Alan Whicker - Journey of a Lifetime

Leaving California had been a wrench for Kathy. She had thought of letting him go alone to start a new life in Florida but decided, upon reflection, that days spent breaking in a new man would be time-consuming, and possibly fruitless.

Anyone can be beautiful and loved: it’s just a matter of applying something, taking a course, buying a pot, denying yourself—or being operated upon, slightly. Trying to keep up in the Face Race the average woman, when last counted, spends five years fourteen weeks and six days of her lifetime in front of a mirror. It certainly feels that way when you’re waiting downstairs.

In view of all this I went to Texas at the birth of Spa Culture to observe the acolytes in The Greenhouse, the ultimate purpose-built fat farm or, if you prefer, health resort. This perfumed palace outside Arlington cost a million pounds to contrive and stands bathed in the soft glow of money, dedicated to the sale of dreams.

Women of a certain age (and some a little younger) were queuing to pay many hundreds of dollars a day for the possibility of rejuvenation. Some stayed months, refusing to give up. The ageing and wrinkled, the plump and the bored surrendered dollars and dignity in exchange for solace and repair, for the mirage of being lovelier and sexier—while outside in the harsh sunlight gardeners symbolically dyed parched Texas grass green.

In Britain, where we at least let grass decide its own colour, narcissism has also come to stay—observe the stately march of opulent health farms where the submissive can easily lose, along with avoirdupois, several hundred pounds a week. Only a couple of these country mansions were in operation when I filmed my first report in 1960; today scores of them are relieving patients of many pounds, one way or the other.

Even for Panorama it was hard to deal with the subject too seriously when the presenter was Richard Dimbleby, and not at all sylph-like. He came rolling up to me at the end of the programme, making predictably caustic comments about slimming. We also got a lot of irritable correspondence from enthusiasts after that, yet I have always held that for anyone with the money and the time such a regime can do nothing but good. It is like being lectured by Nanny and sent to bed without supper.

Establishments vary from earnest nature cure centres catering for those with little faith in orthodox medicine, to antiseptic Victorian mansions where society matrons tussle with the years and Show Biz straightens its elbow.

For anyone not really sick, one of the cheerier hydros full of tubbies expensively repenting excess is a more agreeable retreat than those chintzy halls where arthritic old ladies knit by the fireside and silently disapprove of the merely weak-willed. The Surrey hydro where we filmed was populated by jolly carboholics resisting the temptation, alcoholics drying out and executives escaping the telephone: “For a break my Chairman goes to the South of France and puts on a stone. I come here and lose one. He feels guilty; I feel great.” Both ways, it’s expensive satisfaction.

One night during my recce I was watching television amid a subdued group in dressing gowns. The Saturday night play was just reaching its climax when a man in the statutory white Kildare coat strode in and switched off the set, in mid-sentence! I leapt up in outrage. “Ten o’clock,” he said, reproachfully. “Time for bed.” I was about to dash him to the floor when it came to me that this was exactly what we were all paying heavily for: a return to the secure days of Nanny knows best.

Once you have accepted such discipline there is a certain consolation in surrendering to father-figures who know what is good for you, having your days planned down to the last half-grapefruit. The carrot cocktail bar, where you sit and boast about the number of pounds you’ve lost, exudes a dauntless Blitz spirit and a communal sense of self-satisfaction at growing, if not lovelier, at least a little lighter each day.

Whatever the economic charts indicate, we are in the middle of one expansionist trend; at least 10 million men and 12 million women are overweight. We spend some £50 million a year on slimming foods which usually taste like crushed cardboard, exotically packaged lotions, complicated massage and exercise equipment, and pills—yet we all lose weight best by practising one magic exercise performed sitting down, though still difficult: you shake your head from side to side when proffered a plateful.

Insurance companies say that any man of 45 who is 25 lb above his proper weight has lowered his expectation of life by 20 per cent. Put in a more daunting way, he will go at 64 when he might have made 80. Repeat after me: No, thank you…

A 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.”