Linda Hazzard - Fast Ways to Get Healthy

Linda's life started the same as most women’s of the early nineteenth century, marrying a relative stranger at the age of eighteen to start pumping out kids.  However, this life wasn't for Linda.  She had dreams of becoming a doctor, and so, at age 31 she divorced her husband, abandoned her children, and moved to Minneapolis.  Now, becoming a doctor is quite difficult, what with all the schooling, studying, internships, and licensing exams.  Not wanting to deal with any of that bullshit, Linda instead decided to go into natural medicine and became a proponent of fasting to clear toxins from the body.  She killed her first patient at the turn of the century.  She was arrested, but the Minnesota courts found that since she wasn't licensed to practice medicine they couldn't hold her accountable.  Now most people would look at this turn of events and think about re-evaluating their lives.  Linda was not one of these people.  Instead she started pursuing a man named Sam Hazzard, whom she decided was the love of her life despite him being a drunkard who had been discharged from the army for forgery and embezzling, and oh yes, he was also married.  Not caring about any of these things, Linda convinced Sam to marry her.  Surprisingly, he was soon arrested for bigamy and consequently imprisoned for two years.

While Sam rotted in jail, Linda spent her time writing a book on fasting which gained her national recognition.  As soon as Sam was released, the two moved to the Puget Sound area where they opened up a sanitarium in order to put Linda's beliefs into practice.  She believed that all diseases were caused by toxins that built up in the body and that the only way to remove the toxins was to abstain from eating until they were flushed out.  Treatment at the sanitarium involved only eating a thin vegetable broth, daily enemas which could last hours at a time, and massages that more closely resembled beatings.  On some occasions, these treatments could last for months.  Despite the fact that Linda was quite literally starving people to death, the rich and well to do flocked to her to heal their ills.  Many of those who went through the treatment reported an energy and exuberance they had never felt before, but only after they started eating again.  People in the area, who watched the emaciated patients stumble through their daily morning exercises, nicknamed the sanitarium Starvation Heights.  In four years at least fourteen people died, many of whom mysteriously gifted much of their fortunes to the sanitarium.

Things finally came to a head when wealthy British sisters and hypochondriacs Dorothea and Claire Williamson checked into the sanitarium.  Claire died of starvation a few weeks later and Dorothea was declared mentally incapable fell and under Linda's guardianship.  Help arrived in the form of an old family friend from Australia who was greeted by Linda, wearing Claire's clothes and jewels.  The family friend was then shown what she was told was Claire's body, which looked nothing like her, and then taken to see Dorothea, who by this time only weighed 50 pounds.  Linda refused to free Dorothea until her bills were paid.  The family friend responded by having Linda arrested for murder.  The trial that followed was as insane as everything else.  Linda declared that she was being persecuted by the patriarchy and the Big Traditional Medicine industry.  Natural medicine and women’s groups flocked to her aid, some of whom threatened witnesses and ransacked houses and law offices.  Linda declared that the people had died due to being full of too many toxins to cure.  The court declared her guilty and had her imprisoned for manslaughter.

After two years in the clink Linda was released.  She and her husband Sam hastily moved to New Zealand to be closer to a group of ardent supporters.  Here, she wrote another book about not eating, declared herself a dietitian and a physician, and starved more people to death with her quack ideas.  While in New Zealand she was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, but was released by paying a fine, which would work out to $450 in today’s money.  Over the next decade she became quite wealthy, which allowed her to return to the Puget Sound area and reopen her sanitarium.  The sanitarium operated for another fifteen years before finally burning down.  Throughout this period, despite state officials claiming they were keeping an eye on it, numerous more people starved themselves to death, believing that they were making themselves healthier.  Given all this one might ask themselves why people would continue to seek Linda's quack treatments.  The answer is simple, people were just as stupid then as they are today.  In her early seventies, Linda fell ill, so naturally, she prescribed her own treatment to herself and starved to death.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linda_Burfield_Hazzard,_FS,_DO.png

