Much of the material for this podcast came from:
Herman Melville: His World And Work, by Andrew Delbanco
Melville: His World and Work
Also: Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference To His Life And Work
Herman Melville A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work (Critical Companion) by Carl Rollyson (2001-01-03)
Music selections for this podcast included:
Erik Satie: Gymnopedie Number 3, by Kevin MacLeod
and
Ted Ngoy, the ultimate American Dream, including donuts
Eventually, in 1976, one of Ted’s customers showed him an ad in the local newspaper, the Orange County Register, advertising a donut shop for sale. Ngoy had meticulously saved 20,000 dollars, the seller financed the rest of the $45,000 purchase price.
By 1985, Ted was a millionaire and a very respected member of the Cambodian community. He and his wife moved into a 7,000 square foot home in Mission Viejo and Ngoy became active in the Orange County Republican Party.
Most media accounts of Ted Ngoy end sometime around 2014. It’s hard to keep up with an individual so far away from the western press, even in the age of the internet. But, judging from his Facebook page, he is alive and surviving quite well. His “photos” page features him, a man in his seventies, with a much younger and beautiful woman who he began dating when she was in her teens. Judging from the photo they seem quite happy.
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The information for this podcast came from two articles:
“Dunkin’ and the Donut King”, November 2, 2014, California Sunday Magazine.
Also, “From Sweet Success To Bitter Tears”, January 9, 2005, Los Angeles Times.
“From Sweet Success To Bitter Tears”
The music played during the intro and conclusion is “Why”, by McNorman.
Frida Kahlo, Mexican icon
Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico. Today, Coyoacan, officially a borough of the Federal District, is part of the urban sprawl of Mexico City. But when Frida was born it consisted of open space, farm and ranch land. Although her birth probably occurred at her grandmother’s house, Frida would spend her childhood and much of her life living in the Casa Azul, the blue house built by her father in 1904. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo was born in Germany and emigrated to Mexico in 1891, when he was nineteen, his Hungarian father, a wealthy jeweler, paying for his passage.
Known during her lifetime as merely the wife of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo subsequently ascended to artistic prominence and popular culture fame in her own right, becoming a worldwide social and political icon. Her sickly childhood, painful existence, tortured relationship with Rivera and brief life provided a tragic backdrop to her artistic accomplishment, now recognized as unique and transcendental. She remains so revered in Mexico that her works have been designated as national heritage objects, prohibited from foreign export. Internationally, she is now perceived as one of the most important and original artists of the twentieth century.
La Cas Azul, Frida Kahlo’s ancestral home.
In early September, Frida got a telegram from her family back in Mexico City informing her that her mother was seriously ill, her breast cancer now entering a terminal stage. Accompanied by her American friend Lucienne Bloch, she was forced to take trains and even a bus over the flooded Rio Grande back to the Mexican capital, an arduous journey that took five days. One week after her arrival, her mother died, leaving her father in a state of grief and confusion. She would remain in Mexico for a month to grieve with her family and also check on the house that was being built for her and Diego. Her prospective home would have a bridge that connected two separate wings of the structure, one for her and one for him.
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Frida Kahlo: Mexican Icon
Since the death of Lenin in 1924, a power struggle over not only over the Soviet government but also the international Communist movement ensued with the winner Josef Stalin and the loser Leon Trotsky. But Stalin was not content with merely expelling Trotsky from the party and the country. His megalomaniac paranoia would subsequently require the physical extermination of his opponent, including Trotsky’s family. Many of Trotsky’s relatives, including his first wife and children would be imprisoned, exiled or executed. Initially expelled by Stalin, Trotsky himself fled first to Turkey, then France, where he was initially offered asylum but subsequently rejected and ultimately Norway, which also eventually deported Trotsky to Mexico
In the winter of 1939, Frida would be reintroduced to a Trotskyite sympathizer named Jacques Mornard. While in Paris, Mornard, who lived in the French capital at the time, claimed that he was moving to Mexico City and aggressively asked her to help secure him a home near hers and an introduction to Leon Trotsky. She refused, explaining that she and her husband had had a falling out with Trotsky and suggested he find a residence on his own. Mornard eventually made his way to Mexico, accompanied by his American girlfriend, Sylvia Ageloff, a trusted member of Trotsky’s inner circle. It would take months, but Mornard, who routinely dropped Sylvia off at the Trotsky compound and did small favors for the entourage eventually ingratiated himself into obtaining a personal meeting with the Soviet exile. Ostensibly, Trotsky was to review a political article that Mornard had written. In the late afternoon of August 20, Leon Trotsky ushered the younger man into his study and began to read his work. Unfortunately for Trotsky, Jacques Mornard was actually Ramon Mercader, a specially recruited Stalinist assassin who took an ice axe from underneath his rain coat and plunged it into Trotsky’s skull. Although the blow did not immediately kill Leon Trotsky, he would die of his injuries within 24 hours.
