Have you ever wondered what it takes to document the most pivotal moments in air, space, and exploration history? Join us for an exclusive conversation with renowned historian James R. Hansen as he shares his remarkable journey from an academic in the history of science and technology to a leading NASA historian. We'll uncover the meticulous efforts behind his acclaimed works, including the authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, First Man, and the probing investigation into the Challenger disaster, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings. Hansen's narrative is not just about historical events but also about resilience, adaptability, and seizing the right opportunities that have defined his career.
Hansen shores the gripping tales of two extraordinary adventurers, John Fairfax and Tom McLean, who undertook solo rows across the Atlantic in the late 1960s. Their stories, filled with contrasting approaches and unique backgrounds, capture the essence of human endurance and spirit.
Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the epic race to row solo across the Atlantic, James R. Hansen
Cutting For Stone, Abraham Verghese
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podcast.
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You're listening to episode 265 .
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James R Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History at Auburn
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University.
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A former historian for NASA, hansen is the author of 14 books
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involving air and space and exploration.
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2005 book First man, the only authorized biography of Neil
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Armstrong, has on two separate occasions appeared on the New
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York Times bestseller list and has been translated into two
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dozen languages.
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In 1995, nasser nominated his book Spaceflight Revolution for
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a Pulitzer Prize, the only time the US Space Agency has ever
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made such a nomination.
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His 2009 book Truth, lies and O-Rings Inside the Space Shuttle
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Challenger Disaster has been called by reviewers the
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definitive study of the Challenger accident.
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His latest book is titled Completely Mad Tom McLean, john
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Fairfax and the Epic Race to row solo across the Atlantic.
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Hi, james, and welcome to the show.
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It's lovely to have you here.
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Speaker 2: Well, it's really a pleasure to be talking to you.
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Speaker 1: Well, not only did I enjoy your latest novel
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Completely Mad, but I was fascinated by your life.
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So let's begin by learning about you and your work as a
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history professor and former historian for NASA.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, when I graduated with my doctoral
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degree I specialized in the history of science and
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technology but I had done nothing related to history of
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flight or NASA.
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But the one good employment that I was offered was
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essentially a postdoctoral fellow with NASA at one of their
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research laboratories, and so I ended up writing two books for
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them in the following five-year period and then started my
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academic career five years after my degree with two books in
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hand, which was very unusual.
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I was just in a very good circumstance to be able to do
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that.
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So I continued.
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Even after I started my teaching at Auburn University in
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Alabama, which is a state university with a lot of good
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engineering and architectural programs, I continued to do
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things that were related to the history of flight because I kind
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of retooled.
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I mean, I had studied mostly European science and technology
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in the early modern era you know not even modern stuff,
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technology in the early modern era, you know not even modern
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stuff.
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And then, but with NASA, I had to retool and essentially
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because most of my books had those early books had to do with
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engineering and I wasn't an engineer, I'd never had an
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engineering course, so I had to really learn a lot and do a lot.
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I did lots and lots of interviews with people that were
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professional engineers and some scientists degrees too, so
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anyway, it just launched me on a career that I never really
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expected and I I used that then because I ended up having been
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being in a doctoral program teaching a lot of masters and
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phd students and getting a lot of them graduated and into jobs
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with the air force or with nasa or at universities or with at
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the smithsonian, and so I one of my lessons was always to be
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adaptable.
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I mean, if you have a good, solid education, no matter what
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your specialization, you can find yourself in a position
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where you may need to translate your skills somewhat and learn
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some new things and end up having some successes that you
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would never have had if you had actually gone on what you had
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thought was going to be your trajectory.
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You know you've got to really be ready to take advantage of
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opportunities when they arise, and I was just very fortunate to
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be able to do that, and I guess you know that led me eventually
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to the Neil Armstrong biography .
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Neil had never agreed to let any author do his story or to
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help them in any way, and because I had a lot of
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background with studying things.
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I mean, neil was first and foremost an engineer and so he
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could tell from my earlier works which I had given to him as
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gifts before he agreed finally to let me do the book.
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It was really that work that I had done, you know, as in my
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postdoctoral years that enabled me to convince Neil that I would
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do a good job with his story.
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And then I ended up getting a book on the Challenger accident
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that I did with Alan McDonald, who is headed the Solid Rocket
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Motor Program for Morton Thock Hall.
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So it just led me in places that I'd never really
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anticipated.
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But I had a blessed career really.
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Speaker 1: Gosh, a few things came up as I was listening to
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you speak, and one of them is I'm always astounded at how we
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are all connected, and yesterday I spent the afternoon with a
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friend of mine who's in my writing group, and she was a
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diver on the boat that went out to search for the remains of the
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astronauts when the Challenger went down.
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She ended up not diving, but quite a few of her friends did,
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and I'm sure that was an extremely difficult dive.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would have been a very
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interesting episode, for sure.
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Speaker 1: Yes, indeed, I don't know of too many people who have
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published two books before they've graduated with their PhD
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.
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Who was the publisher of those two books?
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Speaker 2: Well, they were actually NASA publications.
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Nasa had one of the best history programs in the federal
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government history programs in the federal government.
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When NASA was established in 1958, in the enacting
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legislation they were mandated to actually be able to tell,
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reveal their facts and information and be a transparent
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organization and do whatever they could to let the American
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public know what they're up to.
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And so they developed an early history program, thinking well,
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here's one way not only can we kind of boast about what we're
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doing, but we can also fulfill that federal mandate, the
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legislative mandate, to be open with the public as to what we're
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up to.
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So they ended up creating a very solid I mean they had a
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number of very prominent historians of science and
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technology that were responsible for overseeing the program.
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And so they ended up.
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They published a number of books.
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I mean I was my academic friends when I was first hired,
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especially, you know, at Auburn they were kind of concerned.
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Well, you know you've done two books for NASA.
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Now maybe go to university press.
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You know they were a little bit skeptical, skeptical but NASA's
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reputation they were.
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The books were reviewed in all the prominent places and
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reviewed well.
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So I did move on to get other types of publications.
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But the NASA publications put me in a good place very early in
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my career when a lot of junior faculty, you know they have to
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go into very heavy teaching loads and they have very little
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time even to get their dissertation shaped up for
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publication, you know, at a university press and I was in a
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position where I was able to.
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You know I was out on a job market to get a university
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position with two books to my name after five years and you
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know so I was just lucky to be in that position.
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Speaker 1: And is NASA still publishing books?
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Speaker 2: They do, they do, and most of their books now have
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been digitized and so you can get free of charge.
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You can find them all on the internet and it's still an
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active program.
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It's gone through some ups and downs, based on who's managing
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the program at the time and what funding's like and that, but
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it's been pretty solid for now, since 1958.
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So it's over 60 years.
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It's done well.
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Speaker 1: Let's talk about your latest book Completely Mad.
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My husband grabbed it, first he read it and then I read it and
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then I just recently reread it.
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But in the prologue of the book you write, quote as a research
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scholar specializing in aerospace history, I have
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learned a lot about people who risk their lives in perilous
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pursuits.
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I have spent five decades of my life studying in depth the
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lives of test pilots and astronauts.
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End quote.
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So why this story and why now?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know, actually I think when I answer
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that question for other people, I start with COVID.
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I mean this you know, in COVID, like I myself, like everyone
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else, we're stuck in the house with not much to do.
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And I started to order a number of books in the adventure genre
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.
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I'd read it.
