Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye
Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the Yankees lost.
Oh, well. We’ll always have our heroes to look up to.
Oops. Turns out, Diamond Jim Brady was a fraud. Or maybe just a garden-variety (make that stockyard-variety) glutton. Or maybe it wasn’t him so much as his image-mongers, who seem to have larded the truth like it was a prize-winning pie crust at the county fair. David Kamp, in a mortally funny piece of debunkery in this morning’s New York Times, has pricked Diamond Jim’s balloon, reducing his reputation like so much Slim-Fast: Turns out Brady was the bloated beginning of a reputational Ponzi scheme that leaves us tail-enders holding a severely depleted bag.
Granted, Brady’s an odd sort of hero in the first place — not a role model so much as a bigger-than-life phenomenon, a sort of Zeus (or maybe Dionysus) of the foodie set. Anything you could eat, he could eat bigger. And did, so the stories go, four or five times a day, in all-out cram-athons, often in the company of his gustatory inamorata Lillian Russell, the even more fabled songbird of the Gilded Age, whose appetites seemingly rivaled Catherine the Great’s.
In truth, it’s no big surprise. Even as we suspended disbelief for the sake of a good story, Brady’s reputation always seemed a little screwy, a little too audacious to be true. Now, on the final day of what increasingly seems to be this Year of Our Ford (a company that at least has so far declined a public handout, and is even rolling out a promising hybrid sedan at what these days passes for a rational price: praise Henry!) it seems somehow fitting to learn that Brady (1856-1917), the fabled railroad tycoon and devourer of copious amounts of flesh, turns out to have had a caloric capacity not quite so Brobdingnagian, after all. Our bubble has burst. We’re waking up from all sorts of dreams.
The legend of James Buchanan Brady is a bold one, not just for his rags-to-riches ascent, which is factual, but for his feats of appetite, which apparently have been fantasized. Kamp quotes John Mariani’s 1991 book America Eats Out on the way Brady allegedly began his day and kept it going:
… “with a hefty breakfast of eggs, breads, muffins, grits, pancakes, steaks, chops, fried potatoes, and pitchers of orange juice. He’d stave off mid-morning hunger by downing two or three dozen clams or oysters, then repair to Delmonico’s or Rector’s for a lunch that consisted of more oysters and clams, lobsters, crabs, a joint of beef, pie, and more orange juice.”
In midafternoon, allegedly, came a snack “of more seafood,” followed by dinner: “Three dozen oysters (the largest Lynnhavens were saved for him), a dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, terrapin soup,” and a steak, with a dessert of “a tray full of pastries … and two pounds of bonbons.” Later in the evening, allegedly, came an apres-theater supper of “a few game birds and more orange juice.”
My goodness, that looks as tempting as a sub-prime loan. I’m especially admiring of Brady’s penchant for shellfish. Trouble is, as Kamp quotes one doctor who deals with obesity, a steady diet like the one Diamond Jim is supposed to have consumed is impossible: “That man would have exploded.”
In fact, in photos, Brady doesn’t really look like a man about to explode. (And Lillian Russell certainly doesn’t look like the Bloated Lady.) He has girth, yes; he’s a man of consequence — but by the look of it, he carries no more excess baggage than William Howard Taft or Grover Cleveland or Winston Churchill or Portland’s culinary favorite son, James Beard, and certainly less than the Cajun cooking legend Paul Prudhomme. Where is the physical evidence of Brady’s extreme gustatory excess?
Kamp quotes another expert — Josh Ozersky, the New York food writer whose blog is called The Feedbag — perhaps even more pertinently. “I think (Brady) and his meals have more in common with Paul Bunyan than they do with A.J. Liebling,” he says.
I’m happy to see a contemporary food writer recognize the redoubtable Mr. Liebling, a World War II correspondent and New Yorker writer whose memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris has given me many a moment of pleasure and regret (and for the record, I’ve never fully believed the reality of Liebling’s Parisian meals matched the rapture of his memories of them). And I’m delighted to see Ozersky bring up Paul Bunyan, because I think the Great Logger strikes straight to the heart of the Diamond Jim Brady mystique.
Like Bunyan, Brady is mythical, even if he actually existed in the flesh: a repository of our American dreams and desires. As such, what’s true and what is fabrication become a confused blend, and maybe not even really very important. We want to believe he did what people say he did, because his deeds inspire us. He lives beyond limits for us, so we can stand the limits we accept for ourselves.
