Did Willy Wonka’s Creator Spy on America?

Summary

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American History Hotline: “Did Willy Wonka’s Creator Spy on America?”

iHeartPodcasts | February 18, 2026

Host: Bob Crawford
Guest: Aaron Tracy (creator and host of “The Secret World of Roald Dahl” audio docuseries)

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Episode Overview

This episode steps outside the usual listener Q&A format to investigate a listener-submitted mystery: Was beloved children’s author Roald Dahl also a British spy in America? Host Bob Crawford welcomes Aaron Tracy, a Dahl biographer and creator of a new docuseries on Dahl, to unpack the truth behind the “real life James Bond” reputation, secret affairs with American power brokers, and the unexpected influence Dahl had on 20th-century history and children’s literature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Roald Dahl and His Disdain for “Willy Wonka” the Movie

• [00:00 | 36:01] The episode opens and closes on a striking note—Dahl hated the film adaptation of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971), despite writing its screenplay. He disapproved of its commercial focus and casting.

  “He absolutely hated it. And he wrote it. He wrote the adaptation... The movie was funded by the Quaker Oats Company… it shifted the focus onto Willy Wonka and away from Charlie.”
  —Aaron Tracy [00:06, 36:09]

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Two Truths and a Lie: Dahl’s Implausible Biography

• [01:14] Aaron kicks off with a game to illustrate the wildness of Dahl’s life:

  1. Amateur neuroscientist (“true”)
  2. Wrote “The French Connection” screenplay (“lie”)
  3. Long-term affair with a U.S. congresswoman while a British spy (“true”)

• Dahl did, in fact, invent a medical device (the “Wade-Dahl-Till” valve) used to treat hydrocephalus in children, saving thousands of lives.

  “He was an amateur neuroscientist who saved the lives of thousands of kids.”
  —Aaron Tracy [03:09]

• He also carried on an affair with Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce as part of his WWII spy work.

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From RAF Ace to MI6 Spy

• [09:57–11:02] Dahl sought adventure through Shell Oil in Africa, then as an RAF pilot (shot down, wounded, grounded). His storytelling and charm caught the eye of British Intelligence, who recruited him for MI6’s “Irregulars” unit working out of Washington, DC.

  “If you sort of picture Don Draper and James Bond and Roald Dahl and Noel Coward all hanging out at a Georgetown bar in the 1940s, that was kind of the scene. It was just this incredibly glamorous spy ring.”
  —Aaron Tracy [12:45]

• Their tasks included high-level seduction and influence operations. Dahl used relationships (even affairs) with influential American women, like Clare Booth Luce, to sway elite opinion and American media coverage in favor of Britain’s cause.

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Dahl’s Popularity & Enduring Literary Influence

• [08:34] Dahl sold more than 300 million books, dwarfing even literary giants. His works remain widely assigned in schools, long after publication.

  “They dwarf all other authors… If you add up all of their books sold, they equal one quarter of the number of books that Dahl sold.”
  —Aaron Tracy [08:34]

• Dahl’s delayed literary fame meant most people know him as an elderly author, but in his youth he was “incredibly handsome…6 foot 6… a great storyteller… and that’s what helped him succeed in his spy work.” [09:57]

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The Anti-Semitism Question—Reconciling the Man and His Work

• [16:07] Dahl made well-documented anti-Semitic remarks in interviews. Tracy (himself Jewish, raising Jewish kids) grapples with whether it’s ethical to enjoy or share Dahl’s books given this:

  “Privately Dahl was unquestionably anti Semitic. He… said in an interview in 1990, ‘I’ve become anti Semitic.’ … He said to an interviewer in 1983… ‘Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’”
  —Aaron Tracy [16:52]

• Tracy convened other writers and philosophers in his own podcast to debate if it’s okay to continue reading Dahl, noting each person’s answer is different.

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The Origin of Dahl’s Writing Career

• [25:19] A chance lunch with then-famous writer C.S. Forester kickstarted Dahl’s writing career. Dahl was meant to supply notes, but wrote a full adventure story instead:

  “I was expecting you to send me notes. Instead you sent me a completed story. Did you know you were a writer?”
  —C.S. Forester, relayed by Aaron Tracy [25:19]

• Early works focused on adult adventure and war stories, not children’s literature.

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Transition to Children’s Books and Personal Tragedy

• [27:29, 33:17] Dahl’s move to children’s stories was driven by personal tragedy; his son’s accident, his daughter’s death, and his wife’s illness drew him into family life and storytelling for his children.

  “He had to become the primary caregiver... so coming up with stories to read them at night… became very important to him.”
  —Aaron Tracy [33:17]

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Early Works and Breakthrough

• [32:43] “James and the Giant Peach” (1961) was a flop at first, but Dahl’s agent urged him on. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964) was the breakthrough, followed by a string of classics: Matilda, The BFG, The Witches.

