Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
Diet Book Deep Dive: Ed McMahon’s “Slimming Down”
This week is our first Diet Book Deep Dive, where we dig into some of the worst and wildest weight loss advice we can find. First up: Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon's pun, alcohol and misogyny-fueled diet plan from the 1970s. Hope you like broiled steak and Sanka!
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Thanks to Lynn Barbera for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!
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Mike: Yes.
Aubrey: Today, we're taking a little trip back in time. We are talking about Ed McMahon, but not like in a great deal of depth. We're mostly talking about, we're sort of book clubbing his diet book called Slimming Down.
Mike: Slimming Down.
Aubrey: So, I'm curious about just for you, what do you know/remember about Ed McMahon and who he is?
Mike: Ed McMahon was the sidekick for Johnny Carson, who was an extremely famous, extremely beloved late night talk show host on The Tonight Show for decades. He was like a fixture in American life.
Aubrey: Yeah, he's like a proto-Andy Richter, like all of the talk show “sidekicks” that we think about now. Yeah, he's an early version of the TV personality. He's not quite an actor. He's not quite a stand up. He's just this affable utility player who would do things like host telethons and [crosstalk] sidekick and that kind of thing. We're going to take a little walkthrough Ed McMahon's career just to get a little grounding.
Mike: Ooh, yes, yes, yes.
Aubrey: Ed McMahon was born and raised in Massachusetts. He, as a teenager, acted first as a carnival barker, and then as a bingo caller.
Mike: Shut up.
Aubrey: Which feels about as perfect as you can get.
Mike: His entire job was just shouting stuff?
Aubrey: Yeah, just yelling. He started to go to college and then he enlisted in the marines, and was a pilot who fought in World War II. So, he's a veteran. By 1957, he started work in TV with his most iconic partner in his career, which was Johnny Carson. They cohosted this game show called Who Do You Trust? That started in 1957. By 1962, those two moved over to host The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. Amongst old school comedians, Carson is widely considered to be one of the gold standards of the genre. It was a show that was like really widely credited with making or breaking careers.
Mike: That's how we got Jay Leno.
Aubrey: Is that what we got Jay Leno? Was he on Carson?
Mike: Yeah, he was on Carson, and then he guest-hosted for Carson. And then he eventually took over The Tonight Show. It was this thing where if you were a standup comedian and Johnny liked you, he would call you over after your stand-up set and chat with you. It was like getting the stupid Paul Hollywood handshake.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Mike: It was this extra level of kudos.
Aubrey: Yeah, he was a big kingmaker. They started doing The Tonight Show in 1962. Ed McMahon was the sidekick on that show, and Johnny Carson was the host of that show for 30 years.
Mike: I know. It is bananas to think about the fact that they did it five nights a week for that long.
Aubrey: It's truly wild. He starts doing The Tonight Show, that really, really launches him as a household name, all of that kind of stuff. In 1973, he starts tagging on other projects along the way. In 73 he starts cohosting with Jerry Lewis Telethon. In the early 80s, I don't know, if you remember this. I remembered it as Publishers Clearing House. He started hosting the Publishers Clearing House giveaways. This was a huge national sweepstakes. The commercials for it were footage of people learning that they had won. And the way that they would learn that they had one was that Ed McMahon would show up at their house with a camera crew and a bouquet full of balloons.
Mike: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: It turns out that all of that was the Mandela Effect.
Mike: Wait, what?
Aubrey: He did not work for Publishers Clearing House.
Mike: What?
Aubrey: He worked for American Family Publishers, which was their main competitor.
Mike: What? This has just been living in my brain falsely for years?
Aubrey: I'm telling you, it blew my brains out of my head.
Mike: What?
Aubrey: I just sent you a clip. Part of the reason that I wanted to watch this clip is, as we're digging into this diet book, I will slip into Ed McMahon voice at times, because it really is written in Ed McMahon voice. So, it feels important to have his voice in our heads as we move forward. This is one of few clips.
Mike: I'm looking forward to your Ed McMahon chuckle.
Aubrey: [chuckles] I haven't worked [crosstalk] that’s bad. That’s aggressively bad. Okay, let me know when you're ready.
Mike: Okay, here we go.
[video starts]
Ed McMahon: Only American family has actually awarded cash millions like this. 1982, the first million-dollar prize.
Male Speaker: I won a million.