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I'd always wanted to read Endurance, which was about
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Ernest Shackleton's expedition during the 19-teens to
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Antarctica, and at one point I'd been interested in writing Sir
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Edmund Hillary's life story, about the first one to ascend to
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the top of Mount Everest with his Sherpa.
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And I didn't end up writing that book, but I wanted to read
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everything about it.
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So I read more about Hillary, I read more about Magellan's
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circumnavigation of the globe, you know, back in the 16th
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century.
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And so I just started thinking.
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I mean being enthralled with the genre which I hadn't read
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much of that particular genre.
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I mean I'd read and written about test pilots and genre
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which I hadn't read much of that particular genre.
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I mean I'd read and written about test pilots and astronauts
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, which is pretty daring stuff in some respects.
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But I had.
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I remembered a telegram, something that was in the Neil
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Armstrong papers, you know, after I was researching the
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biography.
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First man, there was a telegram that the Apollo 11 crew sent to
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a man named John Fairfax.
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When they sent it from their quarantine, after they came back
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from the moon mission, they were put in quarantine for a few
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weeks to make sure that they weren't bringing back germs or
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bacteria to infect the rest of the world you know the Andromeda
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strain and all that stuff.
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And so they were in quarantine kind of.
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I mean, they had some official things to do but they were
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reading books and watching movies and reading newspapers
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and they saw this story.
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Mike Collins, actually the command module pilot for the
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mission, he saw an article in the Miami Herald that was about
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this man, john Fairfax, who had just landed in a rowboat in
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Hollywood Beach near Fort Lauderdale after rowing solo
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across the Atlantic Ocean, and they had sent this telegram of
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congratulations to him back in 1969, you know, and I had a copy
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of that telegram in the Armstrong papers and what I was
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struck by was, you know, the telegram said to John Fairfax
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well, we just made a half a million mile trip to the moon
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and back, but compared to you rowing solo across the Atlantic
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Ocean, we feel kind of like you did something.
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Especially we had all these flight controllers and stuff
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back in mission control in Houston taking care of us and we
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were constantly in communication.
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Our spacecraft was in communication with the ground.
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You had no communication really with much of anyone.
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So I started thinking after again, covid, I'm reading all
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these books about adventure.
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I'm thinking I wonder if there's.
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So I had to look to see what had been written about Fairfax's
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trip and what Fairfax himself had done in writing about it.
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But then I learned I did not know, but I learned that at the
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same time Fairfax's trip and what Fairfax himself had done in
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writing about it.
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But then I learned I did not know, but I learned that at the
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same time Fairfax was rowing across the Atlantic from the
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Canary Islands to Florida, there was another guy, also British,
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who was a paratrooper, active duty British army, who was
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rowing from Newfoundland to Ireland.
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And it was not officially a race but it was kind of a race
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between the two and I mean the book isn't about a surprise
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ending as to who wins.
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So I'm very upfront about who gets there first.
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But the man who was going from Newfoundland to Ireland was a
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man named Tom McLean who was active duty British paratrooper
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and he was still alive.
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Fairfax had died in 2012, so I couldn't access him.
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But I found out that McLean was alive, was living in Northwest
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Scotland, and I started Skyping with him.
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I introduced myself and sent him a couple of books, and so,
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anyway, I found I thought, well, how about putting these two
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stories together, which had never been put together and you
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know they're crisscrossing?
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You know, for me, once I found out how interesting the two of
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them were as people, you know the backstories, then I realized
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I really had something because you know I'm I essentially, over
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the last 20, 25 years, have been writing biography that I
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knew that the backstories of these two men they were both in
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their late 20s, early 30s when they did the crossings, but the
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lives that they had led up to that point were just remarkable,
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I mean extraordinary, in different ways.
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And so I thought, well, somehow, through this journey which will
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be the focus of the narrative, this journey which will be the
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focus of the narrative, I need to have ways to tell the
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biographies.
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And so, for the first time really in my career as a writer,
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it almost became a type of novel.
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I mean, I had to find some different techniques by which to
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tell a story.
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I mean mostly in sort of backflashes to what had happened
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to them.
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But I had to find the opportune moments in the journey of the
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Rose to really tell the story of .
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Well, who were these guys?
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How did they get to this point?
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And that really became the point of my book to try to
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understand who would do something as crazy as throwing a
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boat solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
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Speaker 1: And there were such stark differences between the
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two men.
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When you and I were chatting earlier, I said how drawn I was
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to Tom McLean's story.
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You know him being an orphan and a paratrooper.
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His story was the one that captured me.
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I think it was because he seemed like such a lovely man
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and humble, and you said earlier that you had a theory as to why
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Tom's story is attractive to many readers.
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Speaker 2: Yeah well, we're drawn to Tom, in contrast to
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John, john, Fairfax, I mean.
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So that's why the biographies are so crucial to explore, and
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Tom the one thing about that.
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I had access to Tom because he's still living.
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I didn't have access to Fairfax , I just had access to some
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memoir papers and logs and things like that, and so I think
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I had enough source materials to really understand Fairfax and
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to present him as a character.
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But I didn't have time, the kind of quality time I had with
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Tom.
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I was Skyping with him, I was meeting his wife, I was talking
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to Jill, his wife, and hearing from her about him.
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And so I am a little bit concerned because there is a bit
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of a bias that shows up in the McLean part of the story
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compared to Fairfax.
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And I do kind of wonder if Fairfax had been living and I
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actually got to speak directly with him and had that, perhaps I
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would have been somewhat more sympathetic to him.
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But nothing, the thing that would not have changed.
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I mean this really becomes the issue as much as character, and
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the character is what explains it.
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Tom made what you would call an unassisted row, unless he was
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forced out by the capsizing of his boat which happened, he
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wasn't going to get out of his boat.
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He and when he, when ships came by and ships did come by on the
00:15:50
way across tom, never got out.
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He wouldn't get out.
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He might ask you know, I mean, if they hailed him and asked,
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you know, do you need anything down there?
00:15:59
And he might say, well, where am I?
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Can you give me my latitude, my longitude?
00:16:07
Because he, you know, they had a sextant to try to get a read
00:16:11
as to where they were.
00:16:12
But if, on cloudy days, you can't spot even the sun, let
00:16:15
alone a star or a planet, you can't get a good read, a good
00:16:19
fix on anything.
00:16:20
So you know, so neither one of them knew you know where,
00:16:23
exactly where they were anything .
00:16:24
So you know, so neither one of them knew you know where,
00:16:26
exactly where they were.
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Tom was insistent on not getting resupplied or any
00:16:29
supplies or getting any help other than a navigational fix,
00:16:33
the occasional navigational fix.
00:16:35
So it was an unassisted row.
00:16:37
Fairfax, on the other hand, was assisted in every possible way
00:16:42
that he could be, I mean whenever there was a ship that
00:16:45
came by.
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In some cases he was given new supplies, food and water, and in
00:16:51
other cases, I mean I ended up counting through his logbook and
00:16:55
through what he had written that he actually was in, out of
00:16:58
his boat and elsewhere 10 times.
00:17:06
Speaker 1: 10 times.
00:17:06
Yes, that was astonishing to me because at one stage you wrote
00:17:08
about how he went on board.
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Speaker 2: These larger ships had a shower, a nice home-cooked
00:17:10
hot meal, yeah, yeah, getting a shower, having steak dinners,
00:17:13
having cocktails, flirting with the, you know, female members of
00:17:16
a crew.
