In promotions for the film RKO was able to highlight the danger of polio, the hope of Kenny’s work as a cure, and the allure of romance. A full page advertisement in Life featured Kenny, Dorrie, and her parents inside a bush cabin, while the text referred to the darker side of polio: “it might strike in far away Toowoomba—or hit next door.”106 In a letter from Rosalind Russell to Kenny ally James Henry that was intended to be published in the local paper, she described the previews of the film to “bobbysoxers” in San Francisco, shipyard workers in Oakland, “high type[s]” in Burlingame, Mexicans in Indio, and a mixed group in downtown Los Angeles. Every group, she said, “pull for Kenny like mad … [and are] ONLY interested in the polio part of the story. That amazed us so that the love story will be cut quite a bit. It still runs through the picture, but the polio part of the story predominates and you can hear a pin drop during the medical portion of the film.”107
But it was the love story that appeared in most advertisements. Another advertisement in Life feted “the drama of a desirable woman who turned her back on all that most women hold dear—love, family, home—to write in glorious deeds one of the most thrilling chapters in all human history.”108 In one poster Russell stood in a bridal gown (never shown in the film) under the heading “The wedding gown that waited” with the caption “Tucked away in a cedar chest for half a lifetime by a courageous nurse who wanted desperately to wear it … but wanted even more to help children walk again.”109 An advertisement in Colliers referred to “one of the greatest love stories ever screened.”110 In another poster Russell faced Brack with the words “She won FAME … but lost LOVE!”111 For a Hollywood woman to succeed in the world of medical science she had to sacrifice everything else.
One casualty of the filmmaking process was Kenny’s friendship with McCarthy. As McCarthy’s original scripts were discarded, she began to worry that she would lose credit for her work. But when she tried to have Kenny defend her, she found that Kenny was no longer her champion. Friends later speculated that the end of their friendship was the result of Kenny’s discovering that McCarthy was a lesbian. But Kenny already knew this and had even offered advice to McCarthy over a break-up.112 In fact the break was caused by Kenny’s assessment of movie politics. As she learned that the studio did not like McCarthy’s scripts, she distanced herself from the writer. While Kenny recognized that for McCarthy receiving screen credit “would mean a lot for her future financial status,” in her view the script was based partly on McCarthy’s first script and partly on Kenny’s own autobiography with “a dash of The Kenny Concept book.”113 “Mary rather amuses me with her protestations of a great friendship,” Kenny commented to Nichols, yet “the first time anything occurs to interfere with what she considers her financial position the friendship takes a very secondary position.” Mary had “many good qualities,” Kenny added, but she needed to “cultivate them and try to obliterate her bitterness and mischief making propensities.”114 McCarthy sent Kenny and her Minneapolis friend James Henry an angry telegram, threatening to spread scandal about Russell, but Kenny “threw it in the waste basket.”115 After Nichols agreed to give McCarthy screen credit as co-writer in August 1944, Kenny urged her to “forget that the picture ever existed.” Kenny thanked her for her friendship, but declared that she had “no time to waste on Hollywood jealousies,” and added “for the sake of my own peace of mind which affects my work, I respectfully request that all further associations and bickering shall cease.”116
THE TECHNICAL FILM
In 1944, as the Hollywood machinery slowly ground on, Kenny decided to replace her short silent films with a longer sound film to be produced by Ray-Bell Films, a St. Paul production company. She financed The Kenny Concept of the Disease Infantile Paralysis by selling some of her property in Queensland, and with donations from local businessmen and Rosalind Russell.117 At one dinner, Russell later recalled, Kenny was going “on & on” about what the Hollywood movie had to include. Frederick Brisson finally said Kenny must realize his wife could not make an “honest” picture but an “entertaining and commercial” picture. If Kenny wanted to make a documentary film, she needed to recognize that was not what Hollywood did. That, Russell claimed later, was “how I happened to pay for the [technical] film.”118
Initially, Kenny saw this film as a supplement to the Hollywood movie. It would “contain material the lay people would not understand or appreciate.”119 But the Hollywood movie was taking years longer to make than she had anticipated, so the technical film had to stand on its own. The film was part of Kenny’s effort to control the meaning and significance of her work. It was intended to dramatize her theory of polio, using the camera to point to what the viewer should be seeing while her voice as narrator told the viewer what the scene meant.
Her allies in Minneapolis assumed that it would be a teaching film but Kenny initially resisted this, saying she did not “expect to include anything about treatment in the film.” Instead it was intended to provide evidence “to the world of science” so that scientists could explore her ideas “further,” a task that seemed even more urgent after the critical AMA report in June 1944.120 But she soon recognized that if the film were to “explain to the Orthopedists of the world how to keep the body straight when affected by this disease,” it would need to have a teaching component. She therefore produced 2 reels: The Kenny Concept of the Disease Infantile Paralysis and Second Phase of the Kenny Treatment. The second reel provided practical information about the making and applying of hot packs and demonstrated specific muscle exercises that would help “to stimulate the muscles from their focal point,” but she usually showed both under the title The Kenny Concept.121 Kenny noted that the film was the result of a direct request from medical officers of the Army and Navy, who had come to the Mayo Clinic for postgraduate study in physical medicine and had traveled to Minneapolis to attend a course at the Institute. They had told her, Kenny claimed, that “it was impossible for them to absorb (as they explained it) one or both of my presentations in the short space of one week, and advised me to make a documentary film explaining the revolutionary concept and presenting result[s] of my clinical research.”122 This gave her film, produced during the war, the approval of both physicians and the military.