  “James and the Giant Peach came out first and nobody bought it… then Dahl… went on to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and that became just an instant sensation.”—Aaron Tracy [32:43, 35:07]

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On the Darkness and Nastiness in Dahl’s Books

• [37:43] Dahl’s hallmark: mean adults mistreating children. Tracy says this is what makes his work attractive—kids crave honest depictions of the world’s harshness.

  “He looked around at the children’s literature landscape, and it was a lot of very saccharine, sugary, you know, niceties. And he knew that kids want to be told the truth... He gave them some of that nastiness that made it feel like they were being told the truth finally.”
  —Aaron Tracy [37:58]

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Literary Mentors as “Wonkas” in Dahl’s Life

• [39:14] Dahl’s real-life mentors—William Stephenson (spymaster) and Charles Marsh (news magnate)—played “Willy Wonka” roles in his life, opening doors and guiding him.

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Wrestling with the Legacy

• [41:51–44:44] Tracy is open about being torn between Dahl’s personal failings and his genius and impact.

  “I really do feel a lot of sympathy for him… I think there was a lot of great stuff in Dahl. … On the other hand, I’m very turned off by all of the bigoted comments. … I think he’s incredibly complicated and I think he’s going to be someone that I continue to think about forever.”
  —Aaron Tracy [42:29]

• Tracy wouldn’t withhold Dahl’s books from his children but would want them to understand the full context.

  “I just think it’s also important to have context and for my kids to know exactly who he was and what he said and what he believed in…”
  —Aaron Tracy [44:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Dahl’s shift from adult literature:

  “He always thought of himself as an adult writer. … You just kind of want to shake him and give him a hug and say, no one is thinking less of you, buddy. Like, your children’s books are so universally beloved.”
  —Aaron Tracy [30:22]

• On biographies and dramatizations:

  “There’s less than five movies that have actually had a character named Roald Dahl, which is very surprising to me.”
  —Aaron Tracy [29:24]

• Host’s Reflection:

  “There’s a Seinfeld episode in this.”
  —Bob Crawford [21:27]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–03:09 – Opening game: Two Truths and a Lie about Dahl’s life
• 03:17–05:26 – Dahl’s invention of a neurosurgical device for his son
• 08:34–09:23 – Dahl’s literary dominance and book sales
• 09:57–12:45 – Dahl’s looks/charisma and transition to spy
• 14:34–16:07 – Dahl’s seduction/influence operations, impact on US media
• 16:07–19:09 – Discussions of Dahl’s antisemitism and the implications
• 25:19–27:22 – How Dahl’s writing career began via C.S. Forester
• 27:29–28:36 – Early adult-focused literature, relationship with the Roosevelts
• 33:13–34:16 – Family tragedies influence Dahl’s move to children’s books
• 35:07–36:01 – “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as Dahl’s true breakthrough
• 36:01–37:27 – Detailed critique of the “Willy Wonka” (1971) movie adaptations
• 37:43–38:53 – The “nastiness” in Dahl’s books and why it resonates with children
• 41:51–44:44 – Tracy’s personal struggle with enjoying and sharing Dahl’s works
• 43:40–44:44 – Favorite Dahl books, children’s assignment, and context

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Episode Highlights

• Behind the chocolate factory: Roald Dahl’s spy work, affairs, and postwar intelligence exploitation offer a real-world parallel to his fantastical literary inventions.
• A difficult legacy: The episode handles the contradiction between Dahl’s creative genius and personal prejudice with maturity, not erasure.
• From failure to fixture: James and the Giant Peach’s flop turned to global phenomenon only after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory rewrote Dahl’s history.

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Conclusion

Aaron Tracy’s deep dive into Roald Dahl’s tangled biography reveals a figure more intriguing, complicated, and at times troubling than any of his fictional characters. The conversation offers a model for how to appreciate art critically—without glossing over the flaws of its creator—while tracing the fascinating intersections between global history, personal tragedy, and literary imagination.

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Listen to more: Check out “The Secret World of Roald Dahl” podcast for a full exploration.
Submit a question: Email [e-mail]

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Transcript

[Bob Crawford]

What did he think of the film adaptation? Willy Wonka?

[Aaron Tracy]

He hated it.

[Ad Voice 1]

Oh, my gosh.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, that 1971 film that is such a classic that we all love with Gene Wilder. He absolutely hated it. And he wrote it. He wrote the adaptation.

[Bob Crawford]

You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message. What do Willy Wonka, Matilda or the BFG have to do with American history? I mean, these are characters from children's books written by the Brit, Roald Dahl. Well, it turns out Dahl had quite the history before turning to children's literature. And part of that history includes seducing the wives of powerful Americans. Yeah, he was a British spy. A real life James Bond, if you will. Dahl's life might actually be more unbelievable than the magical characters in his books. So I figured let's dive into his history with someone who just published a 10 part audio docuseries about Dahl. It's Aaron Tracy. Aaron, welcome to American History Hotline.

