Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Fan Who Infected a Movie Star

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

German measles is a minor illness for most people - but for unborn children it can be devastating. In 1943 - when the link was only just becoming clear - a young US marine decided to break rubella quarantine to meet the movie star Gene Tierney (played by Mircea Monroe). The marine was sick... and Gene was pregnant.The appalling consequences of that meeting tell us much about how our thoughtlessness can harm those around us - but the kind of tragedy that befell Tierney and her daughter can be averted if we appeal to the better parts of human nature.Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin A mental health institution. A psychiatrist is assessing whether a new patient needs to be admitted. I'm not going to stay. I'm not going to stay. Please, Mr. Nied relax. needs to be admitted. Miss Tierney. Miss Jean Tierney. Then one of the most famous women in the world.

Should take a Hollywood by storm in the 1940s, starring in Laura, the Razor's Edge, and as femme fatale Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But now it's years later, and Jean Tierney hasn't starred in a movie for a while. Sadly, it's not hard to see why. Nowadays, she spends a lot of time sleeping, whole days, sometimes two at a time. Then there were the delusions.

And that means the steak must be for you, ma'am. Take that back to the kitchen. Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am. Is it not cooked to your satisfaction? Please, just take it back to the kitchen. Jean, what are you doing? You can't go on like this. You must eat.

I won't eat that food, mother. They're trying to poison me. No wonder Jean's mother has brought her to a psychiatrist. Who do you think is trying to poison you, Miss Deerney? I don't know if I can trust you. You might be one of them. Who are you concerned about, Miss Deerney? The Communists.

Jean is worried about the Communists, but she's not going to tell him that. How do you spend your time nowadays? Scrapping the kitchen floor. It's true. How do you spend your time nowadays? Scrapping the kitchen floor? It's true. Jean likes to scrub the kitchen floor. It's something she can do without having to think. You know, Mr. Ernie, that you have to stay so that we can help you.

You can't force me. No one wants to force you. We can work on your problem, and you might even have fun. Do you have any flaws I can scrap? What had caused Jean Tierney's mind to become so tragically unmoored? Her family did have a history of mental illness. Her aunt, her mother's sister, had also been convinced that she was being poisoned. But Jean herself later wrote a memoir tracing her breakdown to a decision made by one of her fans a decade and a half earlier.

That decision is one that might feel disturbingly familiar to many of us today. I'm Tim Halford and you're listening to be an actress. She came from a well-to-do family. Her father was a New York insurance broker. She had been to finishing school in Luzanne, Switzerland. Girls from her class didn't become actresses. They married a Yale man and made a home in Connecticut. That all changed when Jean was 17 on a family holiday in California.

She went on a Hollywood studio tour where a director approached her with the immortal line. Young lady, you ought to be in pictures. Could she come back tomorrow for a screen test? She did, and she was offered a contract. Her father, the insurance man, wasn't keen. He insisted that she at least continue the plan to make her debut in high society back on the East Coast. He was sure she'd be so excited by the social whirl of country club dances that she'd soon forget any pipe dreams of the movies. I am so bored I think I will die." Jean's father grudgingly agreed to help her get into acting. She found an agent and roles on Broadway.

The critics loved her. She signed with 20th Century Fox, and in 1940, she starred in her first film, A Western with Henry Fonda. She landed more leading roles. She got invited to much cooler parties. Yet one of them, she met a man. I thought he was the most dangerous looking character I'd ever seen. Not handsome, but dangerous in a seductive way.