00:17:16
You know of a Russian crew that he saw you and he was rather
00:17:20
insistent and some of the captains of the ships were
00:17:23
actually kind of miffed at him that he was asking for so much
00:17:27
from them and so, and then at one point when he gets into the
00:17:30
caribbean he takes a few days off, he's, he goes in sunbays
00:17:35
and you know, on the beach and has barbecue and different
00:17:39
things you know.
00:17:40
So.
00:17:40
So the assisted versus the unassisted, and that became an
00:17:46
important issue for me and it becomes sort of a subtext.
00:17:48
I don't necessarily take it on real directly, I don't slap the
00:17:53
reader in the face with it, but I just threw the narrating the
00:17:56
events.
00:17:56
It's there and one of the things that helps to explain it
00:18:00
is that Fairfax didn't know about McLean.
00:18:02
Helps to explain it is that Fairfax didn't know about McLean
00:18:03
.
00:18:03
Fairfax left in January of 1969 from the Canary Islands and he
00:18:11
could leave then because he was going a southerly route across
00:18:14
the Atlantic to Florida and so he could leave.
00:18:18
He wasn't going to face the winter weather of the North
00:18:21
Atlantic which Tom was.
00:18:23
Tom had to wait until April 1969.
00:18:26
Fairfax didn't even know there was this guy, tom McLean,
00:18:30
through his entire row.
00:18:31
He only learned about it afterwards.
00:18:33
Mclean knew about Fairfax and it wasn't like he absolutely
00:18:38
felt like he was going to do everything possible to beat him.
00:18:43
That really wasn't so much his motive, although he was aware of
00:18:46
it and would have preferred to be first.
00:18:48
Fairfax arrives in in florida on july 19th 1969, which is one
00:18:54
day before the moon landing occurs, and tom arrives in in uh
00:18:58
, in northwest ireland, at black sod bay, on the 27th of July,
00:19:04
so about a week later.
00:19:05
And so Fairfax gets all the attention.
00:19:10
He holds the record In all the record books.
00:19:13
There's an organization called the Ocean Rowing Society
00:19:16
International that's based outside of London and they keep
00:19:19
the records in conjunction with Guinness, the Guinness Book of
00:19:22
Records.
00:19:23
And so Fairfax gets all the acclaim for being the first to
00:19:28
cross.
00:19:28
But it's almost as if the record keepers were either
00:19:32
ignorant of the fact that Fairfax was getting out of its
00:19:35
boat all the time and getting all this help and Tom wasn't, or
00:19:39
either they didn't know it or they didn't care.
00:19:42
There weren't any rules stopping that from happening at
00:19:45
the time and it's still kind of a shady kind of thing but it
00:19:49
seems to me Tom deserves.
00:19:50
Tom has always been kind of the forgotten guy in all of this.
00:19:53
He's not in the record like in the same way.
00:19:56
Speaker 1: Well, one of the things that I found amazing and
00:19:59
a little absurd about what these two men did, as opposed to what
00:20:04
your friend and mine, Lynn Cox, did.
00:20:07
Well, she was a little bit later, but as an open water
00:20:10
swimmer, the rules that she had to go by were astonishing when
00:20:16
compared, especially, with what John Fairfax was doing.
00:20:21
I mean, you didn't see her jumping up on a boat and having
00:20:25
a shower and then getting back on the water.
00:20:26
Per se, yeah, it was extraordinary.
00:20:29
But with this in mind, what do you think drew John Fairfax to
00:20:33
the ocean?
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Well, john Fairfax, his background story is almost
00:20:39
unbelievable.
00:20:40
I mean, thomas is pretty stunning.
00:20:43
I mean he had this interesting career where he was an orphan.
00:20:47
He was an illegitimate son who was shipped off from Ireland,
00:20:53
born outside of Dublin, to this Fagans orphanage home when he
00:20:58
was only five years old and he has kind of this Oliver Twist,
00:21:03
charles Dickens orphanage life up until the mid-teens when he's
00:21:07
sort of shipped out from, you know, from the orphanage out to
00:21:11
farms where he was supposed to work and then.
00:21:13
But when he's 17 and a half, when the, when he hits the age
00:21:16
that he's allowed to join the british paratroopers, he, he had
00:21:20
a friend that he had met, an old friend from the orphanage,
00:21:24
from the boys home that he saw the, saw this friend in this
00:21:27
paratrooper's outfit and wondered what that was and he
00:21:30
was told that this is, this is a not a nasty outfit of men, you
00:21:34
know.
00:21:34
And tom thought well, that's what I want to do.
00:21:36
So at 17 and a half he becomes a British paratrooper.
00:21:39
He has this interesting combat experience with the British Army
00:21:43
back when the British Commonwealth was fighting off
00:21:45
insurgencies and trying to defend the British interests
00:21:50
economic interests, strategic interests, political interests.
00:21:53
So he goes to Borneo and fights in the jungles of Borneo.
00:21:56
He's in Bahrain and Aden, in problems in the Middle East and
00:22:01
has a lot of interesting and tough assignments.
00:22:03
And that's McLean's story in a nutshell.
00:22:07
Fairfax, on the other hand, he's the son of a Bulgarian woman
00:22:12
who comes from a fascist family, who had left Bulgaria after his
00:22:16
grandfather attempted a coup against the Bulgarian king, and
00:22:21
then they end up moving to Mussolini's Rome and Fairfax's
00:22:25
mother ends up marrying not marrying, having a child, john
00:22:31
with a British BBC journalist who, when the war breaks out in
00:22:34
1939, goes back to London and never has anything to do with
00:22:38
fairfax until much, much later and then doesn't have anything
00:22:42
very nice to do with him.
00:22:43
So johnny grows up in mussolini's rome and his mother
00:22:48
is kind of a high class escort within.
00:22:50
It's a little not so sure everything she's up to with the,
00:22:54
with people in mussolini's inner circle.
00:22:57
After the war she takes her little boy, johnny.
00:22:59
They cross the ocean.
00:23:01
Where did they go?
00:23:01
They go to Buenos, argentina, juan Peron's Argentina, where a
00:23:05
lot of other fascists are hiding out after the war.
00:23:08
And so Johnny grows up there, gets into a lot of mischief.
00:23:13
By the time he's 12 or 13, he's running away from home into the
00:23:16
jungles of Northern Argentina hunting jaguar and interacting
00:23:21
with native, native indians, and I mean it goes on and on.
00:23:25
I mean some of the stuff that he does.
00:23:27
It's like can this be true?
00:23:29
You know, I did my best to absolutely.
00:23:31
And at one point he goes to san francisco and after living like
00:23:35
a month and spending all of the money that his mother gave him,
00:23:37
living with this, this chinese prostitute in San Francisco, he
00:23:42
runs out of money and decides I better get back home, and so he
00:23:45
steals a bicycle and heads back to South America from San
00:23:49
Francisco and he gets the bicycle right.
00:23:51
He takes the bicycle all the way into Central America and
00:23:55
then in Guatemala he gets hooked up, you know, he loses the
00:23:59
bicycle.
00:23:59
He ends up walking into Panama, I mean sort of with a bunch of
00:24:03
hippies on the beach for a while , and then he becomes a pirate.
00:24:06
I mean, I'm just rushing through this biography.
00:24:10
Speaker 1: It's like a crazy fictional story.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's just incredible stuff.
00:24:14
And so you know, you kind of think, well, rowing across the
00:24:17
ocean solo is kind of a crazy thing.
