The Weight of Fame: A Hollywood Tragedy

Pushkin. In the wardrobe department of a Hollywood studio, an eighteen year old called Molly O'Day is trying on a costume. Around her seamstresses, target fasteners, pins gritted between their teeth. Molly O'Day wore this same dress last year for her star turn in nineteen twenty seven's The Patent Leather Kid.

Now it doesn't quite fit. There's nothing strange about that. Molly O'Day is a teenager, her body is growing changing. Why should she fit last year's template? And Hollywood costumiers know every trick in the book. They know how to unpick lining, how to let out seams, how to shift a row of hooks and eyes to the very lip of the fabric. They can just alter this dress, can't they? Alas, No, Molly Oday and this dress are a problem, because locked away in another room on that studio lot is a contract.

It stipulates working hours and exclusivity and something else too. Molly O'Day must hold the same silhouette forever, as long as she wants to keep working. The body of this young woman must not change. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales Molly o' day wasn't her real name. She was born Suzanne Noonan, and she had begun life thousands of miles from Hollywood, the daughter of an opera singer and a prominent New Jersey judge, and the youngest of eleven children. The family was comfortable until Judge Noonan died young.

The banks closed, and we became poor.

Suzanne recalled struggling Missus. Noonan sold their home and took her children to Los Angeles, where the film industry was exploding. Movie palaces were springing up amid the orange groves and oil fields. The city was part boomtown, part fantasy machine.

I was fourteen, so I tried acting. I was pretty a fresh face, so it all took off.

Still just a schoolgirl, Suzanne was spotted by Hollywood pioneer Hal Roach. She began acting in his two reelers, slapstick comedy shorts, screened before a main feature presentation. It was a brilliant training round. She learned how to act for camera alongside soon to be legends Laurel and Hardy. But her big break came in nineteen twenty six, when aged sixteen, she beat two thousand other girls to win the role of Curly Callahan in war epic The Patent Leather Kid.

General production manager Al Rockett was impressed by her raw instinct.

One of the problems was finding a actress for the part of the heroine. I told this girl the story of the pat and Leather Kid very carefully and slowly, and she had tears in her eyes when I finished.

As Curly Callahan, Suzanne Shape shifted from flighty nightclub dancer to tender nurse on the front lines of the Great War. It was a far cry from the physical comedy she was trained in, but she delivered. Her co star Hollywood Royalty Richard Barthelmus appears to have appreciated her gift for acting too.

He was a delight to work with. He took me under his wing, so to speak.

The studio behind the film, First National Pictures, signed Suzanne to a long term contract under which she would star in several features a year. They recognized that in this young woman they discovered two things. A great talent than someone they could sell. With her dark hair and expressive eyes, Susanne was ripe for rebranding as a homegrown Celtic starlet, so they gave her a new name Molly o' day was born. The patent Leather Kid was a smash hit.

Richard Barthelmess was nominated for an Academy Award, and critics praised Molly's performance too.

She is sincere and earnest and most competent in a part that demands a great deal.

Said The New York Times, proving she was no one hit wonder. Molly went on to star in a string of popular features. In the Lovelorn, she navigated the pitfalls of youthful romance. In Hard Boiled Haggerty, she had a double role, playing both frenchwoman Germaine Benoit and Germaine's lookalike sister.

In The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, she reunited with Richard Bartelmus. Molly was also named a Wampus Baby Star, a prestigious accolade bestowed by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers. It wasn't unlike thirty under thirty lists today.

Naturally, if you do something good, you get other offers.

As a Baby Star, Molly landed deals to market cosmetic products, appearing in national campaigns for brands such as Luxe Toilet soap. But more than that, anointment by the Wampus was the definitive seal of approval from the industry's gatekeepers. It signaled to everyone who mattered that Molly O'Day was the next big thing. Her personal life flourished too. She began dating actor and dancer George Raft, who described her as one of the sweetest and most gentle women he had ever met.

To the press and the public, Molly had it all. She was being hailed as the miracle girl of Hollywood. Her rise so swift and so brilliant that the papers called it meteor like an apt description, perhaps that one that carries a quiet warning Metea's burn bright. But they also burn fast two first National pictures, Molly O'Day wasn't a miracle girl, but an item on a balance sheet.

