The guard unlocked the cell door and nodded toward the corridor. Forrest Yeo-Thomas, code name White Rabbit, had been waiting for this moment. He had been betrayed in occupied France, captured by the Gestapo, and shipped to Buchenwald concentration camp. Eight months of abuse had not broken him, and now, during the last days of the war, he led a work detail escape that freed many prisoners with him.
Before the war, Yeo-Thomas had served two years in the Royal Air Force, but he wanted more danger. He requested a transfer to occupied France, where he worked as a liaison between the French government in exile and the resistance. His first two missions went perfectly. The third ended in betrayal and capture.
He attempted escape after escape until the Germans transferred him to Buchenwald. His survival there, and his final escape from a work detail, made him one of the best British spies of the war. Pop culture would later cement his legacy. Author Ian Fleming was said to have based James Bond on him.
Christina Scarbeck, born in Poland in 1915, was a beauty pageant runner-up and the wife of writer and politician Jerzy Giżycki. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and everything changed. The couple fled to London, where Scarbeck began working for British intelligence. She established a courier system from Poland to Hungary, and in 1944, under the assumed name Christine Granville, she took to France.
Her most famous act was in Digne, where she tricked the Gestapo into releasing two captured agents. Her wanted poster hung throughout German headquarters, but she still pulled it off. After the war, despite receiving service medals from France and Britain, she was cut loose by the British government and barred from returning to communist Poland. Her life spiraled.
In 1952, living in a cruise ship hotel, she was killed by a rejected suitor named Dennis Muldowney. Wilhelm Canaris once thought Adolf Hitler was the bee’s knees. He was appointed head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence. Then he got a front-row seat to Hitler’s atrocities and changed his mind.
He began collecting like-minded opponents and participated in several plots to eliminate the Führer, always distancing himself enough to avoid suspicion. In 1944, after another failed plot, Hitler dissolved the Abwehr. This time, Canaris’s luck ran out. Others, tortured for information, gave him up.
He was imprisoned and refused to admit guilt until early April 1945, when his incriminating diaries were discovered. On April 9, 1945, Canaris and his co-conspirators were hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Odette was born in France in 1912 and moved to Britain after marrying an Englishman in 1931. In 1942, based on her wartime photographs, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive.
She was sent to France, but in 1943, the Gestapo arrested her. At Fresnes Prison near Paris, they tortured her through multiple interrogations. She never revealed the whereabouts of other agents. Transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, she faced months of beatings and isolation.
Then she spun a tale. She told her captors that her co-spy, Captain Peter Churchill, was Winston Churchill’s nephew and that she was his wife. SS officer Fritz Sühren, the camp’s commander, bought the story completely. He drove Odette personally to the American lines to surrender, hoping her status would save him.
It did not. Odette testified against Sühren and everyone who made her life hell. She became the first woman to receive the George Cross for conspicuous courage in extreme danger. Haro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen hated the Third Reich.
Both came from upper-class German backgrounds, connections that allowed Haro to secure a position in the Reich Air Ministry in 1934. They began forming a squad of like-minded anti-Nazis. By the 1940s, their opposition had become real espionage, with large amounts of intelligence passing between them, the Soviets, and the US government. The Gestapo called them the Red Orchestra, because they sang to Soviet Russia.
Libertas used her position in the German film industry to document evidence of war crimes and pass it on via radio. But in 1942, one operative broadcast from the same place twice. The Gestapo tracked the signal, decoded messages, and arrested the group. They hunted down members all summer, arresting Haro at the Air Ministry on August 31, 1942.
Three days before Christmas, all captured members were executed. In 1944, the Reich launched Operation Magpie to learn about the Manhattan Project. The plan was to use a submarine to drop spies Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh near Hancock, Maine. After landing in snowy Maine, they made it to New York within two days.