[Aaron Tracy]

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

[Bob Crawford]

I am thrilled to have you here. Okay, Aaron, we're breaking our format today for you because I think it's a great idea to do so. We're not answering a listener's question, but I just had to talk to you after hearing a couple episodes of your new Raald Dahl series. So to start, can you give me two truths and a lie about Roald Dahl? And I'm going to try to guess the right one.

[Aaron Tracy]

I love it. I didn't realize you were breaking your format for me. All right, I'm honored.

[Bob Crawford]

Yeah. And I'm also putting myself out there.

[Aaron Tracy]

I, I've made a tough one for you, so. Yeah, you're, you're gonna miss it. Um, I hope. All right, number one, in addition to being a writer, Dahl was an amateur neuroscientist who invented a medical device that saved the lives of thousands of children around the world. Number two, Dahl wrote the screenplay for the best picture winning 1971 film, the French Connection, starring Gene Hackman. It was about detectives who bring down a heroin ring in Marseille. Number three, Dahl had a long term affair with a U.S. congresswoman while working as a British spy in Washington during World War II. So.

[Bob Crawford]

I'm trying to think how many Congress women were in Congress at that time. And there had to be at least one. One or two. French Connection is a great movie.

[Aaron Tracy]

And.

[Bob Crawford]

I'm pulling for number one to be true. So I'm going to say French Connection is the. Is the lie.

[Aaron Tracy]

Damn. You got it. That's frustrating. He did not write the French Connection. He did write the fourth James Bond film, you Only Live Twice, but he did not write the French Connection.

[Bob Crawford]

Yeah, incredible.

[Aaron Tracy]

That was impressive. Yeah. He did have a long term affair with the congresswoman. And he was an amateur neuroscientist who saved a life of thousands of kids.

[Bob Crawford]

So tell me more about the neuroscientist. What? I mean, what did he develop?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, isn't that nuts? So his son Theo, I mean, it's a horrible tragedy. Doll had a lot of terrible family tragedies in his life, and one of them was his son. Theo was hit by a taxi when he was just three months old. So just horrible. Theo was in and out of the hospital for the next several years. And in the hospital he developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. And at the time, there was no device that could get the water off the brain without causing infection. And Dahl at this point was a world famous children's author. He had absolutely no medical training, but he was also someone who, as you'll hear, you know, as you and I talk, and also if you listen to my podcast, he went through life during the just always winning, just always being just an overarching success at everything. And so when he learns that there is no tube that can get the water off his son's brain without hurting him more, he doesn't just say, let the doctors figure it out. He says, you know what? I've always succeeded at everything. Let me try. And so he gets together what I think of as a writer's room, which he learned in Hollywood. He put together a toy maker and he put together a neuroscientist and himself. And they sat in a room and they basically threw ideas at the wall until they came up with a tube that made minor adjustments, but important adjustments to the existence.

[Bob Crawford]

A shunt.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, it's a valve. I've heard it called a shunt. A tube.

[Bob Crawford]

Yeah.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. And the proper name is the Till tube Doll Wade Valve, which, you know, he didn't want to put his name first because he wanted to put Tyl's name first, but it ended up working and helping his son and then being used around the world. And it's credited with saving the lives of over 3,000 kids.

[Bob Crawford]

You know what? My daughter is a brain tumor survivor. Oh, wow. And she never needed a shunt. Thank God. We know many kids who did, and she was once a candidate for one. And so that is an amazing connection that I had no idea. This episode is already well worth it. We've learned so much already. We're just getting started.

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[Bob Crawford]

Understand Dahl's popularity as an author. How do his book sales compare to other children's authors?

[Aaron Tracy]

I mean, they dwarf all other authors. The guy sold over 300 million books. So I put the stat in my podcast, but it's something like, if you put together all of your favorite authors for me, I named Philip Roth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway and on and on and on. And then you can add in Shel Silverstein, a fellow children's author like Dahl. If you add up all of their books sold, they equal one quarter of the number of books that Dahl sold. He was just the absolute biggest. He dominated the field. You know, part of that, I think, is because so many of his books were turned into great films, and so they fed off of each other. But he's. He's dominated children's literature in a way that nobody else had until J.K. rowling came around.