Ed McMahon: 1983, the first $2 million prize.
Female Speaker: I won $2 million.
Ed McMahon: 1984, another $2 million prize.
Male Speaker: We won millions.
Ed McMahon: And now the first $10 million prize ever from American family. The winning entry may be in your mail right now, watch for this envelope. It could make you superrich.
[video ends]
Mike: Oh, my God, whenever you see like a 25-year-old clip of somebody winning the lottery, never google their name. Never. It never turns out well.
Aubrey: Yeah, it's not great. That's the kind of stuff that you would hire Ed McMahon to do. The big highlight that we're going to talk about before we dive in on diet book, Ed McMahon was the host of Star Search. What do you remember about Star Search, Mike?
Mike: I mean, now, it really only comes up when we're talking about random celebrities, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. They both got started on Star Search. So, there's this excruciating footage of them being very talented as children, but then they have to do this miserable small talk with Ed McMahon, where he's like, “Where are you from young child or whatever.” And it's just so bad. I don't know how people could survive watching these shows live. But, basically, for the youths, it was a show where random people would come on, and they would sing or dance or play piano or whatever. And then judges would give them a score and it was like, “You're now going to be catapulted into the top echelons of American stardom.” And, of course, that never happened for 99.9% of the people on it. But it was a way to just watch random people do random ass shit on a Saturday afternoon. I feel it was on at 3:00 PM [Aubrey laughing] on a Saturday, like the time when nothing interesting is going on in human life.
Aubrey: That's about right. In addition to the folks that you mentioned, yes, 99.9% of people had nothing happened. And then I'm going to list off a bunch of the people from the 0.1%. [laughs]
Mike: Here we go, here we go.
Aubrey: This is what’s about to happen. Here are people who appeared on Star Search at some point in the late 80s, early 90s. Billy Porter, Aaliyah, Alanis Morissette, Usher, Pitbull, Sharon Stone. The list goes on and on and on and on and on. Norm Macdonald.
Mike: Wait. Can we watch a clip of Ed McMahon on Star Search?
Aubrey: Yeah, of course.
Mike: You know that Britney Spears documentary just came out. There's a clip there where Ed McMahon is talking to Britney Spears.
[video starts]
Ed: I noticed last week you had the most adorable pretty eyes. You have a boyfriend?
Britney: No, sir.
Ed: Why not?
Britney: They're mean.
[laughter]
Ed: Boyfriends, you mean all boys are mean? I'm not mean. How about me?
Britney: It depends.
[laughter]
Ed: I get that a lot.
[laughter]
Ed: Now, you grew up on a farm in Missouri. Tell me about that.
Britney: Well, Ed, it was real nice.
[laughter]
Ed: So far, host, zero. Youngster’s two. Okay. Good luck to both you.
[video ends]
Aubrey: Oh, my God. I also forgot, this is so brutal. I forgot that they have people vote. It is very American Idol, very America's Got Talent. And it's so rough to think about a child having that experience like that level of rejection or approval on national television, feels so gnarly to me. Ugh.
Mike: I think it'll be much better for the kids if we had them do a push up contest every single year at school, where this was done in front of all of their peers, and they were judged according to their physical attractiveness and ability.
Aubrey: Make them climb a rope [crosstalk] Yeah.
Mike: [laughs] Do you find these clips excruciating to watch? I can't watch clips like this without covering my face.
Aubrey: It's very, very creepy. I will say the part that I cringe hardest at is the bizarre compulsory heterosexuality that I think folks who were not around in the 80s and 90s may not have an understanding of the degree to which, like, that was a thing that adults would just ask you. Like, “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Oh, you're real Lady Killer.” Like this weird painting children into a picture of an adult heterosexual life. It's very strange.
Mike: I mean, she's 10. It would be weird if she had a boyfriend, like I don't know what a boyfriend means at that stage. And it's also just such a weird thing to ask a 10-year-old girl.
Aubrey: Well, to say nothing of like, “How about me? I'm not mean?” Like, what are you doing, Ed McMahon?
Mike: Not all men, Britney.
Aubrey: Can we pivot into Slimming Down with Ed McMahon?
Mike: Yes, let’s.
Aubrey: This book is the book that started my diet book collection.
Mike: Oh.