They had 60,000 dollars, enough to rent an apartment in Manhattan. Then greed ruined everything. Colepaugh stole most of the cash and went on a drunken bender that outed both spies. They were arrested by December 30.
Both received death sentences, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt commuted them. Morris Berg was a baseball player and coach from 1923 to 1939, but he was also highly intelligent and multilingual. On a 1934 trip to Japan, he filmed Tokyo and its harbor from a rooftop.
When World War II broke out, he provided that footage to the US Army unit planning the Doolittle Raid. He was then parachuted into Yugoslavia to find a way to deter German progress on atomic weapons. His focus was German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Berg was set to eliminate Heisenberg during a lecture, with a concealed pistol and a cyanide pill.
But after watching the lecture, he determined Heisenberg had not yet developed a weapon, and the assassination was put on hold. After the war, Berg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom but declined it because he could not share the secret of why he deserved it. He spent his remaining decades being coy about whether he was still working on top-secret missions. He died in 1972 and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, which was donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Elyesa Bazna was hired as a valet by the British ambassador to Turkey, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was notorious for bringing home sensitive classified documents. Code-named Cicero, Bazna photographed and sold these documents to Germany throughout 1944. He earned the highest amount ever paid to a spy up to that point. Eventually, the leaks pointed to the Ankara embassy.
Bazna narrowly avoided detection during the war. After the war, he discovered the Germans had paid him in counterfeit money. His new business ventures failed, his lawsuit against the government failed, and he spent the rest of his days as a night watchman. Harold Cole had a roller-coaster career.
He started as a villain, became a hero, and ended as a villain again. A former convict, he enlisted in the British army after his release. In 1940, he was captured during the German invasion of France. He escaped and hid out in Marseilles, where he worked with the French resistance to establish escape lines.
With his help, several individuals escaped occupied France. Then he was captured again, and the Gestapo flipped him into an informer. Fifty captured resistance fighters were executed as a result. After the war, the British and French hunted him down.
He was captured and placed in a NATO prison in Paris, only to escape again in November 1945. French police found him on January 8, 1946, and killed him. He rests in an unmarked pauper’s grave. When you hear the name Ernest Hemingway, you think of great novels.
A Farewell to Arms. For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Old Man and the Sea. He won a Nobel Prize in 1954.
But when he wasn’t at his typewriter, the American literary titan was secretly a spy. And he was terrible at it. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Hemingway lived in the US for most of his 61 years. He had four wives and worked as a war correspondent.
But he was also a world traveler, and that international courting got him involved in clandestine work. The stories about his time spying for the Soviets didn’t come out until nearly 50 years after his death. In 2009, a former KGB officer named Alexander Vassiliev published a book with personal notes from the KGB archives. It was there he found details of Hemingway’s career as a spy.
The Soviets gave Hemingway the code name Argo. It was meant to flatter him, to make him feel like a real secret agent. And it worked. Hemingway was incredibly enthusiastic.
According to Vassiliev’s notes, Hemingway repeatedly expressed his desire to help the Russians. In 1941, he was approached by the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor. The recruiters didn’t have to do much convincing. Hemingway received no money, an arrangement the Soviets called ideological recruitment.
He was a true believer. Hemingway had little interest in politics until the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He got a firsthand look as a journalist and didn’t like what he saw from Francisco Franco and the fascists. He became virulently anti-fascist and appreciated the aid the Soviets sent to the anti-fascist forces in Spain.
That experience laid the groundwork for his recruitment. Their mutual hatred of fascism made them natural partners. Hemingway was first recruited in New York City by an agent named Jacob Golos. Throughout the 1940s, he had clandestine meetings with Soviet agents in exotic locations.
He loved to fish off the coast of Cuba, and Havana became a frequent meeting spot. He also met them in London. A 1941 trip to China likely first attracted the Soviets’ attention. When Hemingway was recruited, he presented the Soviets with a set of stamps and instructed Golos to give them to anyone who would be meeting with him, as a means of authentication.