The man was Oleg Cassini, a Russian Italian fashion designer. Jean's family did not approve. He wasn't a Yale man, he hadn't even gone to Harvard. Jean and Oleg decided to alope. They booked flights to Las Vegas under assumed names. In June 1941, they were married. Jean was just 20 years old. While Jean and Oleg were getting hitched in Vegas, on the other side of the world, an

eye surgeon was puzzling over a mysterious wave of cases, all referred by pediatricians. Norman McAllister Gregg worked in a hospital in Sydney, Australia. In the first half of 1941, he'd found himself seeing cataracts in newborn baby after newborn baby. The cataracts were obvious from birth as dense white capacities completely occupying the papillary area. Most of the babies were of small size,

ill-nourished and difficult to feed. Many of them were found to be suffering from a congenital defect of the heart. It seemed 20 cases himself and had heard about more from his colleagues elsewhere in Australia. Something strange was going on. But what? Greg looked at the baby's dates of birth. Six to nine months earlier, an epidemic of Rubella, often known as German measles, had swept through Australia. Could there be a connection? Greg asked the mothers if they'd had German measles when they were pregnant. Most said yes. Some couldn't remember, but that wasn't too surprising as Relo is typically not too serious, a rash,

a few days of fever, if you had a mild case, you might not even notice. Greg published his speculations in the transactions of the ophthalmological society of Australia. I think it is reasonable to assume that the occurrence cannot be a mere coincidence. is reasonable to assume that the occurrence cannot be a mere coincidence. Not everyone was convinced. Could such a minor infection in a pregnant woman really cause such severe birth defects? To many doctors it seemed unlikely. Still, it was worth looking into. The National Health and Research Council of Australia decided to investigate. Two years later, in 1943, America had entered the Second World War. Jean Tierney's husband Oleg Cassini joined the army.

It just been posted to Fort Riley in Kansas. Jean was preparing to join him, but there was something she wanted to do first. One last appearance at the Hollywood canteen. The canteen was the movie industry's way of giving moral support to the war effort, a social club with free entry for anyone in an American military uniform. The stars would entertain them, serve them food, chat to them and dance with them. Betty Davis, Rita Hayworth, Marlena Dietrich, Bob Hope, they were all regulars. Jean hadn't been for a while.

She felt bad about that. At a nearby camp of the United States Marine Corps women's reserve, that gave one young woman a moral dilemma. Have you heard? Jean Tierney's at the Hollywood canteen tonight. What a shame we can't go. They couldn't go because their camp was under quarantine. There'd been an outbreak of German measles. It was generally a mild disease, but still, in wartime, the military doesn't want any kind of infection ripping through the ranks, potentially putting a lot of people out of action at once.

I know we're not supposed to, but you're not thinking of breaking quarantine. Oh, I feel fine. And jean tyranny, she's my favourite. No, I feel fine. And Jean-Tierney, she's my favourite. There were two things that young Marine didn't know. She didn't know about the article Norman McAllister Greg had published in the transactions of the Optalmological Society of Australia. Why would she? And you might have guessed.

The second thing she didn't know. Jean-Tierney Tierney was pregnant. We'll discover the consequences of the marines mistake in a moment. A few days after her appearance at the Hollywood canteen, Jean went to see her doctor. I've got these red spots all over my face. You have Rubella. Nothing to worry about.

You'll be fine within a week. And she was. Also, it seemed. Jean went to Kansas and lived the life of an army wife at Fort Riley, scrubbing Olegg's laundry, and she had her baby, a daughter. They called her Daria. She was fair and blunt, a beautiful child. But Daria was born premature.

She weighed just two and a half pounds. She needed eleven blood transfusions. She had a cataract in the corner of an eye. As the months went by, Jean fought the realization that Daria wasn't developing as she should. When the baby waved her hands in front of her eyes, she seemed to be struggling to see them. It also appeared that she couldn't hear. When Daria was a year old, Jean was leafing through a newspaper.

An article jumped out at her. It was about a newly published study in Australia. Researchers had been looking into a theory first suggested by a Sydney eye surgeon, and now there was evidence. Dr. Greg had been right, when a pregnant woman gets German measles in her first trimester, there's a risk of serious birth defects. Jean took the article to her daughter's pediatrician, hoping to be told that something could be done to make Daria better.

