Diana Nyad spoke with film producer Teddy Schwarzman last Thursday at his sister Zibby’s bookstore. Teddy founded and now presides over Black Bear Pictures, one of the production companies involved with NYAD. Teddy’s sister opened her bookshop a year ago in a high-end Santa Monica shopping district.
(Teddy and Zibby’s father, financier Stephen Schwarzman, is the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group. As of February 27, 2024, he’s worth 37.9 billion USD, up about 400 million since Diana spoke with his son.)
Here are a few of the absurdities and lies Diana served at Zibby’s bookshop last week.
Nine? Nein
Nyad didn’t start swimming competitively until after Olympian Jack Nelson began coaching at Fort Lauderdale’s Pine Crest Preparatory School. That happened in the fall of 1961. Diana had already turned 12.
And I was a little swimmer. I was a competent little nine-year-old pool swimmer. And I stood on the beach with my mother one day at nine.
. . . But honestly, [Cuba’s] so close. It’s that close that you, you little champion swimmer, you could almost swim there.
. . . But the truth is it went all the way back to age nine. (4:13)
But there was something in me who wanted to go back. That dream [of swimming from Cuba to Florida] was unfinished. And it had started at age nine. (55:15)
More telling than the I-Was-Nine lie is Nyad’s Mom-On-The-Beach fabrication. Diana didn’t start previewing that story until about 2014. Before that, Diana’s mother had nothing to do with discovering the Cuba swim; Diana found it on a map. Going further back, she just wanted to do a 100-mile crossing anywhere. She had a long swim planned for the Aegean Sea in 1980.
Most likely, Nyad got the idea from Walter Poenisch. He began planning a Cuba-Florida crossing by 1967. See “Discovering Cuba” for details of Nyad’s various I-Discovered-Cuba stories.
Nyad Feigns Humility While Proclaiming Her Greatness
And then, in my 20s, I became one of the best open-water swimmers in the world. I held the records for around Manhattan Island, Capri-to-Napoli in Italy, across Lake Ontario.
And there were other great swimmers as well. But in my mind, all those swimmers were . . . [Nyad corrects herself] swims were in this category. [She motions with both hands to her right.] If you tell me you’ve swum the English Channel, I have respect for you. But all those swims are over here. And Cuba [motions with both hands to her left], nobody had ever made it. (5:19)
Nyad conveniently omits her three failed English Channel attempts — she went to England in 1976 intending to become the first woman to complete an English Channel two-way crossing. She tried three times and didn’t get across once.
The great Canadian marathon swimmer Cynthia Nicholas completed the two-way in 1977, shattering the men’s record by almost 10 hours.
Nyad never mentions Nicholas. Until recently, she never mentioned any swimmer by name (except Diana Nyad) unless she intended to denigrate them.
But within the last few years, she has taken to naming and implicitly equating herself with an athlete who has completed swims she (Diana) wouldn’t dream of attempting:
For those of us like Sarah Thomas, who’s done the English Channel four times consecutively, 54 hours in the English Channel — so there are three of us who do the long, long swims. (15:27)
Nyad doesn’t name the third. Lucky for her, she has at least six people to choose from, all of whom have completed swims lasting 50 hours or longer: Vicki Keith (Canada), Veljko Rogošić (Croatia), V.S. Kumar Anandan (Sri Lanka), Neil Agius (Malta), Caroline Block (USA), and Steve Stievenart (France).
For details, see “Swims Over 50 Hours.”
A Mary Oliver Twist
Nyad frequently mentions advice she ostensibly received from the actor Christopher Reeve:
And then Christopher Reeve — he had fallen from his horse and now he was a quadraplegic — and Chris was very big on regrets. “You have no idea what banana peel you might slip on tomorrow. Don’t wait! Chase your dreams right now.” So I was kind of filled with all that. [I] read the Mary Oliver poem.
. . . I’m going out and make that swim the goal of my one wild and precious life. (8:42)
Nyad often talks about “the Mary Oliver poem.” But until she spoke at Zibby’s, she had always given its title: “The Summer Day.” And she always clearly stated that the phrase “one wild and precious life” comes from that poem. (See this 2016 speech for an example of Nyad going all out exploiting the poem.)
On Thursday, she did neither of those things.
Why the sudden coyness? Perhaps because Nyad was trying to use the poem and not use it at the same time. In an exhaustively researched article, writer Caitlin Cowan posited in January that the filmmakers didn’t have permission to use Oliver’s intellectual property.
In a recent follow-up article, Oliver’s literary executor tells Cowan that she was right. The filmmakers did not have permission to use any of Oliver’s work. See Cowan’s “Update: Yes, Netflix Steamrolled Mary Oliver’s Estate, and Here’s the Proof.”
Only The Best People: Claudio Miranda Did NOT Work On Avatar
Nyad talks about how those involved in the movie are all “world-class people,” including its Director of Photography (DP):
And then, you know, the cinematographer is Claudio Miranda, I don’t know if you ever saw the Life of Pi, you know, with the tiger in the ocean. That’s his visual vision. He’s the director of photography. Did I say “cinematographer”? I meant director of photography. And you know, he did the Avatar movies. (30:15)
Claudio Miranda wasn’t involved with any Avatar film. Mauro Fiore was Avatar’s DP. Russell Carpenter worked as DP on Avatar: The Way of Water and the upcoming Avatar 3.
