A not-so-sweet family history
Jell-O. Peer deep into its gelatinous form to find some tasty morsels — cherries, chunks of ham, pineapple . . . or a dark and unsavory past.
There’s plenty of the latter in “Jell-O Girls” (Little, Brown and Company), the new memoir by Jell-O heiress Allie Rowbottom. In it, the 32-year-old chronicles the sometimes enigmatic and often dramatic lives of three generations of Jell-O women, from her grandmother Midge to her mother, Mary, who died in 2015, to the author herself.
“Working on [the book] . . . was comforting in a way. It was sort of like visiting her,” Rowbottom tells The Post of her late mother. “It’s like I got to the book because that’s where she is.”
Rowbottom’s great-great-great uncle, Orator Woodward, of Le Roy, NY, bought the idea for a sweet gelatin dessert from inventor Pearle Bixby Wait in 1899 for a mere $450, according to Rowbottom. In 1906, Woodward died at age 50 of complications from a stroke, and later, in 1925, his heirs sold JellO to what is now Post Consumer Brands for $67 million, ensuring the family would be set for generations.
But with great wealth came great problems — as Mary’s cousin John explains in the book: “It’s called the Jell-O curse.”
And cursed they were. Midge died of breast cancer when Mary was just 14. Sexually abused as a child, Mary drank heavily and developed an eating disorder with Dexedrine, leading to a breakdown at 19 that would put her in a psychiatric hospital for years. During that time, her beloved cousin Joan committed suicide, and her close friend Bea died in a car accident.
Years later, Allie herself struggled with an eating disorder while in her teens, and endured her parents’ messy divorce. When she was 29, her mother died of metastatic carcinoid tumors. The curse seemed to stretch all the way back in time to Wait, the man who first developed and sold his invention: He died in middle age, ill and penniless.
Although Mary avoided the cursed dessert for much of her life, ironically, it would be the last meal she ever ate — a birthday dessert of whipped-cream-covered black-cherry Jell-O.
In spite of her family’s misfortunes, Rowbottom, now married and living in Los Angeles, continues to benefit financially from the Jell-O legacy. Even so, she doesn’t see herself embracing the jiggle anytime soon: “It’s kind of shocking how much sugar is in it!”