During the 1940s, the USSR and the Americans were allies. Hemingway likely felt no compunction about working for the Soviets. But as the political situation changed, he realized the arrangement didn’t look good. Hemingway didn’t offer his services to the Soviets exclusively.
When World War II broke out, he approached the US Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. He offered to work as a spy for them too. They accepted. One mission involved using his fishing vessel, Pilar, in the Caribbean.
He concocted a way to use high-explosive charges to defend his boat, figuring his crew could throw grenades into the conning towers of German submarines. He never got the chance to try it. According to his KGB file, Hemingway’s work failed to produce any political information. The file noted that he was never verified in practical work.
Hemingway may have been one of America’s greatest writers, but he was one of the USSR’s worst spies. He was bad at the job, and the Soviets never learned anything from him. After the war, McCarthyism brought a witch hunt for communists. Hemingway became deeply concerned that his work for the Soviets would come to light.
In private letters, he admitted he was scared of being dragged in front of a committee. He never believed he had betrayed his country, but he knew many people had been blacklisted for far less. In his final years, he became convinced the FBI was following him everywhere. He lived in perpetual fear.
On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway used a double-barrel shotgun to take his own life. Years later, records revealed that J. Edgar Hoover had indeed ordered long-term surveillance on him, watching him and tapping his phones. Hemingway was right.
Bob Ross didn’t have naturally curly hair. That famous silhouette wasn’t born from a desire to serve looks. Bob was broke. He figured he could save money on hair maintenance by cutting his own hair once and perming the life out of it.
He hated the look, but he’d inadvertently created a signature style that his corporate overlords insisted on keeping. It was in the logo. You can’t change a logo. Bob was used to strict uniform and hair standards.
He was in the military for 20 years. Before he picked up a paintbrush, he was a sergeant in the US Air Force, stationed at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. As a sergeant, he wasn’t a soft-spoken, gentle man. He was a hard-nosed boss, demanding the cleanest toilets and the most perfectly made beds.
He later said he was the guy who made you scrub the toilet, the guy who made you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late. The job requires you to be a mean, tough person, and I was fed up with it. I promised myself if I ever got away from it, it wasn’t going to be that way anymore. He kept that promise.
After retiring in 1981, he seemingly never raised his voice again. He moved to Florida and studied the wet-on-wet painting technique under Bill Alexander. But their relationship soon got dicey. Alexander hosted The Magic of Painting on PBS.
After Bob’s show, The Joy of Painting, became a smash hit, Alexander said he felt betrayed. He even claimed to have invented wet-on-wet, despite it being attributed to artists as far back as the 15th century, including Claude Monet. The Joy of Painting ran for 31 seasons. For every show, Bob made three copies of his work: the one painted on air, a reference copy, and one for his how-to books.
Bob was a glorified volunteer. PBS didn’t pay him. He used the platform to sell his art supplies and courses. He donated his paintings to PBS stations, who sold them to make money.
Bob never profited personally from his own paintings. He painted an estimated 30,000 pieces before his death at age 52. His art has been priced at various amounts, but previous auctions didn’t sell. With no public record of his sales, it’s impossible to guess how much they’re worth.
The answer is obviously priceless. According to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight, 91% of Ross’s work contained at least one happy tree. Viewers rarely saw evidence of people in his artwork, just the occasional cabin or smoking chimney. Most of his audience didn’t actually paint along.
They just wanted to sit back and relax. Bob was soft-spoken and positive. He received up to 200 fan letters a day, many thanking him for being the calm in their lives. He developed real relationships with frequent letter writers, checking in if they hadn’t written in a while, and sending paintings to fans whose stories touched him.
He also kept animals in his shirt pockets while filming, including Peapod, an epileptic squirrel he bottle-fed on air, and an owl brought by his friend Diana Schaefer, the bird lady. Bob was missing part of his left index finger, lost in a woodworking accident as a kid while operating a saw. He held the paint palette with his left hand, keeping the missing finger out of view. He created a whole persona of being a relaxed, artsy man.
