The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The woman who changed the world
Eleanor Halls discovers how the Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch built up her billion-dollar empire
ITHIS IS BIG by Marisa Meltzer 304pp, Chatto & Windus, £14.99, ebook £9.99
t was 1961 and 38-yearold Jean Nidetch was on her way to her local grocery store to buy, primarily, but among other things, three boxes of Mallomars. These gooey marshmallow treats would soon be stashed under the sink in the bathroom of her home, where, once the door was locked and the children distracted, Nidetch, who at 15 stone was lighter than her husband and happy about it, would consume all three boxes in one sitting.
She was thinking about this when an acquaintance walked past her in the aisle and, marvelling at her physique, asked Nidetch when she was due. Stricken, Nidetch – whose cab driver father had always been proud of having a plump daughter and wife during the Depression – went home, took a bracing look at herself in the mirror, and signed on to a New York obesity clinic. By 1962, she had lost 70lbs and, crucially, kept the weight off.
A naturally charismatic and glamorous extrovert who never left the house without an immaculately coiffed bouffant, Nidetch soon became a household name in her neighbourhood for weight loss tips and motivational pick-me-ups, which she dispensed to anyone who dropped by her home. Her motto: “It’s choice, not chance, that determines your destiny.” These drop-ins soon became regular weekly salons, and on May 15 1963, Nidetch had launched Weight Watchers with her first public meeting. She was so confident of her future success that she called it Weight Watchers International.
“Most fat people need to be hurt in some way into taking action and doing something for themselves. Something has got to happen to demoralise you suddenly and completely before you see the light,” writes 44-year-old American journalist Marisa Meltzer in the opening pages of This Is Big, as she describes the moment that turned Nidetch from an unknown housewife into one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs almost overnight.
The first Weight Watchers meeting had 50 chairs set out –
400 people turned up. By 1966, 297 classes were operating every week in New York City alone; by 1968 the company reported a gross revenue of $5.5 million; and in 1969, the company had 102 franchises and 1.5million members. In 1978, Weight Watchers was sold to Heinz for $71million.
Meltzer, who first visited a dietitian as a toddler and “fat camp” aged 10, became fascinated with the businesswoman after reading her obituary in April 2015. She was drawn to the details in Nidetch’s life that mirrored her own – the women were both blonde, both five-foot-seven, both lived in Brooklyn and both Jewish. Meltzer, a self-described “chronic, yo-yo dieter” who has received her fair share of misguided pregnancy enquiries, decided to join Weight Watchers on the spot. She then wrote down a list of questions she wished she could have asked Nidetch, who had died aged 91 of natural causes and with little of her fortune left. The answers, and the fascinating meanderings of Meltzer’s research, provide the backbone of her book.
Nidetch wrote an autobiography in 2010 and a history of Weight Watchers in 1970, but Meltzer’s This Is Big is the first outsider’s chronicle of what is now a billiondollar global empire, which has spawned magazines, frozen food lines, cookbooks and cruises; an empire so tightly woven into the fabric of American society that no social history makes sense without it. Currently, 45million Americans are on a diet, and $33billion (£27billion) is spent on weight loss products annually. Weight Watchers’ celebrity ambassador Oprah Winfrey owned 5.5million shares until 2019. Last year, as diet became a dirty word and wellness its shiny new usurper, Weight Watchers rebranded to WW.
The word diet, as Meltzer writes, comes from the ancient Greek diata, or “way of life”. In Europe, plumpness used to be admired as a physical demonstration of wealth, class, and in the case of women, fertility. The word diet didn’t assume its connotation of losing weight until industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century, when men put out of manual labour suddenly found themselves
The first Weight Watchers meeting in 1963 had 50 chairs – 400 people came
year’s diary-cum-novel, from January 1979 to February 1980, that recounts a meticulously observed day-by-day stew of political and personal life, domestic details and apparently unexpurgated internal reflections, dreams and anecdotes. Inconsistent (“I tend to have more than one opinion about things”), teasing, contradictory, he deploys spontaneous turns of thought to effects that can make you flinch:
People who are not capable of having more than one opinion do not think, they just go straight ahead. I fear that what people regard as thinking is often no more than the ordering of new knowledge and perceptions in such a way as not to disturb those that are already filed. Hardening the stone. People can’t stand it when you fail to live up to their image of you. Their inability to accept you is interpreted as a defect in your character, not theirs.