By the nineteen twenties, the movies were a lucrative in industry, and the major studios controlled the entire pipeline. They owned the film sets, the distribution networks, and the movie palaces up and down the country. They farmed their actors out for brand deals and took a cut of the profits. The industry revolved around a vital resource, star power. It was the stars, magnetic and beloved who pulled millions of Americans into the movie theaters each week. It was those same stars who sold the sheet music, the cosmetic products, and the fashion trends. The stars were the studio's most bankable assets, and so to minimize risk, studio executives treated them not as partners but as corporate property. Screenplayers weren't

freelancers who negotiated a new deal with each movie. Instead, they were salaried employees with long term contracts, iron clad agreements that covered everything from working hours and pay to how they should behave in their private lives and who they could marry. The more popular a star became, the greater their power to negotiate perks such as private dressing rooms, top billing, and script approval. But newer stars on the lower rungs of the studio system were little more than cogs in a massive machine. If they stepped out of line, they faced suspension without pay, or even dismissal. It was a confining, precarious way to live.

It was the people you worked with that became favorites, not the studio.

Said Molly, You did as you were told, and what you were told might not just be a about your work schedule. Or your love life. It might also extend to your measurements. Some contracts specified a maximum weight for a performer. Others included clauses about facial and physical disfigurement, and in practice, any bodily change that might result in lower box office returns could be lumped under this vague umbrella.

On the surface, Molly's career was flourishing, but behind the scenes, the scripts stopped pouring in. Molly should have been memorizing lines, but instead she found herself waiting at home for work. In the language of the studio system, she was idle. Fan magazine Photoplay reported that Al Rocket summoned the teenager to his office, scrutinized her body, and then delivered a crushing blow.

Molly, you can get as fair as you please. It's your life and you have to live it. But as far as we're consigned, you're through. That is, until you get down to the right physical size for our pictures.

It was an ultimatum, diet or else. Molly had gained some weight, and First National Pictures wasn't happy about it. She hadn't gained much, but the fashion of the day was to be extremely thin. The ideal the sylph like flapper, and Molly was around twenty pounds heavier than the average screen star of her height. Fan magazine Photoplay thought it knew how this had happened.

Molly didn't dissipate a core to accepted standards. She didn't run around with men. She didn't buy rolls, Royce's or swimming pools and tie up all her income on down payments. She just bought ice cream and cream puffs and candy.

Molly herself recalled things a little differently.

Everything I ate seemed to add pounds. I was a growing kid, and I was hungry. And it was the streamline era in the pictures, where a girl had to have a figure like a lead pencil. I didn't have that kind.

Cautionary tales will return. Spring nineteen ninety six, twenty nine year old Mary Lennon of Boston was planning her wedding. She and her fiancee Tom were hoping to raise a big family, and they were excited about their life together. Mary had promised her mother that there'd go wedding dress shopping, but first she wanted to lose some weight she'd gained over the winter months. She was keen to look and feel her best at her wedding. This was the nineteen nineties.

Trying to look and feel your best meant confronting some unforgiving beauty standards. Emaciated heroin chic was dominating the runways. Meanwhile, Hollywood was pumping out star studied wedding rom coms. But the big day wasn't just a rite of passage, but a glossy, high value production with the Bride as its smaller star. Mary had been athletic for much of her life, and until now she hadn't worried about her weight. Because of a family history of thyroid problems. She decided to consult an endocrinologist who ran some tests. Good news, said the doctor, Your thyroid function is perfectly normal. Then she told Mary about a new weight loss treatment called Fenfen.

Across America, it was being touted as a miracle for the speed and ease with which it melted away unwanted fat. Fenfen was actually an off label combination of two pre existing drugs, fenfluramine, an appetite suppressant, and fenamine, a mild stimulant. Together they performed a clever trick. Fentamine boosted patients energy levels, while fenfluramine told the brain to flood its synapses with extra serotonin, creating a feeling of fullness. Mary was intrigued by the little blue and White pills, so the doctor wrote her a prescription and she started taking them. They worked well. Ten pounds quickly disappeared from Mary's body. Eleven days into her treatment, she arranged to meet her parents

for a round of golf. Out on the course, she suddenly felt dizzy. Her chest tightened. She began to panic. I can't breathe. Mary gasped, I think I'm going to faint. Towards the end of nineteen twenty seven, First National Pictures gave Molly twelve weeks to restrict her calorie intake and fit back into her costume from the patent Leather Kid.