He just wanted people to be happy. He once said he got a letter from somebody who said everything in his world seems to be happy. That’s for sure. That’s why I paint.
I can create the kind of world I want and make it as happy as I want it. If you want bad stuff, watch the news. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known as Lewis Carroll, studied mathematics at Oxford and was a skilled photographer. His book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is about a young girl who falls into a rabbit hole.
The title character was based on a real girl named Alice Liddell. In 1856, Dodgson met Alice and her sisters while they were playing in a garden. He struck up a friendship with the family and took pictures of the girls. On July 4, 1862, he took a boat ride with the girls.
To entertain them, he told a delightful story full of strange characters, making Alice the protagonist. Young Alice enjoyed it so much she asked him to write it down. That request led to one of the most enduring novels ever born. Dodgson befriended many young girls over the course of his life, but none ever took Alice’s place.
After she got married, he wrote to her saying he had had some scores of child friends since her time, but they had been quite a different thing. Having a large number of underage friends is a weird thing to brag about. Dodgson’s fascination with young girls has led biographers to examine his relationships. Most of his photography subjects were girls between 10 and 15, and more than half of his remaining work concentrates on undressed or semi-undressed portraits of girls.
He once wrote, a girl of about 12 is my ideal beauty of form. In the Victorian era, it wasn’t uncommon for children to be depicted without clothes in art. These depictions were interpreted as being about chastity and purity. One of Dodgson’s most famous photographs of Alice was taken when she was six.
She appears as a beggar girl, with ruffled clothes, a serious gaze, and a raised open hand. The image takes on an uncomfortable quality. Dodgson also wrote to a 10-year-old girl who had sent him a lock of hair, saying extra thanks and kisses for the lock of hair. I have kissed it several times for want of having you to kiss.
In his own time, Dodgson’s love of children was openly celebrated. His obituary stated that he was very popular with children. His nephew noted that Dodgson would regularly hug and kiss the children. There is no evidence he ever harmed any of them, but biographer Morton Cohen examined his diaries and determined that Dodgson was left feeling disturbed and had problems sleeping after spending days with Alice.
Cohen believed he dealt with these emotions by writing whimsical stories. Dodgson once mentioned he was afflicted by the inclinations of his sinful heart, managing his impure thoughts by focusing on mathematics. Up until 1863, Dodgson spent time with the Liddells nearly every single day. That year, something happened between them that damaged the relationship.
Scholars don’t know what caused the rift, but a page from his diary around that time was conspicuously removed. Biographer Florence Becker Lennon wrote that Dodgson may have been interested in marrying Alice, who was 11 at the time, or one of her sisters. A proposal may have caused the rift. Dodgson eventually reconciled with the family but never spent time with them again.
As Alice grew up, she got sick of his obsessive attention. He photographed her for the final time when she was 18. In the image, she wears an expression that looks uncomfortable and strained. It’s the look of a person who has just about had her fill of Charles Dodgson.
After her husband died, Alice sold the handwritten manuscript he had given her. She wrote to her son that she was tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, known as Mata Hari, was born in the Netherlands in 1876 to a wealthy family. For the first 13 years of her life, she lived a lavish lifestyle.
Then her family lost all their money, and her mother died. She was sent to boarding school, where the headmaster began flirting with her when she was 15. She was withdrawn from the school. At 18, she answered a newspaper advertisement for a bride in the Dutch East Indies.
The groom was Captain Rudolf MacLeod, a Scottish-born Dutch officer. They married in July 1895. MacLeod turned out to be an alcoholic who kept a concubine and eventually took to physically abusing his wife. Zel left him and began studying local culture, taking up Indonesian dancing.
She told her family she had started using the artistic name Mata Hari. Eventually, MacLeod asked her to return, and she agreed. Their marriage was still unhappy. Both children fell ill, and young Norman died.