00:24:19
But when you think about what these two guys, especially
00:24:23
Fairfax, what they were up to before, it's like, yeah, for
00:24:28
them it wasn't with crazy remarkable biographies to go on
00:24:31
and do these sorts of things.
00:24:33
But in this particular case I had one reviewer on Amazon who
00:24:48
didn't like the fact he thought the author should have just told
00:24:51
the story of the rose and not spent so much time with all
00:24:56
these flashbacks into their biographies.
00:24:58
Well, if not for their biographies, I wouldn't even
00:25:00
been that interested in writing the book, because to me it's
00:25:03
really all about these two men.
00:25:05
And who were they?
00:25:06
Why did they do what they did and why did they do it so
00:25:09
differently from one another?
00:25:11
Speaker 1: Yes, I agree, and that is the heart of this book.
00:25:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so too.
00:25:16
Speaker 1: What do you think it was about Tom's personality and
00:25:19
his upbringing that had him, as you quote in the book take to
00:25:24
the army like a duck to the water, Because we forgot he was
00:25:28
in the SAS for a while?
00:25:29
I mean, this was one extraordinary man.
00:25:33
Speaker 2: Yeah right, that was not just a normal paratrooper,
00:25:37
that was the special air service group.
00:25:40
That was essentially a commando unit that had been created
00:25:44
during the Second World War in North Africa, you know, to get
00:25:48
in behind the lines of Rommel's panzer divisions, and so that
00:25:53
group from the very beginning.
00:25:54
I mean, there's actually a very interesting TV series
00:25:58
dramatizing the birth of the SAS in North Africa, and so of
00:26:03
course Tom doesn't join it until the early 1960s, but you know
00:26:08
he continues to want to push himself into the most extreme
00:26:12
situations that he can.
00:26:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a fascinating man, but he was also
00:26:16
fighting authority constantly.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a fascinating man, but he was also
00:26:19
fighting authority constantly.
00:26:20
Oh yeah, I think so.
00:26:22
I never wanted to make him any sort of victim in terms of his
00:26:25
childhood and being illegitimate and being isolated and going
00:26:31
through the rigors of this orphanage.
00:26:33
But it is what it is and he is, um, you know he it's the way he
00:26:40
grew up, um, and the way he survived, the way he faced life.
00:26:45
I mean, it wasn't that he didn't have some friends or that
00:26:48
he was a complete loner.
00:26:49
He wasn't.
00:26:50
He enjoyed comradeship.
00:26:52
But he was also, uh, the kind of person who felt like you know,
00:26:56
I'm in this life, I'm, you know, I'm gonna have to do some of
00:26:59
these things on my own.
00:27:00
You know, I have a lot of.
00:27:02
I'm gonna have to have the confidence and the abilities to
00:27:05
survive a lot of stuff.
00:27:06
And and he did, he had to, and I think that's what made him as
00:27:11
successful as he was as a soldier, um, not that he
00:27:15
couldn't he.
00:27:15
He worked in team settings, but usually small team settings, I
00:27:19
mean in Borneo.
00:27:20
You know the jungle warfare that he was involved with in
00:27:25
Borneo in the early 60s.
00:27:27
You know he was very good at what we would consider to be
00:27:31
pretty remarkable kinds of fighting, where you had to stay
00:27:34
very quiet, you had to be on your own, you had to survive a
00:27:38
lot of difficulties.
00:27:40
Um, tom, I think that explains why, in the end, he wanted to do
00:27:43
things unassisted.
00:27:44
It wasn't that he he rejected help, but he he really want, he
00:27:50
really felt.
00:27:51
I think that he was at his best when he was challenging,
00:27:54
challenging himself to do things solo.
00:27:58
And I think Fairfax had a wilder kind of ego-centric kind
00:28:05
of approach to things.
00:28:06
I mean, it's not that Tom didn't have ego, but Tom was not
00:28:10
.
00:28:10
You know, he never.
00:28:12
He wasn't out to be a hero or to be a celebrity at all, and I
00:28:15
think Fairfax was.
00:28:17
If we ever have make a movie of this, it'll be interesting to
00:28:21
cast these two characters.
00:28:22
Speaker 1: Yes, that will be interesting and I hope it all
00:28:25
pans out.
00:28:26
Just going back to something you mentioned, we have these two
00:28:30
men and neither of them had a well, really a father figure.
00:28:34
John's father got up and left and Tom was always told that he
00:28:37
was an orphan, His parents had died.
00:28:39
Speaker 2: Right, right, that's what he had been told, yeah.
00:28:42
Speaker 1: And, with this in mind, I wondered if, deep inside
00:28:45
their subconscious, there was this will to achieve, this need
00:28:50
to prove themselves as men.
00:28:52
What are your thoughts on this?
00:28:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I think that really was at the heart of
00:28:58
both of it.
00:28:58
Very contrasting characters with different motivations, but
00:29:01
in some ways similar.
00:29:03
In some ways similar.
00:29:04
I mean, when you say that these were two men about the same age
00:29:07
, I mean I, you have to say both of them were British.
00:29:10
But you know, again, fairfax, never.
00:29:13
He didn't live in England until you know.
00:29:15
It's until the time that he chose to and he moved, moved
00:29:18
into England to get things set up to make the row, but he'd
00:29:22
been a boy in Rome, mussolini's Rome.
00:29:25
He'd been in Argentina and Buenos Aires.
00:29:27
He was all over the Caribbean through most of his teens and
00:29:30
early 20s.
00:29:30
And one thing about his being British is, if you listen to him
00:29:36
talk and I did get some, I found some video of him.
00:29:39
He was interviewed.
00:29:40
One of his stops, one of his assists, was a yacht comes to
00:29:44
meet him about a hundred miles off the coast of Florida.
00:29:46
He had committed himself contractually to having
00:29:50
interviews, exclusive interviews , with ITN, a British
00:29:53
broadcasting organization, and so he got out and spent the
00:29:57
night on the yacht and had dinner and had this interview
00:29:59
and it's on.
00:30:00
You can find it on youtube and his accent is it's.
00:30:03
It's sort of like a it's almost sounds like a continental
00:30:06
europe version of english.
00:30:08
I mean, and again, he, he's speaking in italy, speaking, you
00:30:12
know, either some bulgarian and some italian.
00:30:14
And then in buenos aires he's speaking spanish, you know, and
00:30:18
he learns English, but he's not around English speakers so his
00:30:23
English is not quite the King's English or the Queen's English,
00:30:26
whereas McLean you know McLean's Irish, but he's over in England
00:30:30
and growing up in this orphanage from the time and then
00:30:32
in the British Army, so he still retains some Irish in him
00:30:36
and he's proud of the fact that he was born in Ireland.
00:30:38
So, anyway, there are similarities between the two of
00:30:42
them, but the contrast of personality, I think, is very,
00:30:47
very prominent and important in understanding why they do this
00:30:52
so differently from one another.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: And that leads beautifully into my next
00:30:55
question.
00:30:56
On page 190, you wrote and that leads beautifully into my next
00:30:59
question.
00:30:59
On page 190, you wrote, quote Tom also loved facing life and
00:31:01
death challenges and facing them all on his own, no help from
00:31:05
anyone.
00:31:06
That made him feel more alive than anything he could do with
00:31:10
other people.
00:31:10
End quote Was this something he explained to you in the many
00:31:14
conversations you had together?
00:31:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's interesting and, I think, very
00:31:18
characteristic of Tom.