[Bob Crawford]

I mean, and to the point. My son is 14, and he has been assigned throughout his time in school here in the 2000 and twenties, he's been assigned Dahl's books. It's just incredible, the staying power of his work. So paint us a picture of Dahl, like, physics. Like, what did he look like? Because his books are so. His characters are just so. I mean, just mythic and legendary. What did. What did the creator of those characters physically look like?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, well, certainly my picture of doll before I started this podcast was the old man sitting in a chair like Masterpiece Theater with a writing desk on his lap, completely bald and hunched over, sort of shaped like a spoon. And that was Dahl in old age. And that's the doll that a lot of people know, because he didn't become famous as a children's author until he was in his late 40s. And so we mostly know Dahl from the second part of his life. When Dahl was young, he was very, very different. He was incredibly handsome and dashing. He was 6 foot 6, just really good looking, a great storyteller, incredibly charming. And that's what helped him. You know, it's a big part of what helped him succeed so much in his spy work.

[Bob Crawford]

Yeah, so let's. Let's get to that part of the story. Like, before he was a children's author, he was a spy. So, like, what is that all about?

[Aaron Tracy]

How.

[Bob Crawford]

How did that come about?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, Dahl was someone who was always searching for his identity. He started off as a businessman for Shell Whale, which took him to Africa. And he was very excited about the adventure of that. Dahl was someone who was always looking for adventure. So he was working for Shell Oil, and after a while it got a little bit tedious for him, and so he wanted the next adventure. So he decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force during the war. And that, again, was just an incredible adventure for him. Soaring through the skies. He was in some harrowing combat missions, got shot down several times, finally got shot down in a way that led to a terrible crash and almost killed him. After that, he was grounded and he needed something new to do. He needed a new adventure. And because of how handsome and charming and what a great storyteller he was, British Intelligence had their eye on him and decided to send him to Washington D.C. to work for the British Embassy, ostensibly. But what he was actually going to be doing was working for MI6. He was recruited into this group called the Irregulars. And the Irregulars were led by William Stevenson, who's this sort of mythic figure in intelligence and spycraft. Stevenson had an incredible eye for talent because he had Dahl working for him, but he also had Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond, and he had Noel Coward, the great playwright, and he had David Ogilvy, who would go on to invent modern advertising and become a Ogilvy.

[Bob Crawford]

And Mather.

[Aaron Tracy]

Mather. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so David Ogilvie is very much the inspiration for Don Draper on Mad Men. And so if you. If you sort of picture Don Draper and James Bond and Roald Dahl and Noel Coward all hanging out at a Georgetown bar in the 1940s, that was kind of the scene. It was just this incredibly glamorous spy ring. And. And their job, specifically, Dahl's job was often to seduce the wives of powerful Americans who were not yet on the Allied side. Britain was trying to bring America into the war and we were just sitting on the sidelines back then. And so trying to. Trying to get some of these men into the. Onto the Allied side required Dahl going through the rives, often for blackmail or. Or just to get the needed intelligence. So one of the women that Dahl seduced was Claire Booth Luce, who was married to Henry Luce, who was the publisher of Time magazine and Life magazine, just incredibly influential in the media world. And oftentimes his magazines were publishing stories that were negative about Britain, and Churchill couldn't have that. And so Dahl went to Luce's wife and Luce's Wife also happened to be incredibly influential in her own right. She was a congresswoman. And so Dahl's relationship with her led to, you know, sort of Henry's magazines publishing less antagonistic articles about Britain and also Clare Boothluce, you know, being more willing to accept America entering the war.

[Bob Crawford]

So do we know more about how this played out with Henry Luce? Like, did they come to him at some point and say, hey, I have dirt on you through your wife or I'm having an affair with, like, how did this play out?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, we don't know about that. We can sort of look at the evidence, which is after the affair, or I should say during the affair, Luce's magazines stopped publishing as many negative articles about Britain. So that very well may have come from Clare whispering in Henry's ear, you know, stop it. Cut it out. We don't know for sure that, that there was anything, you know, like blackmail happening. But the overall there's definitely a sense that, that these irregulars, through propaganda, through outside the box ideas, like they hired a, they hired an astrologer named Louis de Waal to go around the country and basically say that he has done a reading of the stars and he knows that the Third Reich is going to fall. And the idea was that that was going to make Americans more prone to want to get into the war because it seemed fated that we were going to win the war against Germany. So the irregulars were just coming up with all of these sort of outside the box ideas and a lot of them worked.

[Bob Crawford]

I have heard before it rumored that Daw was an anti Semite. Is there truth to this?

[Aaron Tracy]

Sadly, there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, I'm Jewish. I'm raising two Jewish kids. I'm thinking a lot about whether or not I'm going to read them Dahl's works, whether I'm going to give them Dahl's books. It's complicated for me. On the one hand, I don't see any of the antisemitism on the page, which makes it more complicated for me to want to take it away. I think if there was anti Semitism in the text, it would be a no brainer for me. Some people say that they think maybe.

[Bob Crawford]

He would not be as revered as he is today.