Zel and Rudolf insisted the children were poisoned by an angry servant, but it’s more likely they suffered from the effects of syphilis treatments they had contracted from their parents. The family returned to Holland, and Zel and Rudolf separated in 1902. When they divorced, she was granted custody of their surviving daughter, but Rudolf never paid child support. He even placed ads in local papers warning people not to help her.
Zel eventually returned the child to her husband. She believed there was nothing left for her in Holland, so she set her sights on Paris. After her divorce, Zel became a circus performer, starting as a horse rider under the name Lady MacLeod. Then she transitioned to exotic dancing.
She used Europe’s orientalism to her advantage, drawing on skills learned in Indonesia and posing as a Japanese princess. She regularly performed nude or nearly nude, a shocking display of skin in that era. Men across Europe went wild. She also took up a secondary career as a courtesan, serving wealthy, influential men, from millionaire industrialists to military officers.
When World War I broke out in 1914, she was busy crossing borders. She met Captain Vadim Maslov, a Russian pilot, and believed she’d found the love of her life. In 1916, his plane was shot down and he was hospitalized. Desperate to see him, Zel applied to visit him at the front, but the French wanted something in return.
They saw her as a border-hopping celebrity dancer who could make an excellent spy. They hoped she could seduce Crown Prince Wilhelm and extract German secrets. They offered her one million francs. Mata Hari began her spy career for the French.
Her ability to cross borders raised questions. In 1916, she was arrested by British officers and only released when she admitted to being a French agent. Her career as a spy ended in 1917 when French secret police intercepted a German message claiming she was a double agent. She had accepted money to share French secrets with a German officer at the beginning of the war.
Zel didn’t deny the transaction but insisted she shared nothing of value. She was arrested in her Paris hotel room. Authorities had difficulty gathering evidence, so they used her life’s story against her, claiming her constant reinvention was a sign of duplicity. However, a dossier in the French state archives suggests Zel may have been innocent.
Her attempted seduction of the German officer was so clumsy that he spotted her as an amateur spy right away. She had only fed him outdated information and gossip. Some historians conclude she was set up by the Germans and used as a scapegoat by the French government. Zel was convicted and sentenced to death.
On October 15, 1917, she was led out to a firing squad. Offered a blindfold, she refused. Mata Hari blew a farewell kiss to the firing squad. After her execution, none of her family claimed her body, so her remains went to medical research.
Her head was removed and kept in the archives at the Museum of Anatomy in Paris. In 2000, archivists discovered her head was missing. To this day, nobody knows what happened to it. J.
Edgar Hoover is the most famous G-man in American history. In 1917, while other young men went off to combat, Hoover took a draft-exempt job with the Justice Department. He was in charge of his family’s welfare and needed to pay the bills. His lack of military service seemed to haunt him, giving him a zeal for action.
He even led raids and personally interrogated criminals. In 1932, Charles Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped. It was the biggest story of the century. After the ransom was paid, the baby’s body was found.
It took three years to convict Richard Hauptmann. Though the FBI had only cursory involvement, Hoover took as much credit as he possibly could, despite most of the credit belonging to the New Jersey police. In the 1950s, the mafia was at the height of its power, but Hoover actively denied the mafia was real. In 1950, the Kefauver Committee held hearings proving organized crime was very real.
In 1958, low-level FBI agents submitted reports confirming it. Hoover dismissed both as baloney. The prevailing theory is that the mob had dirt on Hoover. Iconic gangster Meyer Lansky once said of Hoover, I fixed that son of a bitch.
Hoover ordered his agents to keep tabs on anyone he considered a threat. Public figures like John F. Kennedy, the Grateful Dead, Liberace, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Jackie Robinson, and even Colonel Sanders. He considered Martin Luther King his enemy.