00:31:20
When you're doing oral history and I've done lots of it with
00:31:23
almost all my books you just really do get a feel for the
00:31:27
character and sometimes it's not necessarily exactly what they
00:31:32
say to you it's how they say it to you, and sometimes it's also
00:31:35
not what they do say to you, it's what they don't say to you.
00:31:39
I mean, I had a lot of time with neil armstrong where I I wanted
00:31:42
him to talk about certain things that he just didn't want
00:31:46
to go there and that was interesting and illuminating as
00:31:49
well with tom and tom was willing to to get inside himself
00:31:54
for you at times.
00:31:56
But I think I got in looking back through my, my notes and
00:32:00
things for the book.
00:32:02
I think tom also answered questions for me by letter and
00:32:06
by email and sometimes I got better I it was like he was more
00:32:12
willing and more able to to free and, you know, not to hold
00:32:17
anything back when he was writing it down, compared to
00:32:21
sitting like this on a Zoom call talking, and so I think some of
00:32:27
the more illuminating comments that he made to me that were
00:32:29
about his character and his personality and his ambitions
00:32:33
and that came from me, and things that he wrote to me,
00:32:36
rather than things that he actually said to me came for me
00:32:39
and things that he wrote to me, rather than things that he
00:32:41
actually said to me.
00:32:45
Speaker 1: I can understand that because when I think of Tom and
00:32:47
his life within this book, on this solo journey across the
00:32:49
Atlantic, writing is also a solo act and he also grew up in a
00:32:52
time where people wrote more letters, you know, with ink and
00:32:55
paper.
00:32:56
And the other thing I wanted to comment on was the way you
00:32:59
wrote Completely Mad, which is in the style of creative
00:33:03
nonfiction.
00:33:04
You tell stories that Tom has shared with you.
00:33:07
It reads as a sincere story of two men's lives.
00:33:14
Speaker 2: Well, as I said to you earlier thank you so much,
00:33:18
manny it was a book unlike anything else I'd written.
00:33:22
At times in my career I had thought of writing something
00:33:27
fictional and I'd even started a couple of things and I sort of
00:33:32
gave it up because I just couldn't make it up well enough
00:33:36
and I just didn't.
00:33:37
But this gave me an opportunity , through nonfiction, to write
00:33:43
in a different way and I really think it helped me become, you
00:33:47
know, maybe too late for me now at my age, but what I have been
00:33:52
writing since Completely Mad, I think has benefited from somehow
00:33:58
opening up my approach.
00:34:00
You know, when you're trained as an academic, historian or any
00:34:04
kind of academic, you get trained to do it a certain way.
00:34:08
Not that there isn't a fairly wide range of opportunities
00:34:11
within that, but you know, if you're a university press kind
00:34:15
of writer, you're just trying to satisfy the university press
00:34:19
editors or your fellow academics and you're writing for maybe a
00:34:22
couple hundred other people.
00:34:23
You know you're not writing for a mass audience.
00:34:27
But I, I, it started with the armstrong book, where I started.
00:34:30
You know that was my first trade press book and then,
00:34:33
moving on from there, uh, I, I started, I think, to loosen up
00:34:37
and and and try to diversify my style a little bit.
00:34:40
But this book really gave me a chance to do it, because I had
00:34:43
to find a way to get these biographies told in a sort of
00:34:48
non-chronological but non-chronological way.
00:34:51
It wasn't just this and then this, and then this, and then
00:34:53
this and then this.
00:34:54
I had to find a more illuminating way of doing it.
00:34:58
Speaker 1: James, you did it so well that I could not read this
00:35:01
book at night because I started to freak out about the crazy
00:35:05
waves and whatever is in the water beneath the boat and I
00:35:10
mean this in a very complimentary way.
00:35:12
You know, I smelt the ocean, I heard the waves and when we're
00:35:17
reading nonfiction and it's very factual we don't feel like
00:35:22
we're in that boat, and that's the difference.
00:35:26
Speaker 2: No, that's right, that's right.
00:35:27
Well, you know one thing that we, that I, one source I should
00:35:30
mention to you.
00:35:31
It's so important and it falls in the oral history.
00:35:34
But also what was written to me was the character Sylvia Cook.
00:35:37
Sylvia Cook was John Fairfax's girlfriend and she met him, or
00:35:44
they met in London within a year or so before John made the row
00:35:51
and Sylvia becomes kind of a sidekick for him, literally
00:35:54
through the row, the first row, but then later.
00:35:57
I mean the life of these two guys afterwards it's like
00:36:01
there's a postscript for each one of them, because their
00:36:04
biographies continue right up to , you know, to Donny K, through
00:36:08
his death and Tom's, to where he is right now in his life.
00:36:12
But Sylvia, in 1972, joins John on a row across the Pacific
00:36:19
Ocean, the first to cross from San Francisco to Australia, and
00:36:24
it's an incredible story itself.
00:36:27
And so, fortunately Sylvia Cook is still living outside of
00:36:32
London and fortunately I was able to find an address for her.
00:36:37
It wasn't easy and fortunately she was willing.
00:36:40
You know, after some preliminary conversations with me, she was
00:36:43
willing to talk with me on the phone and answer questions by
00:36:48
email and send me letters and she provided insights into John
00:36:53
Fairfax and John Fairfax's mother, who plays a pretty
00:36:57
prominent role in the story that I would never have been able to
00:37:00
get otherwise, I mean, because the records were just not
00:37:04
available for that kind of background biography.
00:37:08
And so Sylvia was really, she was in the boat, even though she
00:37:12
didn't make the boat with Johnny, she was the later boat
00:37:15
in my boat for the book.
00:37:17
Sylvia was right there with me the whole time and I just, you
00:37:22
know, sometimes with books I mean I think it's probably true
00:37:25
for every author when you don't do something that works out
00:37:30
pretty well, you know, you've got a lot of confluence of good
00:37:34
things that have happened, lucky things that have happened, and
00:37:37
and, uh, I mean, I suppose I mean a foolish author, I mean,
00:37:41
and I can be a foolish author at times, but a foolish author
00:37:44
would not have even tried to find Sylvia Cook, would have
00:37:47
just tried to write the book without Sylvia Cook.
00:37:49
Well, you can't, you can't tell this story without her.
00:37:52
You know you can get.
00:37:53
You can get all the materials from the Ocean Roaring society
00:37:56
and you can get the log books and all that but they're not
00:37:59
primary sources, are they?
00:38:00
yeah, absolutely, and that's one thing I guess my training
00:38:04
taught me, or my original training, and that is you.
00:38:06
Don't you lift up every rock?
00:38:08
When I did the armstrong biography, for example, uh,
00:38:12
neil's first wife, janet they've been married for 30 some years.
00:38:15
When they divorced in the 1990s and, uh, and they were married
00:38:20
all through Neil's career as a test pilot and an astronaut and
00:38:24
through the moon landing I knew I needed to talk to her, even
00:38:27
though they were divorced, and I mean, long story short, you
00:38:31
know it was a very hard thing to get her approval to participate
00:38:37
in any kind of oral history with me, but I managed to get 16
00:38:40
hours of tape recording with her, which was crucial to
00:38:44
understanding Neil, because you can't understand the man without
00:38:50
understanding his mate.
00:38:52
I don't think, especially when they're married for that long.
00:38:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I don't think so either and, as I said
00:38:59
to you a little earlier, I distinctly remember my mother
00:39:03
screaming with joy in Australia, saying how this woman had rowed
00:39:09
across the Pacific.
