On August 5, 1922, about 300 guests arrived at the Southampton summer home of George Warrington Curtis — an heir to the Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup patent medicine fortune — for what The New York Herald called a “fete Champetre,” a “party in the fields.”
Curtis had asked guests to arrive at his 100-acre Captains Neck Lane estate before ten p.m. Driving onto the grounds after that would be too dangerous; all lights would be on the night’s entertainment: The Marion Morgan Dancers.
By the early 1920s, the interpretive dance company Morgan founded in 1915 was well-known throughout the U.S. for its vaudeville programs. Wealthy people like Curtis occasionally hired the troupe to entertain.
That night, Morgan’s dancers performed an “Egyptian dance,” a “Persian bow dance,” a “Russian war dance,” an “impressionistic faun dance,” and more. After the show, Curtis’s guests did their own dancing in the estate’s music room, then dined at tables placed around the pool.
Curtis likely met Jeanette Glass, a member of Morgan’s company, that evening or at the rehearsal the night before. Two years later, Curtis and Glass married at the estate.
She was 30, and he was 55. But Diana Nyad — Jeanette and George’s granddaughter — tells a different story. In her 2015 “memoir” Find a Way. she writes that the day they wed, Jeanette was a 21-year-old “gold digger and show dancer,” and George was a 71-year-old “wealthy, erudite man of society.”
Diana’s grandmother was never a “show dancer” in the pejorative way Nyad meant it, and her grandfather was never 71.
I put “memoir” in quotes because the term suggests an honest account constructed from memories, not a disingenuous one built from lies. Nyad fabricates so much of Find a Way that calling her book a memoir is like calling a goose an airplane: Both have roughly the same shape and both can fly, but no one would try riding a goose from Los Angeles to New York.
Here are a few more fabrications from Find a Way:
- “I was the first woman to swim around Manhattan” (p. 66). Nyad was the 7th.
- She tells a detailed story about a Holocaust survivor forced into sexual slavery at Dachau Concentration Camp (pp. 134-136). A former director of the camp’s memorial site called Nyad’s story entirely fictional.
- Diana describes a counting pattern she claims got her through the nights of her crossing (p. 183). However, if she followed her own instructions, she’d have to count nonstop for over five days.
- She tells a story about Jeanette living in Manhattan in 1941 and refusing to open her door to Lucy (p. 38). However, Jeanette lived in Los Angeles in 1941. She moved to California when she married Arthur Cernitz in 1933 and lived there until her death 40 years later.
. . .
Next month, 100 authors will gather about 15 miles northeast of Captains Neck Lane for the East Hampton Library’s 20th Annual Authors Night, “one of the most popular and celebrity-studded events of the Hamptons’ summer calendar.”
The Purist, a glossy, celeb-infused East Hampton magazine, published an interview with Nyad late last month. “While we do our best to check specific facts,” writes The Purist’s Founding Editor Cristina Cuomo, “we are aware that what is a true fact or not is itself a matter of opinion.”
Diana Nyad couldn’t have prefaced her interview any better.
Nyad spoke with Ray Rogers, The Purist’s executive editor, who asked her about Authors Night and her life post-biopic. Nyad’s family connections don’t come up. Below are some things that do:
An Inadvertent Truth
ROGERS: Has your life changed at all since the movie came out?
NYAD: No, I think I’m too grounded. My values have been set.
For at least half a century, those values have included fraud, deception, and wild self-adoration.
Diana should be grateful that the filmmakers ignored the first two, but it still annoys her that they spotlighted the third. However, she won’t admit her annoyance because she wants to pretend she doesn’t hold grudges:
I can let go of any little hurt feelings I had that I wasn’t as likable and friendly as I really am. And that . . . . I wasn’t the kind of a visionary who poured the Kool-Aid that [my team] all drank. I was that person in real life.
Yet she keeps complaining about it — and bringing the same refreshments. In an appearance earlier this year, she again grumbled that the filmmakers don’t depict her as a cult leader:
I was something — if I can use the terms — of a visionary. I had this vision. . . . And this was 40 people who were believers. They drank the Kool-Aid of my words and my emotions. (clip)
Someone ought to tell Diana about Jim Jones. Friends don’t let friends imply they share values with a mass murderer.
Nyad Time
In a small area of Los Angeles surrounded entirely by the Pacific Time Zone, Diana Nyad has a separate time zone all to herself. Clock resettings happen frequently in the Nyad Time Zone. These resetting may appear arbitrary, but they’re not; they always benefit Diana.
For instance, on March 4, 2021, she and the Hollywood trade magazines announced that Annette Bening would star in Nyad. Ten months later, they announced that Jodie Foster would play Bonnie Stoll. But ten months can kill a story’s momentum. The wait also suggests that Foster may have balked at playing Robin to a pathologically narcissistic Batman. So, Diana, who once said she always tells the “absolute truth” in interviews, declares a time change:
Once Annette Bening signed [onto my biopic], Jodie Foster signed 24 hours later.
