Grudge Matches, Beefs, and Rivalries Petty and Grand of Famous Historic Figures

21. A Royal Grudge: Prince and the King of Punk-Funk

Early in his rise, Prince had a grudge going on with Rick James – although most of it was driven by James, AKA the King of Punk-Funk. A brilliant but seriously troubled artist who was eventually undone by a crippling addiction to drugs and alcohol, the Super Freak and Give it to Me Baby singer liked Prince when he was still a relative unknown. He had him perform as his opening act in a 1980 tour, but the admiration soon developed into a love-hate relationship, and then into a growing grudge.

Rick James was territorial, and grew upset when Prince copied some of his concert moves. As James’ manager put it: “Rick would go ooh-ooh!, and his audience would go crazy every time he would do that, and Prince would start doing the ooh-ooh! before Rick would come out. Rick was like, ‘Man, you can’t do that ooh-ooh! stuff, that’s what I do!’ And Prince was like, ‘Dude, you don’t have a monopoly on ooh-ooh! I can do what the fuck I wanna do!’” It got worse.

20. Rick James Almost Beat Up Prince

Rick James recounted in his autobiography that he almost beat up Prince: “I chased after that little turd. I caught up with him and was about to lay him out when his manager stepped in. “What the hell is wrong with you, Rick?” asked the manager. I told him Prince had dissed Mom and that I was gonna kick his scrawny ass. Prince explained that he didn’t know who Mom was. “Well, now you know, motherfucker,” I said. “Prince will be happy to apologize to your mother,” said the manager, “and he will be happy to apologize to you.” Prince apologized to Mom and apologized to me. I was a little disappointed ’cause I really did wanna kick his ass.“

Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bootsy Collins recalled that “Rick definitely had an attitude with Prince … I remember being on shows with Rick and Prince, and they would pull plugs on each other, gettin’ ready to go to blows“. Fortunately, the feud never reached the physical violence stage, thanks to peacemakers such as Chic’s Nile Rodgers: “I used to always say to Rick, ‘We all are just doing our own kind of thing. Prince is Prince, you’re you—we all have our own identity when it comes to the world of funk“.

19. Howard Hughes vs Jane Greer

Howard Hughes (1905 – 1976), the billionaire recluse, eccentric, and all around weirdo, could hold a grudge like few others. For example, he once bought a major movie studio to which an ex-girlfriend was contracted, just to wreck her career. His victim was Jane Greer (1924 – 2001), a film noir actress who made a splash in the 1940s with femme fatale roles in movies such as The Big Steal, Dick Tracy, and Out of the Past. In 1942, when she was eighteen, Greer caught Hughes’ eye when he saw her modeling in Life magazine. Infatuated, he sponsored and sent her to Hollywood to become an actress.

However, when Greer showed an interest in other men, it enraged Hughes: he reasoned that he had made her, and had every right to break her. Greer’s mother, who worked for the War Department, had seen to it that her daughter was one of three young women chosen to model uniforms for the new Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1942. When her modeling appeared in the June 8^th, 1942, issue of Life magazine, many across the country were smitten, including Hughes. He collected people – especially beautiful women – like normal folk collect stamps. So he signed the teenaged model to a personal contract.

18. A Mogul’s Grudge

Howard Hughes’ “personal contract” with Jane Greer was as creepy as it sounds: soon after she signed, Hughes told the teenager that he never wanted her to marry anyone. At first, that was no problem for the inexperienced Greer, who initially liked Hughes. As she put it years later: “I found him rather endearing, like a child. His idea was to go to the amusement park … He won a large collection of Kewpie dolls for me“. When Greer welcomed the attentions of other men, however, Hughes’ jealous side came out, and give rise to a prolonged grudge against the budding actress. Hughes taking Jane Greer out to amusement parks was all well and good – for a while. Things got awkward, however, when Greer welcomed the attentions of other men who saw her as a woman and not a child, and had more in mind than taking her to amusement parks.

Hughes wasn’t the only one captivated by Greer’s 1942 modeling photo. Star Crooner Rudy Vallee was also smitten, and tried unsuccessfully to get her address from Life magazine. When he eventually found it, things got complicated. Greer might have liked hanging out with Hughes, but an eccentric tycoon treating her like a child with trips to amusement parks was no competition to a star singer romancing her like a woman. Rudy Vallee swept Greer off her feet, and after a whirlwind courtship, they wed in 1943. Hughes seethed with jealousy. Whatever the legality of the “no marriage” clause in Greer’s personal contract, Hughes had meant it, and felt betrayed. So he went from doting to destructive, and set out to wreck Greer’s career.