Aubrey: It got me into this mode of looking for like, “Oh, my God. Old diet books are hilarious,” and they are a window into the ways, in which current diet books are also hilarious and wacky. This is a book that is an era just like trapped in amber. It came out in 1973, and boy, oh boy, can you tell, it came out in 1973 from a guy who was middle aged in the 70s. [chuckles]
Mike: That’s the thing. [crosstalk] Him and Johnny Carson were these people who were just always old, like, I don’t remember them ever being less than like 50. And then they were just on the air and they always had this sort of late 50s, early 60s. I can't remember them ever really aging within that bracket.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. We've talked about on this podcast that most diets breakdown into one of three categories. There's low fat, low calorie, which tend to go together. There is low carb and then there are other specific food group restrictions. When people go gluten-free, when they cut out “processed foods,” when they cut out night shades, whatever the things are. Prior to getting this book, I absolutely thought of low carb diets as a wave that was started by Dr. Atkins.
Mike: Are you about to tell me that it was started by Dr. Ed McMahon?
Aubrey: [chuckles] I don't know that it was started by him, but this was absolutely a low carb diet book.
Mike: Fascinating.
Aubrey: It is very fun and very bananas. The basic conceit of his diet is, it's just counting calories from carbohydrates. He recommends about 250 “Carbo Cals” a day. Very excited to report that most hard liquor is zero carbo cals.
[laughter]
Aubrey: It's very middle-aged man in the 70s. There's one point at which he says, “Do you realize I could have 65 martinis to equal the carbo cals of just one French dinner? [laughs]
Mike: What? How could he just decide that alcohol calories don't count?
Aubrey: I have none idea. Interestingly, his version of low carb is actually considerably better in some ways than most low carb diets these days. He has a whole explainer in there about how carbohydrates are actually necessary. So, you don't want to get down to zero calories from carbohydrates. He talks about like, “Your body and your brain need carbohydrates to function,” which is true. Part of what I love about this book is that it is steeped in this 60s, 70s middle-aged masculinity. It is also a hall like forgotten 1960s and 70s foods.
Mike: So, it's like eat a lot of aspic to get the hot broads.
Aubrey: [laughs] You're so close. Here's some of the chapter titles for the table of contents. Are you ready?
Mike: Ooh, give it to me.
Aubrey: Chapter One, “I was overweight at birth.” Chapter Two, The Breadstick Conspiracy. Chapter Three, “The Potato Plot.” Chapter Four, “Two Martinis Into Connecticut.” Chapter Five, “Sitting up and taking liquids,” which is all about how much you can drink on this diet. [laughs]
Mike: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: He has a chapter called Metro Cal, Carbo Cal and Oh, Cal Cutter.
Mike: Oh. Ed, keep workshopping that. Let's put a pin in that, let's see if we can top that.
Aubrey: Everything you wanted to know about snacks, but we're afraid to ask. It's just like dad joke central.
Mike: Yeah. I'm imagining a lot of citations to people with the last name McGillicuddy.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Mike: This is what I associate with this era in American life.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's about right. Are you ready for some sample meal plans?
Mike: Ooh, yeah, tell me.
Aubrey: Okay. Monday, breakfast, half a grapefruit with artificial sugar. Lunch, a glass of Tab.
Mike: Wait, that's the whole breakfast? Just a grapefruit with artificial sugar?
Aubrey: Not a whole grapefruit, half a grape fruit, with like Splenda on it.
Mike: I'm already hungry, Ed. I would eat that and be hungry 20 minutes later.
Aubrey: I also feel like he skated right past what all of lunch was, which is a glass of Tab. That's your whole lunch is a glass of Tab. Ed?
Mike: [laughs] But the thing is, I've had four martinis by that point. So, I'm too buzzed to notice how hungry I am.
Aubrey: [laughs] By dinner, I am nauseous with hunger, is how I would imagine myself feeling.
Mike: Yes.
Aubrey: So, here's what you got when your stomach feeling a little upset because you're so hungry. For dinner, you better have a steak and asparagus with Hollandaise sauce.
Mike: Your body is so just tanked up at that point, that you just fall asleep at 6:45.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. [chuckles] Wednesday's meal plan. Breakfast, two scrambled eggs with Parmesan cheese and a cup of Sanka.
Mike: Wait, okay, what is Sanka?
Aubrey: Sanka is an old school instant coffee.
Mike: Oh, that shit?
Aubrey: Yeah.
