, where he was ostensibly working for
the British embassy, but in reality he was recruited into
a group called the Irregulars, which is this group headed
up by William Stevenson, who's sort of a legendary figure
(27:58):
in spy circles. They worked out of thirty Rockefeller Center
in New York where Sorry Night Live is tape now,
which is a really strange place for you know, a
top secret spy organization, but that's where they were, and
they had agents in New York and d C. Doll
started off in DC, like I said, and he was
(28:21):
working as a spy doing whatever needed to be done.
This was a time before America got into the war,
and so Churchill and Britain they're in their darkest hour.
Things are going horribly of course in the war, and
they would do anything to get America to come to
their side. So they were using outside the box ideas
(28:41):
to try to get, you know, the America to come
to their aid. And so one of those ideas was
start the irregulars. And so what the irregulars were doing
were you know, a lot of propaganda, a lot of
sort of really strange ideas that you could imagine Doll
and his fellow twenty somethings coming up with out at
(29:03):
a bar, you know, and George Shannon late at night,
like one of them was, they came up with this
idea to hire a psychic named Louis de Wall to
go around the country and tell everyone that he has,
you know, looked at the stars and the third Reich
he is determined is going to fall. And so it
(29:24):
made Americans feel more comfortable about getting into the war
because it was written in the stars that they were
going to win.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
And then sort of the most salacious, you know, arguably
most interesting thing that Dahl did for the regulars was
he was tasked with seducing the wives of powerful Americans
who were not yet on the Allied side. So one
of them was the wife of Henry Lose. Henry LuSE
(29:54):
was the most powerful man in media. He owned Time magazine,
and Life Magazine and Sports Illustrated, on and on, and
these magazines were printing a lot of anti British stuff,
which Churchill sort of could not allow because it was
not helping their cause of getting the Americans into the war,
(30:15):
and they couldn't really get through to Henry Loose. But
his wife was a different story. His wife was a
woman named Claire Booth Loose, which I love that sort
of whimsical name. It sounds like a name that Doll invented.
And she was incredibly formidable and influential in her own right.
Besides being married to Henry, she was also a Broadway playwright.
(30:38):
She wrote a play called The Women, which was adapted
twice for the movies. She was a war correspondent for
a Vanity Fair, and she worked for other magazines. She
was a great journalist. And then she ran for Congress
and won and became one of the few women in Congress.
And this is who Doll targeted, and Doll was successful.
(30:58):
They had a long term affair, with Doll's goal being
to sort of turn down the anti British rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Wow, it's okay, So that it itself already already feels
like a subplot in an amazing film, right startup spycraft
with the twenty year olds who who come up with
their best ideas three beers in or somebody.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I haven't even told you who was in this group.
I mean it was William Stephens said had an incredible
eye for talent, so he had Rolled Doll. He also
had Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond.
He had David Ogilvie, who had become the father of
modern advertising and the inspiration for Don Draper. He had
Noel Coward, the great playwright. So you got to picture
(31:50):
Noel Coward, Roll Doll, James Bond, and Don Draper all
just like hanging out in DC in their mid twenties,
all just incredibly gorgeous and dash.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
That's what it was like.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
I'm struck by the psychic pitch, because, yeah, I think
it would probably it feels like that something like that
might even work to a degree here in the modern day,
in twenty twenty six, which is both astonishing and in
no small way kind of frightening. I've got to ask
(32:23):
you this though, erin so our spy mechanism, right, the
quote unquote juiciest part of this part of his noisy life,
And again I love that turn of phrase of yours.
Is him attempting to garner us support by seducing the
spouses of VIPs. Does that not seem like it could
(32:48):
backfire in a pretty powerful way, like if the affair
is exposed.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're You're absolutely right. It absolutely
could have. But Churchill's back was against the wall. I
mean is we've all seen the movies and listened to
the podcast and read the books like this was their
darkest hour. They were not going to survive the onslaught
by the Nazis, and so he was doing anything he
possibly could to try to get America into the war.
(33:17):
And so you're absolutely right that this was a gamble,
but luckily it's one that paid off.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Ah, folks, hold the phone, get your everlasting gob stoppers ready.
We made an audible call as we were having our
conversation with Aaron Tracy, the creator of the secret world
of Role Doll we realized this is a two barter
max because we just have so much more stuff we
(33:43):
want to.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Get to, right, I mean, this is just a great interview,
and you know, Aaron's is a fond of knowledge and
he's just so great telling the story that you know,
both you and me big role dollphans. So we can't
get enough of this stuff, especially the spy stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
I had to Yeah, I forget to ask you, what
what is your favorite rule doll book? Obviously you can
tell I love George's Marvelous Medicine.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Yeah, I mean I actually looked up the list because
I have to remember all of them. There's so many on there.
I'm gonna go with the BFG Big Friendly Giant. I
love that one as a kid. That's one of that.
I had my dad read me multiple times because it
was just like, this one's great, but in so many
obviously James and the Giant Peach, the what is the
Glass Elevator one? Oh yeah, yeah, Second, Charlie that that
(34:30):
one's under underrated, under hit.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yes, and and again Aaron and Max and I are
not joking about that. What did Aaron call it? That
somewhat gruesome nature? I called it a subtle darkness in
the works of Doll. With that mind, folks, we can
confirm to you that whatever age you are at, honestly
(34:58):
those books still slap. I'm just gonna say there a
lot of them are great on a reread, even as
an adult. Thank you for tuning in. Please check in
with us this coming Thursday when we will have part
two of the Secret World of World Doll with Aaron Tracy,
thanks to our super producer, none other than the Willy
Wonka podcasting mister Max Williams, and Max thanks to your
(35:23):
brother Alex Williams for composing the track. Noel will be
returning from his adventures very soon. In the meantime, you
know the score, my friend? Who else? Who else? Who
else do we think?
Speaker 4 (35:37):
Let's see, Let's thank Christopher Haciotis of Eves Jeffcoat here
in spirit, the people over at Ridiculous Crime, They're amazing.
Check them out.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Aj Bahamas Jacobs. We were talking about him a little
bit off air. His ears might be tingling, Doctor Rachel
Big Spinach Lance and of course two point three out
of five reluctant acknowledgement not quite a thank you to
(36:09):
the one and only Max.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
You got it.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
You gotta give them the shout.
Speaker 4 (36:12):
Out, oh the uh, the child getting sucked up the
tube or floating to the spinning ceiling. Fans of our podcast,
Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Hey a A the Wizard.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Thanks so much, folks, As as Noel always likes to say,
we'll see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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