17. Buying a Movie Studio to Wreck an Ex’s Career

Howard Hughes had brought Jane Greer to Hollywood and got her acting lessons. When she showed an interest in other men, he kept her shelved with no screen tests or acting gigs. So she sued to get out of her personal contract to Hughes, successfully bought it back, and joined RKO – one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Greer had a run of successful films with RKO – until Hughes bought the studio to wreck her career. He called Greer to his office, and told her he would not use her anymore.

“Since I was under exclusive contract to Howard at RKO, that meant I would not be able to work for anybody else, either. I told him directly that this meant that he was ruining my film career. He replied by saying, ‘Yes, that’s right’“. Greer managed a few roles, but only when Hughes could find nobody else. After six years of barely any work, she paid the final installment to buy out her contract. By then, Hughes’ jealous grudge had cost Greer her best acting years.

16. A Drug Czar’s Grudge Against a Jazz Legend

Billie Holiday (1915 – 1959), born Eleanora Fagan and nicknamed “Lady Day”, led a turbulent life. She was raised in a brothel, and was prostituted by her mother in her childhood. She was further traumatized by the death of her ill father, after he was denied medical care in a whites-only hospital because of segregation. That pain is reflected in Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit, a song about the lynching of blacks that she made her own, and that became an anthem of the budding civil rights movement. Holiday turned to drugs to cope with the pain. The United States vs. Billie Holiday, a 2021 biographical movie, addresses her addiction struggles. A key theme is Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger’s grudge against and relentless pursuit of Holiday. Anslinger pressures people in Holiday’s life to set her up for possession charges, and has her trailed by agents.

Anslinger also appoints an undercover agent to gather evidence against Holiday. How much of that was real? FBN Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, who held that job for 32 years and spearheaded the criminalization of drugs, was an awful person. An extreme racist and bigot, even by his era’s standards, Anslinger demonized racial minorities and immigrants. He also hated jazz, a mongrel music of African, Caribbean, and European origins mating on American soil. It was the opposite of all that Anslinger believed in. He thought it was musical anarchy, and proof of primitive impulses in black people, about to erupt. As he described it in internal memos: “It sounded like the jungles in the dead of night“. Anslinger also thought marijuana made people insane. That combined with his racism to produce a toxic mix. He once stated: “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men“.

15. The Horrible Anslinger

Jazz musicians smoked weed, and their music sounded freakish to Anslinger. That proved to him that marijuana caused insanity, so he targeted jazz musicians. He ordered his agents to: “prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons in a single day“. When congressmen questioned that, he reassured them that his crackdown focused not on: “the good musicians, but the jazz type“. Billie Holiday was one of his main targets. In real life, as in The United States vs Billie Holiday, Anslinger sent black undercover agent Jimmy Fletcher to target her. Fletcher is depicted as becoming romantically involved with Holiday. However, it is unclear whether that happened in real life. Whatever the relationship, Fletcher got close enough to Holiday to bust her on a drug possession charge in 1947.

That got Holiday a year in prison. It also got her a felony record that limited the venues in which she could perform. In 1949, Fletcher once again busted Holiday on a possession charge after she was set up. The movie shows a repentant Fletcher deliberately tank the case on the witness stand. There is no evidence that Fletcher threw the case, but Holiday was acquitted. In the movie, Fletcher then trails Holiday for years, and has a long affair with her. The historic record is silent as to whether such an affair occurred, but Fletcher was assigned to Holiday for years. It is also historic fact that, as depicted in the movie, Anslinger’s grudge against Holiday lasted until her final breath. In 1959, as she lay dying of cirrhosis, her hospital room was raided. She was kept under police guard until she died.