If she couldn't, there'd be consequences. Then, as now, the issue of weight was make or break in Hollywood. To secure a plum roll. Lilah Lee once lived on nothing but orange juice. She dropped eight pounds in less than two weeks. Vilmabanke had to lose fifteen pounds before Samuel Goldwyn would hire her. Fan magazines and Gossip rags compounded the pressure incessantly speculating about screen stars measurements and diets, and bluntly acknowledging that an actress's talent was far less important than her figure. As actress and model Carss Palmer warned.

The said is sat in the world is that of a pretty girl eating marshmallow, sundaes.

The magazine's openly shamed Molly, describing her solid flesh. One paper cruelly claimed that in her effort to slim down, she visited influenza patients, hoping to catch the disease and lose her appetite. Fans were irked by this coverage, and they made it known in their letters to the magazines.

I see Molly O'Day is not allowed to be a star because she's put on a few pounds.

Of weight, wrote one fan.

If directors chose stars that have a few curves instead of girls who look like sticks, I would be better pleased.

But such voices didn't convince studio executives. Molly's agreement with First National didn't require her to hold to a specific weight range, but did include the facial and physical disfigurement clause. The studio seems to have argued that Molly's adolescent weight gain was a kind of disfigurement, and they suspect her without pay. We don't know exactly what diet Molly went on, but in the nineteen twenties there were plenty of options to choose from. In what the press called a reducing craze, women chased the waiflike flapperform with all sorts of punishing regimens.

Some ate nothing but grapefruit, oranges, toast, and eggs for eighteen days straight. Others gave up potatoes, butter and sweets and submitted to regular enemas. A lawless market for reducing aids boomed. Laxative gums, reducing girdles, soaps that promised to dissolve fat away.

Wash away double chins, and years of age with lamars fifty cents a bar.

Other methods were even more sinister. It was rumored that if you swallowed tapeworms, the parasites would absorb anything you ate. Then there were over the counterpills like Rido Fat, which contained concentrated thyroid extract. In nineteen twenty six, one dieter took too many of these and quickly developed heart disease.

She died soon afterwards, at the age of thirty three. Whatever solution Molly chose, it didn't work. Twelve weeks after owl Rocket's ultimatum, she still couldn't fit into the dress. She was replaced as the lead in a picture called The Barker, and again suspended. Molly managed to keep herself busy. Recalling how difficult life had been for her mother, she founded a relief association for women who needed help with childcare but had nowhere else to turn. All the same, this suspension from work, now nearly six months long, must have been bitterly disappointing for Molly, not to mention humiliating, the question of how to win back her career was never far from her mind. By July nineteen twenty eight,

Molly's allotted idle time was coming to an end. Al Rockett sent his boss a memo.

Molly all day starts back on salary to day. We had discontinuing her bonus until we find out what condition she is in and just where she will fit into this year's production.

He needn't have worried. When Molly returned to the studio, she was thoroughly reduced. Triumphant, She donned the costume she had worn as Curly Callahan, but the ordeal had left its mark. Maybe the studio still didn't think she was thin enough. Maybe the relentless scrutiny had bred in Molly a deep internal panic. Either way, the goalposts had moved, and fitting into the dress no longer represented victory. Maintaining a slim silhouette through diet would be a grueling, lifelong battle.

But what if there was a permanent solution. Everyone in Hollywood knew that there were doctors who, for a fee, would remake the body, surgeons who tightened wrinkles, altered noses, and sliced fat clean away. Boston, nineteen ninety six. Yan's distressing symptoms continued. She visited her doctor's office to ask if the dizziness and shortness of breath could be a side effect of her new medication, and was told by the office nutritionist to stop taking fenfen. After that, her symptoms improved, but a few months later they were back and worse. Flights of stairs left Mary totally exhausted. Her legs and stomach began to swell with water retention. She felt like she was suffocating, and she collapsed at work. Eventually,

Mary was so unwell that she and Tom were forced to postpone the wedding. In November, matters came to a head. Mary was rushed to a Boston emergency room, where doctors threaded a thin catheter into her art to check the flow of blood around her body. Soon enough, they had a diagnosis, primary pulmonary hypertension PPH. The delicate capillaries sending oxygen to Mary's lungs were thickening with scar tissue. They were narrowing closing. Her heart was exhausted from trying to pump blood to the blocked tissue, and it was failing. Petrified, Mary listened to the grim prognosis. The damage was permanent.