In 1964, he told reporters that King was the most notorious liar in the country. Today, King has a national holiday. Hoover has a low-rise office building named after him. The FBI was extremely suspicious of Albert Einstein, mistrusting his German heritage.
The bureau compiled an 1,800-page file on him, never finding him guilty of wrongdoing. When Einstein was hired onto the Manhattan Project, the FBI stated they would not recommend employing him without a careful investigation, saying it seemed unlikely a man of his background could become a loyal American citizen. Before Hoover’s tenure, the bureau was happy to induct female agents. But Hoover didn’t allow women to join as agents, insisted they wear skirts or dresses, and didn’t let them smoke at their desks.
Rumors circulated that Hoover liked to dress in drag, but those rumors are just rumors. His biographers can’t agree, and the original source was a known perjurer. Hoover viewed the gay community with suspicion and antagonism, orchestrating the Lavender Scare in which he convinced President Eisenhower to fire all homosexual government employees. But there’s evidence to suggest Hoover might have been gay himself, possibly in a relationship with his closest advisor, Clyde Tolson.
The two were lifelong bachelors who dined together every day, took vacations together, and wore matching suits. At Hoover’s funeral, Tolson collected the folded flag. The FBI’s image was a big deal to Hoover. He worked as a consultant on ABC’s TV series The FBI and demanded final say on the scripts.
He was a master at using media to make adversaries look bad, even congratulating an agent for coordinating a local news program to undermine the black nationalist movement. He served a 48-year career under four Republican and four Democrat presidents, resisting, supporting, or avoiding each administration’s demands. The ideology he believed in most was whatever kept Hoover in power. By the end of his career, he had more than 1,600 files on senators and congressmen locked in his office, containing everything from who was cheating on his wife to who had a gambling problem.
He collected any information that might tighten his grip on Washington and kept it ready for blackmail. Lori Erica Ruff had a relatively normal life. She had a husband, whom she later divorced, and a daughter. On Christmas Eve of 2010, Lori Ruff took her own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
After her death, discoveries came up about her true identity, including the fact that Lori Ruff was not even a real name. Her case has puzzled the internet community for years. Lori Ruff was born Kimberly McLean in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her uncle said she had a normal childhood, a shy child who kept to herself.
The troubles began after her parents divorced. She didn’t adjust well to switching schools and a new stepfather. In 1986, when she was 18, she ran away from home, telling her mother not to look for her. After her suicide, her husband, Blake Ruff, found an 11-page suicide note, described as the ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual.
There was a letter to her daughter, not to be opened until she turned 18, but authorities found nothing. Then Blake found a lock box containing shredded documents revealing that Lori was actually Becky Sue Turner. Blake had known his wife as Lori Kennedy. His confusion only deepened when he learned Becky Sue Turner died in a house fire when she was a child.
The lock box also contained fake IDs with a number of different names. Joseph Velling, an investigator for the Social Security Administration, took the case. He found someone who knew Becky earlier in life and said she got breast implants and worked as an exotic dancer. Medical records supported it.
Velling asked a reporter at the Seattle Times for assistance. The reporter published a report titled, She stole another’s identity and took her secret to the grave. Numerous online sleuths joined the case. A California-based scientist got in touch with Velling with a theory: Lori was actually Kimberly McLean, reported missing in the Philadelphia area.
Velling went to Philadelphia with a hunch and a photograph. He showed the picture to one of Kimberly’s family members, who exclaimed, Oh my god, that’s Kimberly. Kimberly’s mother agreed to a DNA test, which proved the women were related. It took six years for authorities to learn Lori Ruff’s true identity.
The timeline came together. Kimberly McLean was born in 1968. Becky Sue Turner was born in 1969 and died in a house fire in 1971. Kimberly got hold of Becky Sue’s birth certificate in May 1988 and formally assumed the identity in June 1988.
She moved to Texas, legally changed her name to Lori Kennedy, and got a social security card. She graduated with a business administration degree from the University of Texas in 1997. In 2004, she married Blake Ruff and changed her name to Lori Ruff. The couple had a daughter in 2008.