Florence Foster Jenkins - The World’s Worst Opera Singer

Flo was born to rich parents in the late nineteenth century and grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth.  She learned to love the stage at an early age.  A bit of a piano prodigy, she performed at many society events starting at age seven, culminating with playing for President Hayes at the White House.  After graduating from high school she told her father that she wanted to go to Europe to study music.  Her father, not a fan of the arts, told her she would be better off marrying a doctor.  Not liking this answer, Flo ran off and eloped with a doctor of poor reputation named Frank Jenkins, who, thanks to his love of hookers, gave her syphilis.  Upon discovering this, Flo left Frank, though a divorce was never formalized.  For a period of time she tried to make it on her own as a pianist, giving piano lessons to support herself, but an arm injury put an end to those dreams and she eventually moved in with her mother in New York City.  It was here that she met an Englishman seven years her junior, named St. Clair Bayfield, who also happened to be a failed Shakespearean actor.  The two became unofficially married and lived in a strange cohabitation which involved them never sleeping together (because of the syphilis) and St. Clair keeping an apartment and girlfriend on the side.

Before long, Flo's father died, leaving her a fat inheritance.  Flo, deciding to restart her musical career, began taking voice lessons and immersing herself in New York's high society.  She joined dozens of social organizations and even started her own music club, the Verdi Club (giving herself the title President Soprano Hostess) where she staged lavish tableau's, most of which cast her as a main character, wearing extremely elaborate costumes she designed herself.  Flo was generous with her money, donating to most of the major musical and artistic endeavors of the city for the next forty years, and earning the great love and admiration of high society.  However, her great dream was to become a singer, a dream largely limited by the fact that the woman couldn't sing worth a shit.  This isn't an overstatement.  The woman sounded like the death cries of a screaming bird in the mouth of a cat suffering from laryngitis.  She had no sense of rhythm, timing, pitch, or tone.  She was consistently flat and often mispronounced many of the words she was singing.  To make it all worse she always chose to sing operatic solos far beyond her technical abilities and vocal range.  It was distorted and terrible, and Flo had no idea.

She first started singing in her forties and it wasn't too long before she began hosting private concerts at her apartment and at small clubs.  Attendance was by personal invitation only, restricted to a select group of friends and club members.  Strangers and music critics were always excluded.  Her friends, who loved her dearly, treated her performances as the highest of arts, and in the rare cases where someone broke into laughter, which invariably happened at every recital, they cheered loudly to cover it up.  It was a grand world created by the willingness of people to lie to her and Flo's willingness to lie to herself.  She truly enjoyed singing and the stage more than anything else, and saw herself as equal to many of the great opera singers of the day.  To be fair to Flo, it is highly likely that her syphilis, and its treatment with mercury and arsenic, caused at least partial hearing loss and perhaps some mental instability.  It was madness, but a madness that everyone was willing to go along with as long as the money kept flowing.  Few people in history can claim the devotion Flo created amongst her friends and fans.

The mystery surrounding Flo's recitals drove the New York art scene insane.  Anything so private as her shows was sure to cause a clamor.  At age seventy-six Flo finally gave into public demand and agreed to do a show at Carnegie Hall.  Tickets sold out weeks in advance.  Numerous celebrities attended.  At the height of World War II it was the musical event of the season.  Flo, in one of her own wardrobe creations, took the stage.  As the audience fell quiet with anticipation, Flo began to sing, and complete pandemonium broke out.  The audience broke out into laughter, applause, and cheering.  People had to be carried out due to becoming too hysterical.  Throughout it all Flo kept going, basking in the attention.  Though the audience was kind to her, the critics were not.  The scathing reviews of what turned out to be her only public concert hurt Flo deeply.  Within a month she died of a heart attack.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Florence_Foster_Jenkins.jpg

