In 1959, eight years after Will’s death, the Kellogg Company introduced an even more potent “perfect food” called “Concentrate.” The tiny golden pellets in each box consisted of “defatted wheat germ,” wheat gluten, milled rice, corn, and ten minerals and vitamins; it was 40 percent “high-quality protein” and 99 percent fat free. The product was discontinued in 1981 due to poor sales.45 The great paradox shrouding the W. K. Kellogg Company’s search for the perfect food, however, was that it coincided precisely with when the firm was fortifying its more popular cereals with tons of sugar and artificial flavorings.
John Harvey Kellogg would have no truck with such nutritional pandering and, perhaps, it was best that he did not live to see the thick sugar coating of the cereal industry that began in the post–World War II era. Although taste was always a concern in his food endeavors, the doctor would never condone the addition of huge lumps of sugar, salt, and so many other unhealthy ingredients to his products. Speculation aside, the many foods John invented or helped develop constitute his most lasting contributions to human health and nutrition, even if he is rarely recognized for them. In the United States and around the world, health-conscious consumers continue to consume versions of his health food products, from soy milk, psyllium, and bran cereals to fiber bars and nut foods, all to the betterment of their health, digestion, and diet. Unlike the well-deserved stain on his reputation garnered from his work with the American eugenics movement, the virtual ignorance of John’s work in developing a healthier diet constitutes a historical shame worthy of both correction and recognition.
15
“Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown”
WILL KELLOGG LOVED HORSES. When he was a little boy, his closest companion was Old Spot, the Kellogg family’s nag of dubious Arabian origin. That is, until young Will came home from school one day only to learn that his father had sold the beast to a farmer who wanted it to pull his plow. Apparently, this was the moment when the awkward boy vowed he would someday own a collection of prized horses. Slower to pardon than most glaciers used to melt, Will finally settled this childish score with his father at the age of sixty-five. In May of 1925, he bought an eight-hundred-acre horse ranch in Pomona, California, for $250,000 (about $3.38 million in 2016).1 He could afford it. Will Kellogg was one of America’s best-paid men and each year took home a salary of more than a million dollars (over $14,000,000 in 2016).2
Soon after his land purchase, Will amassed one of the finest collections of Arabian horses in the world. Unlike John, who spent his last years fearing for the degeneracy of the “white race,” Will restricted his theories on breeding strictly to his champion horses, many of which were purchased from the famous Lady Wentworth stables, Crabbet Arabian Stud Farm in Great Britain, and her Sheykh Obeyd Stud Farm near Cairo. Lady Wentworth’s savvy horsemen were renowned for their ability to mate their best horses with the Bedouin breeders’ sleekest animals. Today, more than 90 percent of the Thoroughbred Arabian horses in the world have descended from Crabbet Stud pedigrees.
Will was especially fond of taking out Antez, a “chestnut stallion with blonde mane and tail,” for morning rides around the ranch. At the age of sixty-six, Will nearly died after Antez slipped while climbing a steep hill on a trail wet and muddy from the previous day’s rain. Will fell off the saddle, caught his foot in the stirrup, and found himself upside-down and helpless under the horse. As Will proudly recounted, “The trembling horse stood fast in his steps and remained in this position for four or five minutes until the caretaker came back to investigate our delay and then rescued me from the perilous situation.”3 The cereal king ceased riding altogether a few years later. While out with his son John Leonard, Will fell off his horse and broke a rib. Then and there, he decided it was best to admire his stallions and mares with his feet on the ground, while walking in the company of one of his German shepherds.4
Will with his twin Arabian colts on their first birthday, February 4, 1940. Twin foals occur in about one in ten thousand births. Credit 114
Antez, the Arabian horse who saved Will’s life Credit 115
