May 7, 2021 • 31 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
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, Miss Tierney, relax,
(00:37):
take a seat, Miss Tierney. Miss Jean Tierney then one
of the most famous women in the world. She had
taken Hollywood by storm in the nineteen forties, starring in
Laura the Razor's Edge and as fem Fatale Ellen Barrant
in Leave Her to Heaven, which earned her an Academy
(00:59):
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.
(01:21):
Then there were the delusions, and that means the steak
must be for you, ma'am. Take that back to the kitchen.
I'm sorry, ma'am. Is it not cooked? Your satisfaction? Please
just take it back to the kitchen. Gane, 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.
(01:46):
No wonder Jean's mother has brought her to a psychiatrist.
Who do you think is trying to poison you, Miss Dyrney?
I don't know if I can trust you. You might
be one of them. Who are you concerned about, Miss Dyrney?
The Communists? Jean is worried about the Communists, but she's
(02:07):
not going to tell him that. How do you spend
your time nowadays? Scrubbing the kitchen floor? It's true, Jeane
likes to scrub the kitchen floor. It's something she can
do without having to think. You know, miss Dearne, that
you'll have to stay so that we can help you.
You can't force me. No one wants to force you.
(02:29):
We can work on your problem and you might even
have fun. Do you have any floors that can scrub?
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
(02:51):
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.
(03:12):
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Jean
(03:44):
Tierney never intended 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 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Girls from her class didn't become actresses. They married a
Yale man and made a home in Connecticut. That all
(04:04):
changed when Jean was seventeen. 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.
(04:26):
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
(04:47):
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 twentieth Century Fox,
and in nineteen forty she starred in her first film,
a Western, with Henry Fonda. She landed more leading roles.
(05:09):
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
(05:33):
he wasn't a Yale man. He hadn't even gone to Harvard.
Jean and Oleg decided to elope. They booked flights to
Las Vegas under assumed names. In June nineteen forty one,
they were married. Jean was just twenty years old. While
(05:56):
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 mc alis to Gregg worked in a hospital in Sydney, Australia,
in the first half of nineteen forty one, he had
found himself seeing cataracts in newborn baby after newborn baby.
(06:20):
The cataracts were obvious from birth as dense white opacities
completely occupying the pupillary 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 had seemed twenty cases himself
and had heard about more from his colleagues elsewhere in Australia.
(06:43):
Something strange was going on. But what Greg looked at
the babies dates of birth Six to nine months earlier,
an epidemic of rubella, often known as German measles, had
swept to Australia. Could there be a connection? Gregg asked
the mothers if they'd had German measles when they were pregnant.
(07:06):
Most said yes, some could remember, but that wasn't too
surprising as rubella is typically not too serious a rash
a few days of fever. If you had a mild case,
you might not even notice. Gregg published his speculations in
the Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia. I think
(07:28):
it 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
(07:51):
of Australia decided to investigate. Two years later, in nineteen
forty three, America had entered the Second World War. Jeane
Tierney's husband, Oleg Cassine, joined the army. It had just
(08:11):
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
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
young woman a moral dilemma. Have you heard Jean Tyranny's
at the Hollywood Canteen tonight. What a shame? We can't go.
They couldn't go because their camp was 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
(09:19):
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 a break in quarantine. Oh,
I feel fine. And Gene Tierney, she's my favorite. There
were two things that young marine didn't know. She didn't
know about the article Norman McAllister Gregg had published in
(09:42):
the Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia. Why would
she and you might have guessed. The second thing she
didn't know Gene Tierney was pregnant. We'll discover the consequences
of the Marine's mistake in a moment. A few days
(10:12):
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, or so
it seemed. Jean went to Kansas and lived the life
(10:32):
of an army wife at Fort Riley, scrubbing o Leg's laundry,
and she had her baby, a daughter. They called her Daria.
She was fair and blond, 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
(10:56):
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 seemed to be struggling to see them. It also
appeared that she couldn't hear. When Daria was a year old,
(11:17):
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 doctor
Gregg had been right. When a pregnant woman gets German
(11:38):
measles in her first trimester, there's a risk of serious
birth defects. Jeanne 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
(12:01):
wasn't optimistic. Soon after, Jeanne was at a Sunday afternoon
tennis party in Los Angeles. A young woman approached her.
I don't suppose you remember me, do you? Why? No?
