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- [00:00]
Aaron Mahnke
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
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- [01:05]
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- [01:45]
Aaron Mahnke
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- [02:16]
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- [02:46]
Aaron Mahnke
Hey, it's Aaron coming to you today with something a little bit different. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the response to the show and of course, completely delighted. I never expected it to become the number four show on the Apple charts. Just mind blowing. Thank you so much to everyone who's been listening to the show and sharing it with friends. It has been a huge help. And my producer and I are back here today because I know you have some thoughts. So I'm going to answer some questions that we've received from listeners and friends of the show. And I'm also going to bring in a few other voices, including two very special guests who can answer a couple of the questions way, way better than I ever could. I am really excited to talk to them. So let's do this.
- [03:29]
Nathan Klucke (Producer)
Hey, Aaron, we've talked about three different Willy Wonkas. We've talked about lots of Dahl adaptations. Why do you think that filmmakers keep adapting Dahl's work?
- [03:37]
Aaron Mahnke
I think, I mean, I've thought about that a lot too. I think it's because the books are really plotted like screenplays. Which probably comes from the fact that well before, I mean, years and years before Dahl was writing children's books, he was in Hollywood. He was writing the fifth James Bond movie and he was writing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and he was writing a bunch of screenplays is that never got made. And so he always thought as a screenwriter. And so Dahl's stories, all of them, have almost a perfect dramatic architecture. There's a clear protagonist with clear intentions and obstacles. There's a rising threat. There's a third act twist that recontextualizes everything. And so I think he's really easy to translate to screen because he's already thought through the structure and he's thought through oftentimes he's also thought through it visually. And I think he can be adapted through so many generations with all the movies we're continuing to get because his stuff is so timeless. Unlike so many writers from the 60s, the 70s and the 80s, he doesn't feel musty. Dahl writes for the id, right. His work taps into something that I think is really primal. The fantasy of revenge against cruel adults and the terror of the world being really secretly monstrous. That kind of stuff that doesn't age. So every generation of children gets to discover it. Fresh. And so I think for many, many more years, especially with this Netflix deal, we're gonna get more doll adaptations.
- [05:17]
Nathan Klucke (Producer)
When you brought this show out to make, why'd you pick Roald Dahl? You could have done anybody.
- [05:24]
Aaron Mahnke
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think a big part of it is that I've got really young kids. So it made me think a lot about, you know, not only what kind of books that I'm reading to them, but also what I loved when I was a kid. And, of course, for me, that was very much Roald Dahl. And so as I started getting more interested in Dahl and I bought one of his. One of his autobiographies, and then I started reading some articles about him, and I just fell down the rabbit hole. I mean, there were just so many interesting things about his life. I mean, obviously there's the controversies with the anti Semitism, but there's just so much more. When I discovered that he was also a medical inventor who discovered or, you know, who built a valve to try to help save the life of his infant son, I was. I found that so romantic and was completely attracted to Dahl for that. Of course, the spy stuff I found fascinating. And overall, I just found Dahl to have, you know, to be going through this search for identity, which felt, you know, very universal. I think we all know what that's like to try to figure out who we are. I just don't think people, for the most part, do it as aggressively as Dahl did. I mean, he was really searching for his identity by going into all of these fascinating worlds. And so the other thing that sort of got me excited about this is I wanted to profile a writer. You know, it's always surprised me. There are very few movies, if you think about it, where a writer is the main character. You know, there's. The ones that jump to mind are movies like Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman or Shakespeare in Love, but for the most part, there are very few of them. And I think the reasoning is that writers live a mostly internal life. And so it's just not dramatically interesting to put them at the center of a film. But I am very interested in writers. And so here was a writer, Roald Dahl, who was not just living an internal life. He was going out, and he was a playboy, and he was a seducer, and he was an espionage agent, and he was a fighter pilot, and he was a medical inventor, and he was all of these things. And so it was an opportunity to write about a writer. And I just. Yeah, I just. I find it very personally interesting that Roald Dahl and I technically have the same job, right? We do the same thing. Our job is to sit in a chair for four hours a day and wrestle words into an interesting order. But that is where the similarities stop. You know, I live in my Brooklyn apartment and I. I just don't have a very exciting life. I love my life. I have a very happy life, but I mostly stay close to home. Dahl was shipped off to Africa when he was 20 years old. And back then it was a very big deal to go off to another continent. And he signed up for the Royal Air Force. He volunteered even though he had never been in a plane before. And of course, if you've listened to the show, I could go on and on and on. So I found it so interesting how he's a writer and I'm a writer, but we could not be more different.