Most of the rest of the decade would be consumed by painting, teaching and attempting to find solutions for the various ailments that plagued her which included a chronically infected hand, her right foot which was troublesome and restrictive, a deteriorating spinal column that was also overwhelmingly painful and even possible syphilis that was diagnosed in the early forties. However, it would be during this time period that Frida would paint some of her most quintessential works.
Frida’s degenerative spinal condition would begin to require surgery and a succession of casts designed to allow her mobility. She would fly to New York in May of 1946 for surgery that would fuse four vertebrae with bone and a metal rod. Returning to Mexico, she would be placed in a steel corset and remain bedridden for eight months.
Frida Kahlo celebrated her 47th and last birthday on July 6, 1954. Drawings and notations in her diary indicate that however it would arrive, she knew the end was near. Officially, she would die sometime in the early morning of July 13, from what a doctor officially noted as a “pulmonary embolism.” Wracked by pneumonia, in constant and excessive pain only dulled by massive amounts of opiates, this certainly would not be a far-fetched prognosis. However, on the evening before her death she insisted on giving Diego Rivera an anniversary present, despite the fact that their anniversary was a month away. Later, her nurse would claim that Frida intentionally exceeded the number of painkillers she was supposed to take. Her final diary entry was both ominous and revelatory:
“I hope the exit is joyful-and I hope never to come back.”
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Two books provided most of the information in these podcasts,
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, by Hayden Herrera
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish, by Martha Zamora
Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish
Ian Fleming, who proved that a great deal of fiction is factual.
Ian Fleming was born on May 28, 1908, the second son of Valentine and Evelyn Fleming. Both parents came from upper crust British backgrounds, Evelyn, known as Eve, was the descendant of a solicitor paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather who was the personal physician to Queen Victoria, both of whom would be knighted for their efforts. Valentine, known as Val, was the son of the wildly successful Robert Fleming, a pioneering British financier who originated the investment bank Robert Fleming and Company.
Although it would not become meaningful for many years, Ian Fleming initiated a relationship in August of 1935 that would have a profound effect on his future literary life. In Kitzbuhel, on a summer holiday, he met twenty-six year old Muriel Wright. Although she came from the type of elite British background that didn’t require that she work for a living, she was a professional model, especially of ski apparel and bathing suits with a figure to back it up. She and Fleming hit it off immediately and they spent a great deal of time together. Unfortunately, Muriel adored Ian Fleming, a situation that he took full advantage of, enjoying her company but not having the slightest intention of moving the relationship forward in any meaningful way.
If Muriel was totally smitten and more than a little naive, Ann Charteris, another girlfriend, was more calculating and fully expected Fleming to propose when her husband was killed in the war. He didn’t so she instead married Esmond Harmsworth, the Viscount of Rothermere. But, even after her marriage, Ann continued to see Ian on the side, a typically twisted Fleming emotional relationship. When she miscarried with her first child, it was rumored to actually be Fleming’s and not her husband’s.
By the end of the war, Fleming was interested in attempting to emulate his brother Peter Fleming, an accomplished travel writer and journalist for The Times. But Fleming was not ready to forego a steady salary for the potentially financially unrewarding life of a writer so instead he took a job with the Kemsley Newspaper chain as a mid level manager. Because his position allowed up to three months of annual vacation, Fleming spent all of his time off in Jamaica, which he first visited during the war. He also began building a home near the northern coastline on Oracabessa Bay. He would name this property Goldeneye and it would quickly become a destination for various British writers and celebrities who also spent time at the nearby Firefly, a home owned by Noel Coward. Goldeneye overlooked a beach and a coral reef teeming with exotic fish and crustaceans and would play an important role in both Fleming’s romantic and professional life.
Sometime in early 1952, Fleming began a process that he would continue while in Jamaica for the rest of his life. After an early morning swim in the reef off of Goldeneye and breakfast in the garden with his wife, he would sit at a roll top desk in his living room and write continuously until noon. After a nap and an afternoon outside, Fleming would return to whatever he had written earlier in the day and correct it. The finished pages would then be deposited in his desk. Although the exact date that Fleming began writing his first manuscript is still up for debate, it was finished in as little as four weeks on the eighteenth of March, 1952. The novel was 62,000 words. It was entitled Casino Royale.
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Ian Fleming proved that a great deal of fiction is factual
Acquiring a name for his protagonist was simple enough. When cosmopolitan visitors to Goldeneye found themselves a little bored by the repetitive, tropical languor, Fleming suggested some bird watching accompanied by the book Macmillan’s Field Guide to the West Indies by James Bond, a volume that sat prominently on a shelf near Ian’s desk. Fleming deliberately wanted a simple name for a character that he described as “an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department.”