Should I? I'm in the women's branch of the Marines.
We met once at the Hollywood Canteen. Let's add two
(12:22):
more items to the list of things that the marine
now didn't know. She didn't know about Daria's 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
(12:47):
shouldn't tell you this, but almost the whole camp was
down with German measles. I brought 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,
(13:09):
and the news has served up depressing stories about people
acting thoughtlessly like that young marine. Take the case of
Brady Sluda. He was a college student from Ohio went
to a spring break party in Miami in March twenty
twenty before the widespread lockdowns. But spring break came far
enough into the news of the pandemic that Sluda really
(13:31):
should have known better than to tell a journalist if
I get Corona, I get Corona. At the end of
the day, I'm not going to let start me from Vardian.
Brady's 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
(13:52):
for someone of his age, and you're any young wants
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
whom it might be a much bigger deal that can
be easy to forget. Consider some of the reactions to
(14:16):
a widely reported study of mask wearing early in the pandemic,
before most governments were mandating the use of masks. Some
Danish researchers recruited six thousand 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,
(14:37):
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 two percent of the mask wearing group got COVID.
Among the non mask wearers, it was a fraction over
(14:59):
two percent. The anti lockdown group Keep Britain Free shared
the news like this Denmark proves mask 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,
(15:19):
and if your sole 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
(15:41):
and noses. We wear masks because we understand that we're
not just potential victims, we're potential vectors. Rubello is like
COVID in that it's far more dangerous for some people
than others, But that wasn't common knowledge in nineteen forty three.
And before we rush to judge the young marine, perhaps
(16:04):
we should first look at ourselves. Have you ever gone
into work when you should have in sick? If you're
a parent, have you ever sent your child to school
or daycare when they weren't fully recovered from an illness.
Research from twenty nineteen found that ninety percent of US
white collar workers sometimes or always came into the office
(16:26):
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
(16:48):
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, The Pushy parent Get Them to School.
A page on the local government's website explain that parents
(17:09):
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 one hundred percent attendance should be
every parent's goal. This attendance campaign, like the research into
white collar sneezers, was from twenty nineteen, pre pandemic. Even then,
(17:31):
the pro attendance cheerleading was criticized. Isn't it courteous to
other parents to keep your child at home when they
might have something contagious? After COVID the campaign web page
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
(17:56):
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 brought quarantine to come to the
(18:17):
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
(18:40):
her novel The Mirror Cracked from side to side, a
movie star takes revenge on the thoughtless partygoer who exposed
her to Rubella by offering her a poisoned dacri. In
real life, though Jean didn't seek revenge, she was too
stunned to seek anything. She just stood there for a
(19:01):
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.
(19:22):
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
(19:43):
clock professional care. Daria lived to sixty six, her mind
ever locked in infancy. She has never talked, but on
my visit she is always aware of my presence. She
sniffs at my neck and hugs me. Jean's marriage crumbled
(20:05):
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. I
felt my mind begin to unravel. I felt scared for
no reason. She tried to talk to her mother, who
(20:26):
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 forties
and early fifties. Jean dated the future President John F.
Kennedy and the globetrotting playboy Prince Ali Khan. But as
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
for hours until I often didn't know where the tears
came from. The young marine who decided the quarantine rules
needn't apply to her, Brady Sluda, who failed to realize
that anyone else might be hurt if he personally caught coronavirus.
It would be easy to think about this as a
(21:32):
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 Hoffmann, who
(21:54):
studies organizational culture, asked the question, how could you minimize
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,
lest they spread disease. But those reminders didn't always work.
(22:16):
Grant and Hoffmann put up signs above dozens of handgel
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 handgel had been used. The first sign,
(22:39):
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 patience, they used fifty
percent more handgell. It's not just handwashing. In twenty fourteen,
(23:00):
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 give blood again. One letter contained factual information about
what kind of illnesses cause others to need blood. Another
(23:23):
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 handgel study. The researchers found
something that made people sixty three percent more likely to
arrange an appointment to give blood. But this time there
(23:44):
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.
(24:10):
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 secondhand 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
(24:32):
always work perfectly and not everyone can have them. When
the UK started to use a new rubella vaccine in
nineteen seventy, 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.
