Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • Decline…and comeback. By the 1960s, tap’s popularity had waned, and many well-known dancers left it entirely. But it found a new audience with the release of the documentary film No Maps on My Taps (1979), followed by the hit Broadway musical Sophisticated Ladies (1981), which starred the best-known modern tap dancer (and tap advocate), 35-year-old Gregory Hines. Other tap films: The Cotton Club (1984), A Chorus Line (1985), and Tap (1989), starring Hines, Sammy Davis Jr., and 16-year-old Savion Glover, who fused tap with urban dance forms. He became a sensation with the 1996 Broadway musical Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. Hines called him not just a good tap dancer but the best tap dancer who’s ever lived.

  GRIP

  Bathroom readers take note: You can find inspiration in the oddest places.

  On the third floor of the Philadelphia Free Library is a glass case displaying a stuffed crow. It’s a raven, to be precise—the very bird considered by many scholars to have been the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “The Raven.” How this stuffed bird came to inspire Poe’s poetry lies in the life and work of another great 19th century writer. Charles Dickens had a talking raven named Grip as a pet. The bird delighted his family and friends with pronouncements like, “Keep up your spirit!” “Never say die!” and “Polly, put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea!” Grip died in 1841 after eating lead paint off a wall, an event Dickens recounted in a letter to a friend: “On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but soon recovered, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed, ‘Halloa, old girl!’ and died.”

  Dickens had the bird stuffed and set in a glass case. His novel Barnaby Rudge, published later that year, featured a talking raven named Grip. When the bird first appears in the book, someone asks, “What was that tapping at the door?” Someone else answers, “’Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter.” Poe was working as a reviewer for Graham’s Magazine when Barnaby Rudge was printed in the United States. His review was favorable, except for one major flaw: the talking raven. Poe felt it could have been more “prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” Four years later Poe published his famous poem, with its lines “Suddenly there came a tapping…at my chamber door,” and “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’ ” The poem was an immediate success and secured Poe’s lasting reputation in American literature.

  As for Grip, after Dickens’ death the bird and case were sold at auction (the bird went for $210; the letter describing its death for $385), eventually ending up in the collection of Col. Richard Gimbel, the world’s foremost collector of Poe memorabilia. By then Grip’s association with Poe’s poem had been well established by scholars. In 1971 Gimbel’s entire collection, including the bird, was donated to the Philadelphia Library, where you can still see it today in the Rare Book department.

  SPOKESTHINGIES

  Why spend big bucks on an unpredictable, real-life celebrity to endorse your products when you can make one up from scratch?

  MAVIS BEACON

  If you used a computer program to learn to type in the past 20 years, you probably used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It’s one of the bestselling instructional software titles ever, with more than five million copies sold since 1987. But the professorial-looking woman who appears on the box, it turns out, isn’t typing wizard Mavis Beacon. Beacon isn’t even a real person. The attractive woman in the photo is former fashion model Renee Les-perance. In 1985 Les Crane, chairman of Software Toolworks, the educational software company behind the program, spotted Les-perance in a store in Beverly Hills and hired her to “be” Mavis Beacon. The marketing department created the name—Mavis, in honor of singer Mavis Staples, and Beacon, as in a guiding light.

  THE GEICO CAVEMEN

  In 2004 GEICO insurance hired the Martin Agency, which had created the GEICO Gecko, to come up with a new ad campaign to direct customers to its Web site. The agency’s writers built on the idea that the Web site was so user-friendly, “even a caveman can do it.” The first ad depicted a TV-commercial shoot: An actor says the catchphrase, then the boom microphone operator—an actual caveman—storms off the set, shouting, “Not cool!” In the second ad, a GEICO rep takes two cavemen out to dinner to apologize. The cavemen are dressed in tennis whites and ordering “roast duck with mango salsa,” the joke being that they aren’t dumb and primitive, they’re Yuppies. By 2007 dozens of Caveman commercials had aired and were so popular that ABC turned the concept into a sitcom called Cavemen. The show wasn’t as popular—it lasted only six episodes.

  THE NAUGA

  In the late 1960s, the industrial chemical giant Uniroyal created a synthetic leather substitute out of plastic and vinyl. It was developed in its Naugatuck, Connecticut, plant, so they called it naugahyde. But the company still had to convince consumers that naugahyde was a viable material for products like car seats and sofas, and that it was different from cheap, hard plastic surfaces—more like a soft animal hide. Solution: Invent an “animal” to be the source of naugahyde. Uniroyal launched a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign that claimed naugahyde was the (shed) skin of a magical animal called the Nauga. Uniroyal’s artists designed a short, smiling brown creature, reminiscent of the Tasmanian Devil from the old Warner Bros. cartoons, and writers created an elaborate backstory: They are native to Sumatra and, in the 18th century, came to America, where they gladly donated their skins to make uniforms for George Washington’s Continental Army. The campaign worked—by the end of the 1970s, naugahyde was the most commonly used synthetic leather in the U.S.