The doctor was diplomatic. New research was being done all the time and who knows what might one day be possible. But it was clear that he wasn't optimistic. Soon after, Jean was at a Sunday afternoon tennis party in Los Angeles when a young woman approached her. I don't suppose you remember me, do you? Why, no, should I? I'm in the woman's branch of the Marines. young woman approached her. Let's add two more items to the list of things that the Marine now didn't know. She didn't know about Darius' disabilities.

In those days, such things simply weren't talked about. And surely she hadn't read the newspaper article that Jean had taken to her pediatrician, making clear that Rubella could be something far more than a minor inconvenience. You know, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but almost the whole camp was down with German measles. I broke quarantine to come to the canteen to meet the stars. Everyone told me I shouldn't but I just had to go. And you were my favorite. I've often thought about Jean Tierney during the COVID pandemic. When the news has served up depressing stories about people acting thoughtlessly, like that

young Marine, take the case of Brady Sluder. He was a college student from Ohio, went to a spring break party in Miami in March 2020, before the widespread lockdowns. But spring break came far enough into the news of the pandemic that Sluder really should have known better than to tell a journalist, braid his problem was thinking of himself only as a potential victim of the coronavirus. If that were true, his view would be completely defensible. Covid was unlikely to be serious for someone of his age, and you're any young once. But of course, we're not just potential victims of Covid, we're potential vectors. We can catch it, incubate it without even knowing, and then pass it on to someone else,

for whom it might be a much bigger deal. That can be easy to forget. Consider some of the reactions to a widely reported study of mask wearing. Early in the pandemic, before most governments were mandating the use of masks, some Danish researchers recruited 6,000 people to a randomized controlled trial, the best way of gathering evidence about what works. They gave half the group masks and instructions about wearing them, as well as some standard advice on social distancing. The other half, the control group, got only the advice to social distance.

The results? Over the next few weeks, a fraction under 2% of the mask wearing group got COVID. Among the non-mask wearers, it was a fraction over 2%. The anti-lockdown group, Keep Britain Free, shared the news like this. Denmark proves masks are not effective. But the Danish study didn't prove any such thing. Keep Britain free was thinking of mask wearers only as potential victims. And if your soul concern about Covid is getting the disease yourself, this particular study did indeed suggest that wearing a mask wouldn't do much to help you. But that's not the only reason we wear masks, or even the main reason.

We wear masks to protect others from virus particles that might be coming out of our own mouths and noses. We wear masks because we understand that we're not just potential victims, we're potential vectors. Rubella is like COVID in that it's far more dangerous for some people than others, but that wasn't common knowledge in 1943. Before we rushed to judge the young marine, perhaps we should first look at ourselves. Have you ever gone into work when you should have called in sick?

If you're a parent, have you ever sent your child to school or daycare and they weren't fully recovered from an illness? Research from 2019 found that 90% of US white collar workers sometimes or always came into the office when they're coughing and sneezing. Perhaps surprisingly they said that the main reason wasn't lack of sick leave or pressure from the boss. It was wanting to keep on top of work. But researchers calculate that more productivity is lost by people coming into work when they're sick, than by people taking cheeky days off when they aren't. That's partly because coughing and sneezing all over your co-workers makes them sick and

unproductive too. As for sending children to school, check out this advertising campaign from a local government website in the UK. Be a pushy parent. Get them to school. A page on the local government's website explained that parents should force their kids to go to school if they complain of feeling a bit unwell. Putting your foot down isn't always easy, but a hundred percent attendance should be every parent's goal. This attendance campaign, like the research into white collar sneezes, was from 2019, pre-pandemic.

Even then, the pro-attendance cheerleading was criticised. Isn't it courteous to other parents to keep your child at home and they might have something contagious? After Covid, the campaign webpage now has a slightly different message. Sorry, the page you asked for could not be found. It may have been moved or deleted. After the break, Agatha Christie puts her own spin on the story. You know, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but almost the whole camp was down with German measles. I broke quarantine to come to the canteen to meet the stars." As the young Marine at the tennis party made her confession to Jean Tierney, she was utterly unaware of the impact she might have had on Tierney and her daughter.