14. America’s Most Iconic Grudge

The grudge between the Hatfields and McCoys, a protracted vendetta between neighboring clans along the Kentucky and West Virginia border, is America’s most infamous family feud. Fought largely in the 1880s, it pitted the Hatfields, who lived mostly in Logan County, WV, against the McCoys, most of whom lived in neighboring Pike County, KY. Bad blood between the rival clans led to significant violence, mayhem, and murder. As modern science has revealed, and as seen below, there was literal bad blood that drove and amplified the vendetta. The McCoys were led by Randolph “Old Ran’l” McCoy, while the rival Hatfields were led by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield. The earliest known violence dates to 1865, when Harmon McCoy, a Union Army veteran who had fought in the US Civil War, was murdered by Confederate guerrillas led by Devil Anse Hatfield.

Bushwhacking had been common throughout the conflict, so the killing did not lead to an immediate feud. However, it stored hard feelings for the future. In 1878, a McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing a hog. The Hatfield was acquitted, but a witness who took his side was murdered by the McCoys soon thereafter. Tensions increased in 1880, when Devil Anse Hatfield’s son impregnated Old Ran’l McCoy’s daughter. Then in 1882, Devil Anse’s brother was mortally wounded in a brawl with three McCoys over a small debt owed on a fiddle. In retaliation, the Hatfields captured and executed three McCoys. The grudge then exploded into a prolonged back forth vendetta.

13. Holding a Grudge Was in the McCoys’ Blood

Things got bad not just for the Hatfields and McCoys, but for outsiders, who felt the feud’s ripple effects. At times, the grudge between the two families threatened to turn into a war between the states of West Virginia nd Kentucky. By 1890 the Hatfields, who had seriously gone overboard with the violence, were reduced to homeless hunted fugitives. Finally, four of them, plus their accomplices, were arrested and indicted for one particularly heinous atrocity. The fighting finally ended in February, 1890, when Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts, a Hatfield, was hanged in Pikesville.

The feud was remarkable for its intensity and longevity. The ability to keep a grudge going for a long time might have been due – at least on the McCoys’ part – to genetics. In 2007, an eleven-year-old McCoy girl prone to fits of rage underwent medical tests. It was discovered that she, and many other McCoys, had tumors on their adrenal glands. Such tumors can release massive amounts of mood-altering chemicals, such as adrenalin. That explains a lot. As the McCoy girl’s doctor put it, her family’s genetic defect: “does produce hypertension, headache and sweating intermittently depending on when the surge of these compounds occurs in the bloodstream. I suppose these compounds could possibly make somebody very angry and upset for no good reason“. Feuding was literally in the McCoys’ blood.

12. Prohibition’s Biggest Grudge

Chicago mob boss Al Capone’s greatest grudge was against the North Side Gang, led by Dean O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, and George “Bugs” Moran. It took place against the backdrop of Prohibition, which had fueled organized crime and violence between criminals, as they competed for a slice of the increasingly lucrative illegal alcohol. Polish born Hymie Weiss (1898 – 1926) grew up in Chicago’s North Side, where he took to a life of crime in his early teens. He eventually teamed up with George “Bugs” Moran and Dean O’Banion to form the North Side Gang, which dominated crime in North Chicago during Prohibition.

Competition over illegal alcohol with the Chicago Outfit, led by Johnny Torrio and his chief lieutenant Al Capone, turned violent. The result was a bitter grudge that lasted for years, claimed multiple lives, and led to America’s most notorious mob massacre. When the competition with the North Side Gang heated up, Al Capone called in his former boss, Frankie Yale. Born Francisco Iole in Calabria in southern Italy, Yale had arrived in the US at age eight. As a teenager, he joined the Five Points Gang. He quickly developed a reputation as a ferocious fist fighter and brawler, and was first arrested in 1912 at age nineteen for disorderly conduct.

Yale began his organized crime career as a protection and extortion racketeer, and in 1913 he was arrested for the robbery and assault of a dry goods store. He walked after the store owner retracted his identification of the culprit. By 1917, he had invested his rackets proceeds into a bar in Coney Island, which became his base of operations. Yale became an early New York mafia leader and hitman, and employed a young Al Capone in his operations. Yale’s criminal enterprise typified a new trend in American Mafiosi “families”: the employment of Italians from all regions, and not just from the boss’ hometown or district as had been the case traditionally.

