Dark secrets of kids authors AVOURITES HAD VERY ADULT PRIVATE LIVES
ROALD DAHL: He was a British spy during World War Two, who worked with James Bond author Ian Fleming.
A plane crash fractured Dahl’s skull and unleashed the part of the brain that controls inhibition. The accident was said to have unlocked outlandish characters such as the BFG and Willy Wonka.
He was touchy about being a children’s author and secretly wrote adult novels about wacky things such as men turning into oversized willies.
Dahl was also known to be a ladies’ man, with a string of affairs to his name – even when his Oscar-winning first wife, actress
Patricia Neal, was recovering from a stroke.
In 1983, he caused outcry for his comments on the Holocaust, saying:
“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason.”
ENID BLYTON: Her books were full of lashings of ginger beer and outdoor play but the Famous Five writer had a fierce temper, insisted on playing tennis naked, was known to be a bully and cheated on her husband.
It’s said Blyton made her two children compete to be her favourite and banned them from seeing their father after the couple split.
The Noddy creator’s daughter Imogen said she had “not a trace of maternal instinct”.
KENNETH
GRAHAME: The Wind In The Willows author had a weird relationship with wife Elspeth. They would compete over who could be the most seductive, using baby talk, but he had a twisted view of sex and he refused to do the deed after becoming a
dad. Acting immature was part of their relationship, as was control, with Elspeth banning him from changing his pants for a year. If that wasn’t enough to kick up a stink, they put pressure on their child Alastair to live up to their insistence he was a genius.
The son preferred to be known as Robinson, after George Robinson, a man who had pulled a gun on Grahame when he worked at the Bank of England. Aged 19, Alastair took his own life. His parents then loathed each other to the end of their days and lived as hermits.
THEODOR GEISEL: Penning favoursuch as The Cat In The Hat under the pseudonym Dr Seuss, Theodor’s life was as much a page-tuner as any of his books. The works themselves had dark undercurrents – Horton Hears A Who! was actually a veiled commentary on the postwar US occupation of Japan.
As his wife Helen lay paralysed and dying of cancer, the creator of the Grinch, played on screen by Jim Carrey, started an affair with a woman half his age called Audrey Diamond, herself married with two kids. When Helen found out, she took her own life.
A year after Helen’s death, Audrey bed. came the second Mrs Geisel but then sent her children to live with relatives because Geisel (whose middle name was Seuss) didn’t like being around kids – despite them making his fortune.
JM BARRIE: Like his character Peter Pan, this author really liked children – so much so he faked his best friend Sylvia’s will to become guardian of her kids when she died.
Taking a shine to the mother of five, he moved in with them and appeared to be an uncle-type figure. But when Sylvia passed, her handwritten will saying the kids should go to the care of Jenny, the sister of their nanny, is said to have been changed to Jimmy by the author.
Two of the children took their own lives and one suffered a nervous breakdown.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN:
The creator of the Little Mermaid, inset left, was fond of prostitutes and kept a no-holds-barred diary account of his regular self-love moments.
He would sneak off when attractive female friends came to visit him to pleasure himself and rate each session in his notebook with plus signs.