[Aaron Tracy]

Completely. Yeah. I mean, some people see anti Semitic tropes in the witches. I'm not so sure if that's true. But privately Dahl was unquestionably anti Semitic. He, he even, he said in an interview in 1990, I've become anti Semitic. Another important quote from him regarding this is he said to an interviewer in 1983 in the New Statesman, there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. So it's, it's, it's tricky, you know, Dahl's estate put out an apology sort of on behalf of Dahl, who was.

[Bob Crawford]

Who after he passed.

[Aaron Tracy]

After he had passed. And around what year was that? It was, it was not long ago. It was only within the past decade. It was around the same time that, that the Hollywood Reporter said that a deal was made by Netflix for the Dahl estate for a billion dollars to start adapting Dahl's works. So it feels a little bit like there was probably some business reasons for.

[Bob Crawford]

CYA is what we call it. We call it cya.

[Aaron Tracy]

So, I don't know. I mean, I could go on and on about the other anti Semitic things that Dahl said. I bring on several people to the podcast, like Claire Dederer and Roxanne Gay and the head of the philosophy department at Wellesley College to talk about all this. Is it okay to continue reading Dahl, knowing what we know about him? And what was interesting was all of us came down with slightly different reasons for whether or not we could continue reading him. It's just, it's, it's not clear cut.

[Bob Crawford]

At what point in the process of creating this series did you learn this or did you already know it? Like, at what point was it confirmed for you? Like, were you already knee deep in research? Like, kind of where you can't go back and you. You learned this or, or was. Did you already kind of know this?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. If you, if you spend a few minutes just Googling Dahl, just researching him a little bit, it comes up pretty quickly, especially after the last few years we've been through with Cancel Culture. You can find it pretty easily. So when I did find it, it didn't make me shy away. It actually, it made me want to lean in because this is something I didn't really know about him before. And he shaped so much of my childhood, like, so many people's childhoods. And so I immediately wanted to know, you know, what kind of man he really was. The way I talk about it on my podcast is the night before my birthday, this. My wife got me a gift. She'd been talking for weeks about this gift that she had gotten me, and she was so excited. She found me the perfect gift. The night before my birthday, I was in Los Angeles. And I flew back and I crawled into bed late, and I woke up the next morning and I came downstairs and there's my wife and my kids, and they're so excited to see me again and wish me a happy birthday. And my wife brings out this giant gift, and I unwrap it, and it's this giant framed, museum quality photograph of this old man petting a dog. And I don't quite know what to make of it. And she says, dummy, it's a photo of Billy Wilder, your favorite director.

[Bob Crawford]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Aaron Tracy]

And so she's right. Billy Wilder is my favorite director. But it takes me a couple minutes until I finally have to tell her, sweetie, this is not a photo of Billy Wilder. And she's so embarrassed. She had bought it from an auction house and it was labeled Helmut Newton Photographing Billy Wilder. So she didn't know. But she goes back to the office and she calls me later in the afternoon. And she had done a little research. And it turns out not only is it not a photograph of Billy Wilder, it is a photograph of Jean Marie Le Pen, the far right French feminist. Oh, my gosh. And so we now have in our closet this just beautiful giant photo of Jean Marie Le Pen, this anti Semite. And that is kind of how I feel about it. Dahl. I don't know if I should be taking all of his books off my shelf and hiding them in the closet next to the Jean Marie Le Pen photo, but it feels a little bit like I want to do that.

[Bob Crawford]

There's a Seinfeld episode in this.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yes.

[Bob Crawford]

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[Bob Crawford]

This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today my guest is Aaron Tracy. He's the creator and host of a new audio docu series on Raw Dahlia. It's called the Secret World of Roald Dahl. Remember, send us your burning questions about American history. Record yourself using the voice memo app on your phone and email it to AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com that's AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com now back to the show. How did Roald Dahl transition to writing.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. So it was something he always wanted, but didn't know if he really had the talent. And then this kind of incredible thing happened. He was at the British Embassy in Washington working, and a writer named C.S. forster knocked on his door. And C.S. forster isn't much remembered today, but he was a big best selling writer of his era. He wrote all these adventure stories. And Dahl was absolutely, you know, starstruck. He had read everything that Forster had ever written. And Forster asked Dahl to lunch. Dahl was 26 years old. And at the lunch, basically, C.S. forster wanted to know all of Dahl's adventures because he wanted to write up some short stories based on Dahl's adventures that he could get published and boost British morale. But at this lunch, Forster ordered the duck. And why this is important is because he had trouble eating the duck. He had to use both knife and fork and he didn't have a hand free in order to take notes on what Dahl was saying. And Dahl saw this and said, you know what, Just eat your duck in peace. I will write this up tonight. I will write notes up tonight and I will send them to you. And Forster was like, great, that sounds amazing. So Dahl went home that night and poured himself a drink and wrote one of his best aerial adventures and shot it over to Forster the next morning, not expecting to hear anything more. And about a week later, he got a letter from Forrester that said, I was expecting you to send me notes. Instead you sent me a completed story. Did you know you were a writer? And that line, that question from Dahl's hero, he carried with him for years. It's like he says, it's what gave him permission to finally be what he had always dreamed of being, which I think is so incredible. I think back on, you know, what if Forrester had ordered a ham sandwich and had a free hand, maybe the children's literature section of your bookstore would look very, very different.