Nyad made a similar reset in 2010. Her effort to get government permission for a Cuba-Florida attempt had stalled, so a well-connected friend contacted then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to Nyad’s 2014 memoir, Find a Way, once Clinton intervened, “the license comes through within twenty-four hours” (pp. 151-152). Emails that Wikileaks published in 2016 show it took over three weeks.
Nyad gives Rogers another example of Nyadian math, this time about songs she sings during long swims. “I’d measure them out,” she tells Rogers,
so I know how long Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” the entire song is, note for note, I know how long it takes, and I know how long it’s going to take if I sing it a thousand times in a row.
But she doesn’t. We know because she used to specify “how long it takes.” She has said that singing “Me and Bobby McGee” 1000 times takes her, “to the second, nine hours and 45 minutes.”
She has also said that singing it 1000 times takes her “11 hours and 7 minutes. Exactly.”
And she has said that singing it 2000 times takes “8 hours and 45 minutes. Exactly.” If that were true, she’d have to sing one “Me and Bobby McGee” every 16 seconds.
If she sang the 4-minute, 9-second single version 1000 times, she’d need almost three days. (The album version would take longer.)
The table below summarizes Diana Nyad’s “Me and Bobby McGee” rubbish:
| reps | Nyad time | actual time | |
| 1000 | 9:45 | 11:07 | 69:10 / 2 days, 21 hours |
| 2000 | 8:45 | 138:20 / 5 days, 18 hours | |
(H/T JA and KH for help with the musical numbers. All errors are mine.)
Known As The Best
Rogers asks Diana what she wants as her legacy. She gives two answers, though the first isn’t a desire but a foregone conclusion: “There’s no doubt,” she says, “that I will be known as one of the better and tougher endurance athletes of our time.”
True — she’ll be known as that because so many people accept her lies. But she was never “one of the better endurance athletes” of any time.
In 2019, she suggested a way to measure her claim:
I became, in the 1970s, the best ocean swimmer in the world. I held all the major records on planet Earth, out in the open sea. (Wilshire Ebell — audio clip)
Nyad never completed any of the major solo ocean swims on the planet, much less set records in them. She attempted the major ocean swim — the English Channel — three times and failed each time.
For legacy number two, Nyad tells Rodgers, “I’d like to be known as one of the better storytellers of our time.” However, I suspect she wanted to tell Rogers, “I am one of the better storytellers of our time.” She once said she wanted her epitaph to read, “She was a master storyteller.” But that was before the biopic. Saying it now would support the film’s depiction of her as a self-absorbed jerk.
So, she talks a circle around the message and hopes we’ll spot it in the center. She begins by taking Rogers back into ancient pre-history. Cave dwellers, she says, were able to identify the greatest singer, the greatest athlete, the greatest painter, and, of course, the greatest storyteller:
Very quickly you know who the best storyteller is. All my life I’ve been asked to speak at friends’ funerals and weddings and birthdays because I can tell a story.
And there’s Nyad’s tacit message as if she wrote it on a Post-It and stuck it onto the space between “is.” and “All.”
As proof that her storytelling greatness was preordained, she tells her vomiting valedictorian story.
It’s the end of the 1960-61 school year at Pine Crest Prep in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Eleven-year-old Diana is attending her sixth-grade graduation ceremony.
But there’s a problem, and only Diana can fix it. She’s sitting in the audience with her mom when the principal approaches. He bends down next to Diana. “Jimmy Woodruff is vomiting violently in the bathroom,” he tells her. “He can’t do it. He’s our class speaker. He can’t get off his knees. He’s retching.”
The principal asks Diana to take Jimmy’s place. She doesn’t hesitate, asking only how long he needs — “five minutes, seven minutes?”
The rest is Pine Crest history, at least as Diana tells it. She saves the day with an impromptu speech about how, “if you look at all our grandparents’ ages combined,” she and her classmates have maybe 70 or 80 years to “do better than we’ve done at age 11.”
Like all of Nyad’s stories, this one changes from version to version. For example:
- She tells Rodgers that she doesn’t remember the event but is repeating a story from her mom. In other versions, she has no trouble remembering, right down to the “little patent leather shoes” she wore.
- In some versions, she says that as of 1961, she knew all her grandparents had lived into their 80s. If that were so, three of them would still have been alive, so she couldn’t have known how long they lived.
- In another, she says she knew in ’61 that G. W. Curtis “lived to be 79,” Jeannette was still living, and so were her father’s parents. The only thing true in that version is that her grandmother was still alive. Of all Nyad’s grandparents, only Jeanette made it beyond 62.
- Nyad tells a suspiciously similar story about a fifth-grade essay, though she once placed it in third. In another version, it’s a fifth-grade essay assigned by her favorite teacher,
Mrs. Farr, F-A-R-R, she sent me an essay I had written. It wasn’t so special. She kept every essay of every kid she ever had, teaching second grade over 50 years. [my emphasis]
All of that suggests the events in Nyad’s graduation story happened nowhere but in her imagination — except the bit about Mrs. Josephine Farr, who did indeed teach second grade at Pine Crest. (But not for 50 years. She died 25 years after she started at Pine Crest.)
