Linda Ciampoli

LINDA CIAMPOLI (née Rhodes), author of CHURCHILL'S SECRET AGENT (Berkley/Penguin, 2010), was born in Los Angeles and raised in Long Beach, California. She studied at the University of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne in Paris and is a graduate of the Department of French at UCLA. After attending graduate school, Linda lived for two years in Israel where she taught English to Israeli and Bedouin children. Accomplished in many fields, Linda was pursuing a career in the hotel industry in Los Angeles when she and Max Ciampoli met in Marina del Rey. Friendship blossomed into romance, which they celebrated on a trip to France where they rediscovered its beauty together while riding on horseback through Provence. Seeing Max's love for horses, Linda took up riding herself when the couple returned to Los Angeles. Eventually, performing exhibitions on her Andalusian stallion became her primary passion, later followed by her love of Flamenco dance. Most recently, she has revived her game of golf. Other creative pleasures include writing and photography. Following their honeymoon to France in 1991, memories of World War II began haunting Max's dreams. Linda suggested he use writing to liberate himself from the nightmares and diffuse their terrible hold on him. Since Max's recollections of the time were in French, Linda was later able to utilize her skills to translate his writing into English and eventually to create the book, CHURCHILL'S SECRET AGENT. Co-author MAX CIAMPOLI, born in Paris in 1922 and baptized at the Vatican, was not yet three years old when he and his parents moved to Monaco, where his father owned famous nightclubs at which many of the era’s most prominent entertainers performed. Glamorous as this world appeared, much of Max’s childhood was tragic. When Max was three, his father hired a personal, live-in tutor, a retired Austrian cavalry colonel. By the time he was seven, Max was not only fluent in German and Italian, but was already an accomplished skier, horseman, and marksman. It was with his tutor that Max often visited his godfather in Cap d’Antibes, where he sometimes encountered his godfather’s vacationing neighbor, Winston Churchill, often painting at his easel in front of a friend’s villa. At the age of seven, Max was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Nice where he completed his high-school education at fourteen and entered university to become a dentist. But when it became evident that war was breaking out in Europe, Max quit the university to serve his country. Through influential contacts from childhood, he was able to join the elite Alpine Ski Troop of the French army as an officer even though he was underage. Soon after, his beloved France was defeated. Refusing to accept defeat, he asked his godfather what he could do to rid France of the Nazis. His godfather called Mr. Churchill and told him that “little Max” had grown into a responsible, resourceful and determined young man who was not only a lieutenant in the elite French Alpine Ski Troop at age seventeen, but was a well-trained horseman and marksman and was fluent in German and Italian. Once he interviewed Max, Churchill decided to have him trained as a secret agent. When between missions in England, Max often stayed at Churchill’s country home where the two would sometimes go horseback riding and hunting together. Wounded at the end of the war, Max was hospitalized for well over a year. When released, he took a trip to the United States and decided to immigrate. Max was a man of tremendous range, talent, energy and adaptability. In the years that followed, he was executive chef at prestigious hotels while simultaneously becoming a horse-breeder, owner of several fashionable hair salons and a classic car collector. Years later, he opened exclusive classic car dealerships in New York and Beverly Hills. Max became a United States citizen in 1956. In the 1970s, tragedy struck. As the result of a brutal assault while on a car-buying trip, Max was hospitalized with amnesia for nine months. During this absence, his manager absconded with everything he owned. He returned almost penniless to Beverly Hills. With the help of a friend, Max started over, this time in the yacht business. Eventually, he became successful, but the bottom dropped out of the market in the mid-1980s. During these years, he successfully fought cancer and came through a serious experimental heart operation. Max met Linda Rhodes, in Marina del Rey, California in 1986, and they were married five years later. Before their marriage, he had not shared his war experiences, but following their honeymoon in France, war recollections began to haunt both of them in the form of nightmares. At Linda's suggestion, he began writing down his memories, later recording them in his native French. Linda then translated his writings into English and transformed them into a book. Now, at the age of 90, Max lives happily with his wife of 21 years. He treasures spending time with Linda, their kitty cat, close friends, and their loving spiritual community. Max and Linda are now working on their second book that relates Max's fascinating life in Haiti and the United States following World War II. Visit their website at http://www.ChurchillsSecretAgent.com, Facebook Fan Page at http://www.facebook.com/ChurchillsSecretAgent and Twitter at http://www.twitter/ChurchillSecret. YouTube: Churchill's Secret Agent Book. See trailer of interview with Max and Linda.