Fawcett was quite a guy – though some elements of his autobiographical accounts of his South American explorations, cause me to doubt whether he was 100% sane / truthful. He certainly seemed, for a long while, to have a charmed life. In 1914, when deep in the Amazonian forests – learning of the outbreak of World War I, he immediately headed for home to “do his bit”. Per his memoirs: rather sweetly, a German settler in the South American back of beyond, lent him money to fund his return to Britain, “although officially we were enemies” (I have no doubt that he was punctilious about repaying the guy, as soon as he got back home). He then fought – with great ferocity, I gather – all through World War I, coming out of it more or less unscathed. His luck ran out in, I think, 1925: on a lost-city quest in the interior of Brazil, from which he never returned – his fate uncertain.
Yup, you took mine. No one would believe that person really lived.
Simo Hayha, is another good candidate.
Juan Pujol. If you were to invent his life, no one could possibly believe it.
A Catalan Spaniard who served on both sides in the Civil War without ever firing a weapon, the experience left him with a deep loathing of both Fascists and Communists. When Hitler rose to power, he knew he had to do something for the good of the world and tried to volunteer as a spy. He approached both the Americans and the British, and both blew him off. So he invented a persona as a fanatic pro-Nazi and approached the Germans. They hired him, gave him a crash course in spycraft, a bottle of invisible ink and a pile of cash and told him to go to England and recruit spies.
Instead, he went to the library and invented fictional spies, and creating troop and ship movements out of whole cloth. Finally the British noticed him and hired him, and he spent the war in Britain eventually creating a network of 27 fake spies, all of whom were getting paid by the Nazis, generating reams of reports consisting of a mix of fake information, real information of little military value, and vital information delayed enough to not pose a threat.
And he wound up getting an OBE from King George and the Iron Cross 2nd Class from Hitler.
This has to be made into a movie!
What I was going to post. And the documentary movie is also well done, I don’t know how they filmed some of those scenes. The next time you think you’re having a bad day, give it a whirl.
Roald Dahl led a life nobody could make up, including literally falling into becoming a writer when C.S. Forrester sold his “notes” on being a fighter pilot to Saturday Evening Post without changing a thing.
While this doesn’t compare to most of the previous posts, Diane Fossey’s life would have made a decent made for TV (Lifetime) movie.
Or maybe a one nominated for 5 Oscars.
And it’s spelled “Dian”.
Banker A.P. Gianinni, who financed Disney’s Snow White when nobody else would and was a great help to the citizens of the Bay Area after the 1906 quake.
I don’t know if it’s true but I read once that the only things in his autobiography that anyone could prove happened was him stealing rides on airlines and forging checks.
But only if they could get someone really good to play her.
If we look at specific fiction tales that had an even better or more interesting reality, I remember that on an old “making of” documentary on the movie “The Deep”, a 1977 adventure film based on Peter Benchley’s novel, it was mentioned that the movie deals with treasure hunters that look for a shipwreck that had a cargo of drugs; that was over another shipwreck from the era of exploration which had a treasure in gold.
Benchley* thought that it would had been too much to write over yet another earlier shipwreck that was under those 2. No one would had believed him. Despite knowing about the real life case that inspired his book where 3 ships had sunk on top of each other. On different centuries of course, but still…
- Yes, that is the same guy that gave us “Jaws”
Specifically, his notes not just on being a fighter pilot, but on being badly burned nearly to death in a fiery crash when his plane was shot down. Which he somehow makes hilarious.
Ann Rule once mentioned that she was thinking about writing a book about the Staynor brothers–Steven who was abducted by a pedophile and held for years, and Cory who was a serial killer.
That would not make a good novel.
Band of Brothers totally.
True story involving Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm…
According to Cary’s lawyer, making a Hail Mary bid for mitigation to keep his client from being executed, The two events were slightly related. Cary had problems with ADHD, and later bipolar disorder as a teen, that most other parents would have been all over, but the Staynors were obsessed with Steven’s kidnapping, spending all their spare time doing things like putting up posters, and expecting their other children to do the same, and then later Steven’s return and attempt at re-assimilation, and his kidnapper-rapist’s trial, that Cary’s problems got nothing, and so his problems ballooned into psychopathy-- something which didn’t have to happen.
I’m not saying I believe this theory one way or another, just that Cary’s lawyer did try to pull it out of a hat. I think Cary got the death penalty anyway.
And Steven died in a motorcycle accident in his early 20s.
Oh, and it’s not “better” than fiction, but definitely stranger (and sadder) is the story of David Reimer. He was one of two twin boys who developed infections of the foreskin around the age of 18 months, and their pediatrician recommended circumcision. The urologist used an electro-cautery device on one of the boys that was designed for adults, instead of using an infant circumcision technique, and ended up burning the child’s penis away.
In a gonzo whopper of an over-reaction, the parents (who can’t really be blamed-- they sought experts’ advice and followed it-- it’s the “experts” you need to question) had the boy reassigned surgically as a girl with a vaginoplasty when “she” was two, hormone pills beginning when she was 12, and a massive campaign to socialize “her” as a girl, which really screwed with “her” head. “She” had a miserable and depressed childhood, failed a grade in school (and “her” brother didn’t, and they were identical twins). “She” learned the truth at age 14, and decided to live as a boy, taking male hormone pills instead. He had some other kind of surgery, although I don’t know whether it was a phalloplasty, or just a reversal of the vaginoplasty. He got married, and things finally seemed to be going his way, just a little. He adopted his step-children.
But his marriage fell apart, and his depression returned. He committed suicide sometime in his 30s.
And if that on its own weren’t tragic enough, his identical twin brother became schizophrenic, and IIRC, also died a suicide.