Nyad has repeated the same misinformation at least two other times:
• clip 1 (Book Passage, 16 Dec 2023)
• clip 2 (Book Passage, 3 Feb 2024)
Someone ought to let her know.
The Two Aspects Of NYAD That Diana Doesn’t Like
- Diana thinks of herself as “a visionary,” but the filmmakers didn’t depict her that way. She forgives them.
I was something — if I can use the terms — of a visionary. I had this vision. And I brought, then with Bonnie too, this team together, the John Bartletts. And this was 40 people who were believers. They, they, they, they drank the Kool-Aid of my words and my emotions.
And Bonnie and I commandeered this together. And in some ways, I understand because a movie has to be just a slice of life. It’s not a huge, wide, sweeping documentary. So I have to forgive that right away and be at peace with that. (31:59)
Diana’s “Kool-Aid” comment reinforces something she said about her crew earlier this month:
We just had our 10 year anniversary, our team in Key West and we are just we’re thick as thieves together, we would do anything for each other. (Book Passage, 3 Feb 2024 / clip)
Someday, someone will make that vast, epic documentary and show how Diana Nyad convinced not only her crew but millions of others that she was not a compulsive liar, pathological narcissist, and brilliant con artist.
- Diana says she’s “charismatic,” not an asshole. The filmmakers depicted her as the latter.
On the other hand, the one aspect that just always rankled me was that the Annette character [Diana Nyad — Ed.] was portrayed by the writer, and then the executive producers, and the directors decided that this is what they wanted, to make her (me) quite the dimension of unapologetic, relentless, “I’m going to do this, I don’t care, nothing’s gonna get in my way.”
And all of that’s powerful. The audience who sees this in the film, they wind up — all of them around the world — walking out or in their homes, writing us to say, “I want to be more like that character.” They admire that character.
But for me, I’m a bit more, shall we say, charismatic, that character. So, I — to be truthful — I had trouble with that. (32:37)
According to Schwartzman, Nyad complained about this “every step of the way” (37:38).
We Can’t Touch Her
An audience member asked about the swim’s rules (44:12). Bonnie explained that Diana “can’t touch the boat. And we can’t touch her.”
The filmmakers reinforce the lie that no one touched Nyad. During the crossing, Bonnie jumps into the water to encourage Diana:
Diana: Don’t touch me. You can’t touch me.
Bonnie: No, no, no. I’m not gonna touch you. (about 1:44)
And when Diana complains about putting on the jellyfish suit by herself — something she didn’t do during the actual crossing — Bonnie says, “Yeah, well, we can’t help you. It’s regulation — you gotta put it on yourself” (about 1:04).
Don’t despair, though, because Nyad did follow one rule during the actual crossing:
You’re not allowed headphones because headphones take away from the discipline that your mind has to have to get through those hours. So that’s against the rules of the sport. (57:34)
Janis Joplin: No Headphones Needed
If Diana has said this once, she’s said it 1000 times:
I can take a song like Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” and I would sing it 1000 times — the whole song from the first note to the last — and it would take me 9 hours and 45 minutes. (56:50)
Diana has also said that singing “Me and Bobby McGee 2000 times . . . will take me 8 hours and 45 minutes. Exactly.”
Go figure.
Speaking of songs, I hope the following tale is true. But Diana told it, so the odds aren’t good.
She asked renowned mountaineer Ed Viesturs what he sings while climbing mountains. He answered,
“I only have one song,” and I [Nyad] was picturing he’s up at the top of the world. He must be singing John Lennon’s Imagine. He said, “No. I sing, ‘Oh, the bear went over the mountain.’”
According to Nyad, Viesturs has “climbed Everest more than any human being the pure way: without bottled oxygen.” In fact, that record belongs to Ang Rita Sherpa, who summited Everest 10 times without supplemental oxygen.
Viesturs made it to the top seven times. However, he used supplemental oxygen on at least two of those outings.
The Final Score
7
Nyad says “honestly” six times and has her mother say it a seventh.
6
Nyad says “the truth is” or “the truth for us” five times and “to be truthful” once.
2
Nyad twice assures her audience that her swim had nothing to do with ego:
“You know, it’s not an ego thing. It’s an actual, “We prepared for it, we trained for it, and we are capable of actually swimming that whole beautiful distance”(17:23).
“Honestly, Honestly, stumbling up onto that shore was not a big magnificent ego moment. Like we did it, we finally did it” (19:11). (See also post-swim teleconference clip: “If you finally ever do it.”)
But Nyad finally allows that maybe, just maybe, there might be a smidge of ego involved:
There is some, you know, I don’t know what you’d call it, but there’s some admiration level to it. (21:09)
Diana’s on the right track. I’d go with an exceptionally high level of desperation for admiration.