At the flat in Prague that he shares with his wife, Madla, and two sons, and at Dobřichovice, where they are building an apartment, life is equally chaotic, injected with the muddle of family relationships, of compromises made to survive, measures to avoid provoking the secret police, and Vaculík’s ever-present attraction to the opposite sex, particularly another courageous dissident, Zdena Erteltová. (She and Vaculík were grotesquely outed as lovers by the regime during its slander campaign against Charter 77, publishing stolen photographs of them naked in a cemetery. Madla always stood by him.)
What may seem a madly free-form narrative to British readers, in which public and private are no respecters of each other’s space, is less so in its original language. As Jonathan Bolton’s valuable afterword points out, A Czech Dreambook fits into a Czech literary tradition of “public intimacy”.
But that was just what held my attention, even more than the individual entries about the carefully arbitrary punishment strategy of the regime; what it is like being under more or less constant surveillance, Vaculík’s literary controversies with other dissidents, his irritation at Madla typing out Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard lectures while dance music blares from the radio. There is a wonderfully compelling authenticity to the book’s blurring of high-minded political conviction with equally urgent personal needs, be it for sexual activity or someone to look after Erteltová’s two pekinese dogs.
A Czech Dreambook has cult status in the Czech Republic. Sparklingly translated by Gerald Turner, it offers a fascinating experience to British readers: the candour of Vaculík (who died in 2015), his insistence on presenting himself in lights both positive and negative, without spin – as when he reads Madla’s diary about his own infidelity, snooping on his own wife like a secret policeman – is especially refreshing. Always on the outside of whatever side there was, he was an entertaining, visionary refusenik: the new totalitarianism, he told me, was the internet, which would “lead us to a life of insects”. In his Dreambook, his frankness is also a deliberate literary stance, a warning to us not to trust in heroes. Yet as a writer and thinker, he had one of the freest minds I’ve ever come across; so I am content still to call him one.
Vaculík’s manifesto was what led Moscow to denounce the 1968 Prague Spring
André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches – his account of life at American Vogue – is ideal reading material for anyone who found The Devil Wears Prada addictive but now needs a stronger hit. It is brimful of toxic behaviour and noxious values, which makes it perfect consolation, too, for lockdown. Maybe we are better off without other people?
Now 70, the journalist began his caviar-and-Concorde-fuelled adventures in fashionland when he was plucked from obscurity by the visionary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, inspiration for the “Think Pink” magazine editrix in the 1957 film Funny Face. Vreeland’s own career was on the slide (Condé Nast hadn’t told her it had fired her but had locked her out of her scarlet-walled office and painted it beige), but her nose for a fashion believer was as sharp as ever. Leon Talley went to work for her – gratis – in her new role as custodian of the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s Costume Institute. For a clothes-obsessed eccentric from a poor AfricanAmerican North Carolina family, it was an intoxicating vault into the outer reaches of the atmosphere. “I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision,” he writes.
At 6ft 6in, and skinny in his early years, he soon discovered that one way to attract attention in the fashion world was via a signature “look”. Anna Piaggi, a contemporary of his who worked at Italian Vogue for years, powdered her face white and once turned up at Le Palace, a famous Parisian nightclub where Leon Talley spent many a wild night, with a basket of reeking dead pigeons on her head. Leon Talley, by comparison, was conservative: boy scout shorts, Savile Row suits lined with Hermès silk scarves and, later, as he became progressively less skinny, couture kaftans. The message here is that he was a passionate aesthete, in contrast to Anna Wintour, the boss who becomes central to this tale and who has always been, he tells us, more passionate about power than clothes.
The Vreeland connection meant he was offered a generously paid job at Women’s Wear Daily, which was then the fashion industry bible. This took him to Paris, the epicentre of cultural life in the 1970s. Wildly sociable and voluble (I didn’t know him, but I knew his booming voice), he was soon ensconced in the beautiful set, hanging out in Paris and New York with Yves Saint Laurent, Tina Chow and Paloma Picasso, who once asked him to hold her handbag while she danced. “It was my favourite part of the night,” he writes with no apparent irony, although since he is no fool – he studied French culture at Brown, one of the top Ivy League colleges – he can’t be unaware that this is a slightly odd pinnacle of achievement.
For all his veneer of worldliness, Leon Talley comes across as a naif. He
THE CHIFFON TRENCHES
It’s impossible to tell if he is being tongue in cheek or deadly serious