Kimberly, now Lori, took her own life in 2010. No one knows how Kimberly was able to steal the identity of a young, recently deceased girl. One theory is that she used an identity broker, but nothing has been confirmed. Authorities found no evidence she was hiding from an abusive parent, was a fugitive, or was a spy.
As far as they were concerned, she was just another teen runaway. Velling still cannot account for what Kimberly did between 1986 and 1988. It appears she spent time in Idaho, Las Vegas, and California before moving to Texas. One thing is certain: Kimberly McLean did not want to be found.
Her ex-husband and daughter are left with little comfort. Her mother finally learned what happened to her daughter, but also learned that her daughter had taken her own life. The motivation remains unclear. On September 26, 2016, the federal government database formally removed Lori Ruff from the list of missing and unidentified persons.
With her passing, we may never learn the truth about why she stole a child’s identity. Georges Prosper Remi, known as Hergé, was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1907. Growing up, he fell in love with animation and took up drawing. At 12, he joined the Boy Scouts, gaining the nickname Curious Fox.
He landed on his pseudonym, Hergé, from the French pronunciation of his reversed initials. He created a prototype character named Totor, a boy scout. He then rebooted the character for a Catholic newspaper called Le Petit Vingtième, a children’s offshoot of Le Vingtième Siècle. The paper was considered pro-fascist, often publishing anti-Semitic points of view and racist imagery.
Hergé made a choice. He created Tintin, a Belgian boy reporter who solves crimes and has adventures. At the paper, Hergé became close to Norbert Wallez, a Catholic priest who became a mentor, stoking some of his darker impulses. Under Wallez’s influence, Hergé moved further and further to the right.
Tintin became an overnight success. The initial two adventures, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, were filled with offensive and racist imagery, so much so that collections circulating today don’t include them. Hergé would later say no ill intention was behind the drawings. He continued creating strips like Tintin in America, which was well received.
Then he announced his next project would be set in China, which made international news. A Catholic priest living in China encouraged Hergé to research the country. Father Gosset provided an introduction to Zhang Chongren, an art student in Brussels. Zhang would prove to be a lifelong friend and a positive influence.
He taught Hergé three-point perspective, drawing from life, and introduced him to Daoist philosophy and calligraphy. Historians argue this one relationship fundamentally altered Hergé’s worldview. The book they worked on was The Blue Lotus, dealing with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, a highly taboo subject at the time. It was received with overwhelming positive reviews and has since been viewed as Hergé’s first masterpiece.
After Zhang moved back to China, Hergé rested on his laurels. Then Belgium was invaded by the Nazis. Hergé and his wife fled to France. On May 28, 1940, the Belgian king surrendered, and many Belgians supported it.
When the king called refugees home, Hergé returned. He discovered his home was being used by a Nazi officer. Even worse, the Nazis shut down the paper publishing Tintin comics. Hergé needed money to survive and to pay taxes.
He was offered a job at Le Soir, another far-right newspaper. The Nazis, in control of Belgium and eventually France, seized control of Le Soir. The next Tintin adventure was produced entirely under Nazi supervision, and Tintin went up against a rich Jewish American businessman. Hergé would oversee colorized reprints of his previous works.
This period, under Nazi supervision, is often looked back on as the highest point Tintin ever reached. Hergé created Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure, and The Seven Crystal Balls, often referred to as his best work. On September 2, 1944, the Allied forces liberated Brussels and shut down Le Soir. The next day, Hergé was arrested after being named in a document known as the Gallery of Traitors.
All the journalists at Le Soir were fired and legally barred from practicing again. A resistance newspaper made a parody comic called The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Nazis. Over 5,500 people were sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration. Raymond Leblanc, a former resistance member, approached Hergé about a new children’s magazine.