Most likely, this aspect of the annual Jamaica sojourn did not go well, as Ann Fleming would return home in less than a month. It was probably about this time that Fleming returned to his philandering ways, involving himself with an exotic, wealthy Jamaican neighbor, Blanche Blackwell, a formerly platonic friend who had at some indistinct moment became his lover. Blanche’s family was among the most prominent of Jamaica’s colonial hierarchy and she was the carefree counterpart to Fleming’s wife’s combative tension. Part of Ann’s discomfort, hostility and early return to Britain may have been her acknowledgement of this situation.
Ian Fleming stayed out of most of the major decisions revolving around the production of Dr. No. He had no interest in composing the script and while he suggested first David Niven and then Roger Moore as the leading man, Broccoli had other ideas. As Bond, he cast a relative unknown Scot, Sean Connery and plucked Ursula Andress out of total obscurity for the role of Honey Ryder.
On August 11, after dinner with his wife and a friend, Fleming suffered another massive heart attack. Although he was coherent enough to joke with the ambulance driver who took him to the hospital, he would die in the early morning hours of August 12, aged 56. It was also his son’s twelfth birthday.
Although Ian Fleming died on top of the publishing world, his wife and son would both experience great unhappiness following his death. Although his son showed some academic promise as a teenager, he was expelled from Eton for, among other things, possessing loaded firearms in his dorm room. He left Oxford after two years, accessed his trust fund at age twenty-one and quickly became an intravenous drug user. He would commit suicide by a drug overdose of barbituates at his mother’s London apartment on October 2, 1975, aged 23.
Never having come to terms with her relationship with her husband, Ann Fleming was plunged into deep depression and alcoholism after the death of her son. She passed away from cancer at age 68, on July 12, 1981, at her home, Sevenhampton Place. Today the mansion is owned by an auto racing magnate.
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Most of the information for this podcast came from “Ian Fleming,”
by Andrew Lycett:
Also, “Goldeneye: Where Bond Was born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica,” by Matthew Parker.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica
The opening jazz used in both episodes is:
Acid Jazz by Kevin McCleod
The reggae used at the end of episode one is:
Recruitment Reggae by The J. Arthur Keenes Band
Rasputin, the wrong man in the right place.
Grigori Rasputin was born on January 9, 1869, in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoe, one of nine children of Efim and Anna. Even the number of surviving siblings of Rasputin is a matter of dispute. Possibly all of his nine brothers and sisters died only a few days after they were born and the only sister to perhaps survive was born in 1875 and named Feodosiya. That such biographical information is unclear is due to both the disorganization at this level of Russian society and the remote location of Rasputin’s birth and early life. Pokrovskoe was a small town located on the Tura river between the Siberian cities of Tyumen and Tobolsk. Tyumen is 1300 miles east of Moscow, even today an eighteen-hour automobile journey. In the late nineteenth century, this would have been a remote and isolated part of the world.
Few individuals have generated as many legends and falsehoods as Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, the so-called “Mad Monk” of Russia. That Rasputin was neither mad or a monk is typical of much of the characterization of this Siberian peasant who would achieve a position of great influence over the government and court of Nicholas II of Russia, the last Tsar of the Romanov dynasty.
By the spring of 1907, Alexandra decided to introduce Rasputin to Anna Vyrubova, officially a lady-in-waiting at court but also the Tsarina’s closest friend. Anna was another deeply religious woman from an aristocratic family, who married briefly and unhappily and became one of Rasputin’s most devout disciples. Her opinion only strengthened his appeal to the Tsarina who trusted Vyrubova implicitly. This connection further ingratiated Rasputin with other members of the aristocracy, although the staretz was starting to engender feelings of either great enthusiasm or profound disgust, a consistent thread throughout the rest of Rasputin’s life.
By 1911, Stolypin had survived numerous assassination attempts, including a bombing that killed 28 people and almost killed his daughter. As a result, Stolypin moved into the secure confines of the Winter Palace. Pragmatic and politically astute, after a single interview with Rasputin, Stolypin came to the conclusion that the man’s influence over the ruling family was dangerous and should be eliminated. However, historical accounts indicate that he repeatedly brought up the matter with the Tsar, who typically responded by deflecting any confrontation. To his daughter, Stolypin said in the summer of 1911:
“Nothing can be done about it. Every time I had an opportunity to warn the Tsar, I did. And here is what he told me recently: “I agree with you Pyotr Arkadievich, but better ten Rasputins than one of the Empress’s hysterical fits. That’s what the reason was. The empress is ill, seriously ill, she believes that Rasputin is the only person in the whole world who can help the heir and it is beyond human capacity to dissuade her about it.”
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