LEGENDARY TV WRITER MARK FROST TALKS ABOUT WRITING THE YANKEE SPINX NOVEL ON ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV

Indexed: 2026-05-21

[00:00:06]I actually knew Uncle Will as a kid. He lived until 1965, and I think I met him at least three times. And on the last occasion, um he had written a When he was working for He worked for FDR for 12 years in the White House, and he was his secretary um for the last four during the war years, and he had was a dedicated and quite brilliant reporter for many years for the Washington Post and the Associated Press prior to that. So, he had decided to keep a diary during the war because all of FDR's movements were top secret.

[00:00:43]Um but as a literary and and a newspaper man, he said somebody should be keeping a record of all of this.

[00:00:50]So, he kept this private diary that begins in right after Pearl Harbor and goes all the way up to the day that FDR dies when he's with him in Warm Springs.

[00:01:02]And uh he ended up not only working for FDR for all those years, he went on to work for Harry Truman in the same capacity for eight.

[00:01:10]And he published his diary of the war years in 1958, and it was a a big hit and became a standard reference text for anybody who wanted to write about FDR.

[00:01:22]And but I knew him as this kind of very kindly older gentleman who was my dad's uncle, great uncle I think. He was my great great uncle.

[00:01:31]And on my Last time I saw him for my 11th birthday, he gave me a copy of that book, an original edition of um FDR um during the war.

[00:01:44]Um And it became one of the cherished possessions of my life. He also gave me This is a little more esoteric, but when FDR died, the US Mint cast a thousand copies of this bronze medallion with it like a giant coin, you know, that had all four of his years and inaugural dates listed and then a portrait of him on the other side.

[00:02:09]He gave that to me. He had he'd been one of the friends who had gotten one of those. He gave this to me with that book when I'm when I was 11.

[00:02:19]And I carried them with them with me my whole life. That two of my most prized possessions.

[00:02:26]Um and I started thinking about writing something about it as early as the 1990s.

[00:02:35]Uh it was in the back of my mind and I had a number of conversations with my dad about him. I learned a little bit more about who he was. He I was fascinated. Um Uh it wasn't until 2016 I was in New York on a a book tour for one of my Twin Peaks books, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, in early November of 2016. I happened to be in the city and uh for election day.

[00:03:06]And I was staying at a hotel on uh 56th Street across from the Hilton, which is on 6th Avenue.

[00:03:15]Um Trump was having his election night party there.

[00:03:21]Uh as I was walking back to my hotel, I was supposed to leave the next morning.

[00:03:26]I saw him go by in a limo. I had met him once years before and we can talk about that later, but um actually twice, but um and I stayed up till 2:30 in the morning and it was not the result almost everybody in New York was hoping for and uh I think I can speak for a fair number of Americans that that wasn't the result they wanted either. And the next morning I woke up and it was a cold and rainy day in New York. It was miserable.

[00:03:58]And I was miserable and I thought what can I do with this feeling?

[00:04:04]And it occurred to me to put in a call to the FDR library where I had never been up in Hyde Park about 90 miles north of the city.

[00:04:15]And they connected me through to the librarian the librarian and I told her who I was and who my uncle was and she said, "Well, we know who you are and we certainly know who your uncle is.

[00:04:27]He was the original director and one of the original trustees of this library."

[00:04:32]And I said, "Oh my god, really? I didn't even know that." I I said, "Is it possible I could come up tomorrow and you could maybe share some of what you have in your archive?"

[00:04:40]And they said, "Of course, you know, give us a day to get it together and come up and see us." So, next day I drove up, got there, went into the library. I'm blown away by the beauty and the stillness and I I actually would use the word beatitude of that what I consider hallowed American ground that the the the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park and I they had a trolley in the library waiting for me that was completely full including the original handwritten copies of his diary in three kind of ledgers that he had kept. And on the page on the table in front of me was a single sheet of paper in a plastic sheath.

[00:05:25]And they said, "You might want to take a look at this first."