00:39:10
She never mentioned John, but to her, because she was a
00:39:15
feminist, it just meant so much to her, and I just think that's
00:39:19
wonderful.
00:39:20
While John was in that boat, rowing with Sylvia across the
00:39:23
Pacific, I can't help but think she was the backbone of the
00:39:27
adventure.
00:39:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm working with a screenwriter who
00:39:33
came to me interested in doing an adaptation of the book for
00:39:37
film, came to me interested in doing an adaptation of the book
00:39:40
for film, and one of the things that I pounded home is that
00:39:42
Sylvia Cook needs to be a central character, maybe even
00:39:44
the narrator of the book, you know, and a voiceover narrator,
00:39:48
because she can give us insights that you can't get anywhere
00:39:52
else.
00:39:53
Speaker 1: So anyway, we have to believe and hope that behind
00:39:56
that playboy persona way, we have to believe and hope that
00:39:58
behind that playboy persona there was something else, and
00:40:01
she was probably the only one that saw it.
00:40:03
I mean, that's probably why she's stuck by him.
00:40:05
Yeah, I'm going to move on to page 154, where you write about
00:40:14
Tom's first experience with the sea, and it was rebuilding an
00:40:15
old boat, a Dow, and venturing across the Gulf from Bahrain to
00:40:18
Dubai.
00:40:19
Can you walk us through what happened on that short voyage
00:40:22
and later the surgery he underwent due to a bullet in his
00:40:26
stomach?
00:40:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know, one of the places he was
00:40:30
stationed, as you know, with the paratroopers, was in Bahrain
00:40:35
and on the Persian Gulf.
00:40:36
And he's, you know, they, like all soldiers, they have some
00:40:41
down times, they have some other things and sometimes they get
00:40:45
into mischief, more mischief than they should be.
00:40:48
But the, the battalion Padre, had found his battalion Padre
00:40:55
and Anglican, I guess, had found this boat deserted on the beach
00:41:00
on the Gulf and got a bunch of the boys to help kind of rebuild
00:41:08
it.
00:41:08
And they actually, you know, a dhow is a traditional, it goes
00:41:13
back even to ancient times, it's kind of a sailing ship, but
00:41:18
they had outfitted it with an engine.
00:41:20
They decided, well, let's take it out on the Persian Gulf and
00:41:22
we can maybe cross over to Dubai , we can make it a real outing
00:41:26
for ourselves.
00:41:26
So they got this motley crew of guys together.
00:41:28
Well, none of them had any sailing experience, which is
00:41:31
typical, because one thing we didn't mention about Fairfax,
00:41:34
and especially McLean, is when they decided to row the ocean,
00:41:38
they had really no ocean rowing experience whatsoever, which
00:41:42
makes it completely mad.
00:41:44
But when they get the dial out onto the Gulf, they get into
00:41:49
this violent storm and the ship's nearly sinking.
00:41:52
And the crew members.
00:41:54
Tom, they're pumping and pumping to try to get the water
00:41:57
out and they do a may and it takes like three hours or more
00:42:01
for the rescue ship to come out and rescue them.
00:42:04
And the sea is kind of like what you're looking behind me
00:42:07
it's real rough and the storm's still there and they're having
00:42:10
to jump from the Dow into this rescue boat and some of them
00:42:14
aren't making it.
00:42:15
They're jumping and they're landing in the water and Tom's
00:42:18
one of them that does and ends up, you know, they end up
00:42:21
getting all rescued.
00:42:22
No one dies or anything, but they end up coming back to shore
00:42:26
, you know, all wet and seasick, it was a mess, so it wasn't a
00:42:31
good.
00:42:32
It wasn't a good little enterprise for them.
00:42:36
The other thing where Tom does get hurt and this happens, I
00:42:39
think in 1961, when he's with one of the paratrooper
00:42:44
battalions they're having a NATO exercise in Greece and they're
00:42:48
going to have a major drop of these paratroopers in different
00:42:52
countries and it's the largest airdrop since World War II,
00:42:56
probably D-Day, and so they're dropping and the drop goes fine,
00:43:00
although a couple of guys break legs and break arms, you know,
00:43:04
and landing, but Tom's okay.
00:43:06
But after this is over.
00:43:08
They're in this.
00:43:09
They find out that there's this big tent that the Greeks have
00:43:13
that have all their weapons stored and somebody that goes
00:43:17
into that tent one of tom's mates finds this colt 45
00:43:20
revolver that was kind of a classic piece of gunnery and so
00:43:25
he takes it out and he show he's showing it to tom and some of
00:43:27
the other guys and the and the gun goes off and it shoots tom
00:43:32
in the stomach, goes through his bladder and pelvis and comes
00:43:36
out and basically blows off his left buttocks and and he's in
00:43:41
bad shape.
00:43:42
Fortunately there's a medic that's pretty enough close by to
00:43:45
start to, you know, stop the blood from blowing and
00:43:48
everything.
00:43:49
And they they take a land rover and they rush him to the
00:43:52
airfield and get him on an raf plane and they fly him to malta
00:43:56
where there's a british hospital and he's in there for like four
00:43:59
or five days and, you know, near death, nearly dies, nearly
00:44:03
dies actually on the airplane trip taking him to Malta and
00:44:06
then they air transport him back to England where he's still in
00:44:10
bad shape and in with tubes and balloons and everything coming
00:44:14
out of him bottles coming out of him or hooked up to him from
00:44:18
for about two and a half months and then he has to go another
00:44:22
two or three months before he's ready to be back on active duty,
00:44:25
which he goes back on active duty, so he has this accident.
00:44:29
It's a really nasty accident that almost takes his life.
00:44:33
Crazy kind of stuff, but when you're a soldier and you're
00:44:36
around these kind of weapons and these silly stupid accidents
00:44:41
can happen, and a really nasty one happened to him yeah, and it
00:44:44
gives you a deeper understanding of why he wanted
00:44:47
that pillow, that cushion, when he went out on his own journey
00:44:50
across the atlantic yeah, for the boat.
00:44:53
Yeah, and that's right he's sitting.
00:44:56
I've always wondered.
00:44:57
I didn't ask him or get too personal.
00:44:59
Actually, he's coming to the States to help me give a couple
00:45:03
of talks at the end of the summer, and you know this is
00:45:07
just a joke, but I wonder what his buttocks looks like now.
00:45:10
Hopefully the scars all healed up.
00:45:14
Speaker 1: Well, if you're brave enough to ask that question,
00:45:16
james, good luck to you Now.
00:45:18
Will you be coming out to California?
00:45:20
Speaker 2: Not any time that I've got planned, I would be
00:45:23
happy to come.
00:45:24
You know I've been out there quite a bit for things, but we
00:45:28
haven't had any good contact to get us out there.
00:45:32
So these are talks all on the East Coast.
00:45:37
Speaker 1: And what month is he arriving?
00:45:38
Speaker 2: He's coming early september.
00:45:40
We've done a couple things together.
00:45:42
Um, we've done things like this with the radio talk europe and,
00:45:46
uh, a couple in a philadelphia public free public library.
00:45:50
We've done some talks together which I think work out well,
00:45:54
because I'm kind of I'm coaxing things out of him.
00:45:57
He's so, he's so humble, I mean he'll be saying things like ah,
00:46:01
there's really nothing to it, you know, you just keep rowing
00:46:05
and you know you end up crossing the ocean.
00:46:07
You know, okay.