(24:53):
It works ninety five percent of the time, but that
still left five percent of women susceptible. In nineteen eighty seven,
the UK recorded one hundred and sixty seven cases of
pregnant women with rubella. They were catching it from children,
their own or their friends. So why not vaccinate the
(25:13):
children too. The US had been doing that since the
early nineteen seventies, and in nineteen eighty eight 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,
(25:33):
and fifteen years later, the number of rubella infections in
pregnancy had dropped from one hundred and sixty seven to
just one. Much the same will be true of COVID vaccines.
If we vaccinate only the vulnerable, it won't be enough.
(25:54):
We need the people who aren't at much risk, the
Brady Sluders of the world, to remember that they're not
just at risk of catching a disease, but of passing
it on, causing consequences for others that can be deadly
or last alike. As I said at the beginning of
(26:16):
this cautionary tale, we don't know the exact connection between
Gene Tierney's mental breakdown and her daughter's condition, but we
do know what Jean believed. She was certain that Daria's
disability was the cause of her own mental illness, and
that disability was caused by the marine's thoughtlessness, passing on
(26:38):
Rubella that night in the Hollywood Canteen. Jean spent time
in three mental health clinics. She went through thirty two
rounds of electro convulsive therapy. Between those spells in institutions,
she stayed in her mother's fourteenth floor apartment in New York.
One day, Jean's mother returned from shopping to be accosted
(27:00):
in the lobby by an anxious dorman. There are policemen
in your apartment, he said, talking to your daughter. Now,
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
(27:20):
the elevator. Oh, Jean, don't get excited, mother. I'm perfectly
all right with 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
(27:41):
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 neighbor's door in Houston in the middle of the night,
sure that they'd kidnapped Daria and demanding that they give
(28:02):
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.
(28:32):
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,
(28:53):
and a better citizen. Brady Sluder hadn't been heartless, he
had been thoughtless, and once he had been prompted to think,
he wanted to do the right thing. I'm sure that
would have been true for them An if she'd had
the slightest idea of the harm she could do. In fact,
(29:14):
I think it's true for most of us. Remember those
blood donors in Bosnia. These were altruistic people. They'd 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
(29:34):
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
(30:02):
sources for this episode include Gene Tierney's autobiography Self Portrait
and Adam gra and David Hoffman's study in psychological science
It's Not All About Me. For a full list of references,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
(30:23):
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonon, Carter,
and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
(30:48):
Rachel Hanshaw, Cobnor Holbrook, Smith, Greg Lockett, Massa Munroe, and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weissberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz,
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Danielle Lacan
(31:10):
and Maya Canning. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
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, Miss Tierney, relax,
(00:37):
take a seat, Miss Tierney. Miss Jean Tierney then one
of the most famous women in the world. She had
taken Hollywood by storm in the nineteen forties, starring in
Laura the Razor's Edge and as fem Fatale Ellen Barrant
in Leave Her to Heaven, which earned her an Academy
(00:59):
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.
(01:21):
Then there were the delusions, and that means the steak
must be for you, ma'am. Take that back to the kitchen.
I'm sorry, ma'am. Is it not cooked? Your satisfaction? Please
just take it back to the kitchen. Gane, 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.
(01:46):
No wonder Jean's mother has brought her to a psychiatrist.
Who do you think is trying to poison you, Miss Dyrney?
I don't know if I can trust you. You might
be one of them. Who are you concerned about, Miss Dyrney?
The Communists? Jean is worried about the Communists, but she's
(02:07):
not going to tell him that. How do you spend
your time nowadays? Scrubbing the kitchen floor? It's true, Jeane
likes to scrub the kitchen floor. It's something she can
do without having to think. You know, miss Dearne, that
you'll have to stay so that we can help you.
You can't force me. No one wants to force you.
(02:29):
We can work on your problem and you might even
have fun. Do you have any floors that can scrub?
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
(02:51):
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.
(03:12):
I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Jean
(03:44):
Tierney never intended 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 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Girls from her class didn't become actresses. They married a
Yale man and made a home in Connecticut. That all
(04:04):
changed when Jean was seventeen. 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.
(04:26):
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
(04:47):
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 twentieth Century Fox,
and in nineteen forty she starred in her first film,
a Western, with Henry Fonda. She landed more leading roles.
(05:09):
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
(05:33):
he wasn't a Yale man. He hadn't even gone to Harvard.