[Bob Crawford]

Well, so, you know, talking about children's literature, was it always children's literature for Dahl?

[Aaron Tracy]

No, it wasn't. So that first story about Doll's. About doll's. Excuse me. That first story about Dahl's aerial adventures was very much for adults. It was to boost British morale. And Forster got it published in the Saturday evening post in 1942. And that's a lot of what Dahl tried to write in the beginning. He also wrote a short story called the Gremlins, which Eleanor Roosevelt somehow got her hands on and absolutely loved and invited Dahl to the White House to talk about. And that's How Dahl befriended the Roosevelts, which was incredibly helpful for a young spy. And during this time he was writing a lot of books.

[Bob Crawford]

This is while he was a spy. I'm sorry, Sorry. This is while he was a spy.

[Aaron Tracy]

That's right, yeah. I mean, for a spy to just like especially a 26 year old spy to befriend a lowly staffer at the White House would be fantastic. Dahl was actually befriending the first family and got invited up to Hyde park to spend the weekend. He was just, like I said, he was just incredibly successful at everything he did.

[Bob Crawford]

Did, did, did Dahl ever have interactions with Churchill while he was in dc?

[Aaron Tracy]

So we don't know for sure if Dahl interacted with Churchill. We know that he wrote up his time with FDR and Eleanor in long reports and would send them back to Churchill. Mostly, though, Dahl was working directly with William Stevenson, who was the head of the Irregulars in MI6.

[Bob Crawford]

Has anyone written anything about the like? Has there been a movie kind of loosely based on the Irregulars? Like when in your research did you come across. Is this a, you know, for British historians? Is this a, you know, a subject well, well covered?

[Aaron Tracy]

That's a good question. The movie does not exist yet. I very much hope to write it. In addition to a podcast creator. Yeah, I'm a screenwriter and so, yes, that is the hope. It's always tricky to try to write something set in, in the 1940s. I mean, the, the period is obviously well covered, but no, not much has been dramatized about the Irregulars. There are several books that touch on the Irregulars, but one of the things that surprised me a lot in my research of Dahl was how few times he's been. He's been portrayed in movies. I mean, so many of his books have been turned into movies and stage shows and even TV shows. But. But there's less than five movies that have actually had a character named Roald Dahl, which is very surprising to me.

[Bob Crawford]

So you talked about one of his big influences as a writer who were some of his other influences in his early days.

[Aaron Tracy]

He wanted to write this strong, muscular fiction like Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was his big hero and he succeeded for a while. Dahl was writing stories for the New Yorker. He was writing. A lot of people don't know this about Dahl because we, we think of him as a children's writer, but he was writing very adult, very sexualized stories for outlets like Playboy and publishing them on his own. He has a book called My Uncle Oswald, which didn't come out until the 70s, but is a really sexualized story. So Dahl. Dahl was kind of never satisfied with writing for kids. I mean, he absolutely loved kids, and he loved the success and that his children's books brought him. But he always thought of himself as an adult writer. And in so many interviews, many of them we play during the podcast, he talks about how writing children's books is so much harder than writing for adults. Like, he. He feels clearly very self conscious about the fact that he never quite made it as an adult writer. And you just kind of want to like, shake him and give him a hug and say, no one is thinking less of you, buddy. Like, your children's books are so universally beloved. I wish he could have sort of accepted that.

[Bob Crawford]

Was it ever controversial that he would write sexualized books and he was also writing children's books?

[Aaron Tracy]

No, I don't think so. I mean, partly, I think it was because it was a different time.

[Bob Crawford]

Right.

[Aaron Tracy]

It might be today, but back then, you know, Shel Silverstein did something similar, and I really think that Dahl sort of kept them separate. Dahl wrote all of these sexualized books and articles for Playboy kind of before he made it as a children's author. He didn't write his first children's book until he was 46 years old. So he had a lot of time before then to write all these other things. His entire chapter at the New Yorker, where he was writing these fantastic fiction pieces, was really before James and the Giant Peach, his first children's book.

[Bob Crawford]

His first children's book. What was his first big hit?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. So James and the Giant Peach came out first and nobody bought it. It sold something like 6,000 copies in its entire first year. It was just a complete dud. And then Dahl, you know, Dahl thought about giving up, but his agent was really pushed him to keep going because she saw something in James and the Giant Peach, even though nobody else did.

[Bob Crawford]

Well, wait, what inspired him to write it? I mean, because you talk about him writing adult literature.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah.

