American women’s obsession with being thin began with this ‘scientist’
Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were hooked on his diet
Bengamin Gayelord Hauser wasn’t the first diet guru to worm his way into Western women’s collective consciousness. The dieting advice of William Banting, an English undertaker turned anti-fat crusader, was so influential in Victorian-era London that his surname became a verb, synonymous with dieting (i.e., “I’m banting”). Hauser also wasn’t the first to count celebrities among his followers. John D. Rockefeller and Franz Kafka were both devoted “Fletcherites,” convinced that chewing a mouthful of food 100 to 700 times resulted in improved health and a slimmer body shape, while Henry Ford was a Hay man (à la Dr. William Hay) who never ate starch and protein at the same meal.
What Hauser managed to do that Banting, Fletcher, and Hay couldn’t was capitalize on the fears and desires of women in postwar America. Unlike women of previous generations, those in the first half of the 20th century had fewer children, better health, longer lives, and more disposable income. Middle age, in particular, no longer meant retreating into a housecoat and waiting to die. Now women “could afford to have a new sense of optimism about what life over fifty could be,” writes Catherine Carstairs in her 2014 article for the journal Gender & History, “‘Look Younger, Live Longer’: Ageing Beautifully with Gayelord Hauser in America, 1920–1975.”
Hauser’s approach to diet and nutrition emphasized that living a healthful life meant travel and dancing and enjoying small pleasures. He gave women of a certain age permission not just to exist publicly but to be the center of attention. To be in the spotlight, though, was a privilege that only those who were beautiful and slim and took special care to adhere to a healthy diet deserved. “There is real tragedy in fat,” Hauser wrote in 1939’s Eat and Grow Beautiful.
How to get and stay slim? Hauser came up with a number of approaches in the 50 years of his career, including juicing, eating according to one’s “type” (potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and sulphur), avoiding white bread, sugars and over-refined cereals, and preparing “healthful” recipes like the “pep breakfast”: two raw eggs beaten in orange juice to create, as he writes in his most famous book, Look Younger, Live Longer (1951), a “creamy drink fit for a King’s table.” Most important of all, don’t skimp on the “wonder foods,” advocated Hauser, including yogurt, powdered skim milk, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses.
When Hauser first began lecturing on diet and health in 1920s Chicago, he billed himself as an internationally famous Viennese scientist (choosing to go Austrian, rather than reveal his German heritage, apparently in an attempt to distance himself from American hostility toward his native country). In reality, Hauser was no scientist and was, at the time, at least, a long way from being internationally famous. Though he claimed to have studied with famous European doctors and nutritionists, writes Carstairs, any genuine nutritional training he had probably came from his time as a student at the Chicago College of Naturopathy and the American School of Chiropractic in New York. He had also experienced the power of fruits and vegetables himself, which he credited with helping him recover from bovine tuberculosis as a teenager.
Hauser was a charismatic speaker with a Liberace-like flirtatiousness with his almost entirely female audience, and by 1930 he had made the move from stage to page with a series of short books entitled the Little Library of Food. The books got Hauser noticed by makeup entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, for whose “beauty farm,” Maine Chance, he developed a vegetable-broth and cabbage-and-celery-juice diet for overweight visitors.
Toward the end of the decade, a friendship with one of Hollywood’s most famous starlets, Greta Garbo, rocketed Hauser to celebrity. His companionship enlivened the notoriously melancholic and private Garbo, and she scrupulously followed his health and dieting advice to achieve a lithe figure more akin to that of an adolescent boy than an adult woman.
Though their close relationship was apparently genuine and may have had a romantic element (even though Hauser was known to be gay), “Hauser was no fool,” writes Louise Foxcroft in her 2011 book Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years. He “set himself up in Hollywood because he understood the power of the movie industry realizing that most of our high-priced movie stars are living in constant fear of losing their attractiveness and thereby their popularity … they simply can’t afford to become fat and unattractive.’”
With Garbo singing his praises, other “lovely ladies of the screen,” including Marlene Dietrich, Paulette Goddard, and Gloria Swanson, hopped on board the Hauser train. In later years, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and the Duchess of Windsor scrambled to secure Hauser’s dietary guidance. And where Hollywood went, so, too, did American women of all ages who sought to emulate the slender waistlines of their favorite stars. Diet was essential to achieving the desired look, and for those women who couldn’t achieve it through diet alone, a postwar industry of torturously slimming undergarments like the Vanishette (with the lofty tagline “INSTANTLY Vanish 4 INCHES OFF YOUR WAIST!”) and the Merry Widow, a waist-cinching brassiere on which women spent $55 million annually (in today’s dollars) in the 1950s, were waiting to lighten their pocketbooks.And still, women were — or at least felt — fat.
Though obesity had been assumed to be caused by an individual’s moral failings since as far back as ancient Greece, by midcentury fat had become the “synonym for the worthless, the slow, the inert, the unattractive, the weak, the poor and the stupid” that it is today, writes Foxcroft. Thanks to advances in chemistry, though, dieting wasn’t the only way to a willowy frame. There were diet drugs like dinitrophenol, a derivative of benzene and a carcinogenic dyeing agent that, along with a slim figure and a tendency to overheat and sweat, left some users blind or without a sense of taste. By the time it was removed from the market in 1938, dinitrophenol had been prescribed to 100,000 Americans. Amphetamines like Dexedrine, which began appearing in 1943, were quickly linked to their own set of problems, including hemorrhagic stroke, a gamble that thousands of women nevertheless took. More recently, over the past decade, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed cases against 120 different health and supplement companies claiming to help overweight Americans lose weight fast.
Hauser, for one, advocated against “mother’s little helpers” for dieting or improved sleep. In fact, with the exception of plastic surgery, much of what Hauser recommended to his followers were not quick fixes but the increased consumption of whole foods full of protein and fiber that would promote better living and all-around health. In this, he is considered by some to be one of the fathers of the natural food movement.
For all of his good advice, however, Hauser was still undeniably a charlatan who famously relished the attention his books and Hollywood connections brought him, appearing almost as frequently in the press as his famous “students.” His reputation as a food science expert infuriated real nutrition scientists, and the American Medical Association condemned him as a fad-hawking con man. After publication of his most influential work, Look Younger, Live Longer — which promoted purchasing blackstrap molasses from Modern Health Products, the Milwaukee-based health food company where Frey Brown, his longtime partner (both romantically and in business), was president — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seized several copies of the book and attempted to bring Hauser to court. (The case was eventually thrown out.)
In the long run, Hauser remained relatively unscathed by allegations of his flimflammery and continued selling books into the 1970s. The beauty standards he helped to plant in the minds of women of all ages, too, have stood the test of time. Today, “up to 40 per cent of women feel like they are always dieting or are constantly concerned about their weight,” writes Foxcroft, and, “in America alone, an astonishing $40 billion a year is spent on slimming.” Even Hauser’s name still means something: among the products to help the modern woman lose weight is the Gayelord Hauser program, sold by the Dutch company Wessanen, which bills it as “a complete range of products perfectly adapted to women’s nutritional requirements.”