Most patients with PPH didn't survive more than a few years. Twenty nine year old Mary had taken some pills to help her lose weight for her wedding. Months later, she was handed what amounted to a death sentence. In Hollywood, Molly, or perhaps the studio executives responsible for her contract, got in touch with surgeon to the Stars, Dr Robert Griffith, who practiced a procedure known as lipectomy, the removal of fat such body contouring was in its infancy and it was dangerous. Anesthesia was rudimentary, penicillin hadn't been developed yet, and the procedure created open wounds that left patients vulnerable to infection. Two years earlier, a young woman from Paris had undergone a similar procedure on her calves. It was

more complicated than her surgeon anticipated. He removed too much tissue, had trouble suturing the gaping wound, and decided not to operate on the second leg. Within days, her condition had deteriorated, gangrene set in, and her leg had to be amputated. Doctor Griffith would likely have known about what had happened to this young woman from Paris, although it's unclear whether Molly herself did. In late nineteen twenty eight, she checked into a Los Angeles hospital where Griffith made long incisions across her hips and legs. He carved away around ten pounds of fat before pulling her skin tort and sewing her back up. Shortly afterwards, Variety reported that Molly had been spotted at the First National Lot, hoping to see

her name on the cast sheets soon, and looking sylph like and happy. She was also weak and walking with a cane cautionary tales will be back shortly. In Boston, Mary Lennan's diagnosis pointed to a catastrophic side effect of her weight loss medication. Fenfenn caused the brain to release extra serotonin, in turn creating a feeling of fullness, But that extra serotonin had also seeped into her bloodstream, causing the small vessels in her lungs to thicken and close.

Mary had taken Fenfenn for just twenty three days, but that had been enough time to set permanent damage in motion. A total heart and lung transplant was deemed too risky for Mary. Her only other option was a mechanical pump, administering a vital drug via a tube straight into her chest. At a cost of up to two hundred thousand dollars per year. Mary was hooked up to the unwieldy pump for twenty four hours a day. If there were any issues with the device, an alarm sounded and she had just two minutes to fix it. If she failed, she'd most likely go into cardiac arrest. It was a terrifying way to live. Mary learned that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, and that she would be unable to safely carry any children. She wept

at this news. Gone were her hopes for a big family with Tom. Now they were focused on getting through each day, managing the risk of infection at the wound site where the tube passed into her chest. Mary told her parents that she was afraid to die, and she told them something else. She didn't want what had happened to her to happen to other women. She was determined to get Fenfen off the market, so her parents helped her find an attorney. Ambitious personal injury lawyer Alex MacDonald took the case on and began sifting through a mountain of internal corporate documents from Wyeth Aurst, which manufactured the key component of Fenfen, and the American Home Products Corporation, its parent company. His goal was to prove that the

companies had known all along about the drug's lethal effects, and that they had hidden them to protect their profits. At home, Alex told his wife about the case. She was a pediatric cardiologist. She had heard offen. In fact, a national weight loss franchise had offered her thousands of dollars to prescribe it to her patients, but her speciality was children's hearts, not weight loss or nutrition, and she flatly refused. Alex soon learned that other doctors had done just the opposite. As he trawled the pharmaceutical data, he discovered that millions of Fenfen prescriptions were being written each year, meaning that millions of people, mostly women, were sitting on a medical time bomb, completely unaware. In December nineteen twenty eight,

Molly was still idle. First National had sidelined her entirely. Whether it was because she was still too weak, still not thin enough, or because public gossip had tarnished her star power, the studio kept her on the shelf. Molly's boyfriend, George Raft, blamed her unemployment on the angry scars that now wrapped around her body. He was furious with her quack surgeon, who he said had not only ended her career, but nearly killed her. Here lay the bitter irony of Molly's sacrifice. She had submitted to a violent medical procedure and had her flesh carved away to satisfy the studio's demands, and now in the eyes of the studio, she was unusable, A broken product. In nineteen ninety nine, a newspaper reported

that she had gained the pounds back. When her contract came up for renewal, First National quietly let it expire. The following year, Molly swapped the movies for a touring vaudeville act. It was a disaster, panned by the critics. They thought she moved clumsily, as though she was uncomfortable in her own body. In November nineteen thirty, after the failure of her vaudeville show, Molly filed for bankruptcy. By winter nineteen ninety six, Mary Lennon's life revolved around the heavy pump, but one day she managed to get out of the house to see a movie. In the darkness of the cinema, the tube came loose. She rushed to the lobby and scrabbled to fix it, keenly aware that the two minute clock was ticking down. When she managed

to reconnect the device, she broke down in tears. Mary's condition was deteriorating rapidly. There was so little oxygen flowing through her body that she began to lose the sight in one eye. Then, in February nineteen ninety seven, her heart and lungs gave out completely. Paramedics rushed to the scene.