Hergé was interested but barred from working due to his collaborator status. Leblanc convinced the head of the military tribunal to review Hergé’s case. The tribunal decreed that, given the particularly inoffensive character of his drawings, bringing him before a war tribunal would be inappropriate and risky. The leniency did not extend to his co-workers.
Six journalists were sentenced to death, and others received lengthy prison sentences. From there, Hergé moved on, launching Tintin magazine and publishing 24 volumes of Tintin, becoming a globally recognized cartoonist. The Brady Bunch cast won the hearts of America with their wholesome family relationships. But the real life Bradys weren’t so wholesome.
Behind the scenes, the TV family was embroiled in addiction and anguish. Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia, was troubled by the pressure of Hollywood and began abusing drugs to cope with a disturbing family secret. According to her memoir, she was deeply disturbed after discovering her grandmother had perished in a mental institution after contracting syphilis. McCormick wrote, I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous co ends above Hollywood.
I thought I would find answers there when in reality I was simply running farther from myself. From there, I spiraled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life. The addiction affected her career. She lost numerous opportunities, including a potential part in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
She was so out of sorts during that meeting that Steven Spielberg simply gave her an orange. She later admitted she would regularly go for days without sleeping. Nothing else mattered. She also terminated three pregnancies by age 21, which she attributes to her severe addiction.
She developed bulimia to keep the perfect figure her character was known for. Barry Williams, who played Greg, was infatuated with his TV mom, Florence Henderson, who was 20 years his senior. He later wrote that his feelings were nothing more than a harmless crush. The married actress eventually humored the teen and went out to dinner with him.
His older brother drove because Williams was too young to drive. Later in life, Williams started an affair with his on-screen sister while filming in Hawaii. McCormack detailed the relationship. We couldn’t hold back any longer, she wrote.
It was our first kiss. A part of me, a tiny part, admittedly, said to myself, Oh my god, I’m kissing my brother. The younger siblings had a similar dynamic. Christopher Knight, who played Peter, was enamored with Susan Olsen, who played Cindy.
Then Eve Plumb, who played Jan, started blossoming as an adolescent. Olsen joked that Plumb stole Knight away. Knight took Plumb out in his pickup truck with candles, a six-pack, and blankets in the flatbed. They were interrupted by the police.
Mike Lookinland, who played Bobby, developed alcoholism. The problem for me was I lived my childhood in my 20s, he said. You should really try to live your childhood when you’re a child, because if you do it when you’re 26, it can be dangerous. He sobered up when he realized he was on the brink of death.
When the choice became clear between living or dying, it became a simple choice. Barry Williams had been smoking since he was 12. He definitely dabbled in marijuana, and he went to set high once. It was disruptive enough that the episode had to be rewritten to reduce his participation.
If you look close enough at the footage, you can see him holding in stoned laughter. Susan Olsen never used drugs during the show but admitted she became something of a dealer later in life, growing marijuana with her husband. She said it was her husband’s idea and that she’d always been into gardening. Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady, remained in the closet for most of his life and struggled with his identity as a gay man.
According to Susan Olsen, hiding part of himself was detrimental to his health. She wrote, Because it was so taboo, he could never make peace with himself. He never allowed himself to have a genuine love. Had he been allowed to form a relationship with another man, he would have been the best husband ever and still might be alive.
Reed, who was HIV positive, succumbed to cancer in 1992 at age 59. And there was a dark Hollywood rumor that turned out to be true: one of the Brady Bunch cast members was killed and replaced with a double. It was Tiger, the family dog. The real Tiger got hit by a car in the middle of filming the first season.
The grieving trainer picked up a lookalike from a pound. The ruse didn’t work for long. The untrained rescue wouldn’t follow directions, and producers eventually nailed his collar to the ground to keep him in place during shots. They finally ditched Tiger unless he was essential to the plot.
Tiger’s dog house appears in almost every episode, but Tiger himself only appears in a few.