Mike: Instant coffee is like Satan's dandruff. I don't know how anybody drinks it. It's just so bitter and empty.
Aubrey: Lunch is too hard-boiled eggs, and dinner is a shrimp cocktail with Thousand Island dressing, and a steak.
Mike: [laughs] This is also a pretty expensive diet. I mean, shrimp and steak every night.
Aubrey: By Friday, your breakfast is a cup of Sanka, your lunch’s a steak and a Tab, and your dinner is something called shrimp platter.
Mike: [laughs]
Aubrey: He also has suggested snacks that you're supposed to rank in terms of carbo cals, like which is the safest snack. Mike, I'm going to ask you from this list of snacks that time forgot. Which of these do you think is lowest in carbo cals? Which of these do you think is highest and carbo cals? Two large apples? Three-ounce package of frozen strawberries? A cream cheese and jelly sandwich?
Mike: That's the spirit.
Aubrey: Tuna fish salad with whole tomato? A dish of tapioca or liverwurst on rye?
Mike: Get rid of that unhealthy stuff in your diet, like apples and eat these bowls of meat instead.
Aubrey: [laughs] What do you think of those snacks? What do you think is the lowest in carbo cals? What do you think is the highest?
Mike: It's got to be the tuna salad, no?
Aubrey: Yeah, tuna salad and a whole tomato. And highest is a tie for a cream cheese and jelly sandwich, which is a thing I have never heard of before picking up this book.
Mike: It's probably good though.
Aubrey: And it's a tie with two large apples. His point here is like, “Ha-ha, you thought apples were healthy. No, no. Carbo cals.”
Mike: Get those fucking fruits and vegetables out of here.
Aubrey: The other thing to know about this diet book is that its reference points are really different than what we think of today. 1973, not a terribly, terribly long time ago, in the scheme of history. But at this point in 1973, the BMI is not actually the standard for weight recommendation.
Mike: Oh, interesting.
Aubrey: There is this weird patchwork happening about “ideal weights” for people, and the most prevalent and the one that he actually reprints in this book, is insurance actuarial charts.
Mike: Oh, right. Because that was all the information we had at the time was from, I guess, like the life insurance companies, of how much they were charging people based on your chances of death, essentially?
Aubrey: Absolutely. The thinking here and the argument he makes in the book is that the data must be good because why else would MetLife in particular stake all of their profits on it? To which I would counter Ed McMahon, they're not staking their profits on it, they're figuring out how to charge people more. That’s a different thing. The interesting thing about these insurance charts, I've looked at these quite a few times in the past, they are divided out by gender, there's a different chart for men than there is for women. They are divided up by height. So, there are different recommendations for your height, but there are also these columns for, if you have a “small, medium or large frame.”
Mike: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: The numbers do track with the BMI with where the BMI ends up landing. But it does divide it out and go, “You should actually aim for the higher end of this or the lower end of this spectrum.” And it's just fascinating to me that these insurance charts actually are more flexible than the BMI.
Mike: Yeah because at least there's some acknowledgment that humans vary in the size they should be. You're able to be like, I'm just a larger person, I'm starting from a different baseline, than Gwyneth Paltrow is. That seems like it's not great, but it's way better than the BMI, which is just like you should be this weight regardless of all other circumstances.
Aubrey: Totally. At one point in this book, Ed McMahon talks about another potential incentive program above and beyond the overcharging for a life insurance plan. This one is in Denmark, “The business of staying physically fit and not overweight actually became part of a political platform in Denmark a few years back. The Boston Globe reported that a Danish reformed party had as a plank in its platform, a proposed law that would require citizens to hand over one hours pay every month for each two pounds that they were overweight." You can imagine the whirlwind of exercising that that would have caused.
Mike: Oh. Finally, fat people have an incentive to lose weight. Finally. Because the world rewards fat people for being fat right now.
Aubrey: Yeah. We got to stop glorifying obesity and start being meaner and make people forgo their wages.
Mike: Finally. [chuckles]
Aubrey: God dammit. This book is shot through with a couple of things that I find really fascinating. And this is, I think, sort of the bulk of our conversation today. One is, it is shot through with so much goddamn misogyny, Michael Hobbes.
Mike: Shocking. [laughs]
Aubrey: There is a chapter in this book, no joke called, “Let's leave women's lib out of this.”
Mike: Nice.