- [08:43]
Nathan Klucke (Producer)
Aaron, we love to have you. How did you choose to bring us and Imagine this project?
- [08:49]
Aaron Mahnke
Yeah, whenever I make a podcast, I look for a really good partner, someone who I think can be creatively helpful both in getting the show made in the way that it should and also giving me feedback on the writing. And Imagine is just like the perfect place for this. I mean, Imagine has made so many great true stories. Cinderella man and 8 Mile and a beautiful Mind and especially Frost, Nixon, which is also about a complicated man in the mid 20th century with his own share of demons. I think it has a lot in common with this Roald Dahl story. And yeah, I really love the team at Imagine. I'm talking to for listeners. I'm talking to my producer, Nathan Klucke right now and also Kara Welker. And in terms of the day to day making of the show, I do want to take the opportunity to tell people who is behind the scenes. Matt Schrader is my producer and just so essential to the show. Really made it happen. He had a ton of creative input, but he also handled everything behind the scenes. The budget, the hiring, the equipment, the insurance, the music license, the schedules. He always made sure that we were ready and prepared. I had worked with Mat on an earlier podcast that I made for Audible called Summer Breeze, and he was just so fantastic. I was so thrilled that he said yes to helping on this show. And then Mark Henry Phillips is our editor and sound designer. Mark picked the music for the show and made it work incredibly well. He created the pacing for the show, the rhythm. He cut out all the times that I sounded like a dummy. He also created those great scenes where I tell a story about a cocktail party or an aerial battle, and you actually feel the scene come to life. That's all Mark, and he did so much more. Mark is just. He's brilliant at this. He's also a great composer. If you can hear season one of Serial, the music in your head, that haunting score, that's Mark. He created that. I had also worked with Mark on one of my Audible shows and was, yeah, just beyond thrilled that he was willing to come on and help us out here. Yeah, it was an absolutely fantastic team. And I also really want to thank the team at iHeart. They've been nothing but encouraging about this show. They got it right away and have been really terrific day to day, working with Katrina Norvell and Anna Stumpf, who I've worked with on a previous show. They're really fantastic creative producers. And the whole team at iheart has just been so great at supporting the show, and that's something you absolutely need as a creator. And I think they're. You know, the fact that they've been behind us is a huge part of why we've been so successful.
- [11:48]
Listener Questions (Devon Fontecchio, Katie Langley)
Hi, my name is Devon Fontecchio. I'm in seventh grade, and I've been in the musical Matilda three times. In the play, Matilda's parents didn't love her and they didn't want a second child. What in Roald Dahl's life made him write the characters like that?
- [12:05]
Aaron Mahnke
Thank you for that question, Devin. Um, yeah, so I think a lot of it comes from the tragedy of his youth, which we talked about in an earlier episode. But when Dahl was just 3 years old, his older sister, Astri, who was 7, she died. And a few weeks later, literally only three weeks later, Dahl's father died. So it was that one, two punch that really colored his entire childhood and really is responsible, I think, for the dark outlook of so much of his work. Now, in real life, Dahl's mother, Sophie, was actually very, very devoted to him. So I don't think she's reminiscent of the mother in Matilda at all. But Dahl's father was kind of a different story. Dahl didn't really remember much about his father. He was only three, like I said, when his father died. But I do think Dahl believed that his father allowed himself to die, and that was, of course, because of his sadness over losing his daughter. So think about what that would do to someone if they thought that their father chose to die instead of to raise them. I think that could absolutely help explain how negligent the father is in Matilda and how negligent both parents are. I also think that the answer comes from the boarding schools that Dahl attended. You know, he was shipped off to these schools at just nine years old. He was absolutely miserable there. The teachers were often really cruel, really physically abusive, and he just felt profoundly