  JACK

  In the 1970s, fast food chain Jack in the Box used a simple graphic of a clown head as their logo—a white ball with two blue dots for eyes, a red smile, and a little yellow hat. They stopped using the logo in 1980, when the restaurant chain wanted a more adult-friendly image. But they brought it back in 1995, when the clown head was turned into an advertising mascot: Jack, the company’s eccentric CEO. From the shoulders down, Jack was a man in a business suit. From the shoulders up, he was a gigantic version of the clown logo. Cheeky ad campaigns provided Jack’s backstory—he loves hamburgers because he grew up on a Colorado cattle ranch, he’s married to a normal-headed human woman, and he has a son who shares his “genetic” condition. The character was the brainchild of the chain’s marketing executive Dick Sittig, who also provides the voice for Jack. Since the introduction of CEO Jack, the chain’s sales have tripled.

  “I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.”

  —Philip Dusenberry

  MEET HITLER’S DOCTOR

  Was der Führer felled by foolish fart pharmacology?

  Here’s Part II of the foul tale. (Part I is on page 77.)

  STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

  By the mid-1930s, the Nazis had already begun destroying what before their rise had been one of the most advanced medical communities in the world. At the same time that they undermined the scientific underpinnings of the German medical establishment with their loony racial theories and crackpot pseudoscience, the Nazis were driving German Jews out of the profession, along with any “Aryan” Germans who opposed Nazism. And yet for all the damage the Nazis did to German medicine, there were still plenty of skilled, capable doctors from whom Hitler could choose his personal physician. So it’s all the more remarkable that he chose someone as peculiar and incompetent as Dr. Theodor Morell.

  DOC MEDIOC–RITY

  Morell’s resume left a lot to be desired. A onetime ship’s doctor who served as an army physician during World War I, he opened a general practice on the fashionable Kurfürstendamm street in Berlin after the war and counted a lot of society figures—politicians, actors, artists, nightclub singers—among his patients. With the exception of occasional cases of bad skin, impotence, or venereal disease, Morell shied away from treating people who were genuinely ill, referring these cases to other doctors while he built up a clientele of fashionable, big-spending patients whose largely psychosomatic illn
esses responded well to his close attention, flattery, and ineffective quack treatments.

  Morell’s skill at coddling his patients was masterful, but his abilities as a physician were clearly deficient, to the point of putting their health at risk. “In practice he was occasionally careless,” biographer John Toland writes in Adolf Hitler. “He was known to have wrapped a patient’s arm with a bandage he had just used to wipe a table, and to inject the same needle without sterilization into two patients.”

  “MADE” IN BULGARIA

  In addition to overseeing his practice, Morell served on the board of Hageda, a pharmaceutical company that manufactured a strange medication called Mutaflor, whose active ingredient was live bacteria cultured from the fecal matter of “a Bulgarian peasant of the most vigorous stock.”

  Mutaflor was intended to treat digestive disorders—the theory being that digestive problems were caused when healthy bacteria, which lived in the intestinal tract and were essential to good digestion, were killed off or crowded out by unhealthy bacteria. Ingesting the cultured dung of a vigorous, clean-living Bulgarian peasant, the theory went, would reintroduce beneficial bacteria into an unhealthy digestive tract and restore proper function.

  That was the theory, and while it sounded pretty good, in truth it was literally a load of crap, and good German doctors knew it. Not so Dr. Morell—and because he had a financial interest in the company that made Mutaflor, he prescribed the pills to virtually all his patients, whether they suffered from digestive complaints or not. Hitler did suffer from digestive complaints, of course, and Morell soon had the Führer taking regular doses of Mutaflor …plus two tablets of Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills at every meal.

  PRIMARY PHYSICIAN

  Hitler’s intestinal ailments were intermittent and, as had been the case during his childhood, still had a considerable psychological component: He suffered from attacks of cramps and farting during times of stress, then when things calmed down his symptoms abated. After he placed himself under Morell’s care, it was just a matter of time before his condition improved, and when relief finally came a few months later—at about the same time his eczema began to clear up—Hitler naturally attributed his deliverance to Morell.

  The “cure” was only temporary, but no matter—the Führer had finally found a doctor he could believe in. “Nobody has ever before told me so clearly and precisely what is wrong with me,” Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer. “His method of cure is so logical that I have the greatest confidence in him. I shall follow his prescription to the letter.” Morell would remain by Hitler’s side until almost the very end.

  HEAVEN SCENT

  Hitler took to Morell immediately, but the Führer’s inner circle despised the doctor from the start, and not just because he was an obvious quack—he was also an extremely unpleasant person to be around. The morbidly obese Morell did not bathe regularly: His skin and hair were greasy, his fingernails often filthy, and when his powerful body odor and bad breath weren’t enough to clear the room, his propensity for belching and farting in polite company usually did the trick. “He has an appetite as big as his belly and gives not only visual but audible expression of it,” Speer observed.