[Bob Crawford]

Like what? What was it about? A big story. Yeah.

[Aaron Tracy]

A big part of it was what was going on with his family. I sort of mentioned this earlier, but Dahl had a lot of tragedies in his family life. His son Theo was hit by a taxi and was in and out of hospital for three years. His daughter Olivia tragically died at seven years old. His wife had a series of strokes that left her completely incapacitated for a while, and they thought she was going to die. So he had all these terrible things happen to his family, and it really made him Focus in on his family, especially with his wife and her strokes. He had to become the primary caregiver for his kids. And so coming up with stories, to read them at night, to tell them at night, became very important to him. And as he focused in on his kids, he moved further and further away from these adult Ernest Hemingway, like New Yorker stories and more into children's stories that his kids really loved.

[Bob Crawford]

That's amazing.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, it's really touching. You know, Dahlia Dahl was a difficult guy. He was bigoted and anti Semitic and he could be abusive to those closest to him. His wife wrote a fantastic memoir about her entire life. She was an Academy Award winning actress, but of course she talks a lot about dolls since they were made.

[Bob Crawford]

What was her name?

[Aaron Tracy]

Her name was Patricia Neal. She was in Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany's and a bunch of classics of the 50s and 60s. But in her entire book, she says a bunch of disparaging things about Dahl, and probably rightly so, but she never says anything bad about him. As a father. He seemed to really, really love his kids.

[Bob Crawford]

What was the first big hit he had?

[Aaron Tracy]

So after the failure of James and the Giant Peach, Dahl went on to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and that became just an instant sensation.

[Bob Crawford]

What year did that come out?

[Aaron Tracy]

It came out in 1964, and only about six years after that the movie came out. And so it was sort of a one, two punch of just changing children's literature. I mean, it became such a beloved book and it ended up influencing everything that came after. And it became such a hit that all of a sudden people wanted anything that Roald Dahl wrote. And so they went back to James and the Giant Peach and that all of a sudden became a huge bestseller. And at that point it was just, you know, there was no stopping him. Matilda, the bfg, the witches, everything he wrote just became a giant hit.

[Bob Crawford]

What did he think of the film adaptation? Willy Wonka?

[Aaron Tracy]

He hated it.

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[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, that 1971 film that is such a classic that we all love with Gene Wilder. He absolutely hated it. And he wrote it. He wrote the adaptation. But it's a. It's, you know, I'm a little bit on. I love the movie, but I'm a little bit on Dahl's side in that it was a very weird, very unartistic process of making that movie. The movie was funded to by the Quaker Oats Company, which is bizarre. I've never heard of a cereal company bankrolling an entire studio film before. But the idea was that they were going to come out with a chocolate bar, a Willy Wonka chocolate bar, and they wanted the movie to sort of act as an ad for it. And so they made a bunch of changes. Dahl's book was called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The movie is called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It shifted the focus onto Willy Wonka and away from Charlie. And when you do that for those kinds of crash, those kinds of crass commercial reasons, I get why the writer can be pretty annoyed. It's not at all how he thought of Willy Wonka. Gene Wilder was kind of the opposite of what he wanted.

[Bob Crawford]

That's incredible, because for me, that is my introduction to him, and that is. I'm. That movie came out the year I was born, and it is just, obviously, it's iconic and it's psychedelic and it's everything about it, so.

[Aaron Tracy]

Oh, it's great. It's really great, too.

[Bob Crawford]

Yeah. So when you think about Roald Dahl, you think about mean adults mistreating children. Totally. The characters, right?

[Aaron Tracy]

The characters, absolutely.

[Bob Crawford]

Tell me about some of the similarities you saw in his characters.

[Aaron Tracy]

Well, I just. I think you're right that there's a lot of nastiness and brutishness in the children's books, and I think that that's not an accident. I think that a lot of it came from his own life, where he could be sort of brutish and nasty. But I do also think that it's something that kids wanted. He. He looked around at the. The children's literature landscape, and it was a lot of very saccharine, sugary, you know, niceties. And he knew that kids want to be told the truth. Kids want. Kids see that the world is not completely calm, comforting place. And so he gave them some of that nastiness that made it feel like they were being told the truth finally. So, yeah, that's. It's. It's not a flaw of the books. It's very much what a lot of kids are drawn to.

[Bob Crawford]

That's great. That's, you know, what made me think of, for a second, Pink Floyd, the Wall, for some reason, you know, just that. I don't know. Just there's a gritty, a British grittiness to it. I don't know. So how do you think, though, his personal life experience influenced the characters?