One can only imagine the star's state of mind. That is in fact what Agatha Christie did a couple of decades later, imagine it. In her novel The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, a movie star takes revenge on the thoughtless party-gower who exposed her to Rebella by offering her a poison daiquiri. In real life though, Jean didn't seek revenge. She was too stunned to seek anything. She just stood there for a while as the young Marine babbled on. Then she silently turned and walked away. Jean looked after her daughter Daria, for as long as she could, hoping against hope that one day Daria would hear and see clearly and speak.

When Daria was four, the doctor sat Jean down for a difficult conversation. He told her that she simply couldn't keep her child. It would be unhealthy for Jean, and hopeless for Daria, he explained. Reluctantly, Jean agreed to place Daria in an institution where she could get round the clock professional care. Daria lived to 66, her mind forever locked in infancy.

She has never talked, but on my visit she is always aware of my presence. She sniffed at my neck and hugs me. Jean's marriage crumbled under the strain, but her movie career continued to thrive. As long as I was playing someone else, I was fine. When I had to be myself, my problems began. thrive. She tried to talk to her mother, who hoped it was all just a passing phase. All you need is an attractive bow and some pretty new French dresses. Attractive bows weren't hard to find.

In the late 40s and early 50s, Jean dated the future president, John F. Kennedy, and the globe-trotting playboy, Prince Ali Khan. But as her friends praised how well she was coping, she was finding it harder and harder to hold herself together. I felt like a person trying to get out of a burning building. When my breakdown came, I cried all the time. I cried for Daria and for me, and I cried for hours, until I often didn't know where the tears came from.

The young Marine who decided the quarantine rules needed to apply to her, Brady Sluder who failed to realize that anyone else might be hurt if he personally called coronavirus. It would be easy to think about this as a tale of selfishness. But selfishness isn't quite the right word. This is more a tale of thoughtlessness. In fact, we flawed humans are far more altruistic than many people give us credit for. We just need a little help. Ten years ago, the psychologist Adam Grant and David Hoffman, who studies organizational

culture, asked the question, how could you minimise the number of times, nurses and doctors forget to wash their hands? Yes, even before the pandemic, we were being reminded to wash our hands, or at least health professionals were, unless they spread disease. But those reminders didn't always work. Grant and Hoffman put up signs above dozens of hand gel dispensers in hospitals. One sign read,

hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases. Another said, hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases. Then they came back a fortnight later to see how much hand gel had been used. The first sign, reminding nurses and doctors that they were at risk of disease, had no effect whatsoever. The second one did, when the doctors and nurses were reminded of patients, they used 50% more hand gel.

It's not just hand washing. In 2014, researchers in Bosnia and Herzegovina wandered about the effects of different kinds of messages on blood donation drives. They sent out seven different types of letters to people who'd given blood in the past, asking in different ways for them to people who'd given blood in the past, asking in different ways for them to give blood again. One letter contained factual information about what

kind of illnesses cause others to need blood. Another described a specific victim who needed blood, with a name and a picture, and so on. The results were even more impressive than in the Hangel study. The researchers found something that made people 63% more likely to arrange an appointment to give blood. But this time, it wasn't anything to do with the different messages. They all had a big impact compared with no letter at all. Just receiving the message was what mattered. Everyone knew that giving blood was altruistic. It didn't require any clever persuasion to get them to do it again. All it took was a simple reminder.

The list of examples goes on. Ads about drunk driving often make you think about the risk to others, not yourself. Some of the hardest hitting anti-smoking ads focus on second-hand smoke. Still another study finds that if you want to persuade people to get vaccinations, a good way to do that is to remind them of the benefit to others. That matters because vaccines don't always work perfectly and not everyone can have them. When the UK started to use a new Rubella vaccine in 1970, the country vaccinated only women of childbearing age. That seems to make sense, they're the population you should worry about after all.