Did Dan’l Boone kill himself a b’ar when he was only 3? Could George Washington really not tell a lie? Was John Henry 6 feet tall and did he weigh 44 pounds on the day he was born? Could Annie Oakley shoot the shadow off a prairie dog at 500 yards? Did Babe Ruth eat 25 hot dogs on a dare, then go out and hit a home run? Does your favorite rock star really snort coke and have sex with three sets of twins every night?
We know these things probably aren’t true, at the same time that, in our dream-selves, we choose to sort of believe them. And part of me can’t help but wonder: Did our dream-selves want to believe in weapons of mass destruction, too, so we could aim our anger and justify our desire to strike back at someone, anyone? And wondering that makes me think that, yes, maybe Kamp’s debunking was a good thing to do. Even though, speaking for myself, I’ll miss the Diamond Jim Brady who never was. The New Gilded Age has come crashing to an end. Like George the Destroyer, Diamond Jim the Dinosaur is no hero for our new times.
I took a break from writing this post to cook some dinner:
A pasta sauce built on a mirepoix of chopped garlic, onion, carrots and celery; some pepper, a little salt, a dash of paprika, some herbs de Provence, mushrooms, a sliced red and sliced green bell pepper, a spoonful of Better Than Veggie paste, a can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes, a scatter of capers and some leftover red wine. Fettuccine. A green salad. A nice bread and some cheeses. And because it’s New Year’s Eve, a good, modest-priced bubbly.
So, hello, 2009.
Farewell, fat of the land.
Maybe I’ll trade you in for a slim volume of poetry.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:10 am
Nice column, very nice indeed. Of course all those giant legendary figures, whose avoirdupoire sure as hell ain’t based on mirepoix, constitue a metaphor for excess of many kinds, so can we say you’re trading a fat volume of poetry for a slim one?
January 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Thanks for directing my attention to Mr. Kamp’s article on Diamond Jim Brady. Nice timing at the end of a holiday season during which mass quantities are consumed with the silent promise to stop when the new year starts (or, let’s just say tomorrow).
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
I very much enjoyed the meander down to the concluding paragraph, Americans have many little religions I believe, as if to throw faith behind something and embrace a childlike innocence is in itself a virtue. I think the introduction of the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was intended to inspire fear at something already existing in pseudo-scientific terminology, language used to obliterate critical thinking..
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Hi Susan, thanks for joining in. You’ve hit on the weak spot in this post, the same one I worried over hours after pushing the “publish” button. I introduced an idea that really needed more explanation, and if I’d been writing for dead-tree publication I’d have considered what you see here a first draft and kept working on it. (Besides, by the time I published it was New Years Eve and there were other priorities!)
Here’s what I was trying to suggest — and this will be inelegant; sort of the working notes instead of the finished essay:
We live with a lot of fantasies, a lot of mythologies, and that’s not a bad thing. They serve a healthy purpose — myth is essential, and far too big a subject to even begin to address adequately here. It’s when we can’t or choose not to distinguish between fantasy and reality that things get troublesome. The legend of Diamond Jim Brady is a great story, and as long as we understand it’s mythology, it’s terrifically entertaining. (In this case, even if we mistake it for reality there’s little harm, except maybe that it costs us a little bit of our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.)
But the danger of myth is that it sometimes displaces reality in the public mind. There are extreme cases of this, of course: The German myth of the master race (which necessitates a belief in inferior races) is a prime example. In recent years the news media — newspapers and newsmagazines to a certain extent; television to a much greater degree — have been blurring the line between what’s real/important and what’s hyped/entertainment. So we get “infotainment”; a world in which Britny’s panties inspire more “investigation” than a fraudulent real estate market, and in which more people vote in the American Idol election than the presidential election.
I’m all for frivolity in our lives — it’s fun, and it’s important, partly because it ISN’T important, and we need that. But it’s partly because of our collective difficulty in distinguishing between the frivolous and the serious, I wanted to suggest, that a keenly ideological national administration was able to sell us on the myth of weapons of mass destruction. We were given a lie wearing the face of a truth, and collectively, we chose to believe it — partly, I’m suggesting, because as a collective we’ve let our critical-thinking abilities get dull, and partly because, as a nation wounded physically and emotionally in the Sept. 11 attacks, we were eager to identify a scapegoat. If we’d been better skeptics, we wouldn’t have bought in to the scapegoating so easily. Circling back to the beginning, that’s why a certain mild importance attaches to separating fact from fiction in the case of Diamond Jim Brady: As a nation that still makes collective decisions, we need the practice on the little issues so we can distinguish truth from illusion on the big ones.