[laughter]
Aubrey: Here's what he says, “Hold on a second, ladies. Before I try to pass myself off here as a semi authority on your particular weight problems, let me list some of my qualifications.”
Mike: Oh no.
Aubrey: “First of all, I'm married.”
Mike: Oh, here it comes.
Aubrey: “Second, I have four children and I'm familiar with all phases of home eating and the trickiness of feeding youngsters. Third, I can and do cook everything from simple stews to complicated repasts requiring hours of preparation. Fourth, well, I'm in favor of women, in general and in particular.”
[laughter]
Mike: I am qualified to speak on women's issues because I like having sex with them.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Mike: Good one, Ed.
Aubrey: Throughout the book, he talks about being tempted by food and it is always paired with, like, it's being offered to you, like food you can't have or food that will make you fat, is being offered to you by a beautiful thin woman.
Mike: What?
Aubrey: Yeah, so he talks about being at like industry parties and having a beautiful server come by with a plateful of canapes to offer you or being on a plane and having a beautiful flight attendant bring you a potato.
Mike: Nice.
Aubrey: He's like, when you get on a plane and you sit down and the flight attendant brings you a potato, I was like, “What?” [laughs] This is some wild 70s nonsense. No, I do not know about that, Ed McMahon.
Mike: This is like Gwyneth Paltrow when she gives fitness advice, and it's like, “Make sure you have a long meeting with your personal trainer who trains you in your own home.” And it's like, I don't know how generalizable this is, Gwyneth.
Aubrey: He draws on weirdly misogynist quotes from other sources. There is, in fact, a cameo in here from Ancel Keys.
Mike: Friend of the show, Ancel Keys.
Aubrey: Friend of the show, Ancel Keys who says, “A fairly common experience for us is the wife who finds her husband staying out more and more. He may be interested in another woman or just like being with the boys. So, she fishes around in the cupboard and hauls out a chocolate cake. It's a matter of boredom and the subconscious feeling that she is entitled to something because she's being deprived of something else.”
Mike: The idea is that I'm supposed to be so terrified of losing my partner that I keep weight off at all times. I'm just living in terror of losing him, so I never eat.
Aubrey: 100%, versus the maladaptive version, which Ancel Keys points out is, you get so worried that you eat all the time. [laughs]
Mike: Right. So, emotional eating is bad, but emotional not eating is good. [chuckles]
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. There is quite a bit of explicit statements in the book, that women are responsible for the weight of their families because women are expected to do the cooking for the family.
Mike: Of course, yes.
Aubrey: At one point he says, “If you really are fed up with your husband, what you could do is put him in the ground with what you cook.
Mike: Oh.
Aubrey: There's no fingerprints. The cops can't catch you. Just feed them a bunch of like fatty terrible foods.”
Mike: What would these foods be, Ed? Would it be a steak and hollandaise sauce?
Aubrey: [laughs]
Mike: What would she be doing? Martinis, Ed?
Aubrey: At one point, he says, “New brides should know this as they start their family meal habits which can lead to obesity. Not only must she keep the family healthy, she must keep them slim and happy. As famed nutritionist Adelle Davis says in Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit. Many women bury their husbands early just by overfeeding them.”
Mike: What? What is overfeeding an adult mean?
Aubrey: [laughs] So, he's joking. This is a dad joke territory. But it's horrific dad joke territory.
Mike: This idea, the looks, the appearance, the weight of your children are the fault of the mother. It's like this is a recipe for extremely bad parenting. A lot of people who have eating disorders, also have mothers with eating disorders, who modeled that behavior for them, like not eating all day, or having only a grapefruit for breakfast.
Aubrey: It's also just a recipe for ginning up what we've seen for decades prior at this point, we will see for decades into the future, which is ultimately like, the weight of the nation is the responsibility of women.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely.
Aubrey: And throughout this book, Ed McMahon leans into that. The first sentence of his whole book, so the first chapter is called, “I was overweight at birth,” he talks about being a nine-pound baby, which like, okay, Ed McMahon. The first sentence of his whole book is, “It's all my grandmother's fault.” And then he goes into talking about how his grandmother cooked for their entire family. She cooked all their meals growing up. What he says about his grandmother, I find really sad and troubling and fascinating, “Naturally, there were potatoes at every meal, a carryover from the harsh times in Ireland brought about by the potato famine. And since potatoes are one of the biggest sources of carbohydrates, the dieters worst enemy, you can see I was off to a bad start, as far as attaining a tapered figure was concerned. But we ate and we ate plenty and we loved every bit of it.”
