Do y’all know who Marie Prevost was? She came up in conversation today and I’ve been thinking about her ever since.
She was a silent film actress. Had some success and then some setbacks. Turned to alcohol, the way so many people in the 1920s did. Depression and alcoholism led to weight gain, and then to crash dieting so she could get and keep roles.
By her mid-30s, the cycle caused her to hit bottom.
She died. She literally starved herself to death, in an effort to lose weight, and died of malnutrition.
But we don’t remember Marie Prevost as a cautionary tale about the dangers of dieting. We remember her because, unfortunately, her body was not found for several days and her limbs showed signs of having been gnawed at by her pet dog.
We’ve all been killing ourselves in the name of thin for a long time.
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I knew about her because of the Nick Lowe song, which came out in 1977, that bore her name. The song mentions “quaalude bombs” (I always thought ludes didn’t exist until the 1960s) and of course the dog thing, but nothing about starving herself to death. Thanks for setting me straight.
How awful! How simply awful.
I think a lot of people (myself included, before I read this) believe that our obsession with thin is a relatively new thing, but this is proof that it’s far from (and then there’s that whole corseting womens’ waists down to eighteen inches thing…).
I thought that kind of thing was an urban legend. How horrifying!