I’ve tried to confirm the valedictorian story with a source close to James “Jimmy” Woodruff. However, they have yet to respond to my last email. I suspect that Mr. Woodruff would feel uncomfortable publicly embarrassing a former classmate.
. . .
Great storytellers have repertoires of tales that aren’t just about themselves. Diana Nyad only tells stories about Diana Nyad — even when they’re not.
On the rare occasions she mentions other swimmers, she does it to glorify herself.
In a 2017 interview, Nyad mentions Australian marathon swimmers Penny Palfrey and Chloë McCardel. Their accomplishments dwarf Nyad’s, so she has to undermine them. First, though, she builds them up, calling them “the two greatest distance swimmers on the planet today, along with me.” Then she attacks. After saying “never to denigrate any of the great swimmers,” she denigrates them for only attempting the Cuba–Florida crossing once and not returning like she did again and again and again and again.
But Palfrey and McCardel had good reason for not coming back. They realized the crossing was likely impossible if they followed marathon swimming rules. Neither wanted to do whatever Nyad did to make it look like she completed a legitimate swim.
Another example of how Nyad treats other swimmers: A month after her crossing, she finally apologized to Walter Poenisch. In The Wall Street Journal. “I wish I could look up to the sky,” she said, “and tell Walter that I am profusely sorry.”
She was 35 years late. Her slander in 1978 destroyed Poenisch’s swimming career. “Whatever he did,” she told the Wall St. Journal, “he was an incredible swimmer.” (See “Damning with faint praise.”)
By the time Nyad apologized, Poenisch had been dead for 13 years. Her apology had nothing to do with him and everything to do with showing the public that she wasn’t entirely heartless.
Her charisma and confidence have fooled millions into believing she’s legitimate, honorable, and even compassionate. But that makes her an effective con artist and brilliant liar, not a skillful storyteller.
“His words, not mine”
Years ago when there was no Netflix yet . . . I chose an executive producer named Andrew Lazar, in part because he was in love with my story and admiring of me as an “epic personality.” I’m using his words, not mine. And he’s in love with the ocean as well. He’s a big-time big-wave surfer.
Netflix, Inc., shipped its first DVD in 1998, long before Nyad began contemplating a second Cuba–Florida attempt. No producer would have considered a Nyad biopic before her 2013 “success.”
Maybe she meant the Netflix streaming service. But that started in 2007, so still too early. The first time I find Nyad publicly mention Lazar is in a 2021 Facebook Live chat.
As for Lazar being “a big-time big-wave surfer,” I find no evidence one way or the other. Without corroboration, I have to assume Nyad’s lying.
(To be fair, I doubted until recently that Nyad “chose” Lazar to produce the film. But a friend pointed me to a video where Lazar probably confirms Nyad’s story. Unfortunately, the clip truncates the word before “chose me to produce it.” H/T AS.)
. . .
Since I’ve been a teenager I’ve been reading Cosmos. Carl Sagan is a god to me.
Nyad often mentions Sagan. Since he is a personal deity for her, I wonder if she’s read any of his other books. Even if she hasn’t, I’m sure she knows his most-quoted aphorism:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (Broca’s Brain, p. 75)
But she might have missed this one:
Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. (The Demon-Haunted World, p. 230)
In other words, you can’t undrink the Kool-Aid.
Not-So-Ancient History
Why does one more catalog of Nyad’s lies matter? It matters because the Nyad biopic prompted Diana and her surrogates to suggest that she is that rarity, the compulsive liar who stopped lying.
Nyad said it first almost half a century ago:
It’s true I used to lie. . . . Only to impress myself. I would tell a cab driver a lie — anybody. I don’t have to do that anymore.
— Diana Nyad, The Village Voice, 1976
She and her current supporters have been cagier:
It makes me really sad that we are scrutinizing things that happened [read “lies Nyad told”] 30 years ago.
— Nyad co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Los Angeles Times, 2023She said some untrue things 40 years ago.
— Evan Morrison, Marathon Swimmers Federation co-founder, Facebook, 2023 (archived)To me, it’s ancient history.
— Diana Nyad, Los Angeles Times, 2023
That works if we define “ancient history” as “things that happened a month ago or more.” Otherwise, Diana Nyad’s serial lying never stopped. And I’ll bet you my unmarked copy of her first memoir, Other Shores, that her next interview, speech, article, or book will prove that, in the Dianaverse, the present is always ancient history.
NoteS
I borrowed parts of this post from other Diana Nyad Fact Check pages:
- “Dance, Jenny, Dance: The Truth About Diana Nyad’s Maternal Grandparents”
- “The Nyad Apologists Who Say She Hasn’t Lied For Years . . .”
- “Unreliable Natator: Omissions, Exaggerations, and Lies in Diana Nyad’s Find a Way“
- “The Vomiting Valedictorian And Other Tales . . .”
- “Walter Poenisch”
See also:
- “Articles about Marion Morgan, Dorothy Arzner, Jeannette Glass, and George Warrington Curtis”
- “’Through That Cold Closed Door’”: Debunking Another of Diana Nyad’s Bad Granny Tales” — Includes biographical information about Jeannette’s mother, who called herself a “divine healer.”