Mike: So, your grandma was nice, and she's cooking you nice meals and you're mad because you're not tapered.
Aubrey: And she survived a potato famine and then got to a place where they have potatoes and she was like, “Awesome. I'm going to make potatoes.”
Mike: Also, potatoes are a vegetable, potatoes are fine.
Aubrey: They are root vegetables, they are nutrient dense, but because they are higher in carbohydrates, we have decided that they are “empty calories,” which they categorically are not.
Mike: Yeah, they seem fine.
Aubrey: I mean, listen, part of what's happening there with the demonization of carbohydrates is that we are demonizing the foods that poor people can afford. Potatoes, bread, and rice. The staple foods that people living in poverty around the world, the things that you can get in large quantity that you can cook up for your family, and we're reifying the idea that you need to have disposable income in order to be thin and healthy. The answer can't be, that it's okay for you to eat food that the poors eat. We can't have that. You got to have Moon Juice and you got to have Sex Dust, and then you got to have steak with hollandaise, and you got to have a shrimp platter. Like you have to have all of this stuff that is very well out of reach for a lot of people.
Mike: I am shocked and disappointed to discover that Ed McMahon does not have an intersectional anti-capitalist analysis of obesity epidemic. Unbelievable, deeply disappointing.
Aubrey: [laughs] This book is really shot through with misogyny. It is also shot through with anti-fatness in a way that, like, of course, it's a diet book. But there is like extra gnarly anti-fatness that shows up. At one point, he talks about not knowing that he was fat and having friends who were like too nice to tell you, which has not been my fucking experience, Ed McMahon.
Mike: I know.
Aubrey: But okay, this is one of those like, I think, probably dude fatness versus lady fatness and 70s fatness, [crosstalk]
Mike: Yeah, no kidding.
Aubrey: -2020s fatness. There are like lots of confounding factors here.
Mike: I also think, as we discussed on the show so many times, this is also before the panic over the obesity epidemic because that only started in the 1980s. I wonder if there's less of the fake sense of obligation that we have now around health, like, “Look, she really needs to hear from me that this is bad for her health.” I wonder if the bullying was somewhat tamped down. Back then, by the fact that this wasn't seen as a societal problem. I feel the construction of the obesity epidemic just really gives people a license to treat fat people like shit.
Aubrey: Yeah. There is a whole chapter in here on health, that is a blueprint of what kind of comes to be in our conversations about health and fatness. He quotes a doctor who says that overweight is America's number one health problem. But the way that it's written is, I'm introducing readers to this idea that being fat is a big health problem, is the vibe that I got from it. This is where we get into like, boy, oh, boy, internalized anti-fatness is a real bear.
When he talks about not knowing that he was getting fat, he says quote, “You know the story about Bertha, the fat lady, who weighs in at 600 pounds telling huge Hannah, ‘You're just right, Hannah weighs 390, now that's heavy, but to Big Bertha, Hanna's just right.’” The idea is like your friends are too nice to tell you how fat you're getting. If you have fat friends, you absolutely can't trust them, because they think it's just fine to be fat, because you're less fat than they are. They won't tell you the hard truth and you need someone who will really give you the straight dope, is the thinking here.
Mike: You need every interaction to be waned with people being shitty to you about your weight.
Aubrey: [chuckles] Yeah, at one point, he mocks the idea of a group of fat people gathering. He says, “I've had daydreams of a bunch of obese carolers standing on a corner singing, we shall overeat.”
Mike: Oh, there's that late night host humor coming through.
Aubrey: It's so gross. I was getting really frustrated with the amount of anti-fatness in this book and the amount of internalized anti-fatness that this dude is just spewing all over everything. Again, not surprising, it's a diet book, but it just does go like over the top a couple of times. And then he starts talking about his experience working on The Tonight Show. And it's fucking heartbreaking Mike. He does this whole preamble about like, “Look, there are bad bosses and there are good bosses. Bad bosses will use their employees to make themselves feel better. They're sort of bullies, they're jibes,” all that kind of stuff.
Mike: Oh, no.
Aubrey: He wants to be clear, Johnny Carson isn't a bad boss, he's a great guy.