unseen by all the adults in charge of him. And so that loneliness being surrounded by adults who just don't get you, that's basically Matilda's entire life, Ms. Trunchbull, is just like how Dahl describes the sadistic headmaster at Repton. So I absolutely think that that was a big influence on that book. And then I think the final answer to the question is the loss of Olivia. Dahl never fully recovered from it. She was just 7 years old, Dahl's daughter, Olivia, when she died. And Dahl partly blamed himself. Measles had broken out, and there were some antibodies available, but Dahl and Patricia Neal, his wife, chose to give the antibodies to Theo because Theo had been in an accident when he was just a few months old. He was hit by a taxicab in New York City, and so he was very fragile. And so they gave the antibodies to Theo, and they were not able to give any to Olivia. And so she did contract measles and soon died. And so think about that. I mean, Dahl blamed his own father for dying. Instead of raising him, he blames himself for his own daughter's death. It kind of makes sense that when he writes Matilda, he creates these parents who don't love their child. That is a primal, terrifying thing for Dahl, and it's kind of. It's what writers do, right? Not to go on too big a tangent here, but I talk about this in my TV class at Yale. When David Chase was creating the Sopranos, he was thinking about his own family. And he had all of these uncles and aunts and cousins who were all in the eyeglass business. They all owned rival eyeglass stores, and they were constantly sabotaging each other and competing with each other. And so when Chase tried to turn it into a TV show, he realized the eyeglass business is not going to make for great tv. So he used all of their dynamics with each other and even some of the characters, and he simply made them a mafia family. That's what writers do. And so I think Dahl was doing the exact same thing. He was taking his guilt over his daughter and his really sort of hurt feelings over what happened to his father. And he was creating these parents who are very negligent with their own daughter. But the nice thing about Matilda, and one of the reasons it's probably my favorite of his children's books is just how hopeful it is at the end. Matilda's parents, they never get any better. They never get more attentive. But Matilda finds magic to beat back the darkness, which is just lovely. So thank you, Devon, for this question.
- [16:26]
Listener Questions (Devon Fontecchio, Katie Langley)
Hi, my name's Katie Langley, and I work in education. What I would love to know about Roald Dahl is if he was listening to this podcast now, what do you think he would be most proud of and. And what would absolutely enrage him.
- [16:44]
Michael Coren
Thank you.
- [16:45]
Aaron Mahnke
I love this question. It's something I thought about a lot as I was making the show because it brings up some really interesting issues, like what a writer owes to his or her subject. How do you do right by them? What's out of bounds? What's not? To answer this question, I want to bring in someone way more equipped than me. Who someone who's undoubtedly thought about this stuff a lot. Mark Harris has written a couple of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. His first book is called Pictures at a Revolution, and it has a completely brilliant conceit. It's about the five movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1967, and by looking closely at those films, it tells you everything about the era and about how new Hollywood was born. It's Dr. Dolittle versus the Graduate, and neither of them won. Cannot recommend it highly enough, but the main reason I want to talk to Mark today is that he wrote what is unquestionably my favorite biography of all time. It came out just a few years ago. It's called Mike A Life, the best thing you could ever read about the director. It does everything you want a great biography to do. It gives you a full picture of its subject so that you feel like you know him backwards and forwards. And even though Nichols, you know, couldn't have had a more different life than mine, like a magic trick, the book makes me see myself in Nichols and really connect with him. The book also doubles as an exploration of the whole era and all the fascinating people in Mike Nichols orbit. Plus, it reads like a thriller. You can't wait to read what comes next. And maybe most important, Mark never judges Nichols, which is a trap so many biographers fall into.