In September 1944, during the NRC committee visit, Kenny invited the committee to see an early version of this new film.123 In their subsequent report the NRC committee members praised the film as “persuasive and interesting, especially with regard to results accomplished by muscle reeducation.” But they criticized its style as “spectacular and definitely of a propaganda nature” and found fault with its use of unscientific-sounding statements such as “the muscle is host to the virus.”124 Nonetheless, the committee recognized the potential power of Kenny’s film for both medical and lay audiences and urged the NFIP to make a “series of teaching films for the professions on the care of individuals with poliomyelitis, including the Kenny method.”125 NFIP officials did not initially follow this recommendation and continued to rely on films produced by other professional groups. Then in 1945 the NFIP produced Your Fight Against Infantile Paralysis for the public and later Accent on Use for physical therapists.126
In October 1944 Kenny organized what she called a “world premiere” for a Twin Cities audience of local physicians, clergy, members of social and civic organizations, and medical and science university faculty. The audience, estimated at 700, gave Kenny a standing ovation, and she was presented with several gifts of flowers during a reception in the theater’s lounge. To reporters unable to attend, Institute board member Henry Haverstock described the film’s “graphic scenes” and its story of “the progress of patients from the time they entered the Institute as cripples to the day they were released as normal, active individuals.” Although it was “technical in nature,” Haverstock believed “the film nevertheless carries a powerful emotional appeal.”127 Kenny then took her film on a tour that included Washington, D.C. and several towns in Illinois and Onta
rio.128
THE KENNY CONCEPT
Kenny was convinced that the power of her film was its first reel, which would enable doctors and other professionals to hear her explain how and why her techniques worked, and thereby recognize the truth of her concept of the disease. “Many statements have been made concerning this work,” she warned, “by those who have preferred to view it from afar.”129 Thus, in an early scene, The Kenny Concept brought the viewer directly into the wards of the Institute to watch a “well trained” Kenny technician in a white gown and mask who was “familiar with the newer knowledge of the classification and typing of the muscular system” treat a patient with hot packs.130 She was also proud of her film’s narrative arc. It showed patients whose “severe pain is overcome in three days,” and then after their “deformities” were “combated” the full function of their muscles was “restored” in 2 months. The patients then waved “goodbye to all treatment and hospitalization and walk out,” after a period of treatment that “prior to my visit to the United States” would not even have begun.131
The Kenny Concept was structured around 2 sites: patients at the Institute—before, during, and after therapy—and Kenny in her office, seated at a desk like a kind of senior stateswoman, reading from her lectures to explain what the viewer had seen and why it was important. Despite the film’s portrayal of Kenny as Institute director, Kenny reminded her audience that as a nurse she had not breached professional conventions, for all of her patients were examined in the presence of “medical men” who were members of the AMA.132
The patients (but not the therapists shown on screen) were named and personalized: Patsy, Allen, Robert, Rosemary, Colleen, Bobby, Vernon, Jack, Wally, and Virgil. And, viewers were assured, they were all real people, not actors.133 It is not quite clear how Kenny distinguished between acting and demonstrating, for she later sent each patient $50 for their participation in the film. “I am always only too happy to help you in any way in your lectures and clinics by being there if you need me,” one recipient replied, “because some doctors really do have to be shown.”134
Kenny was usually careful not to identify the patients with a surname, but she did boast to a group of university officials that after meeting a young man called Jack MacArthur and finding out that he was related to General Douglas MacArthur, “I felt it absolutely incumbent upon me to try do something for him.” In her film MacArthur’s body was used to dramatize the harmful effects of orthodox polio care. He is first seen lying on a table while Kenny explains that “this patient did not receive treatment by the newer science.” To show “the devastating effect of peripheral involvement” (the term she used to imply viral infection in places outside the brain and spinal cord) MacArthur, flanked by Kenny and a nurse in white, tries to sit up. Then he is shown as completely recovered after 2 months of treatment for “peripheral damage.”135
Kenny saw this transformation as testimony not only to her method but also to her theory. She believed that the patients in the film, like her other patients at the Institute and around the country, were “clinical proof” demonstrating “that the concept of this disease infantile paralysis presented by me as the result of my research is correct.”136 For Kenny the film provided visual confirmation of her ideas, democratically available to anyone who watched the film. “Dr. Fishbein and anyone else may see living proof of the value of the newer science of dermo-neuro-muscular therapy introduced by me for the newer concept discovered by me,” she told one reporter. “This proof can be produced anywhere at any time in the documentary films.”137 To bring home the lessons of the film she wrote A Brief Description of the Film Presenting The Kenny Concept, a pamphlet intended to be handed out to audiences, reiterating that the film provided “indisputable evidence directly contradicting the theories upon which all previous treatment had been based.”138 As further evidence of a serious engagement with medical science, the film reproduced photographs of patients featured in Robert Lovett’s Treatment of Infantile Paralysis in order to show the poor results of orthodox care.