To keep busy, Will built a mansion he called “the Big House,” situated on a five-hundred-foot-high hill. Designed to impress, Will’s estate cost over $125,000 ($1.67 million in 2016) and was ready for habitation on New Year’s Day of 1927. It featured long buildings of a Spanish design, with red-tiled roofs, yawning archways, and a series of courtyards with gurgling, stone-cut fountains.5 Inside were fourteen rooms, four and a half baths, a fully stocked kitchen, a breakfast room, and a dining room that seated up to twenty guests. The living room was built around a sixty-foot-long picture window, which afforded an excellent view of the Pomona Valley, all the way to the San Jose Hills and, on a clear day, the San Antonio Mountains. Each room was designed to replicate a sense of “early California living.” Directly above the lavish furniture was a lattice of ceiling beams made of distressed oak, all bearing the monogram “W.K.K.” There were two walk-in dressing closets, several sleeping porches, a Skinner pipe organ in the living room (just like the one he had in his Battle Creek home, costing $25,000, or about $334,000 in 2016), and a chapel-like entry hall with an antique tiled mural depicting St. George slaying the dragon.6
Behind the house was a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by a brick and concrete patio, several barns, a seven-car garage to house Will’s convoy of Lincoln limousines, and a machine shop. Alongside these structures was a spacious administration building and living quarters for the ranch foreman, ranch hands, and stable boys. The pièce de résistance was a pristine U-shaped stable. Each of the thirty comfortable stalls in this grand structure was equipped with a watering device fed by a million-gallon reservoir activated by the touch of a horse’s nose. Surrounding the estate were groves of olive, avocado, grapefruit, orange, pomegranate, and lemon trees and three ponds (two for ducks and one for fish). Completing the picture were several winding roads, horse riding paths, and hiking trails, all leading into a canyon filled with bamboo, eucalyptus, ginger, and one of the world’s largest sycamore trees.7
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EVERY SUNDAY, Will and his staff welcomed nearly three thousand visitors into a grandstand built around a horse ring. Some knew of the Kellogg ranch from reading the many newspaper and magazine articles describing it; others watched the horses put through their paces every New Year’s Day at the annual Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena. Millions more heard about the ranch in April of 1939, when Will agreed to make his national radio debut on the NBC Blue Network. He did not pitch his cereal, even if the mere mention of his name conjured visions of Corn Flakes. Instead, he spoke about the recent birth of a set of Arabian colt twins, which he heralded as the world’s only such pair.8
On many of these Sundays, seated right next to the hoi polloi, were members of Hollywood’s film royalty, including “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, and her dashing husband, Douglas Fairbanks; Will Rogers, the one comedian who could reliably make Will laugh; the “It” girl, Clara Bow; Tom Mix, the cowboy star of the silent Westerns; a prim and proper Olivia de Havilland; the strong and silent Gary Cooper; Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” kids; the always sultry Marlene Dietrich; and the comically crude Wallace Beery. On other occasions he hosted Colonel Charles Lindbergh (for whom Will named one of his horses “Hawaragil,” the Arabic word for “airman”) and the humanitarian Helen Keller. Like his brother, Will enjoyed hobnobbing with celebrities, both at his ranch and while dining at Hollywood’s favorite watering hole, the Brown Derby. For example, writing his former daughter-in-law, Hanna, on March 27, 1929, Will gushed over posing for pictures with the silent screen star Colleen Moore, who is best recalled today, if at all, for popularizing the bobbed haircut so many women wore during the 1920s.9
The sumptuous Kellogg horse stable, with a line of visitors on a Sunday waiting to see Will’s horses put through their paces Credit 116
Left to right: W. K. Kellogg, with Carrie Staines Kellogg (Will’s second wife), Hollywood movie star Co
lleen Moore, Mrs. Elizabeth Selden Rogers (a leading suffragist and public school reformer), and Mrs. Clara Butler (Will’s sister), circa 1929 Credit 117
The weekly horse shows began promptly at 2:00 p.m. and ended at 3:30. Over a loudspeaker system, a seasoned announcer told the fans about the lineage of each horse and then described the maneuvers the Arabian jumpers, gaiters, draft, and stock horses were about to perform. Mounted upon them were trick riders ornately dressed as Bedouin horsemen. The climax of the afternoon was a reenactment of the famous chariot race scene from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1925 blockbuster film, Ben-Hur, featuring teams of Shetland ponies, elaborate Roman-style chariots, and several brave charioteers.10
Will rarely mingled with his guests, preferring to sit in his Lincoln limousine, in a reserved slot of the horse ring’s parking lot, watching the crowd watch his horses.11 Despite the droves of people he invited to his Pomona estate, he complained that after living there for more than fifteen years, “I have had only three friends in the whole valley.”12 Even among a throng of grateful visitors, Will was a lonely man.