[Aaron Tracy]

Well, certainly with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I think you could sort of argue that the whole thing is a bit of a metaphor for Dahl's life. The character of Charlie is mentored by Willy Wonka and by the End Willy Wonka gives Charlie the factory. You know, sort of groomed him to take over. Dahl had a series of mentors very much like Willy Wonka throughout his life. One of them was William Stevenson, the head of the Irregulars. And if you look back at Willy Wonka, he really does feel like William Stevenson. He's. He's very enigmatic, he's very secretive. He can be very cruel. And so there's no question that Dahl based Willy Wonka a little bit on him. But some of the other mentors Dahl had was one of them was Charles Marsh, who was this newspaper magnet, incredibly wealthy, and saw something in Dahl. And after the war, Dahl had gone back to Buckinghamshire, where he was from, and kind of just moved into his mother's place and didn't have an idea for where to go from there. It was very much feeling to Dahl's sisters like Dahl was this incredibly handsome, charismatic young man who left and saw the world and did incredible things in the world, but by his late 20s, had kind of come crawling and was now losing a lot of money gambling and dog racing, and would just kind of turn into their father and get stuck there, and that would be it. But Charles Marsh just would not let that happen. Charles Marsh thought Dahl had too bright a future ahead of him. So he bankrolled Dahl to come back to New York. He put Dahl up in an apartment, and he introduced Dahl to Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, and basically started the next phase of Dahl's writing career, which is, again, very much a Willy Wonka movement.

[Bob Crawford]

Without giving it all away for free. But it is free to download the podcast.

[Aaron Tracy]

That's right, you just have to subscribe.

[Bob Crawford]

But without giving it all away here, what do you hope people take away from this series?

[Aaron Tracy]

I really hope they get a better understanding of Dahl. I think he's just such a fascinating figure who is constantly on this search for identity. And so getting to know someone who's. Whose work, you know, especially someone who has this fascinating a life, I think is just hopefully a really enjoyable experience for people as a writer.

[Bob Crawford]

You know, you've spent so much time with him, with Roald Dahl. Right. And he's a complex individual, like every person is, but he's got this stain of antisemitism upon him. You've spent all this time with him. There must be some personal endearing you have towards him, but you understand the whole picture. What is that like as a writer? Like, how do you hold him in the. The good, the bad and the ugly of him kind of in yourself and the way you regard him personally.

[Aaron Tracy]

I mean, I have a ton of sympathy for Dahlia with what happened to his son and his daughter and his wife and how injured he got in the war. I really do feel a lot of sympathy for him. So I don't at all believe he should be canceled. I don't believe we should just see him as a one dimensional, abusive, bigoted figure. I think there was a lot of great stuff in Dahl. I think he was a fantastic father. I think becoming an amateur neuroscientist to save his son and to save thousands of others is an incredibly romantic, great thing. So I'm very torn. You know, on the other hand, I'm very turned off by all of the bigoted comments. So I'm definitely not ready to throw him into the trash bin of history by any means. At the same time, I'm grappling with whether or not I'm gonna share him with my kids. So to me, that's. It's sort of the best possible outcome in that I think he's incredibly complicated and I think he's going to be someone that I continue to think about forever.

[Bob Crawford]

What is your favorite Roald Dahl book?

[Aaron Tracy]

I love Matilda. I probably. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my favorite going into this project. But then rereading them, I just think Matilda is such an extraordinary character. It's an extraordinary story. It made for a fantastic stage adaptation. It's just a pleasure to read. What about you?

[Bob Crawford]

Oh, well, I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I haven't read all his books. My son. This is a que. This is a thought. Like. Well, because my son was assigned several of them. Like, he had to read. The whole school did a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory month and he read the BFG and he read. There was a grade where he. He read several of them. Okay, so what would happen? So Charlie and Chocolate Factory is my favorite because it's the one that most endeared me and I'm most familiar with. But you're wrestling with whether to share his work with your children. What happens if they're assigned his work?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, it's a good question. I think I definitely would not prevent them from reading him for all the reasons I've laid out that I really do think he's worth considering. He's more than worth considering. He is absolutely an important figure to grapple with. I just think it's also important to have context and for my kids to know exactly who he was and what he said and what he believed in as they read the work. But yeah, I think I would be tickled if my kids were assigned to read the BFG. The Guardian came out with their list of the 100 best novels written in English and not just children's books. The 100 best novels. The BFG came in at number 88, which is extraordinary. I mean, it was a couple places down from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The work is incredibly thoughtful and complicated, and they're great stories.

[Bob Crawford]

I've been talking with Aaron Tracy. He's the creator and host of a new audio docu series on Roald Dahlia. It's called the Secret World of Roald Dahl. We'll include a link to his podcast in our show notes. Aaron, thank you for joining us today on American History Hotline.

[Aaron Tracy]

Thanks so much. It's really fun to be here.

[Bob Crawford]

It's been great to have you. You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of iHeart podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is joining James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americanhistoryhotlinemail.com if you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me OBCrawordbase. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week.

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