Kenny’s theory that the polio virus attacked muscles more often than the nervous system was difficult to prove by showing only the body’s clinical appearance. The American public was used to seeing cinematic dramatizations of germs as well as men in white coats and test tubes in laboratories. The Kenny Concept used bodies to talk about the polio virus. As the camera focuses onto Virgil’s back, the narrator explains that “the virus evidently found a host in the spinal muscles alienating the abdominals.”139 (It was this kind of statement that had annoyed the NRC committee visitors.) But it was difficult to demonstrate that what the viewer saw was actually the picture of a virus in the muscles.
Alienation was also difficult to demonstrate. In the case of Colleen, Kenny’s voice explains, “the quads are stretched and the hamstrings are stimulated in order to bring about subconscious contraction and preserve the pattern of movement in the cerebrum.” But while stretching and stimulating could be shown on film, the other comments were simply words, as was the narrator’s statement, “We are now ready to overcome condition of alienation of the quadriceps … by relaxing and contracting, the subconscious mind is reached, then it is necessary to get the brain power back to the point of attachment.”140 Such phrases and terms made sense only to a fully trained Kenny technician or perhaps to a professional who had attended one of Kenny’s courses. For most audiences, these were serious-sounding words indicating the wisdom and skills of a polio expert, but neither they nor the images that accompanied them explained or proved the validity of Kenny’s concepts.
In Kenny’s staged lecture in the film she compares the comments of her medical critics to the evidence her audience has just seen. She quotes O’Connor admitting in August 1944 that the results of NFIP-funded researchers “had been negative.” She tries to denigrate orthodox treatment without demonizing its practitioners, saying “in this film you have seen fettered muscles crippling their victims even with the best and most conscientious treatment.”141 But her pamphlet attacked polio care more harshly, warning of the dangers of any modification of the Kenny method: “all investigators, whether antagonist or kindly disposed, have admitted that deformities have been eliminated in all patients receiving the unadulterated Kenny treatment.”142
Kenny was most convincing when she appeared as the active clinician giving a patient special muscle exercises, saying “Don’t think of anything, don’t think of anything at all, don’t think I am doing anything with you. Now think with me, relax that, let your brain power extend to here. I am taking it back, don’t you try to take it back, I am taking it for you.” Then she shifts from clinician to teacher and theorist as she turns to the audience explaining “it will take some little time to correct the mistake [of] non-treatment of in-coordination.” To reiterate the economic as well as physiologic necessity of functionality she features Wally, a patient who after 16 months of orthodox treatment could not sit up or feed himself, but is shown transformed after 16 months of Kenny treatment. Kenny, dressed in a white suit with a corsage, stands proudly besides Wally, now a young aspiring businessman in a suit, one hand casually in his pocket.143
Still, Kenny continued to believe that her film constituted proof of her theories. Her “documentary film,” she proudly announced during a fundraising event, presented “indisputable evidence and proof of my clinical findings. I have forgotten the weary 34 years of loneliness, humiliation and sacrifice in the joyouse [sic] consciousness that as a result of the knowledge gained by me through research, your child will walk again and play again—perhaps you yourself may again enjoy a happy normal life.”144
Most viewers who disliked the film said nothing to Kenny. But on occasion sympathetic doctors did try to help her turn her film into a medium that might convince a scientific audience. James Perkins, the head of the Division of Communicable Diseases of New York State’s health department, had attended Kenny’s course in Minneapolis in June 1942, and continued to be interested in her work. In May
1945, after watching a copy of The Kenny Concept with other officials in the health department’s screening room, Perkins wrote to Kenny to explain why he believed its use of dramatic cinematic conventions made it untrustworthy as a medical film.145
The strength of the film, Perkins assured Kenny, involved “those portions showing you at work at the bedside [which] make clear, as no amount of printed matter can, your mastery of muscle anatomy and physiology, as well as your understanding of the mental factors involved.” But there were certain aspects of the film that he believed would “hinder your cause rather than help it so far as the medical profession is concerned.” Two elements had left him and other physicians in his department with “mixed emotions”: the testimonials quoted in the film and the “direct comparison of your cases with horrible examples of deformities resulting from treatment by the orthodox method.”146
The testimonial, Perkins warned, was the strategy of choice for defenders of alternative medicine. The sincerity and social standing of these defenders did not give their words any greater credibility. At a recent hearing on the licensing of chiropractors in New York’s state legislature, for example, the “most glowing and yet worthless testimonials were presented by such individuals as a retired brigadier general, an Army nurse, a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Metropolitan opera star.” These men and women were “absolutely sincere,” but their conclusions were “completely erroneous.” This technique, further, was likely to raise professional hackles. Physicians “are so well aware, through bitter experience, of the utter worthlessness of testimonials, that I think there is almost an automatic reaction against the device or method being advocated when testimonials are used.”147
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