Jean and Oleg decided to elope. They booked flights to
Las Vegas under assumed names. In June nineteen forty one,
they were married. Jean was just twenty years old. While
(05:56):
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 mc alis to Gregg worked in a hospital in Sydney, Australia,
in the first half of nineteen forty one, he had
found himself seeing cataracts in newborn baby after newborn baby.
(06:20):
The cataracts were obvious from birth as dense white opacities
completely occupying the pupillary 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 had seemed twenty cases himself
and had heard about more from his colleagues elsewhere in Australia.
(06:43):
Something strange was going on. But what Greg looked at
the babies dates of birth Six to nine months earlier,
an epidemic of rubella, often known as German measles, had
swept to Australia. Could there be a connection? Gregg asked
the mothers if they'd had German measles when they were pregnant.
(07:06):
Most said yes, some could remember, but that wasn't too
surprising as rubella is typically not too serious a rash
a few days of fever. If you had a mild case,
you might not even notice. Gregg published his speculations in
the Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia. I think
(07:28):
it 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
(07:51):
of Australia decided to investigate. Two years later, in nineteen
forty three, America had entered the Second World War. Jeane
Tierney's husband, Oleg Cassine, joined the army. It had just
(08:11):
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
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
young woman a moral dilemma. Have you heard Jean Tyranny's
at the Hollywood Canteen tonight. What a shame? We can't go.
They couldn't go because their camp was 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
(09:19):
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 a break in quarantine. Oh,
I feel fine. And Gene Tierney, she's my favorite. There
were two things that young marine didn't know. She didn't
know about the article Norman McAllister Gregg had published in
(09:42):
the Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia. Why would
she and you might have guessed. The second thing she
didn't know Gene Tierney was pregnant. We'll discover the consequences
of the Marine's mistake in a moment. A few days
(10:12):
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, or so
it seemed. Jean went to Kansas and lived the life
(10:32):
of an army wife at Fort Riley, scrubbing o Leg's laundry,
and she had her baby, a daughter. They called her Daria.
She was fair and blond, 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
(10:56):
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 seemed to be struggling to see them. It also
appeared that she couldn't hear. When Daria was a year old,
(11:17):
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 doctor
Gregg had been right. When a pregnant woman gets German
(11:38):
measles in her first trimester, there's a risk of serious
birth defects. Jeanne 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
(12:01):
wasn't optimistic. Soon after, Jeanne was at a Sunday afternoon
tennis party in Los Angeles. A young woman approached her.
I don't suppose you remember me, do you? Why? No?
Should I? I'm in the women's branch of the Marines.
We met once at the Hollywood Canteen. Let's add two
(12:22):
more items to the list of things that the marine
now didn't know. She didn't know about Daria's 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
(12:47):
shouldn't tell you this, but almost the whole camp was
down with German measles. I brought 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,
(13:09):
and the news has served up depressing stories about people
acting thoughtlessly like that young marine. Take the case of
Brady Sluda. He was a college student from Ohio went
to a spring break party in Miami in March twenty
twenty before the widespread lockdowns. But spring break came far
enough into the news of the pandemic that Sluda really
(13:31):
should have known better than to tell a journalist if
I get Corona, I get Corona. At the end of
the day, I'm not going to let start me from Vardian.
Brady's 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
(13:52):
for someone of his age, and you're any young wants
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
whom it might be a much bigger deal that can
be easy to forget. Consider some of the reactions to
(14:16):
a widely reported study of mask wearing early in the pandemic,
before most governments were mandating the use of masks. Some
Danish researchers recruited six thousand 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,
(14:37):
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 two percent of the mask wearing group got COVID.
Among the non mask wearers, it was a fraction over
(14:59):
two percent. The anti lockdown group Keep Britain Free shared
the news like this Denmark proves mask 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,
(15:19):
and if your sole 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
(15:41):
and noses. We wear masks because we understand that we're
not just potential victims, we're potential vectors. Rubello is like
COVID in that it's far more dangerous for some people
than others, But that wasn't common knowledge in nineteen forty three.
And before we rush to judge the young marine, perhaps
(16:04):
we should first look at ourselves. Have you ever gone
into work when you should have in sick? If you're
a parent, have you ever sent your child to school
or daycare when they weren't fully recovered from an illness.