- [18:27]
Mark Harris
I think what a biographer owes to their subject is really only a sincere pursuit of the truth. That's the only thing. I don't think a relationship between biographer and subject is necessarily adversarial. I don't think it has to be. But if it doesn't feel adversarial sometimes, then you probably picked the wrong subject. For a biography, just as if it doesn't feel admiring, sometimes you've also probably picked the wrong subject. I mean, I'm. You know, you mentioned the idea of someone looking over your shoulder as you. The subject of your writing, looking over your shoulder, either as you write or as you're researching. And that really resonated for me because that was an experience I felt I had many, many times when I was working on the Mike Nichols book. Probably more often when I was researching, I'd be sitting in the library and I would come across some old document or story or interview, and I would read it and start taking notes really diligently. And sometimes I really felt I could hear Mike over my shoulder saying, you know, that's not quite accurate, or, let me tell you what was really happening that day, or, yes, that was a lie that we all agreed on. But, you know, what really went on with so and so. And I think that kind of internal dialogue between biographer and subject is a really valuable thing, even if all it really is is a way for the biographer to stretch their own imagination. You know, it's. Working on a biography is constantly kind of an act of checking in with your subject. And by checking in, I don't think it's necessarily a question of saying, is this okay? Can I do this? Was this right? Are you going to be mad at me? I mean, obviously, with a subject who's died, that's all theoretical. And I wouldn't ever want to write a biography of a living subject. But it's more like, I think the question, what would you make of this? Asked in a biographer's head about the subject they're writing about? Is often a really useful question because you spend years trying to chase what you can't definitively have, which is, what was someone thinking at a given moment? You can try to reconstruct that from diaries or from letters or from conversations with someone who you interviewed, but you're ultimately guessing. And I don't believe in writing the kind of biography where there are sentences like so and so paced the room nervously alone. Like, if they were alone in the room and they never told you whether they paced the room nervously or not, then you shouldn't put it in. But I do think that anyone who's writing a biography has to take on a certain level of arrogance. At some point. You have to start to believe that you get them. You kind of know how they were thinking and what they were thinking, or all you're going to end up with is a kind of dry recitation. Of fact. And so I think to counterbalance that arrogance, it's good to feel the person over your shoulder sometimes second guessing you, correcting you, telling you not to be so sure of yourself. It's a good jolt of humility, which I think you need when you're a biographer as often as you need arrogance.
- [22:31]
Aaron Mahnke
I love that answer. That makes a lot of sense. And so that sort of, you know about what you owe to your subject. Did you feel an obligation to Mike Nichols family, to his widow son? How much were they in your mind as you were writing and researching?
- [22:45]
Mark Harris
Well, that's a very different thing because that's an actual, practical, tangible thing about living people. I would not have written the biography if I had not had their consent in advance. And consent, rather than cooperation was what I asked for. I specifically asked Diane if she was okay with this and if I could state publicly that she was okay with it as a way of getting other people who were willing to talk to me to cooperate. And she gave me that. I did not say, and I need you to do an interview or I want. And she never said, I want to read it along the way, or you can't talk about this and this and this. And. And so I felt very fortunate. I mean, what I. What I got from Diane and Mike's kids was exactly what I asked to get, which was permission, consent, and permission to make that consent public. So beyond that, I really tried very hard not to think, what would they make of this? What would they feel about this part of his life that I'm writing about? Because I think that really would have been presumptuous of me to try to guess what Mike's kids would think of any given moment. And also I think it would have been ultimately damaging to the book. I think that would have been really a problem. So. So I tried quite hard to keep them out of my head, except when I was writing about them directly. And to this day, I don't know whether any of them have read the book or not. And as curious as I might be to know that, I'm also okay with not knowing.
- [24:55]
Aaron Mahnke
I was also thinking about when you said just now that you wouldn't have Mike pacing a room if he was alone in a room, because you have no idea if he was pacing. How do you feel about historical fiction? How do you feel about all the TV shows? I'm thinking of Love Story, for instance, the JFK junior Carolyn Bessette Show. Do you.
- [25:17]
Mark Harris
Are those.
- [25:18]
Aaron Mahnke
I mean, those are obviously very different than a biography, but they share Some of the same DNA. How do you feel about those shows? Do you watch those shows?
- [25:28]
Mark Harris
I haven't actually watched Love Story, so I can't say anything specific about that. But in general, I feel fine about those shows. I don't think that historical fiction has precisely the same obligation to reality as biography. I mean, historical fiction is an area where you're taking real people and real events and you're trying to find a way to dramatize them in. In a way that will be compelling to readers or to viewers. But I do think that there's a line. But, you know, you. You can. You can have someone in historical fiction, someone say or do something that they didn't precisely say or do, but if you find yourself having them say or do something that is the opposite of what they would have said or done because you think that makes the story better, then, yeah, I think you're cheating. And I think you're doing a disservice to those people and to history and even to your own storytelling. These are people that plenty of people actually knew and interacted and worked with and befriended and loved. So I think doing historical fiction about contemporary people is a really, really tricky thing when it's. When it feels less like historical and more like current events.
