When twenty-year-old millworker Mary Williamson was crowned "Great Britain's Perfect Woman" in 1913, the prizes were paltry. Apart from her official title, she received little more than a nice write-up in the papers and a job offer from the contest's promoter, fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden.
The press coverage was old hat: as a champion swimmer, Williamson had already had her fair share of ink. But the job was a definite step up, and she soon settled into her new career as the costar of Macfadden's traveling physical fitness show. Billed as "The World's Healthiest Man and Woman," the pair performed feats of physical prowess, the highlight of which was Williamson's nightly jump from a seven-foot platform onto Macfadden's stomach.
It wasn't long before Mary Williamson discovered her biggest prize…and the secret reason for the contest: Macfadden was searching for his third wife, and she was the lucky winner. One day, while the pair was halfway through a ten-mile run, he proposed; when she accepted, she later recalled, "He stood on his head on me for one minute and four seconds."
Macfadden, who was more than twice Williamson's age, was self-made in every sense. To begin with, there was his childhood, which seemed pulled from the pages of a Dickens novel. Born "Bernard McFadden" in 1868 to an alcoholic father and a tubercular mother, he was sickly and scrawny — a condition that only worsened when McFadden was interned in a boarding school whose students, by his estimation, made Oliver Twist seem "dangerously overstuffed."
When McFadden was four, his father died; when he was eleven, his mother followed. At the funeral, an aunt remarked that he was sure to follow, as the signs of consumption were already upon him. McFadden decided to live, just to spite her.
Media Platforms Design Team
Wikimedia Commons
Macfadden, in 1905.
After his mother's death, McFadden signed on for a two-year stint as a "bound boy" on a northern Illinois farm. The open air, plentiful food and hard work did him good, as did subsequent jobs in construction, wood chopping, and printing. Obsessed with physical fitness, he began working out in a gymnasium and, in 1887, hit on the career that would make his fortune. Hanging out his shingle as a "kinistherapist" — a title that he later admitted was meaningless — he declared himself a "teacher of physical culture."
Or, to put it another way, he became one of America's first personal trainers.
With the new job came another change. Not content with his birth name, McFadden exchanged it for "Bernarr Macfadden," a more "picturesque" and "distinctive" moniker that he though was evocative of a lion's roar. And roar he did: never a shrinking violet, Macfadden offered endless theories on health and fitness. Proclaiming "Weakness is a crime; don't be a criminal," he waded into battle against what he saw as the six pillars of sickness in America: corsets, white bread, doctors, vaccination, overeating and prudery.
By 1910, Macfadden ruled over a physical fitness empire. Author of eighteen books on health and nutrition (he would eventually write more than 100), he also launched America's first physical fitness magazine, Physical Culture, opened a chain of 1-cent health food restaurants, and founded several spas, which he referred to as "healthatoriums." Along the way, he established the "Coney Island Polar Bear Club," a group that met every winter in New York's famed seaside resort to swim in the frigid Atlantic Ocean. It still exists.
But all was not well in Macfadden's world. Physical Culture's publication of almost-nude photographs drew the ire of anti-pornography activist Anthony Comstock. While Macfadden won most of his court cases, a 1907 article on the dangers of syphilis cost him $2,000 in legal fines and almost landed him in jail. Luckily, he was pardoned by President William Howard Taft.
Another battle centered around Macfadden's healthatoriums. Eager to establish himself as the top man in American health and nutrition, he opened his flagship spa in Battle Creek, Michigan — a small city that just happened to be home to two of America's most famous health experts: W.K. Kellogg and Charles W. Post. To add insult to injury, Macfadden also launched a cereal,"Strengthfude," that directly competed with Kellogg and Post's products. Macfadden's offering never took off — despite the big picture of him on the front of the box.
But Macfadden's fortunes were about to change. Soon after their wedding, he and Mary began building a family. Twelve years of almost permanent pregnancy resulted in seven children — Byrnece, Beulah, Beverly, Braunda, Byron, Berwyn, and Bruce — that Macfadden used to test out — and sell — his theories on health and fitness. For years, the brood filled auditoriums across the country, not to mention the pages of Physical Culture.