Maybe that’s too heavy a load to put on poor Diamond Jim’s shoulders, broad as they were. But I meant to suggest that little things and big things ARE connected, and it’s good to remember that.
Now, I think I’ll start thinking about what’s for dinner tonight. Unlike Diamond Jim’s, I think it’ll be a one-course meal!
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Thanks for the elucidation of the original post. I do feel that people in general become very attached to having an enemy, and that it’s hard to give up that emotional compass point. So that can play into the will to believe what’s handed down as far as selecting the blameworthy.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Generally, we know the differences between myth/fantasy and “reality,” and the primary one, don’t you think, is that representation of reality is what we are skeptical about. We can be ultra-skeptical when we want to be. With the WMD we WILLFULLY embraced the myth — America as Sheriff in a town gone wrong — and marched through the center of town guns blazing. I say “we”. It wasn’t everyone. Diamond Jim, yeah, where’s the harm? Paul Bunyan. Babe, the blue ox, or Babe, the slugger, who lived life larger than you or I could ever hope to. Why do we need “someone” with an appetite so gargantuan? I imagine us, small, hungry, upright primates, sitting around a fire, stomachs growling: Tell us the story of Diamond Jim, and how much he used to eat! Strangely, it made us feel better…
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
The Diamond Jim myth strikes me as an example of the echo chamber that has probably shaped public discourse for centuries. All that has changed is the speed with which stories ricochet until they take on what Stephen Colbert astutely called “truthiness.”
Whether we’re talking about a human interest story (such as gustatory excesses) or WMDs, the stories ping pong about, gain momentum, and deepen in resonance until they are accepted as truth. Sometimes the stories are launched with specific intent — to promote a shellfish restaurant or a war, as two examples. Other times, they are borne of a need to plug the silence (whether a hole in cocktail party conversation or the need to fill the 24 hour news cycle).
Out of curiosity, I did a Google search on “MICHAEL PHELPS DIET” and found several apparently independent articles that had the exact same descriptions of his “typical” daily intake of 12,000 calories:
Breakfast: Three fried egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, and mayo; five-egg omelet; a bowl of grits; three slices of French toast with powdered sugar; three chocolate chip pancakes; and two cups of coffee.
Lunch: A pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread (plus about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks).
Dinner: Another pound of pasta and an entire pizza, plus another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.
Do you suppose Mr. Phelps has the chocolate chip pancakes every morning? How big is that entire pizza he has for dinner? Why do we know that the French toast was topped with powdered sugar, but we don’t know whether the pound of pasta at lunch came with a nice marinara?
The story starts to sound an awful lot like the Diamond Jim myth, albeit with fewer lobsters and less orange juice. Does it matter? Perhaps only to the extent that we use faulty received knowledge to shape either personal or public policy decisions. The other troubling problem is how those who didn’t embrace the WMD myth were arrogantly discounted as naive fools.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:28 am
Excellent point, MTC — the echo chamber gets louder and faster. I didn’t know about the Michael Phelps Diet — sounds almost EXACTLY like the dissemination of the Diamond Jim myth, doesn’t it? — the same initial information being reported over and over again until it simply becomes accepted as fact. Again, in this case, not that it matters a lot, unless there’s some 9-year-old swimmer somewhere out there who adopts it in hopes of winning a passel of gold medals. (As an aside, I wonder if Diamond Jim’s choice of orange juice over wine helped keep him awake enough to keep right on eating, although OJ has a high acid content: I hope he cut the juice with bananas.)
Yes, Barry, I think there was a willfulness to the nation’s falling-in-line behind the WMD myth — a wanting to believe, even as the evidence mounted to the contrary, that our leaders knew something we didn’t know, and wouldn’t lie to us on such an important topic (we accept that they lie to us continually about little things — and, yes, there IS a connection between big and little: set the pattern on the little, you’ve set the pattern on the big). And it’s quite true, as MTC points out, that many people DIDN’T buy into the WMD myth, and their views were swept aside like so much mealy-mouthed liberal pish-posh. Odd, when skepticism used to be considered a conservative value. In the myth biz, some people wake up from the dream a lot earlier than others.
January 11th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
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