00:46:08
So so some days that you know, at one time he one of the
00:46:12
chapters in the book, I think might even be titled this but
00:46:15
you know he counted how many war strokes.
00:46:17
You know you're.
00:46:18
And he doesn't have a seat that moves, you know they're not, he
00:46:21
didn't want one of those either .
00:46:22
Fairfax had one, one of the movable seats that helps, helps
00:46:25
you, like I'm moving right here but he counted how many war
00:46:29
strokes he had in a given day and when he got up to 24, 000 he
00:46:32
stopped.
00:46:33
He's not, he didn't stop rowing , he stops counting.
00:46:35
And so whenever tom sort of you know, in his modest, naturally
00:46:41
modest way, would sort of say well, mate, you know, you just
00:46:43
keep doing what you need to do and you'll get there.
00:46:46
You know, I think no, no, no one had done this.
00:46:49
And, like you know the only people that crossed the ocean.
00:46:52
You know there had been several that had tried and died and
00:46:55
nobody had crossed it solo until they did it in 1969.
00:46:59
I mean, this is really unbelievable stuff.
00:47:01
I mean 50 foot waves, shark attacks.
00:47:04
I mean running out of food Again.
00:47:07
Can you imagine being on the ocean in a rowboat all by
00:47:11
yourself and a bad storm is on its way?
00:47:17
Young people who would read the book would need to know and
00:47:18
think about the fact.
00:47:18
You know people.
00:47:18
Young people who would read the book would need to remember,
00:47:20
need to know and think about the fact.
00:47:22
You know there's no GPS systems yet.
00:47:24
You know the satellite telephones really aren't there,
00:47:29
could be there, but they weren't for these guys and so they
00:47:33
don't know where they're at most of the time.
00:47:35
And if anything happens I mean this is what Tom says If
00:47:38
something happens, you got to figure it out on your own you
00:47:41
know you're not going to get help, most likely.
00:47:43
And so it's different today, when people row and there's
00:47:47
always rows there's probably several rows going on right, and
00:47:50
in fact there is.
00:47:50
I mean there was a newspaper picture of a guy rowing solo and
00:47:54
he had a dozen sharks that were surrounding him.
00:47:56
But, unlike Tom and John back nearly 60 years ago, when you do
00:48:01
go across now, you do have GPS and you do have satellite phones
00:48:05
and you do have internet, probably even, and you have
00:48:09
constant communication, you might have an escort boat that's
00:48:12
going with you.
00:48:13
Somebody had to take that picture of the man in the
00:48:17
rowboat with the sharks, and so these guys didn't have anybody
00:48:20
doing that, even though, as I said, fairfax, whenever he did
00:48:24
encounter somebody that could help him, he tried to avail
00:48:27
himself of that.
00:48:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing I do want to mention is I found Tom's
00:48:32
photographs just so charming.
00:48:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, selfies before, selfies, yeah.
00:48:37
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed, there's a part in the book that I wanted
00:48:41
to ask you about.
00:48:41
It's in chapter 16, titled why, and it's after Tom hears people
00:48:46
saying of him, quote you're either stark, raving mad or a
00:48:49
self-serving show-off, because what you're planning is a
00:48:52
completely insane and aimless adventure.
00:48:55
End quote, to which Tom says quote I wanted to achieve
00:48:59
something, I wanted to amount to something.
00:49:01
I wasn't trying to be a hero, I just wanted to make my mark.
00:49:05
End quote.
00:49:05
Can you expand on the extreme differences between Tom and
00:49:09
John's need to row solo across the Atlantic?
00:49:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the quote from Tom, I think in some
00:49:17
important ways also would reflect on Fairfax's motivation.
00:49:21
But Fairfax, you know, one thing that I mentioned in
00:49:25
passing was that Fairfax had contracted with ITN to sort of
00:49:30
cover, give him publicity.
00:49:32
Fairfax wanted publicity, he wanted to make this into
00:49:36
something that would not only, you know, salve his ego but also
00:49:40
make him some money.
00:49:41
You know, he was really interested in that.
00:49:43
Tom had a contract, you know had a couple little contracts to
00:49:48
help support the building of the boat.
00:49:50
You know, a little money.
00:49:51
He had something from, you know , from gillette, his ship, his
00:49:55
boat was called super silver because the lead had a new razor
00:49:58
blade out.
00:49:59
That was so they, he got what he could.
00:50:01
But completely, I mean, although they both had this
00:50:04
motivation of proving themselves to the world, you know they all
00:50:09
had different levels of of ambition.
00:50:11
For that tom would have been happy and was happy.
00:50:14
Tom was happy that he did what he set out to do and even if he
00:50:19
didn't get the credit for the record, even if he didn't make a
00:50:22
lot of money, didn't hardly made any money off of it all,
00:50:26
even though he he didn't get much publicity for it, he was
00:50:29
satisfied because he had done what he set out to do.
00:50:32
He knew that his fellow troopers down in the in the in
00:50:36
the british army, the commander, that he had to have approval
00:50:40
from the guy that told him look, son, you're completely mad, you
00:50:43
have no experience on the ocean rowing and and you know you're
00:50:48
going to kill yourself prove to them that he could do it.
00:50:51
That was important.
00:50:52
Fairfax, on the other hand, he wanted you know, he wanted the
00:50:56
world.
00:50:56
You could see it in the pictures.
00:50:57
He raises his oars into a v when he arrives, arrives in at
00:51:02
hollywood beach.
00:51:03
He wants, he wants to be the celebrity and he ends up kind of
00:51:08
being one.
00:51:09
I mean, he ends up doing another one, this incredible row
00:51:13
with sylvia cook across the pacific.
00:51:15
Then what, what's important about what happens with him
00:51:18
later?
00:51:18
Tom retreats to the highlands, to the wild highlands of
00:51:22
Scotland, where he becomes a.
00:51:23
He creates an adventure center.
00:51:25
You know this really Spartan kind of.
00:51:28
If you want this Spartan vacation, you know, you come to
00:51:31
Tom's adventure center.
00:51:32
What does Fairfax do?
00:51:34
He becomes a professional gambler in Las Vegas.
00:51:37
He becomes a very prominent professional gambler.
00:51:40
In fact, when he died in 2012, I found in the Las Vegas papers
00:51:44
like half a page obituaries because he had become really
00:51:48
well known, for I guess he played back rat James Bond's
00:51:52
gambling game.
00:51:54
But he became a really well known.
00:51:56
I've got some pictures in the book that show him in different
00:51:59
Las Vegas locations.
00:52:01
So just contrast between Fairfax ends up on the Las Vegas
00:52:05
strip, tom ends up in the highlands where you can't even
00:52:09
find the guy unless you really go looking.
00:52:10
I mean that captures a lot about who they were.
00:52:15
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:52:16
Now you mentioned the movie.
00:52:17
What's next for you?
00:52:19
Speaker 2: well, I do have a very exciting project that I've
00:52:23
I've finished a new manuscript.
00:52:25
It's under contract to saint martin's press.
00:52:27
You might wonder why in the world would I want to take this
00:52:30
on, but I'm right.
00:52:31
I've written a marital biography of charles and anne
00:52:36
moral lbergh.
00:52:36
A marital biography.
00:52:39
It's looking at their lives, and the book is called Solo and
00:52:42
Together the enigmatic life and legacy of Charles A Lindbergh
00:52:47
and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
00:52:48
What I've set out to do thinking needed to be done is to
00:52:52
look at them individually by looking through the lens of
00:52:56
their marriage, and I believe that you get insights into them
00:53:02
both as partners and as individuals by looking at them
00:53:07
in this particular way.