Zelda Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby’s Gal

Zelda was born to a rich southern family at the start of the twentieth century.  Her mother was a southern belle and her father was a remote and strict man.  Both doted on and spoiled Zelda, an active girl who enjoyed swimming, the outdoors, and ballet.  As she blossomed into a teenager she became quite wild for the time: drinking, smoking, and spending all of her time in the company of various boys.  She hungered for the attention of others and did anything to attract it; things like dancing the Charleston (it was a very different time) and wearing flesh covered swimsuits so people thought she swam naked.  Through it all her reputation never suffered thanks to the facts that she was extremely attractive and her family was very wealthy.  Zelda first met F. Scott Fitzgerald when she was eighteen and he was twenty-four.  Scott was stationed at a nearby military base and was a self-assured man who dreamed of being an author.  The two fell in love, but Zelda refused to marry Scott because he was unattractively impoverished.  To correct this, Scott simply wrote his first book which made him an overnight success.  Scott swept Zelda away to New York City and the two were soon married.

Scott and Zelda were the toast of New York, or rather the toast of the city's most famous drunks. Their lives, despite Prohibition, revolved around never ending parties fueled by an unquenchable thirst for booze.  They'd go to parties and drink until they passed out.  They'd swim in public fountains, get thrown out of hotels, and pass out in random houses.  The newspapers loved them.  Soon after the publication of Scott's second novel, Zelda gave birth to a daughter who was quickly handed off to a series of nannies and boarding schools.  The next year Zelda became pregnant again, but got an abortion in order to save her figure.  Behind the couple’s public facade was a shit show of bitter fights, heavy drinking, and rampant spending.  With Scott's writing career on the rocks, the two moved to France where Scott concentrated on his writing and Zelda concentrated on an affair with a French pilot.  Before long Zelda demanded a divorce, which Scott dealt with by locking her in the house until she changed her mind.  Though Scott soon published his third and most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, things quickly fell apart from there.  Zelda tried to kill herself with sleeping pills and Scott double downed on his alcoholism.

Zelda got back at her husband by telling him that she disliked having sex with him because he had a tiny penis and was most likely a homosexual.  This prompted him to show his penis to Ernest Hemingway for his opinion.  Scott sought revenge by having sex with a prostitute, which somehow proved his masculinity.  Upon discovering this, Zelda purposefully threw herself down a flight of stairs at a party, but her husband pretended not to notice.  The two became increasingly miserable.  Scott's writing wasn't going well and Zelda was decidedly bored and lonely, which she coped with by doing crazy antics to get Scott's attention, which he dealt with by guzzling booze.  For a while Zelda took back up ballet dancing, practicing herself into physical and mental exhaustion every day, but Scott called it a waste of time because of her age.  The two still partied, but fewer people wanted to be around them.  Zelda became increasingly erratic until Scott finally had her shut up in a looney bin.  The headshrinkers there diagnosed her with schizophrenia.  It was around this time that they moved back to America, with Zelda transferring to a better, more American mental institution soon after their return.

Zelda's time as a crazy person wasn't wasted.  She wrote a book which enraged her husband since she used many tales from her own life.  Scott believed that if anybody was going to write about Zelda's insanity and his alcoholism it was going to be him.  The book didn’t sell well, nor did the many art pieces that Zelda painted.  Over the next several years Scott finished his fourth novel, but spent most of his time living in Hollywood, having an affair with another woman and taking any writing job he could get to help pay for his wife's medical bills.  Zelda meanwhile underwent numerous shock therapies, completely lost her mind, and started having conversations with many long dead historical figures.  Near broke, the pair continued in a strange love-hate relationship for the rest of their lives, barely ever seeing each other.  Their last time together was a vacation to Cuba where Scott was beaten up for trying to stop a cockfight and became so intoxicated and exhausted that he had to be hospitalized.  Two years later he died at the age of forty-four.  Zelda, newly released from the insane asylum, missed both his funeral and her daughter's wedding.  She soon returned to the familiar comfort of the asylum where she died at the age of forty-seven when it burnt to the ground.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zelda_Fitzgerald_circa_1919_Retouched.jpg