11. An Escalating Beef

Unlike their conservative predecessors, Frankie Yale and the new Mafiosi were willing to cooperate with other ethnic gangs, so long as there was money to be made. From protection, he soon branched out into prostitution, and ran a string of brothels. When Prohibition arrived, Yale became one of Brooklyn’s biggest bootleggers. The high profits came with correspondingly high risks, and in 1921 he barely escaped an assassination attempt by rival bootleggers. He got away with a shot up lung, while one of his bodyguards was wounded and another was killed. He survived another assassination attempt just a few months later, that claimed the life of another bodyguard. That was followed by yet another attempt in 1923, when he escaped with his life only because the assassins mistook an associate for Yale and shot him dead instead.

In 1924, Yale’s former employee Al Capone asked him for a favor. So he travelled to Chicago with a hit team to murder North Side Gang leader Dean O’Banion, who was locked into a deadly grudge match with Capone and the Chicago Outfit. O’Banion owned a flower shop in Chicago’s North Side, so Yale and a team of Brooklyn hitmen visited, under the pretext of arranging floral arrangements for a mobster’s funeral. The visits were reconnaissance trips to study the layout of the place. On November 10^th, 1924, Yale returned to the store with two men. When he and the proprietor shook hands, his accomplices shot O’Banion in the chest and throat, then finished him off with a bullet to the back of the head. Rather than settle the grudge with the North Side Gang, however, the murder merely intensified it, as O’Banion’s successor Hymie Weiss vowed revenge.

10. The Man Who Scared Al Capone

Yale was arrested, but was released when police failed to shake his alibi. Capone returned the favor a year later, when he helped Yale murder three rivals and wound a fourth in an ambush outside a New York City nightclub. The friendship ended in 1927 when Yale, Capone’s whiskey supplier, got greedy and began to hijack the Chicago gangster’s trucks. Negotiations failed to resolve matters, so Capone went after his former boss. On July 1^st, 1928, Yale received a call that something was wrong with his wife. Yale jumped into his armor-plated car and sped off, without waiting for his usual escort of bodyguards. He was intercepted en route by gunmen who riddled his vehicle and shot him to death with armor-piercing bullets.

Back in Chicago, in his first major act of revenge for the murder of Dean O’Banion, his successor Hymie Weiss went after the Al Capone’s boss, Johnny Torrio. He was ambushed outside his apartment with a fusillade of gunfire, and took bullets to the jaw, lung, abdomen, groin, and legs. Severely wounded, Torrio was spared from a coup de grace shot to the skull when the killer’s gun jammed. The near death experience frightened Torrio, and convinced him to retire. So in 1925, he handed control of the Chicago Outfit to Capone, and moved to Italy.

Capone, who reportedly feared Weiss, tried to make peace and end the grudge match with the North Side Gang. His offers were rejected. After repeated failed efforts by the rival bosses to kill each other, Weiss led a team of gunmen in 1926, that fired over 1000 bullets into Capone’s headquarters. Capone survived, and returned the favor a few weeks later. On October 11^th, 1926, Weiss was about to enter his headquarters, when hitmen opened fire from the windows of a nearby building’s second floor. Weiss was fatally injured, and died in an ambulance en route to the hospital.

9. A Massacre to Cap Off a Grudge

Hymie Weiss’s successor, George “Bugs” Moran, carried on the North Side Gang’s war against Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit. The gangsters’ grudge reached a crescendo on February 14^th, 1929, when seven members of the North Side Gang were stood up against a wall, then cut down by automatic weapons gunfire in what came to be known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. It began when Capone hatched a plan to lure Moran to a warehouse, with the promise of a delivery of cut-rate stolen whiskey, then kill him along with his chief lieutenants. Just before he reached the warehouse, however, Moran spotted a police car approach the warehouse, and turned around. Four men in police uniforms exited the vehicle, entered the warehouse, and ordered its occupants to line up against a wall for a pat down.

The cops were fake, and as soon as the men turned around to face the wall, the “policemen” opened fire with shotguns and Thompson submachine guns. Six died on the scene, and a seventh, who took fourteen bullets, refused to ID the shooters. He told investigators “nobody shot me”, before he expired. A key suspect was Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn (1902 – 1936), who got his nickname because of his love of Thompson submachine guns. McGurn was a Sicilian-born small time boxer, who changed his birth name from Vincenzo Gibaldi to the Irish-sounding Jack McGurn, because boxers with Irish names got better bookings back then. Boxing didn’t pan out, however, so McGurn leaned more into his criminal sideline as mob muscle. By the mid-1920s, he had become one of Al Capone’s chief bodyguards and hitmen.