- [26:57]
Aaron Mahnke
Yeah, Yeah. I think about the op Ed that Daryl Hannah wrote. Daryl Hannah was JFK Jr. S girlfriend when he met Carolyn Bessette, and she wrote a piece that was fantastic, saying just how violated and quoting a writer on the show who basically said, we used Daryl Hannah for storytelling purposes. We needed an antagonist, we needed a third wheel, and so we used Daryl Hannah. But of course, she's a living, breathing human being who's still very much in the world.
- [27:27]
Mark Harris
Right. And again, not having seen the show, I will say I found her argument against that kind of use very, very compelling and convincing.
- [27:37]
Aaron Mahnke
Yeah. I'm curious how you decide how much of yourself to put in a biography. It may be the different mediums, podcast versus book, but I definitely put some of myself in the Roald Dahl show. I guess I feel like it's my point of view no matter what, so I may as well sort of acknowledge that fact from time to time. When I say something about myself in relation to Dahl, it feels like I'm almost telling the listener, remember, this is not an objective telling of the man's story, if such a thing could even exist. It's through my particular lens.
- [28:12]
Mark Harris
I think a lot of myself seeps into the work. I mean, in the Mike Nichols book, I never use first person and the only occasion where I could have used first person was when I write about him making the HBO version of Angels in America, because that was written by my husband and I witnessed a lot of it. And I could have interjected myself in. In the new book that I'm working on, which is a history of popular culture as relates to the gay rights movement, there are a few occasions, even though it's a history book, where I do go into first person, because I think it's really important for readers to know that I'm a white CIS gay man. It's really important to them to know when I was born and where I lived and what I experienced. Even though this is not in any way an autobiography or a memoir, because I think it would be more misleading in a way for me to pretend that I was writing a completely objective, God's eye view of this whole subject than for me to say to people, look, this is coming from a particular perspective, and here's what you have the right to know about me and the perspective that I developed. You should know if you're going to read a big, long book, you should know who's talking to you. And I think in a podcast like the one you're doing where you are, literally, it's in your voice, you know, literally and figuratively, I don't see how you can not put a bit of yourself into it. And also, don't people want that?
- [30:11]
Aaron Mahnke
There's a line by Janet Malcolm, the great journalist and essayist, that gets thrown around a lot when people talk about biographies. She wrote, the biographer at work is like a professional burglar breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly burying his loot away. I'm curious what you make of that. I'm curious if you agree.
- [30:34]
Mark Harris
You know, she also called journalists con men. I mean, you know, I half agree with what she said. I think the image that she came up with of going through drawers and looking for the thing, the valuable, that you want to make your way off with is not inaccurate. I think everyone who's worked on a biography, you find some paragraph or some letter or some quote, and you're like, aha, yes, this is what I need. This. This is the treasure in the trash. Because also, when you're working on a biography, you go through a lot of stuff that is useless for you or redundant or off the point or. Or irrelevant or just incomprehensible. So, yeah, she's right about that, I guess. Where I differ with her is I don't think there's anything criminal or illicit or nefarious in what biographers are doing. But at the same time you should feel humility. When you are holding someone's letters or diaries or memos in your hand. You're looking at private things that were not intended for you to read. So it's always good to remind yourself of that and to remind yourself to use that material responsibly. You know your your job is never to whitewash the life of the person you're writing about. Otherwise why would you want to do that book in the first place? But you are being entrusted with telling the story of a life. This is a very self serving thing for me to say to myself, but I would say I want to do right by Mike. But I think the way to do write by Mike is to write the kind of biography of someone that he would want to read. He valued specificity and accuracy and truth and psychological clarity and narrative. And so that's what I was trying to do. Now maybe that was just me giving myself a permission slip to write the kind of book I wanted to write, but that's what I meant when I said I think it's good to be in mental dialogue with your subject as long as neither of you ends up pushing the other one around.