Mike: But. [laughs]
Aubrey: And here it is, “This is the type of material Johnny will hit me with during one of his monologues. The airline gives garment bags to the entire staff for our trip to California. Even Ed, his is a little unusual. He has the only garment bag roomy enough to sleep six.”
Mike: Ah.
Aubrey: “You all know Ed McMahon, the bluebird of flabbiness.”
Mike: That's not even a joke.
Aubrey: It's really not.
Mike: That's just mean.
Aubrey: Throughout the book anytime he talks about Johnny Carson, pretty much, he's like, “Look, he's a great guy, but I really don't like it when he does this.” And then talks about being publicly ridiculed by this guy. It's really uncomfortable.
Mike: Yeah. Also, I feel that also gives other people license to make the same kinds of jokes that when people see you at, like public appearances, he was probably getting these kinds of jokes from random ass people too. It would just wear you down.
Aubrey: Yes. And reifying this idea that listen, fat people have it coming, we know we have it coming. We're not going to resist. We're not going to tell you to do better or treat us like people. I know this is going to keep happening. I know that this is part and parcel of being in the public eye, and of being not a thin man in the public eye, and it still bothers me. At the end, he says, “Now, I ask you, is that anyway to treat a faithful trusted employee who's labored in the vineyards of commercial TV with one man almost 15 years, but it's all in fun, it helps the show and I'm getting used to it. And besides, he is the boss.”
Mike: Oh, my fucking God. See if this was happening now, Ed McMahon would do a YouTube video with all the receipts, and like, screen [crosstalk] of the DMs. Holy shit.
Aubrey: [laughs] But if I think about being Ed McMahon in that scenario, I'm on stage every night. This is seen as a totally fine and very funny thing to do to a guy whose job it is to go along to get along. He can't say anything, that brings the show to a grinding halt. He is the boss, and this is a time when like, folks are not really critical of work hierarchies. He just doesn't push back, and it becomes so profound that he starts losing weight and he has this little experience.
Mike: Oh, no.
Aubrey: “Singer Della Reese, who occasionally is guest hostess on The Tonight Show had been away for several months. She didn't know I had gone on my new plan. She looked at me, did a double take and said, ‘Well, hello slim’. I don't know the rate of exchange on words for dollars. But that remark was worth plenty to me.” Because you are working every day with a dude who talks shit about your weight. Just someone acknowledge that you're getting thinner and you were like, “Yes, thank God, I'm on my way out of this garbage.” Of course, it meant so much to him.
Mike: He's in just such a terrible, abusive workplace, and he's trying to solve the abusiveness of the workplace by getting rid of the reason that he's being bullied. And that's not how bullies work, Ed.
Aubrey: It's totally not how bullies work, as evidenced by even when he loses weight, Johnny Carson doubles down on these jokes about Ed McMahon being an alcoholic, so much so like when I asked the boomers in my life, “What do you remember about Ed McMahon?” They were like, “Oh, famous drinker.” And in this book, he's like, “I don't really drink that much.” [Mike laughs] But Johnny kept making jokes about it. There's a joke in there where he says, “Ed is a late drinker, as soon as it gets late, he starts drinking.” “Ed went for his annual physical today, the doctor found an olive in his bloodstream.”
Mike: That was pretty good, but also mean.
Aubrey: Stuff like that, where I'm just like, “I don't know, man. Could you do this without treating your trusted colleague as like a total punching bag in public?”
Mike: Is this the part of the episode where we get to talk about what a piece of shit Johnny Carson was?
Aubrey: Yes, because I don't know anything about Johnny Carson, in particular, outside of this book, where he seems like a real fucking piece of shit, if I'm honest.
Mike: This is something that lives rent-free in my head, that it was almost 10 years ago now, that I read a book called Johnny Carson by a guy named Henry Bushkin, who was Johnny Carson's longtime lawyer, and they were extremely good friends for, I think, it was like 15 years. And then he pissed off Johnny Carson in some way. He's not totally sure what exactly he did. And then Johnny Carson just never talks to him again. In this book, he describes that, this was Johnny Carson's MO, that he would have these close relationships in his life, like wives, his fucking children, very close friends, people that he grew up with, and then they would do something to piss him off. And he would just cut them out and never speak to them again. This is eventually what happened with Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson, that after Johnny Carson famously leaves The Tonight Show, he leaves Hollywood completely, and he never speaks to Ed McMahon ever again after he leaves the show.