The finale of Will’s weekly horse shows: a mini-chariot race with Shetland ponies, based on the exciting 1925 MGM film Ben-Hur Credit 118
Will’s greatest contribution to the California scene involved the loan of Jadaan, his best Arabian stallion, to Rudolph Valentino, the movie star famously referred to by journalist H. L. Mencken as “catnip to women.”13 On April 16, 1926, Valentino telegraphed Will with the request to borrow Jadaan for his film The Son of the Sheik, the sequel to his 1921 smash hit, The Sheik.14 Valentino planned on wearing costumes and jewelry costing more than $11,000 (about $147,000 in 2016) to portray “the best dressed Sheik in all of Araby.” For added box office appeal, he cast Vilma Banky, the Hungarian siren discovered by producer Samuel Goldwyn, to play the Sheik’s love interest.15
In Valentino’s mind, the most important actor to cast was of the equestrian variety. As he explained to Will, “I especially ask for Jadaan because I consider him the embodiment of the finest Arab from every standpoint and feel he would be the greatest living example to show people of the world through this picture.”16 Given the value of the animal, Valentino’s plan to make Jadaan a “star” was an attractive but risky proposition. Will’s eldest son, Karl, objected, fearing for the horse’s safety. The next day, April 17, Will overruled Karl and consented to Valentino’s request. Will demanded a nonnegotiable return date of May 1, along with Valentino’s promise to cover all transportation, feeding, and lodging costs, insurance fees of $20,000, and his chief horse trainer’s salary. The “Sheik” accepted the terms and enthused to Will via telegram, “Cannot begin to express my thanks for your great courtesy….You may be sure I will give Jadan [sic] even more considerate treatment than if he were my own Stop Sincere Regards Rudolph Valentino.”17
Rudolph Valentino, in Son of the Sheik, atop Will’s best Arabian stallion, Jadaan Credit 119
Unfortunately, there were several production delays while shooting the film’s desert scenes near Yuma, Arizona. The scorching heat and the angry, biting flies in no way helped the actors, horses, and camels appearing in the film. Way over budget and with too little film in the can, Valentino kept Jadaan longer than the agreed-upon time, a move that was poorly received in Pomona. Both Will and Karl suspected the film star of stalling and secretively using Jadaan for breeding purposes but they could never prove it. In an effort to recall his loan, Will sent reproachful, angry telegrams to the movie set in Yuma. On May 1, for example, Will wired Valentino, “In my business dealings I am not accustomed to treatment of this sort.”18 The horse was eventually safely returned and the film was released to great acclaim and financial success. It grossed more than $1 million in the first year alone (about $13.4 million in 2016), and in the two years that followed it earned more than double that amount.19
On the evening of July 9, 1926, Karl Kellogg and his wife, Etta (but not Will), attended the film’s premiere at Sid Grauman’s famed Los Angeles movie palace the “Million Dollar Theatre.” Karl was disappointed to find there was no formal mention of his father in the credits and that Jadaan had relatively few “close-ups.” There were, however, some exciting shots of the Sheik in the saddle holding on to Jadaan’s reins, as the horse reared up on its hind legs and then raced across the sand dunes, leaving only “a trail of hoof prints.”20
On August 23, while in New York City during a national tour for the movie, Rudolph suffered a perforated ulcer and died of peritonitis. His funeral, and the crush of fans it attracted, made for one of the biggest spectacles of grief and celebrity ever seen on the streets of Manhattan. H. L. Mencken’s tart eulogy for Valentino easily could have been applied to the man who lent the actor a horse, minus the descriptor “young”: “Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other young men….Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.”21
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AT ODDS WITH WILL’S vast material success was an equal amount of emotional impoverishment and conflict in his personal life. Sadly for the people he loved the most or worked with most closely, Will too often projected the detritus of his inner demons directly onto them. It was a destructive dynamic that refused to die until Will did. “There was in Mr. Kellogg’s makeup,” his authorized biographer Horace Powell noted, “a high degree of intolerance, as there is in the outlook of many strong men. Few of his executives were ever comfortable in his presence.”22 Behind those thick black glasses was a nest of seething grudges against anyone who crossed him or his company. Will kept his own counsel on almost everything and ran his empire as a “one-man government.”23 “Once his mind was made up,” his grandson Norman Williamson Jr. recalled, “there was no changing it through further discussion.”24