- [33:13]
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- [34:12]
Martha Stewart
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- [35:28]
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- [35:57]
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- [37:03]
Steve Israel
Hi, I'm Steve Israel I'm a former member of the United States Congress, a novelist, and now the owner of Theodore's Books in Oyster Bay in New York. Roald Dahl created stories that captured generations of young readers, but his legacy has been tainted by some well documented anti Semitic remarks later in life and some anti Semitic stereotypes noted within his work. Specifically, thinking about the witches, scholars and readers have pointed to elements that echo longstanding antisemitic stereotypes. And so my question is this. When we look back at Dahl's work today, how should readers reconcile the brilliance of his storytelling with the prejudice that he expresses publicly and subtextually?
- [37:49]
Aaron Mahnke
It's a great question, and I am guessing it's the only one we're going to get today from a former member of Congress. How cool. I love, by the way, that Steve went back to his hometown and opened a bookstore. Now, we've obviously already spent a lot of time in episodes seven and eight on Dahl's antisemitism and the question of separating the art from the artist. So to answer this question, I want to bring in someone with a really unique perspective that we haven't heard from yet, someone who is at the dead center of the action. I am really excited to talk to him, and if you've been following the show, I hope you're going to be excited, too. You may remember that we teed up our episode about Dahl's antisemitism by describing how Dahl picked up the phone one afternoon and called a young journal journalist. That journalist, who happened to have a Jewish father, asked Dahl about a book review he had written criticizing Israel. Dahl took the opportunity to go on an anti Semitic screed that culminated in Dahl saying to him, there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity going on. To say even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. The new Broadway play Giant uses that conversation of Dahl with a young journalist as its spine. Well, I am very pleased to say we have that young journalist on the line. Michael Coren is now an Anglican priest and the author of 20 books. I am so thrilled he agreed to help me answer Congressman Israel's question. I asked Michael to start off by telling us about the infamous call with Roald Dahl.
- [39:23]
Michael Coren
I was a pretty young journalist in my early 20s and I had a job with the New Statesman magazine, which was a bit of a couple because back then Christopher Hitchens was writing for it. And I mean, it still is a good magazine, but back then it was very quite an important publication. And I was in awe, but out of my debt. And then Dahl, who I'd had no contact with. I mean, I was admirer of his work still out. I knew his children's right and his adult writing. And he had reviewed a book called God Cried, about the invasion of Lebanon, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, you know, nothing changes. And he'd reviewed it for a magazine called the Literary Review, which I've written for many times, and it was published, owned by a man called Naim Atala, who was a friend. He'd met Dahl, and Darla said, you know, I'm stationed out there. I know the area. And so Naeem said to the editor, see if Roald Dahl will review this book. And he did review the book. And it was a very extreme review. I think it bled over from critique of Israel and Zionism into anti Semitism to the extent that the editor of the New Statesman. And though I don't think there was anyone there who was Jewish or had any sort of Jewish heritage. My father was Jewish, but that wasn't why they gave me the. The job. They said, call Dal up and. And see what he has to say. And the assumption was he would say, oh, yeah, I read. Emotions got the better of me. And that was. It was over the top. I'm. I'm sorry, but that wasn't what happened at all. He. He was extremely polite, courteous, extremely English, even though, of course, he wasn't really English anyway, and explained what he said, why he said it, and the more I spoke to him, and it wasn't an aggressive interview. I mean, I felt very young and inexperience.
- [41:18]
Aaron Mahnke
How old were you?
- [41:19]
Michael Coren
I suppose I was about 24.
- [41:21]
Aaron Mahnke
Wow.