Aubrey: What?
Mike: Yes, there's lots of other stuff too, like, he’ll fire workers for making one mistake. Then not even do it to their face, like guys that have worked for him for like 10 or 15 years. He also treated women terribly. Everyone from women he would meet on these comedy tours, to his four wives. He just treated everyone like shit. He also, this is cold, but when he was on break from The Tonight Show, he would go to Vegas to do these comedy shows. And he just did the same comedy act, word for word, the same thing for three decades. It just was lazy and mean.
Aubrey: I sure do wish that we had conversations that also accounted for this experience of celebrities. Do you know what I mean?
Mike: Yeah.
Aubrey: I am not saying by any means that people's fond memories of watching Carson or McMahon are out the window and you can't like them anymore. But I am saying, we should be honest about who these people were in their fullness. Yes, comedic genius, and yes, also real shitty to workers and real shitty to people in his life and real shitty to Ed McMahon, who then turned around and was pretty shitty throughout this book to other fat people.
Mike: They were great. I think there is such a thing as presenteeism, where you view the actions of the past through 2021 lenses. It's fair to put things in the context, I think that these things were within bounds for the social and sexual mores of the time, but also those mores were bad. I think it's also fine to say that given what people expected of celebrities in the 60s and 70s, like Johnny Carson's behavior is pretty much par for the course. But that's a shitty course. It's good that we have a different course now and a different par.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right.
Mike: This is-- this is literally what social progress is, is we have different rules for behavior now than we used to.
Aubrey: Yeah. The vibe that I get from Ed McMahon in this whole book is that he is navigating a relationship with a dude who's low-key abusive.
Mike: Toxic as fuck.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. Abusive in a way that is, like, socially acceptable at the time. And he's figuring out how to negotiate his relationship to this dude, who signs his goddamn paychecks. He is tied to this dude who's being really publicly awful to him, and he's having reactions to that. And his reaction to that is the case with many people who are in sort of like abusive or toxic situations as he tries to sort of people please his way through it. And he's like, “If you don't like that, then I'll lose weight.” It's just whatever he can do to maintain his relationship and his standing in this space is what he's doing. Part of how he does that is by turning around and talking about Huge Hannah and Big Bertha or Bertha, the fat lady, or whatever it is.
Mike: Do you think that part of the reason this is so hurtful to Ed, is that he's not able to say to Johnny Carson, like, “Hey, this hurts my feelings.” It seems like they didn't really have language for that sort of thing, especially between men.
Aubrey: Yeah. I mean, amongst men at that time, that would have been a challenging thing, amongst male comedians at that time, that's a rare thing amongst male comedians now. It's just fascinating to have this little look into midcentury weight loss stuff, particularly, through a man's eyes in a way that is still so clearly pinned to women.
Mike: It's an interesting portrait because it's a man who's talking about his weight and a man who's talking about his feelings. Two things that were not encouraged for men to do at that time.
Aubrey: Absolutely. He does bury all of those feelings in so many jokes, so much weird, misogyny of the time, racism of the time, all of that kind of stuff, and shitting on other fat people, which is part of how anti-fatness works. It's also part of the reason that you will hear fat people and fat activists in particular talk about how incredibly painful and difficult it can be to talk to people who used to be fat and lost a lot of weight, because often, those are folks who have bought in, they're like, “I earned my privilege. Part of the bounty that I get for finally attaining thinness is that I too, get to shit on fat people. This is a sign that I have reached a level of privilege, and I really am a thin person, because I can talk down to fat people in this way that I absolutely hated, but thought was justified when I was fat.” That's what's happening in this book, where you're like, “Oh, my God, why are you being so shitty to fat people?” And then there are these little moments, where you see how Johnny Carson is treating him or you see how people treated him growing up or whatever the things are, and you're like, “Oh, that's why.” But it does feel, again, a really fascinating look into this whole world.
Mike: And into this complicated man with a terrible boss.
Aubrey: [chuckles] Yeah, that's right. So, that’s what I got for Slimming Down with Ed McMahon.
Mike: I feel very well educated. I'm cracking open a can of tab next to me.
Aubrey: Get your Sanka.
Mike: I've got a steak under the broiler.
Aubrey: What? [chuckles]
Mike: Shrimp in the fridge. Just ready to finally slim down to my MetLife predicted weight.
Aubrey: [laughs]
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