Media Platforms Design Team
Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
The October, 1926, issue
Macfadden's publishing empire also expanded. At Mary's behest, he launched True Story magazine, a pulp filled with racy tales of alcoholism, premarital sex, adultery, and other crowd-pleasing topics. More magazines followed, including True Romances, Dream World, True Ghost Stories, True Detective, and Photoplay. If a topic was popular, Macfadden would quickly open several magazines to exploit it; if its popularity waned, he would shutter them just as fast. At New York's Macfadden building, he kept track of the winners and the losers by hoisting a flag on the roof for each magazine in the company's roster. It became traditional for employees to begin the day by checking the flags to see if they still had jobs.
By 1935, Macfadden was one of America's top publishers, with a combined readership of over 7.3 million — more than those of Luce, Curtis, or even Hearst publishing. But the crown jewel was his newspaper, The New York Graphic. Also known as "The New York Pornographic," the daily tabloid covered the sleaziest and most lurid stories, illustrating them with "cosmographs," a sort of early Photoshop, in which the faces of celebrities would be pasted onto photographs of models reenacting the headlines.
While Macfadden plumbed the depths of America' publishing gutter, he also attracted some of the top talent of his day: Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan got their start on the Graphic, and Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Mahatma Gandhi contributed articles to other Macfadden publications. His magazines helped elect mayors and governors, senators and Presidents: a physical examination sponsored by Liberty magazine paved the way for FDR's election when it proclaimed that he was physically fit for the rigors of the White House.
But, despite repeated attempts, Macfadden was never able to engineer his own election to the Senate or the Presidency; in fact, although he was instrumental in getting FDR to create a cabinet-level Secretary of Health position, he wasn't able to score an appointment to the job. New York mayor Jimmy Walker — another politician Macfadden endorsed — explained it best when he said, "Everybody knows you can live to be a hundred by following Macfadden's ideas. But New York wants to live the way that I do."
It didn't help that, for all his outstanding advice, Macfadden was also a crank. He founded a religion, "Cosmotarianism," that blended his bizarre theories on physical fitness with the Bible. And some of his theories were, indeed, bizarre: convinced that baldness could be cured by tugging on one's hair, he wore a towering pompadour; believing that physical contact with the "magnetic currents" of the earth could inspire feats of sexual prowess, he often went barefoot; furious at the fashion industry, he would wear his suits until they fell off his body. Combined with his tendency to challenge strangers to fights, it's hardly surprising that Macfadden was sometimes mistaken for a dangerous vagrant.
Media Platforms Design Team
Thoms D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Macfadden in '52, training for his 84th birthday parachuting jump
Mary Macfadden helped contribute to the public ridicule. After the births of their seven children, she had a hard time living up to her husband's exacting physical requirements. That, combined with his serial infidelities and her refusal to bear him more children, led to steadily escalating fights. They divorced in 1946; in 1953, she published Dumbbells and Carrot Strips, a scathing memoir of her marriage that roundly ridiculed Macfadden's numerous quirks.
Despite his troubles, Macfadden remained buoyant. He celebrated his 81st birthday by parachuting out of an airplane while wearing a business suit, a feat that he widely publicized and repeated on his following two birthdays. By 1955, however, he was starting to slow down. In October of that year, he developed a urinary blockage, which he attempted to cure by employing his favorite treatment: a three-day fast. When that didn't work, he was admitted to a hospital, where he died.
Most of Macfadden's businesses have disappeared, but the culture he inspired is still going strong. There are more spas and quack health remedies than in his day, and the white bread that he detested is more reviled than ever. The physicality that he championed — and which he passed on through acolytes like Charles Atlas — has become part and parcel of modern life. And the world of breathless confessions and sleazy gossip and retouched photos and lurid headlines that he helped create continues on in hundreds of magazines and websites, talk shows and podcasts and blogs. Pushups or pinups, wheatgrass or gossip, we're still living in Macfadden's world.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57zZ6urGWgpLmqwMicqmimlazAcK2RbG1qaF%2BowbOtzaCcZqyRobJutMisq6iqmZh6p7XTp5ysq12cwrPBjJucq6aRp79uucCcnZqclJq7cA%3D%3D