- [41:22]
Michael Coren
And he said, I mean, you know, these things have been printed so many times. You know, Hitler may have been a stinker, but there's a reason why people do this. I think that sort of thing, it just went over and I said to him, I said, Mr. Darling, you should know my father's Jewish. And this. I don't think I actually attacked. I didn't attack. I just. I just said that. Every time I said anything in response, it was as though I hadn't spoken. He didn't really respond. And then he spoke about not seeing any Jews in the armed forces during the Second World War. That old canard, I mean, it's such garbage. It's about the. It was set in Germany during the First World War. To the extent that the authorities took a poll, a survey of how many Jews were fighting, it was amazing how many German Jews were fighting in infantry positions, front line. One of them, of course, alongside Adolf Hitler. But I. I said to him, well, my father was in bomber command and he just wouldn't listen. Just spoke over me at that point and quite a bit of other stuff too. And so I went to the editor and said, you should see this and listen to this. And he did. And he said, well, you've got. You've got to write it. So I wrote it. And this was pre Internet, remember, A lot of people watching now will say what. There was a time when there was no Internet, no social media. So the. The article RAM wasn't that big. And there was some surprise and shock and I did a follow up and it was mentioned in a couple of other news. Well, I think just one other newspaper at the time, but it really didn't make much of a splash at all. It seemed to just come and go. I remember Naim Atala at who owned the Literary Review and a publisher called Quartet Books. He phoned me and he was very upset, you know, I'm so sorry this has happened. And it was embarrassing for him. I met with him, we became friends, but it really just faded away. I can't pretend that everybody was up in arms now today. Well, in the current context of what is being said about Jewish people, who knows? But if there'd been social media and Internet back then, I think it would have been enormous. And calls to cancel him, which I've always opposed. After that, I forgot about it. I interviewed loads of people and every few years somebody would contact me about the Dahl piece. And then a few years ago, Mark Rosenblatt, who I didn't know, contacted me. Lovely fella. And he said, I would like to write a play around this. And I said, well, sure, do what you want to do. And he interviewed me at some length and he interviewed me again and we met in London and then he'd sent me the plan. He said, you have to keep this confidential. You can't show it to anyone. I read it and thought it was very impressive. And then he called me and said, I think he may have said, are you sitting down? And he said the Royal Court Theater wanted to stage it and John Lithgow has got hold of the script and he would love to play Roald Dahl. And that's what happened. And I was at the first night at the Royal Court Theater and it's a very strange experience sitting there with my cousin. I remember sitting there and hearing your name because I'm not in it physically. It's my voice. It was a lovely actor called Richard Hope, who played me very accurately. And then my cousin said, he's got you. It's got you. And on speakerphone. And it. I don't. I don't want to give too much away, but it's only the denouement conclusion of the play, because what the play does, it's nuanced. It doesn't do the black and white thing. It's not dull, is bad. He has many of the best lines. He's charming. And his critique of Israel and Zionism, for example, is probably upset quite a lot of people. It's quite convincing in many ways, and it shows him as a man of compassion and empathy. But on this issue, it's different. And so the conclusion, the concluding 15 minutes or whatever is. Is me. And that's very strange. And it's going to be very strange. And when I see it open again in On Broadway, and I mean, John. John Lithgow has said, you know, I played serial killers, but it's different when I am on stage and in the audience, I am saying lines that I know will be deeply offensive to people. Sitting. Yeah. And he does it so very well. You know, when I met him for the first time at the party in London a few years ago, and I went downstairs and he. He said to me, you're Michael Coren. And the first thing he said was, did I get him right? Did I get him right? Which I thought was such a sensitive and vulnerable thing to say. And the reviews were magnificent.
- [46:01]
Aaron Mahnke
Yeah. We went to see it on Broadway the other night. And when your character comes in, it's the climax of the whole playa. It's the very end. And you could hear a. A pin drop in the theater. All thousand people are glued to the stage.
- [46:16]
Michael Coren
Does he sound like me?
- [46:18]
Aaron Mahnke
Did he sound like you? Yeah, I think so.
- [46:22]
Michael Coren
I have a very. Richard. Richard Hope is English, and I have a sort of a slight lisp, and I have a sort of up, lower middle, upper working class, East London accent, which has been refined over the years, I suppose, but not easy for an American to get that. You don't have to. It doesn't have to be.
- [46:42]
Aaron Mahnke
So a listener to our show wrote in asking about how to reconcile Dahl's bigotry with his art. You've experienced Dahl's antisemitism firsthand, and I'm curious if you have any opinions on the subject. Are you, for instance, are you still interested or able to read Dahl's books or see the film adaptations without thinking about Dahl's Anti Semitism or. You know, I'm just curious for. For how it's affected you.