  Even Eva Braun found Morell repulsive, but Hitler didn’t care. When she and others complained about his offensive body odor, the Führer brushed them off. “I do not employ him for his fragrance, but to look after my health,” he’d say. (Who knows? Maybe Hitler liked having another farter in the room, so that no one who “smelt it” could tell for sure who’d “dealt it.” )

  TAKE THIS…AND THIS…AND THIS

  In those early days, Morell’s influence on Hitler was fairly benign; the stinky doctor limited himself to giving diet tips and, of course, prescribing Mutaflor and Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills. But over time he became more controlling over what Hitler was allowed to eat, and the number and strength of the medications he prescribed increased dramatically. In the years to come he would prescribe enzymes, liver extracts, stimulants, hormones, painkillers, sedatives, tranquilizers, muscle relaxants, morphine derivatives (to induce constipation), laxatives (to relieve it), and other drugs by the dozen.

  According to one estimate, by the early 1940s Hitler was taking 92 different kinds of drugs, including 63 different pills and skin lotions. Some medicines were taken only when specific complaints arose, but others were taken every day. By the summer of 1941, Hitler was popping between 120 and 150 pills a week on average. And on top of all the pills, Morell also administered injections—as many as 10 a day, sometimes more. So many, in fact, that even Herman Goering, Hitler’s heir apparent and himself a morphine addict, was startled by their frequency and took to calling Morell the “Reich Injection Master.”

  Nobody knew for sure what Morell was giving Hitler. There were other physicians in the Führer’s service—two surgeons, Dr. Karl Brandt and Dr. Hans Karl von Hasselbach, traveled with Hitler in case he ever needed emergency surgery, and other specialists, such as visiting ear, nose, and throat doctor Erwin Giesing, were called on from time to time to treat specific complaints. But none knew what Morell was really up to. Any physician worth his salt would have been alarmed by all the injections Morell was administering. But whenever Brandt or anyone else asked him what was in the shots or why Hitler needed so many, he shrugged them off as vitamin or glucose (sugar) injections, or answered cryptically, “I give him what he needs.”

  THE ONE-TWO PUNCH

  Considering all the medications that Morell was administering to Hitler, why was it Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills that finally prompted the other physicians to act? It may have been the simple fact that they came in a tin. Most of the pills and shots that Hitler took were unidentified and mysterious, but Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills came in a little metal container (like Altoids breath mints or Sucrets throat lozenges) that identified them by name and even listed the active ingredients: gentian, belladonna, and an extract of something called nux vomica.

  The gentian was harmless enough. But the presence of the other two ingredients in the pills, plus the revelation that Hitler, on top of all his other medications, was popping as many as 20 of the anti-gas pills a day, was startling. Even if Dr. Morell had read the label on the tin, he might not have known that nux vomica is a seed that contains large amounts of strychnine, commonly used as the active ingredient in rat poison. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, contains atropine, a toxic substance that can cause excitement, confusion, hallucinations, coma, and death if taken in large quantities.

  That’s what alarmed Dr. Giesing when he saw the six black pills sitting on Hitler’s breakfast tray that morning in July 1944: Without even realizing it, Hitler’s own personal physician had exposed him on a daily basis to significant doses of not one, but two deadly poisons.

  DER GUINEA PIG

  By then it was obvious to everyone around him that Hitler’s physical and mental state were deteriorating. His tremor had become quite pronounced, his memory was slipping, he was having trouble following conversations, and his mood swings were intensifying. Giesing wondered if the rat poison in the fart pills was the cause of some or all of these symptoms. He popped a few tablets himself…and when he began to experience some of the same symptoms, including irritability and abdominal cramps, he shared his theory with Hitler’s surgeons, Dr. Brandt and Dr. von Hasselbach.

  THE PLOT THICKENS

  Brandt and von Hasselbach had never liked Dr. Morell and had no faith in his abilities, and like Dr. Giesing they were concerned for the state of Hitler’s health. Now, they thought, they had an opportunity to get rid of Morell once and for all and give the Führer the proper medical care he clearly needed. But if they thought getting rid of Morell would be easy once his incompetence was exposed, they soon learned how mistaken they were. When Brandt told Hitler what was in the pills he was popping like candy, he not only took Morell’s side, he fired Brandt and von Hasselbach for daring to interfere with Morell, and he told the visiting Dr. Giesing that his ser
vices were no longer needed.

  Even though Morell was as stunned as everyone else to learn that he’d been medicating the Führer with rat poison, Hitler himself didn’t seem to mind. “I myself always thought they were just charcoal tablets for soaking up my intestinal gases, and I always felt rather pleasant after taking them,” he explained.

  And though it was Morell’s responsibility to keep track of how many of the pills Hitler was taking, Hitler himself had ignored Morell’s instruction to take only two at a time and had begun popping six or more before each meal. The dictator didn’t blame the pills for his stomach cramps, either, since those dated back to his childhood.

  Now that Hitler understood that the fart pills were potentially dangerous, he stopped taking so many…but his health did not improve. His physical and mental decline not only continued, it accelerated.

  So what was the true cause of his collapse?

  Part III of the story is on page 441.

  VERY QUIZ-LIKE

  Latin words that end in “ine” describe the characteristics of particular animals

  —canine, for example, means doglike. Can you match the other “ines”

  to what animal they refer to in English? (Answers on page 537.)

  1. Bear

  2. Dove