Garbo's Gayelord

Greta Garbo sat hidden behind a screen in a ballroom of Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel last week to hear her good friend Bengamin Gayelord Hauser lecture to a roomful of A.W.V.S. socialites.

A youngish man with a flashy smile and a broken accent, Bengamin Gayelord Hauser, "food adviser" to many a movie star, cut up fruits & vegetables, stuffed them into an electric chopper, quaffed the juice as he delivered the kind of message that makes M.D.s shudder. Samples:

>If there is a food shortage in the U.S., chew your food for half an hour-"you'll get more out of it."

> Lack of calcium produces "fear of the dark, nail biting, gossiping."

> Leaving skins on vegetables is good for the health, and also good for defense "since the ladies of A.W.V.S. are so busy."

> The Irish eat "lots of sea lettuce" which is rich in iodine. This influences their thyroids, in some mysterious manner keeps their hair from turning grey. By giving a 70-year-old woman vitamin B complex, Hauser claimed to have turned her white hair black. (In the audience last week was his 84-year-old sponsor Lady Mendl--Decorator Elsie de Wolfe--whose hair, once blue, is snow white.) Worry, said Hauser, also turns hair grey "by destroying the adrenal glands."

Hauser stopped calling himself an M.D. when the American Medical Association's Bureau of Investigation checked up on his credentials. Now he prefers to be known as "a food scientist." He claims to have been cured of tuberculosis of the hip by eating "36 lemons a day," for one or two weeks.

In 1937, three concoctions endorsed by Hauser--"Slim" (containing the harmful drugs senna, bladderwrack, buckthorn bark), "Correcol" (consisting of weeds and gum), and Hauser Potassium Broth (a mixture of alfalfa, okra. beet tops, etc.)--were seized and declared by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to be "misbranded and sold under false and fraudulent claims."

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