When things did not go the way he demanded or expected, Will could explode with a resounding force, such as the time he attended a vaudeville show with his son John Leonard. The comedian on the bill had the audience laughing hysterically over an improvisational song where he made up lyrics about members of the audience. Will was rolling about and chuckling away until the comedian approached his box singing, “I see a little short, fat man in the box, with a bald head.” According to John Leonard, “W.K. got so mad at this, I had to take hold of him and pull him down in his seat.”25
Will reserved his deepest anger, of course, for his brother, John. Their nonstop enmity placed a great deal of stress on the rest of his family, who had no desire to anger either one of them. Shielding the most sparks from this fraternal feud was their sister Clara. After her divorce from Hiland Butler, Clara lived in John’s house, acted as his personal secretary, and, upon Ella Kellogg’s death in 1920, took on many of the domestic duties of the Residence. Several years later, Will invited Clara to stay with him at his palatial Tudor Revival home, “Eagle Heights.” The house was situated on a bluff comprising thirty acres of land and a view of Battle Creek’s picturesque Gull Lake.26 Clara accepted and enjoyed the luxurious accommodations her brother provided. After a few weeks, however, she pined for the more familiar surroundings she shared with John. Clara wrote the doctor about her desire to “come home.” Immediately after reading the letter, John asked his driver to take him to his brother’s estate. At the doorstep, a forceful John told Will in no uncertain terms, “She wants to come back.” Will responded just as heatedly, “She doesn’t need to come home. She is well cared for here.” Much to Will’s discontent, the doctor won this silly battle and Clara returned to the Residence.27
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BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Will was a cold and inattentive husband to his wife, Puss. Bone-weary after long days at his plant or in the boardroom, Will preferred to eat the dinners she prepared in stony silence. The rare snippets of conversation he did offer almost always centered on the conduct of his company. In fact, the Kelloggs functioned in separate spheres. Puss’s life orbited around rearing their children and keeping house even as she struggled with a losing battle against cancer. Will’s life w
as singularly driven by the Kellogg Company. The emotional distance between Puss and Will grew with each passing year and was most poignantly described by a relative recalling family walks on the Saturday Sabbath: “The rest of us went walking with Uncle Will, but his wife never did.”28
As Puss’s cancer progressed, Will did pay closer attention to her but only in his own fashion. He spared no expense in finding the best physicians, consulted with them closely, and sent her on deluxe trips to warm climates so she might recuperate from her latest operation or treatment. The money he spent, however, was not powerful enough to reverse her malignancy. On September 2, 1912, Ella “Puss” Kellogg died. She was only fifty-four. Will found solace by throwing himself deeper into his work even though he knew it could not completely assuage his grief. A relative concerned about Will’s prolonged depression after Ella’s death suggested that he might want to remarry. Will sadly replied, “I made one woman unhappy. Why should I inflict myself on another?”29 Will understood the corrosive effects of his brooding silence and how that might negatively impact his inviting another woman to live in his home.30
Five years later, Will reversed course by courting Dr. Carrie Staines with quiet suppers and long car trips along the Michigan countryside. Staines, a former schoolteacher from Grand Rapids, went to John’s missionary medical school and, for twenty-five years, worked as a physician at the Sanitarium. John told Dr. Staines that he strongly objected to her “keeping company” with Will and threatened to fire her if she continued to see him. When Carrie told Will of her professional dilemma, he “almost impulsively” suggested the solution of marriage. They were wed on New Year’s Day of 1918, thus ending her tenure at the San.31
The Kelloggs Page 38