As they loaded her into the ambulance, she begged them to save her life. They couldn't. Mary Lynnon died in hospital at the age of thirty, less than a year after taking her very first dose of fenfen. Lawyer Alex MacDonald went to Mary's funeral. He watched her fiancee, whose eyes were so puffy from crying that he could barely open them. He watched her parents, who seemed simply dazed.

Instead of walking down the aisle before a bride, I walked behind a casket, said her mother. Five months after Mary's death, the medical establishment formally connected the DOTS. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic announced that they'd found dozens of rare heart disease cases in otherwise healthy young women, the link between them. These women had all been prescribed fenfhn.

In September, under immense pressure, the FDA forced the drugs off the market. Fenvhn was finally off the shelves, just as Mary had wanted, but the legal battle was only just beginning. Equipped with this new medical data, Alex McDonald pressed on with the Linen family's suit from the nineteen twenties flapper to nineteen nineties heroine chic women have faced a merry go round of impossible physical standards, many of them biologically unachievable for the average human body. And whenever there's an impossible physical standard, a market emerges to sell a technical hack, a miracle soap, a surgeon's scalpel, a cocktail of drugs. In the rush for these fixes, the possibility of collateral damage is all too often minimized. When

Molly O'Day's teenage body did exactly what normal healthy bodies do, she was shamed and punished, so much so that she submitted to the surgeon's knife. Decades later, Mary Linnon was handed a different fix, little blue and white pills that promised weight loss as they quietly mutilated her body from within.

It might be tempting to dismiss Molly and Mary as simply vain or naive. I think their decisions are entirely understandable. A glowing career was being dangled in front of Molly. It was her employers, the people responsible for her income, who asked her to shrink. Mary, on the other hand, wasn't being ordered to lose weight by a studio executive.

No one was writing about her in national magazines. She was a bride to be navigating the visual demands of the nineteen nineties. She was also a patient navigating her health. When she sought guidance, a specialist doctor offered her Fenfenn as a safe medical solution. Both women placed their trust in people who seem to know what they were doing, and met with a brutal commercial logic. Technical hacks are still with us. Some, like GLP one weight loss drugs, promise genuine health benefits. Others, like the Brazilian butt lift, carry a real risk of death for a purely esthetic payoff.

These hacks have very different utilities, but their popularity points to an enduring cultural truth. We treat physical variety not as the feature of human experience, but a bug to be patched, and we reward rapid, visible change, whatever the cost. In January two thousand, the Linen family's civil suit finally went to trial. World renowned cardiologist Dr Stewart Rich took the stand and explained how Fenfenn had rewritten the biology of Mary's lungs. Her death, he said, was akin to slow strangulation or drowning. Attorney Alex MacDonald argued that company executives had received clear reports about the danger to fenfen users of heart and lung damage, and that they'd hidden those reports fearing their profits would suffer. Exhausted by the

trial and weary of the potential for a protracted appeals process, the Linens ultimately agreed to a settlement of fifteen point five million dollars. At the time, it was the largest wrongful death recovery in Massachusetts history. They planned to use some of the money to start a foundation in Mary's name dedicated to the study of primary pulmonary hypertension. In the years that followed, the company had to set aside at least twenty one billion dollars to address the growing national fallout of fenfen. It has consistently denied that it acted improperly. After Molly O'Day lost her leading lady status, she secured a few supporting roles in b movies. In her mid twenties, she walked away from acting altogether. She

got married, had four children, and found success as a real estate agent. In her spare time, she worked with the homeless. In nineteen ninety seven, the year that Mary Lenen passed away. Molly was living peacefully in California, a matriarch in her eighties with eight grandchildren and twelve great grandchildren.

Shortly before her death in nineteen ninety eight, she gave a final interview. Asked about her years in Hollywood, Molly explained that she was still bothered and saddened by what had happened to her there. She also reflected that she'd been a good actress.

I was a natural.

If only natural had been enough. The key source for the story of Mary Lenen was Dispensing with the Truth, the victims, the drug companies, and the dramatic story behind the Battle over Fenfen by Alicia Mundy. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Bend A. Dafhaffrey edited the scripts.

Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Genevieve Gaunt, Melanie Guttridge, ed Gochen Stella, Harford, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Corin Gilliard Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Milleres is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does make a difference to us and if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members only newsletter every month. Why not join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club.

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The Weight of Fame: A Hollywood Tragedy

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