00:53:09
And it's not that the biographies of Anne and Charles
00:53:11
aren't excellent ones.
00:53:13
I mean Scott Berg's 1988 biography of Charles won the
00:53:17
Pulitzer Prize, but it was written nearly 40 years ago.
00:53:21
Scott Berg's 1988 biography of Charles won the Pulitzer Prize,
00:53:23
but it was written nearly 40 years ago.
00:53:24
Anne lived until 2001, and a lot of source materials did not
00:53:32
become available until after she died.
00:53:33
And then the two major biographies of Anne Moore
00:53:34
Lundberg, who herself, as I say she, was a distinguished writer
00:53:37
and very prominent, you know, an aviator herself.
00:53:40
Two biographies of her that anybody would read are from the
00:53:44
1970s and 1980s, so there's a lot of updating that needs to be
00:53:48
done.
00:53:49
But it's not just updating, it's this if you look at, if
00:53:52
you're looking through the lens of the marriage, you ask some
00:53:55
questions and see some things that you wouldn't do otherwise
00:53:59
and it sheds a lot of light.
00:54:01
Of course, charles is an extraordinarily controversial
00:54:05
character and he's become more and more so over time.
00:54:08
You're diving into the midst of all these controversies over
00:54:14
his belonging to the America First movement opposing the
00:54:17
American entry into World War II , anti-semitic remarks.
00:54:20
His visits to Nazi Germany, first movement opposing the
00:54:21
American entry into World War II , anti-semitic remarks.
00:54:26
You know his visits to Nazi Germany.
00:54:27
I'm not writing it to excuse or defend or apologize or anything
00:54:29
for anything that he or Anne might have had happened in their
00:54:32
life.
00:54:32
I'm doing it to understand them , to make our understanding of
00:54:36
them richer and deeper than than it has been.
00:54:40
And, of course, charles we found out after, in about 2004, that
00:54:46
charles had affairs later in life with three women in europe
00:54:51
with whom he had seven children.
00:54:52
That was not known, not and never knew it, and the family
00:54:56
never knew it until the first family in Munich in Germany,
00:55:01
came out in 2004 at a press conference and announced that
00:55:05
they were the children of Charles Lindbergh and their
00:55:07
mother, a German woman named Hesseimer.
00:55:14
About Charles and these European families.
00:55:18
That has never been.
00:55:20
I mean, there's been one book in German written about it that
00:55:23
was written right when it happened.
00:55:25
It's kind of a journalistic account, but there's been.
00:55:28
I've been in touch with one of the children and I have records
00:55:31
from the family, from the Lindbergh family, things that
00:55:34
showed up in the papers that just showed up within the last
00:55:38
10 years, and so I've got something that I think will be
00:55:41
really pretty stunning.
00:55:44
My editor's working through the manuscript as we speak, I hope,
00:55:49
and it's a very big manuscript that's probably going to need to
00:55:54
be either cut down or published in two volumes, I don't know.
00:55:57
Speaker 1: Well, that's exciting .
00:55:58
Congratulations.
00:55:59
Speaker 2: Very exciting.
00:56:00
Speaker 1: Okay, James, that's talk books.
00:56:02
What are you currently reading?
00:56:04
Speaker 2: I went to the Tucson Book Festival this past spring
00:56:07
it's not the first time I've been there and I met a couple of
00:56:10
authors and Jonathan Ige's biography of Martin Luther King,
00:56:15
which is a National Book Award winner.
00:56:17
I finished that a very major revisiting of the King life.
00:56:23
And then Abraham Verghese's book, cutting for Stone, which I
00:56:30
he was one of the main speakers at the Tucson Festival and I
00:56:34
got to meet him and it's a remarkable story, you know, and
00:56:38
so I, you know, like you, I'm sure, I have to be reading
00:56:43
something always, I mean, even though when you're writing it's
00:56:47
kind of hard, especially when you're in the research side of
00:56:49
writing, you don't have as much time to read as you'd like, but
00:56:53
I always have to keep a book nearby, and so that's what's
00:56:57
that's.
00:56:57
I finished the Ike book and I'm book and I'm about a third of
00:57:01
the way through the Verghese book.
00:57:03
Speaker 1: Well, james, thank you for being here today, and I
00:57:06
absolutely enjoyed reading Completely Mad Tom McLean, john
00:57:10
Fairfax and the Epic Race to Rose Solo across the Atlantic.
00:57:14
Even if I couldn't read it at night, it's a fabulous, fabulous
00:57:18
story.
00:57:19
Speaker 2: The paperback just came out this past couple of
00:57:21
weeks and the audiobook just came out as well, and so I'm
00:57:26
hoping that gives us a little new life and if it does, if the
00:57:29
movie does materialize, as you know, that gives you a new
00:57:33
audience afterwards, and I do think it would be.
00:57:36
It's kind of like a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned in terms
00:57:39
of what kind of cinema it could produce.
00:57:40
I mean, the challenge again would be how do you in a book,
00:57:45
you know where you have to flash back into biography.
00:57:47
That's hard enough.
00:57:49
But in a movie, I mean, it's been done well at times.
00:57:53
Speaker 1: But I think you have the perfect opportunity in the
00:57:55
Sunday letters and our listeners are going to have to read the
00:57:58
book to know what I'm talking about.
00:58:00
But they are perfect for backstory.
00:58:03
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:58:04
This screenwriter has been very nice and supportive and he's
00:58:09
asked me to cast the movie and I've told him the person I would
00:58:13
like to play John Fairfax, is Alexander Skarsgård.
00:58:19
It has to be somebody that is very powerful and dynamic but
00:58:25
maybe has an edge to him that not everybody likes.
00:58:27
So Alexander Skarsgård.
00:58:29
And then, in terms of Tom, you remember the movie Banshees of
00:58:33
Innisfil.
00:58:34
There was a young Irish actor who played kind of a troubled
00:58:39
young man who fell in love with the protagonist's wife actually
00:58:44
the protagonist for the movie, and I can't remember his name
00:58:48
offhand.
00:58:48
I should remember it.
00:58:49
Speaker 1: That's Barry Keegan.
00:58:50
Speaker 2: Barry Keegan.
00:58:51
That's it.
00:58:52
I thought he could play Tom.
00:58:54
You know he could play Tom.
00:58:56
Speaker 1: Colin Farrell would be awesome too.
00:58:58
Speaker 2: Colin Farrell.
00:58:59
Yeah, yeah, colin Farrell would be a good choice.
00:59:02
Speaker 1: Well, it's all very exciting, and keep me posted,
00:59:05
james.
00:59:05
As I said earlier, I love your book and thank you for being on
00:59:09
the Bookshop Podcast.
00:59:10
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
00:59:11
Thank you for the interview.
00:59:13
Speaker 1: You've been listening to my conversation with James R
00:59:15
Hansen about his new book.
00:59:16
You've been listening to my conversation with James R Hansen
00:59:17
about his new book Completely Mad, tom McLean, john Fairfax
00:59:21
and the epic race to row solo across the Atlantic.
00:59:25
To help the show reach more people, please share episodes
00:59:33
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00:59:34
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00:59:36
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00:59:37
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00:59:40
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00:59:45
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00:59:47
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00:59:56
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00:59:59
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01:00:03
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01:00:06
The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy
01:00:10
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01:00:14
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01:00:18
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01:00:20
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