The Rubella vaccine is pretty effective. It works 95% of the time, but that still left 5% of women susceptible. In 1987, the UK recorded 167 cases of pregnant women with Rubella. They were catching it from children, their own or their friends. So why not vaccinate the children, too? The US have been doing that since the early 1970s, and in 1988, it's what the UK started to do, too. It made Rubella vaccine universal for children as part of the MMR vaccine.

Rubella is what the R stands for, alongside mumps and measles. And 15 years later, the number of rubella infections in pregnancy had dropped from 167 to just one. Much the same will be true of COVID vaccines, if we vaccinate only the vulnerable, it won't be enough. We need the people who aren't at much risk, the braided sluders of the world, to remember that they're not just at risk of catching a disease, but are passing it on, causing consequences for others that

can be deadly, or last a lifetime. time. As I said at the beginning of this cautionary tale, we don't know the exact connection between Jean Tierney's mental breakdown and her daughter's condition. But we do know what Jean believed. She was certain that Darius' disability was the cause of her own mental illness, and that disability was caused by the Marine's thoughtlessness, passing on Rubella that night in the Hollywood canteen. Jean spent time in three mental health clinics. She went through 32 rounds of electro-convulsive

therapy. Between those spells and institutions, she stayed in her mother's 14th floor apartment in New York. One day, Jean's mother returned from shopping to be accosted in the lobby by an anxious dormant. There were policemen in your apartment, he said, talking to your daughter, don't worry, she's okay. But well, someone called the police because they saw your daughter standing on the window ledge. Looking like she was about to...

Jean's mother ran for the elevator. Oh, Jean! Don't get excited, mother, I'm perfectly alright! Oh, look at you! I was never going to do it, mother. I was only looking down to see how far it was. Jean did get better. Mostly.

She married an oil baron and lived quietly in Texas. She wrote her memoir, Self Portrait. Sometimes, she said, she'd wake up, convinced that the communists had stolen her daughter. Once her husband found her banging on their neighbors' door in Houston in the middle of the night, sure that they'd kidnapped Arya and demanding that they give her back. But these moments passed, and she learned to accept them. To make any progress at all, you first have to accept the fact that you have an illness. If it takes saying out loud, I am sick, I am insane, I am a crazy person.

One must say it. I have gone through such a time and more and survived. A couple of days after his spring break interview, Brady Sluder posted on Instagram, our generation may feel invincible, but we have a responsibility. I deeply apologize for my unawareness of my actions. I want to use this as motivation to become a better person, a better son, a better friend, and a better citizen. Brady Sluder hadn't been heartless, he'd been thoughtless, and once he'd been prompted to think, he wanted to do the right thing. I'm sure that would have been true for the Marine if she'd had the slightest idea of

the harm she could do. In fact, I think it's true for most of us. Remember those blood donors in Bosnia? These were altruistic people that had given blood before, but they were also forgetful. Without a reminder, they didn't think of going back to give again. We can often be self-centered in that we instinctively see things from our own perspective. But when we remember to think about others, we're not selfish, quite the opposite. And sometimes all it takes to remind us is something as simple as a sign above the hand gel dispenser.

Key sources for this episode include Gene Tierney's autobiography, Self Portrait, and Adam Grant and David Hoffman's study in Psychological Science. It's not all about me. For a full list of references, see TimHalford.com Corsinary Tales is written by me Tim Halford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Weiss, Julia Barton, edited the scripts. Starring in this series of cautionary tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright alongside Nazar Alderazi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutridge, Rachel Hanzure, Kodner-Hullbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Miseum and Roe and Rufus Wright. The show also

wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LeBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarrs, Carly McLeory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Daniela LeCarn, and Maya Caning. Corsionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Thank you. you