- [47:07]
Michael Coren
It's a good question. We have four children, and we read all of them. Roald Dahl. And that is interesting. You know, I see the movies. Does it occur to me it. Not really. Let's be honest here. There are a lot of people who I would consider great. I love Trollope, for example, Anthony trollope. I love T.S. eliot, who didn't always say the nicest things about Jews. So we have to. But with Darl having actually heard it. Yeah. I didn't have trauma counseling, for goodness sake. You know, and this is what he said. This is what he believed. And it's. It's very strange. And when it happened, there were people I knew who they were in. In the arts, and they'd met him or they said, what this is. No, it couldn't be. But someone. I was also working on a TV show at the time called the Outsiders. I was just the researcher and writer. But one of the people we interviewed back then was Salman Rushley. It was before the fatwa and all that. Very nice fellow. And I told Rush, I said, I did with Roald Dahl the other day, and this is what he said. And someone said, yeah, I'm not really surprised. Not because he knew about his antisemitism, but he said, there's a cruelty in Dahl's writing that is extraordinary, and that makes it quite attractive in many ways. But I can see how that cruelty could turn into something like anti Semitism, which I thought was a very interesting comment.
- [48:36]
Aaron Mahnke
Absolutely. That's really interesting. Just to be clear, this was your only interaction with Roald Dahl, the phone call?
- [48:44]
Michael Coren
Yeah. I may have called him again, but it wasn't of any substance. Yeah, this was the only one.
- [48:50]
Aaron Mahnke
And, you know, you've obviously, you've spoken a lot about that phone call, but did you have any other takeaways from the call, any other impressions of Dahl, his personality or anything else from talking to him? And how long was the phone call, by the way?
- [49:05]
Michael Coren
15 minutes, 20 minutes? Well, it was this sort of juxtaposition of incredible courtesy and vile opinions. And I think he said, is that enough for you, Mike? That sort of thing. And as though he was, you know, trying to be helpful. I think that gets a laugh. He did it in London and. Have I given you enough? And I said something like, oh, very much so. But, you know, I've been brought up England in the 1970s. Antisemitism was minimal. Minimal. There'd be one or Two kids in the school who were. And nobody liked them. The political parties that were the fascist parties never got even close to winning a seat. So, yeah, it was there, but it was nothing, really. But I've seen it a bit like in the soccer games. That's a different whole long story. But. And you hear. But they were thuds. They were moronic thugs, and so who cares? You know, you expect that sort of thing. They're racist. Before, we had the term homophobic, but believe me, they wouldn't be. They just hated. But when you get it from someone like Roald Dahl, who is erudite and courteous and obviously brilliant, it's different. And that was what was most disturbing. If a screaming idiot in the street screams out something. Angus, a medic. Meh. But Roald Dahl, it was different.
- [50:36]
Hannah Tracy
Hi, this is Hannah Tracy, your wife. I was just wondering, are there any lessons as a father or a husband that you've learned from Roald Dahl that you're looking to bring into our family so that I can emotionally prepare, or are you just sort of sticking to the storytelling inspo.
- [50:56]
Aaron Mahnke
Okay, Hannah, first of all, did you listen to the show? You do not want me bringing home Roald Dahl's lessons as a husband. His wife of 30 years, Patricia Neal, wrote a really juicy, revealing autobiography called As I Am. She has some very unkind things to say about her husband, and it will never not be shocking to me that Neil spent three decades married to Dahl and spills way more ink in her book on her relationship with Gary Cooper, who she was with for 1/10 as long. But she also does point out what a good father Dahl was. He really loves his kids, and the only reason we have all those classic children's books is because he wanted to impress them with his bedtime stories. Also, Hannah, I want to take the opportunity to apologize for any. Any time in the podcast that I used you as a strawman or a punchline on one of the other podcasts I went on to promote our show, the host pointed out that my references to my wife always felt like an old vaudeville routine where I use her to poke fun at myself. So my apologies. I love you. Thank you for putting up with me while I tore my hair out writing the show and for all the really great feedback and contributions you made to it throughout. Could not have made the show without you. And also, thank you for letting me record it in our bedroom. Hopefully next season, we'll have more of a studio. You put up with a lot of equipment in our room for way too long. And so that's it for this episode. Thank you again to all of our listeners for your help in making the show such a hit. We are hard at work on our next story, so we'll be back soon. I hope you'll stick with us.
- [52:32]
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Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice, but it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious. Ask questions. But when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more@amahealthvsushype.org that's amahealthvshipe.org this is Sophia
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Aaron Mahnke
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