I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting by Rebecca Harrington Read Free Book Online

boyfriend are always running around naked in their backyard.” Though Simon Doonan described Garbo as Hauser’s “longtime beard.” Whether they had an affair or not, here was a chronic dieter who lived with her nutritionist. Garbo was living the dream! So I wanted to emulate that in some small, sad, yet thoroughly modern way for my latest experiment in historically validated strange eating habits.
     
Preparation
    After a rather exhaustive search, I find two of Hauser’s aforementioned books on the Internet and buy them. When I finally receive the books in the mail, they’re quite dusty and a little intimidating. Neither seems to have been opened since they were published in 1930 and 1951; when I crack the spine of one, I start sneezing.
    The first line to
Look Younger, Live Longer
is “You are making a mistake.” Why? Because you are treating this book “like any other book” when it is in fact “a passport for a new way of living.”
    Hauser believes that if you fuel your body with “wonder foods” you can live until you are one hundred. In case you are curious, wonder foods are: brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and molasses, apparently all rich in various vitamins and minerals that will guarantee long life. These are not easy products to procure in the modern world. Edible yeast is quite hard to find (the stuff that makes bread rise is not something you can just pop in your mouth) and looks very disgusting and inedible when I buy a version you can sprinkle on cereal at a health food store next to my apartment. Apparently yeast is quite nutritious. My grandmother tells me that she had a relative who used to eat yeast all the time. “Of course she did have stomach troubles,” she tells me.
    The recipes in both books look absolutely terrifying. There is one particularly horrible-looking one for a “celery loaf,” which Hauser defends as “really delicious” and consists of pureed celery, nuts, and milk. There is something about this combination that makes me involuntarily shudder. Luckily, I also find an exhaustive fan website devoted to Garbo’s eating habits. Apparently she loved dried apricots.
     
Day 1
    In one of Garbo’s first and only interviews, she told a reporter in exasperation, “I was born. I had a mother and father. I went to school. What does it matter?” It is in that spirit of Lutheran simplicity that I start my diet with one of Garbo’s favorite lunches: “a cup of chicken broth with chives, cottage cheese, half a ripe avocado with a vinegar, herb and oil dressing, a slice of pineapple and one piece of toasted and buttered dark bread.” Although this dizzying array of food does not go together in the classic sense, it is not exactly terrible. It is just plain. Terrible comes with dinner, which is based on Hauser’s meal for Garbo the first night he met her: a veggie burger “consisting of wild rice and chopped hazelnuts, mixed with an egg and fried in soybean oil,” plus a dessert of “a broiled grapefruit with [blackstrap] molasses in the center!” The veggie burgers take a long time to cook and taste predominantly of eggs. The hazelnuts are an unpleasant surprise. Broiled grapefruit tastes medicinal. I am not very hungry, just confused about why these ingredients have been paired together.
     
Day 2
    There was a period in Garbo’s life where she subsisted almost entirely on “chicken, dried apricots and whole milk, with brown beans and biscuits for snacks.” This is actually a fun day. Whole milk is delicious, and brown beans are very filling. I eat chicken I bake in the oven. I feel like I am in the army in 1942.
    Garbo retired from acting at the age of thirty-six after she appeared in the notorious flop
Two-Faced Woman
. (This is a crazy movie in which Garbo plays fake twin sisters and has to dance for a very long time. She is not a good dancer.) Soon thereafter she moved to New York and did most of her grocery shopping about ten blocks away from my apartment. I could have