Although a suspect in the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre, the authorities were unable to charge McGurn for lack of evidence. Because mob loyalty is largely a myth, Capone and the Chicago Outfit distanced themselves from McGurn to avoid the heat he drew as a suspect. Cast off, McGurn tried to become a professional golfer. He did no better than he had as a boxer, and fell into poverty. His misery came to an end on February 15^th, 1936, one day after the seventh anniversary of the massacre, when three hitmen shot him dead in a Chicago bowling alley. They reportedly left a Valentine’s card near McGurn’s corpse, that read: “You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your dough, Your jewels and cars and handsome houses, But things could still be worse you know… At least you haven’t lost your trousers!“

8. The Maharajah and the Environmentalists

Civil disobedience can change the world for the better. For example, the nonviolent movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. However, civil disobedience is effective only against authorities that are susceptible to campaigns of moral pressure. It requires at least a bare minimum of civil society, bare minimum rule of law, and rulers who have a bare minimum of respect for the essentials of civil rights. Or at least rulers with a bare minimum of fear of the public’s reaction if such rights are too flagrantly flouted. Against rulers who can’t care less about justice or the need to treat their subjects humanely, and have the power to enforce their will no matter what anybody thinks, the consequences of civil disobedience can prove horrific. Take for example eighteenth century Indian Maharaja Abhai Singh of Marwar (1702 – 1749).

A nasty piece of work, Singh conspired with his brother to murder their father and seize power in 1724. In 1730, he needed wood for a new palace, and the forest near the village of Jehnad seemed like a good source. However, the forest was sacred to the locals. So they literally hugged the trees to keep them from being cut. Singh developed a grudge against the locals, and simply ordered the tree huggers beheaded, and for the timber to be collected. When other protesters from nearby villages showed up to hug the trees in a bid to save them, the maharaja’s men sawed right through them to get to the trees. All in all, 363 were slaughtered to get the trees for Singh’s palace. September 11^th, the anniversary of what came to be known as the Khejarli massacre, is commemorated in modern India as National Forest Martyrs Day.

7. The Purple One’s Other Grudge

Michael Jackson and Prince were two of modern music’s greatest icons. Both peaked at roughly the same time, and shared the 1980s as that decade’s biggest stars. Unsurprisingly, rumors swirled that they had developed a rivalry, which evolved into a grudge. Rumors that were eventually confirmed as true. What is surprising is just how serious things got: they developed a grudge so extreme that at one point, Prince tried to run MJ over with his limousine. The duo had taken different paths to reach the top. MJ was a successful prodigy as a child singer with his brothers in the Jackson 5, and he made a smooth transition into an even more successful adult singer when he went solo and released Off the Wall in 1979. He followed that up with the best-selling album of all time, Thriller.

Prince’s path was grittier, with a series of underground albums, before his first hit single. By the early 1980s, when Prince was about to take off, MJ was already a cultural juggernaut. In 1983, Michael Jackson was at the top of the world after the release of Thriller. Although not in the same league, Prince was about to take off thanks to hits such Little Red Corvette and 1999. There was already talk that Prince might become the next MJ, and that did not sit well with the King of Pop. MJ and Prince revered and were influenced by James Brown. At one of his concerts that year that was attended by both, the funk legend invited MJ onstage to do a little song and dance. MJ killed it. Then he whispered to James Brown: “Call Prince up – I dare him to follow me“.

6. Prince vs the King of Pop

James Brown did not yet know who Prince was, and asked “who?” After Michael Jackson repeated it a few times, Brown told the audience that somebody named Prince would join them onstage. Prince, delighted to share the stage with his idol, did a good Jimi Hendrix impression, and performed some sexy dance moves. It started off good, but ended badly. Prince tried to get the crowd involved, but they were not as enthusiastic as he had hoped. So he decided to call it a day. As he exited the stage, Prince leaned against a prop lamppost, and both musician and prop stumbled and fell into the crowd. MJ was delighted at Prince’s mishap, and his unconcealed glee at the Purple One’s humiliation transformed what had been a mere rivalry until then into a serious grudge.

Years later, the King of Pop still savored his rival’s literal fall. As he described it: “He made a fool of himself! He was a joke … People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video“. Understandably, Prince was mortified. He had not just suffered an embarrassment before a crowd, but in front of his idol, James Brown, and in the presence of his rival, MJ. So he decided to run him over. According to music producer Quincy Jones, a livid Prince waited in a limo outside the concert venue, and planned to run MJ over when he came out.