[00:05:28]And I picked it up and it was typed um with lots of single space with lots of little scratches and cross outs and words written in and I started to read it and and honestly my hand started to shake because I realized what I was holding was the copy of FDR's first inaugural speech that he held in his hand when he took office in 19 early 1933.

[00:05:57]We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

[00:06:01]And I had a wondrous afternoon there and I walked out saying, "Okay, this is whatever this is going to be, it's going to be the next thing I write."

[00:06:12]And I ended up spending almost 9 years.

[00:06:17]I was first going to do it as a play.

[00:06:19]That was my instinct. And I wrote it as a play and I wrote all this dialogue and I learned all about every single character in the story. It was an enormous to to sort of take that whole block of time and history and create a space in my head where it all could live.

[00:06:37]Um and the play then, as I realized the scope of the story was larger than what the stage could manage, and I finally decided after doing some stage readings with some wonderful actors in New York, "Okay, I'm going to do this as a novel."

[00:06:53]And that then became the book that we're talking about today, The Yankee Sphinx, which uh was a long journey, the longest I've ever worked on a single project.

[00:07:03]The closest analog for me was uh the book I had written in 2001, uh The Greatest Game Ever Played, uh which became a best seller and we made a I think a a pretty good movie of it and it came out in 2006.

[00:07:17]Um of of taking this whole period of time and compressing it and uh making it come to life for people. It's almost like you're creating a a diorama of an age for people. And to do that, you have to collect an enormous amount of material, most of which you never get a chance to include, but it informs everything else that you're using. And I realized that's what this was, it was going to be like that. And that book took two years to write.

[00:07:46]And I realized, okay, this is going to take at least four times longer because it's a longer period of time. They the the impact of the story and of the the effect these people had on the course of history is much larger.

[00:07:59]Um and the reason I finally turned to a book was uh I wanted to do the story in my uncle's voice.

[00:08:07]Uh I wanted it to be a first-person narrative.

[00:08:11]Uh and it was a way of honoring my ancestor if that makes sense. I felt a strong pull to let him tell his own story.

[00:08:20]So, that was the challenge. Uh and that's where writing it as a play first became so important because I found all the voices of people in many of whom are household names, many of whom you don't know, but they're equally fascinating. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their daughter Anna who becomes quite important in the book is an extraordinary woman.

[00:08:43]Um Harry Hopkins, kind of a forgotten man of history who was FDR's right-hand man and is a very poignant and powerful presence in that book. And and really just everything about it. Uh and and to put it in my uncle's voice who was a trained war correspondent who had been to cover the First World War, who had gone to Germany to cover the Weimar Republic in the early days of Hitler and saw him speak at a Munich Beer Hall for the Washington Post, who had covered the Irish Troubles for the AP in Ireland. He He was the right person to tell the story.

[00:09:22]And so, um it was a a way of simultaneously paying homage to an ancestor who uh I thought was kind of one of the forgotten quiet men of history and also telling the story of this remarkable friendship with this amazing protein figure in American history who as it turned out is kind of opaque to people because he was so guarded in his personal life.

[00:09:49]And that's where the Harry Hopkins term for him is the Yankee Sphinx came from.

[00:09:54]He was describing him as a man who was brilliant and a great leader and completely inscrutable to everybody around him.

[00:10:02]Well, my uncle became one of the few people that he let in.

[00:10:06]And so I felt there's nobody who can tell this story better than the guy who was with him every single day that they were uh working for hours together um and to for them to be the witnesses to their own history, I thought was the perfect way to tell the story.

[00:10:25]Growing up when I did and that the the fact that my dad was a World War vet and um I grew up in a period when that history was still being kind of processed by the world through the '50s and '60s. You know, that experience was so monumental for for really all of our civilization as we know it. Um gave me such a grounding in understanding the world that I came out of that was so fundamental to my family's history and our country's history and really the world's history that I was really grateful to go on that journey um and I had such a great way of entering into it and letting myself channel that story for a a generation that perhaps today has doesn't really know as much about it. Um and certainly at a time when an American president could represent something entirely different to our people than you know, perhaps recent examples that we've had.

[00:11:28]Uh I felt it was a privilege and and honestly a blessing to be able to tell the story.