sensible girl I took out in New York refused her apple pie à la mode with the boring chant, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”. She had a tidy diet which did away with tiresome calorie and carbohydrate counting: the Zero-Cal. She did not eat.
In California Elaine Johnson, a 35-year-old housewife, was 20 stone and so fat she could not cross her legs or sit without breaking the chair. She started her rigorous regime after getting wedged in a cafeteria doorway—a telling position from which to face facts.
At the same hospital Bert Goldner weighed in at 425 lb, or almost 4 cwt. He was so spherical he could not sit or lie without fainting from lack of oxygen, so had to sleep standing up or kneeling. During a nap he once toppled over and broke a leg.
In Beverly Hills I went to see that little round impresario Allan Carr, living in disco style behind his guarded electric gates. He had made his fortune from Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and thought he had won a lifelong battle with avoirdupois after a major bypass operation ensured that all food would just slip through his stomach without registering. Many people undergoing that six-hour operation die of heart failure, so he did sincerely want to be slim.
During the next five years he lost 150 lb. Then, in the interests of staying alive, he had to have it all put back in old-fashioned order again, and immediately gained 75 lb. Allan Carr may be small and round and aggressive, but he is a man of decision: he had his jaw wired up so he could not eat.
“It also prohibits you from talking,” he told me, “which is worse than not eating. I was very frustrated, as you can imagine, but you always carry little clippers around with you in case you choke or something, when you can snip the wires. So there I was sitting in the movie theatre watching Diana Ross in The Wiz.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be good—I have these instincts about certain movies, so I didn’t go to the première because I didn’t want to lie to people, or hurt their feelings. I went on a Saturday. By the end of the first 45 minutes I disliked it so much, I was so nervous and agitated I just had to tell my friends what I thought about it.
“So I went to the men’s room and took the clippers out and snipped my mouth open. I just couldn’t stand not talking, at that moment. That’s how I lost my mouth wiring. I’d had it on for ten days and I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t carry on, I couldn’t talk on the phone very much. It was just terrible.”
One of the few remaining ways of drastic dieting open to him, I suggested, was sleep therapy, as practised in India, where it’s a relief to stick to boiled eggs and a Coke.
“I’ve thought about it. You just go down to Rio for the Carnival, wear yourself out, and then sleep naturally for two or three weeks afterwards; but that’s too slow, I haven’t got the time to spare.”
I suggested he should travel to some of those places I had visited around the world where food was anything but enticing. He had done that, too: “The best place is Egypt. It’s like going on a scenic vacation and a diet at the same time. There’s absolutely nothing you can eat in Egypt.”
Mixing with people with extreme weight problems makes one feel slim, instantly. Even reading diets offers a sense of quiet achievement; in a health farm it’s positively therapeutic.
The form at our farm was a Sunday arrival with pseudo-medical test that evening: blood pressure, heartbeats, weight, and the old army how-do-you-feel routine. The usual treatment is a complete fast, by which they mean three oranges a day. Should you be determined to take on the world, reduce to three glasses of hot water a day, with a slice of lemon to take the taste away.
Mornings are filled with mild action: osteopathy, ultrasonic therapy, infra-red and radiant heat, saunas, steam and sitz baths, plus various combinations of sweat-inducing bakery: mud, wax, cabinet, peat and blanket baths. Best of all, massage and manipulation, which comes in all forms from distinctly painful to Wake up, Sir.
A health farm is rigorously asexual—all slap and no tickle—but, as I always say, it’s nice to be kneaded.
Looming ominously behind such agreeable time fillers, there are enemas and colonic irrigations. Nature-cure enthusiasts explain that in decoking the engine, waste poisons must all be swept away for a fresh, empty start—and that’s the way they gotta go. This may or may not be medically sound, but it is not a thing I will willingly take lying down.
The various spin-off activities, or non-activities, seem more therapeutic: complete rest (or stultifying boredom); non-availability of demoralizing distraction, like pleasure; the spiritually uplifting and unusual sensation of being above temptation. I derived additional and permanent benefit by giving up smoking forty or fifty a day on the assumption that if I had to be mildly unhappy anyway I might as well be totally miserable. I have never restarted that horrible habit.
On a fast, with a dark brown mouth, cigarettes are as resistible as everything else. The whole system is so outraged, one further deprivation goes unnoticed. I commend this ploy to the addicted. I also—giant stride for one man—cleaned my car, a beneficial and constructive exercise which took care of two soporific afternoons.
Because of the pressure of television I have had no time for health farms for several years—so the car needed another visit even more than I did. Then the Metropole at Brighton launched the largest health hydro in Europe. I joined a cheery group drinking mimosas on a private Pullman from Victoria and submitted to the inaugural weekend of events and slimming treatments. Without any struggle at all, I put on five pounds.
Nature cure, treated seriously, is not an expensive folly. Ignoring its unworldly cancer-cure fringe, the theory seems eminently reasonable: rest, restraint, simple food. Write off those who triumphantly smuggle scrummy-tuck into their bedrooms or creep off on afternoon dainty-tea crawls; their weighty problems are here to stay.
The ideal fortnight, down on the farm, is ten days’ fast (during which you lose a stone) and four days’ gentle return, via yoghurt, to salads and plain food. This puts four pounds back into that shrunken stomach. The more flab you take with you, the more you leave behind. Heavy drinkers and the very fat watch, fascinated, as it melts away and long-lost toes creep coyly into sight.
The benefit of the outrageous bill at the end of it all is that one may be stunned, upon release, into sensible eating— though most patients edge slowly up to the weight they took with them. Sterner souls change their life pattern—better and smaller people for ever.
All right—so I got the car cleaned.
6 RANDOLPH: AS RUDE TO AMBASSADORS AS HE WAS TO WAITERS
After the well-regimented, almost gentlemanly war I had known with the Eighth Army in Sicily and Italy, I saw at once that Korea was going to be something else: dirtier, more confusing, prisoners murdered, not a good place to be. There was no front line—every divisional HQ was in as much danger as its forward company.
As the US Army was due to rediscover in Vietnam, all an enemy soldier had to do to become a peaceful and invisible civilian was to hide his weapon, take off his jacket and stroll through our defences. I don’t even want to write about their treatment of prisoners.
The war that we had just won with the capture of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, was unwinding almost as soon as we’d finished their Hungarian caviare and champagne—a trifle sweet, but quite acceptable at that hour in the morning. We were sitting on the tatami after sleeping in ditches, so it felt
