Life with a Genius

DUMBBELLS AND CARROT STRIPS (405 pp.)--Mary Macfadden & Emile Gauvreau--Holt ($3.95).

Mary Williamson was only a Yorkshire millhand until Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden, the "Father of Physical Culture," put a tape around her torso (bust 38 1/2, hips 39). After that, life speeded up for Mary. First, in a nationwide contest, Macfadden crowned her "Great Britain's Perfect Woman"; then he gave her the star turn in his physicultural demonstrations--that of springing nightly off a high table and landing "with both feet together on his breadbasket."* Between springs he poured into her astonished ear the truth about the breadbasket--how the Macfadden stomach revolted against breakfasts, steaks and alcohol, and how steel-strong it grew on a regimen of nuts, raw carrots and beet juice. She knew that he loved her when he took her on a 20-mile hike; they had barely covered half the distance when he popped the question. When she said yes, "he stood on his head for me for one minute and four seconds." So began (in 1913) a robust alliance that was to flourish until 1930, when they separated. Dumbbells and Carrot Strips is her story of those years, and if it is richer in beet juice than any other biography of Bernarr Macfadden, this is because no one has more to reveal about a man than his former wife. Moreover Mary has been assisted by Emile Gauvreau, once a Macfadden editor, who not only has his own beans to spill about the boss but knows just how to cook Mary's. Mahogany for the Teeth. Mary was 19 when they married; Bernarr was 45. He had already rid himself of two wives' who had proved too brittle to uphold the high Macfadden standards of "divine vitality," so he took no chances with Mary.

Her breakfast might consist of one dry cracker washed down with cold water and honey; her lunch varied from grass tea and pea soup ("Fit for a king!" he exclaimed, smacking his lips) to a wide assortment of nuts, fruits, vegetable juices and interminable strips of raw carrot.

The active day began with the "Macfadden Bed Exercise," in which each mate turned outward on the double bed and put the limbs through slashing, scissor movements, meanwhile straining the torsos inward. There followed calisthenics before the open window, dumbbell exercises, headstands and one-legged squatting exercises. The body was by then sufficiently limbered up for a "ten-mile jog trot." Mary was excused from some of the more rigorous exercises when she was pregnant, so she could sometimes lie abed watching her husband. Physically, he was a striking specimen. His perfectly muscled body was only 5 ft. 6 in. high, his visage was stern, beaked and remorseless, his eyes of a peculiar hazel which became somberly multicolored in moments of passion. His teeth were none too good--per haps because he believed that the cure for toothache was to chew hard on a piece of mahogany ("massage," he called it). He always slept soundly; even when many anxieties were on his mind, his snores resounded "like coal going down a chute." Though his joints cracked like muskets when he did his one-legged heave-ups, he was determined to outlive any other man of his generation and be a second Napoleon. Not that he approved entirely of Napoleon. Bonaparte, he used to say, "filled himself full of onion soup and brandy before the battle of Waterloo. That fixed him for keeps."

Fasting for Impurity. Bernarr and Mary traveled a good deal. It was on a trip to France that Bernarr composed the mam 'hymn" of his "religion of happiness," which he taught his disciples to bellow to the tune of Jingle Bells:

Day by day, in every way,

I am getting well (Ha!)

I am filled with health and strength

More than I can tell (Ho!)

Now I know, I can go

All along the way (Ha!)

Growing better all the time,

And singing every day! (Ho!)

It was only after they settled down in the U.S., Bernarr's homeland, that Mary awakened to the full range of his genius as health philosopher, promoter and publisher. At his editorial peak, Macfadden published such sure sellers as Liberty, True Story and Physical Culture, plus some 20 other magazines, with a combined circulation of 16 million a month. His employees included the fabulous John Russell coryell, creator of Nick Carter and author of romantic novels signed "Bertha M. Clay" and articles on "the benefits of fasting" under the name "H. Mitchell Whatchet." Another great Macfadden ally was Mother Teats, the Carry Nation of physical culture, who sipped grass tea and fought under the slogan: "Intercourse for Procreation Only!"

( The simpler Macfadden tenets included the harem skirt, grass-eating, boxing with the feet, having babies without doctors standing on your head to make your hair grow." But all these techniques were useless unless the patient practiced the Master's main belief--"that . . . there is but one disease: impurity of the blood" for which there was but one cure--to stop eating and give the famished body a chance to consume its own diseased tissues. Not that the Master objected to patients purchasing his "Isham's California Waters of Life" for "dissolving and washing away cancer, and curing paralysis, baldness, dyspepsia, tartar diabetes bunions, and the cigarette, liquor and drug habits."

But even the most advanced Macfadden theories seemed trite compared to the revolutionary Macfadden inventions. Most sensible of these was the "physical culture watch"--a turnip-size timepiece whose dial showed what exercises should be performed and what food eaten at given hours (e.g., "8 a.m. No breakfast. Take glass cool water. Walk to work. Identify the birds . . ."). Others included an apparatus for sluicing "pure Macfadden air" over the skins of fully dressed businessmen while they sat working at their desks, and a narrow-gauge railroad with open flatcars for the use of customers in department stores. ("It will revolutionize Macy's," said Bernarr. "Then Gimbels.") Most staggering of all, though never completed or put to use, was the mammoth freezer into which the unemployed were to be put in times of depression "and defrosted when employment becomes plentiful again."

A Second Reformation. By then, Mary and Bernarr were beginning to drift apart. It was all very well for him to dream, as he slept on the floor encased in "The Macfadden Body-Free Blanket Rib," of becoming the "first Physical Culture President of the United States," but Mary blanched at the thought of becoming known as the "Constantly Pregnant First Lady." She had borne him four daughters under the "no-doctors" rules of Macfadden birthmanship, and now he felt that four sons (conceived by following the Macfadden rules of sex determination) would nicely round off "The Perfect Family." Mary obliged with three and then rebelled. The Prophet of Physical Culture gave her a long, hard look and pronounced the terrible final words: "Woman, yon are no longer necessary to my success!"

It is Mary's hope that readers of this biography will find it free of "the animus which, regrettably, is part of the human make-up." The hope, regrettably, is not justified. Every last frailty and intimate secret of Bernarr Macfadden is exposed by Mary and her ghost with such relish that by the time they are through with him, the Father of Physical Culture sounds much more of a human being than he ever did before. Moreover, Bernarr takes on unexpected stature as the modern pioneer of the low-heel shoe, the bed board, enriched flour, sun bathing, brief swimsuits and many of the foods known today to be the richest in vitamins. Macfadden hoped to usher in a second Reformation, but, as he rightly remarked of the leader of the first one: "[Luther] sat around doin' too much thinkin' and takin' cracks at the Pope. That's not the way to make a success these days."

*Nowadays Macfadden, 84, takes his own high jumps, has celebrated three of his last four birthdays by parachuting from a plane.

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