It is not clear whether Prince actually made the attempted hit and run, but as Quincy Jones told QG in an interview, he had every intention of doing so. By the late 1980s, the King of Pop and the Purple One were at the top of their game, and despite the bad blood, Quincy Jones tried to bring them together in a collaboration. His first attempt was the charity single We Are the World, which Michael Jackson co-wrote and performed in. Prince refused to participate. A few years later, Jones tried to bring them together on the song Bad, where they would sing opposite each other and perform jointly on the music video. Prince expressed some interest, but eventually declined. MJ did the music video with Wesley Snipes.

5. Michael Jackson Thought Prince Was a “Meanie”

Prince had not gotten over the grudge during the negotiations about a duet on Bad. He showed up at Michael Jackson’s home one day in an overcoat, with a white box labeled “Camille” – Prince’s nickname for MJ. Its contents terrified the Single Gloved One. According to Quincy Jones: “The box had all kinds of stuff—some cuff links with Tootsie Rolls on them. Michael was scared to death—he thought there was some voodoo in there. I wanted to take it, because I knew Michael was gonna throw it away“. As time went by, Michael Jackson came to see his feud with Prince as a one-sided beef that he simply could not understand or explain. As he told an interviewer: “I have proven myself since I was real little. It’s not fair. He feels like I’m his opponent…I hope he changes because boy, he’s gonna get hurt.

He’s the type that might commit suicide or something…I don’t like to be compared to Prince.” MJ went on to describe Prince as “one of the rudest people I have ever met,” and that he had been “mean and nasty to my family“. By the twenty-first century, things had thawed a bit, but Prince had not forgotten the feud. In 2006, Black Eyed Peas leader will.i.am invited MJ to a Prince performance in Las Vegas. When Prince discovered that MJ was there, he walked out into the audience, and began to play bass in his face. As Rolling Stone editor Steve Knopper put it, it was “like aggressive bass slap“. Later, an outraged MJ asked Will, “Will, why do you think Prince was playing bass in my face?” He went on: “Prince has always been a meanie. He’s just a big meanie. He’s always been not nice to me“.

4. A Nerd Grudge

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and creator of the Lord of the Rings universe, was a good frenemy of C.S. Lewis, the author of Narnia. They had religious differences, and frequently argued about the minutiae and nitty-gritty of Middle Earth versus Narnia. One thing, however, brought them together in perfect agreement: a shared hatred of Walt Disney. Lewis eventually got over the Disney hate with the passage of time, but Tolkien kept the grudge going strong for decades, until his dying day.

It began in 1938, when the two authors went out together to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Lewis did not like Disney and his movie. As he put it: “Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music … What might not have come of it if this man had been educated-or even brought up in a decent society?” Overall, he thought the whole thing was lowbrow comedy. That was mild compared to Tolkien’s take.

3. Tolkein Took Dwarves Seriously

J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, just a few months before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in America. He, along with C.S. Lewis, took fairy tales and dwarves seriously. As in they had world views and philosophies and doctrines based on a reverence for fairy tales and their folk roots. They thought that Walt Disney had grossly oversimplified and cheapened something they deemed sacrosanct. While Tolkien’s dwarves were grim mythical creatures rooted in Nordic mythology, Disney’s dwarves were comic buffoons.

Lewis eventually mellowed out, but Tolkien just got more and more upset about Disney and his take on fairy tales. For the rest of his life, he complained that Disney had commercialized and infantilized once-serious folklore fables, with adaptions that “hopelessly corrupted” them. In other words, Disney had made folk stories accessible to the general public, as opposed to the scholars and nerds whom Tolkien thought were the only ones who could truly appreciate such tales. The grudge lasted for the rest of Tolkien’s life, but it seems to have been one-sided: there is no evidence that Walt Disney knew or cared what Tolkien thought of him and his creations.

2. The AC vs DC Grudge

Today, alternating current (AC) lights up our homes and workplaces, and powers up our appliances through wall sockets. By contrast, direct current (DC) is relegated mostly to batteries. In the nineteenth century, however, the issue was undecided, and powerful interests fiercely competed to decide whether AC or DC would dominate the world. Alternating current was championed by George Westinghouse, who pushed AC as the best means to bring electricity to the masses. On direct current’s side was Thomas Edison. There was serious money at stake, and Edison came to regret how he had once screwed inventor Nikola Tesla over, because Tesla effectively decided the issue against Edison.

DC is crappy compared to AC, because DC is weaker and can only be transported short distances. However, Edison had invested millions in DC, and he was not about to let the upstart AC flush that investment down the drain if he could help it. Then Tesla, a former employee with a grudge against Edison, who had cheated him out of a promised reward, wrecked Edison’s electricity plans. Employed by Westinghouse, Tesla designed the modern AC electricity supply system that ensured its easy delivery and use. That ensured the defeat of Edison and his DC plan in what came to be known as “The War of the Currents“. In addition to his key role in the development of readily usable alternating current – a scientific contribution that revolutionized the world – Tesla had a long list of other major inventions.

1.     The Wizard of Menlo Park’s Nasty Side

Tesla had over 700 patents in 26 countries. They included: X-ray devices, electric generators, electric arc lamps, fluorescent lights, spark plugs, robots, remote controls, bladeless turbines, the Tesla Coil, and FM radio. Indeed, the modern world as we know it would be impossible without Tesla. As the American Institute of Electrical Engineers put it: “Were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the results of Mr. Tesla’s work, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our towns would be dark“. Thomas Edison’s worst act during the Current Wars might have been the time when he electrocuted an elephant to death as a stunt. As seen above, the Wizard of Menlo had millions invested in direct current, and that investment was threatened by alternating current.

When a dentist named Alfred Southwick sought his help to develop a humane method of execution by electrocution, Edison decided to turn AC’s strength into a liability, by highlighting its ability to kill. Edison talked Southwick to use alternating current to execute condemned prisoners in what became the electric chair. To cement in the public’s mind the link between AC’s risks and its promoter, George Westinghouse, Edison came up with a catchy name for the new method of execution: “Westinghousing”. The intrepid inventor then went on a whirlwind public tour to highlight alternating current’s deadliness. To demonstrate the rival current’s lethality, Edison used AC to publicly electrocute dozens of dogs, cows, horses, and a circus elephant named Topsy.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

American Mafia History – “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn

Am-Pole Eagle – The Man That Al Capone Feared

Atlas Obscura – The Movie Date That Solidified J.R.R. Tolkien’s Dislike of Walt Disney

Carlson, W. Bernard – Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2013)

Cheney, Margaret – Tesla: Man Out of Time (2011)

CNBC – Today is National Forest Martyrs Day: Here’s the History, Significance and All You Need to Know

Comic Book Resources – Why the Creator of the Lord of the Rings Hated Disney

Cooke, Lucy – The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales From the Wild Side of Life (2018)

Cracked – The Pettiest Grudges Held by Historical Figures

Critchley, David – The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891-1931 (2008)

Daily Beast – Rick James’ Intense Rivalry With Prince Nearly Came to Blows

Daily Beast – What the Hell Has Hollywood Got Against Nikola Tesla?

Encyclopedia Britannica – Hatfields and McCoys Feud

Far Out Magazine – The Bizarre Start of the Rivalry Between Prince and Michael Jackson

Guardian, The, August 28^th, 2001 – Jane Greer

Hari, Johann – Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2016)

History Collection – Geriatric Glory: Historic Figures Who Did Amazing Things in Their Old Age

James, Rick – Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James (2015)

Life – Jane Greer: The Actress Whose Career Howard Hughes Tried to Quash

Los Angeles Times, August 28^th, 2001 – Jane Greer, Star of Film Noir ‘Out of the Past’

Mafia History – What Do We Know About Frankie Yale?

Man of Many – The Story Behind Prince and Michael Jackson’s Rivalry

National Public Radio – What Not to Serve Buzzards for Lunch, a Glorious Science Experiment

Pop Matters – Prince and Michael Jackson: The Rivalry and the Revolution

Slate – What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in ‘The United States vs Billie Holliday?

Smithsonian Magazine, October 11^th, 2011 – Edison vs Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry

Vanderbilt Magazine, November 1^st, 2007 – Tumors May Have Fueled Hatfield-McCoy Feud

West Virginia Encyclopedia – The Hatfield-McCoy Feud