Research from twenty nineteen found that ninety percent of US
white collar workers sometimes or always came into the office
(16:26):
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
(16:48):
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, The Pushy parent Get Them to School.
A page on the local government's website explain that parents
(17:09):
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 one hundred percent attendance should be
every parent's goal. This attendance campaign, like the research into
white collar sneezers, was from twenty nineteen, pre pandemic. Even then,
(17:31):
the pro attendance cheerleading was criticized. Isn't it courteous to
other parents to keep your child at home when they
might have something contagious? After COVID the campaign web page
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
(17:56):
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 brought quarantine to come to the
(18:17):
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
(18:40):
her novel The Mirror Cracked from side to side, a
movie star takes revenge on the thoughtless partygoer who exposed
her to Rubella by offering her a poisoned dacri. In
real life, though Jean didn't seek revenge, she was too
stunned to seek anything. She just stood there for a
(19:01):
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.
(19:22):
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
(19:43):
clock professional care. Daria lived to sixty six, her mind
ever locked in infancy. She has never talked, but on
my visit she is always aware of my presence. She
sniffs at my neck and hugs me. Jean's marriage crumbled
(20:05):
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. I
felt my mind begin to unravel. I felt scared for
no reason. She tried to talk to her mother, who
(20:26):
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 forties
and early fifties. Jean dated the future President John F.
Kennedy and the globetrotting playboy Prince Ali Khan. But as
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
for hours until I often didn't know where the tears
came from. The young marine who decided the quarantine rules
needn't apply to her, Brady Sluda, who failed to realize
that anyone else might be hurt if he personally caught coronavirus.
It would be easy to think about this as a
(21:32):
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 Hoffmann, who
(21:54):
studies organizational culture, asked the question, how could you minimize
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,
lest they spread disease. But those reminders didn't always work.
(22:16):
Grant and Hoffmann put up signs above dozens of handgel
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 handgel had been used. The first sign,
(22:39):
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 patience, they used fifty
percent more handgell. It's not just handwashing. In twenty fourteen,
(23:00):
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 give blood again. One letter contained factual information about
what kind of illnesses cause others to need blood. Another
(23:23):
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 handgel study. The researchers found
something that made people sixty three percent more likely to
arrange an appointment to give blood. But this time there
(23:44):
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.
(24:10):
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 secondhand 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
(24:32):
always work perfectly and not everyone can have them. When
the UK started to use a new rubella vaccine in
nineteen seventy, 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.
(24:53):
It works ninety five percent of the time, but that
still left five percent of women susceptible. In nineteen eighty seven,
the UK recorded one hundred and sixty seven cases of
pregnant women with rubella. They were catching it from children,
their own or their friends. So why not vaccinate the
(25:13):
children too. The US had been doing that since the
early nineteen seventies, and in nineteen eighty eight 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,
(25:33):
and fifteen years later, the number of rubella infections in
pregnancy had dropped from one hundred and sixty seven to
just one. Much the same will be true of COVID vaccines.
If we vaccinate only the vulnerable, it won't be enough.
(25:54):
We need the people who aren't at much risk, the
Brady Sluders of the world, to remember that they're not
just at risk of catching a disease, but of passing
it on, causing consequences for others that can be deadly
or last alike. As I said at the beginning of
(26:16):
this cautionary tale, we don't know the exact connection between
Gene Tierney's mental breakdown and her daughter's condition, but we
do know what Jean believed. She was certain that Daria's
disability was the cause of her own mental illness, and
that disability was caused by the marine's thoughtlessness, passing on
(26:38):
Rubella that night in the Hollywood Canteen. Jean spent time
in three mental health clinics. She went through thirty two
rounds of electro convulsive therapy. Between those spells in institutions,
she stayed in her mother's fourteenth floor apartment in New York.
One day, Jean's mother returned from shopping to be accosted
(27:00):
in the lobby by an anxious dorman. There are policemen
in your apartment, he said, talking to your daughter. Now,
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
(27:20):
the elevator. Oh, Jean, don't get excited, mother. I'm perfectly
all right with 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
(27:41):
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 neighbor's door in Houston in the middle of the night,
sure that they'd kidnapped Daria and demanding that they give
(28:02):
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.
(28:32):
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,
(28:53):
and a better citizen. Brady Sluder hadn't been heartless, he
had been thoughtless, and once he had been prompted to think,
he wanted to do the right thing. I'm sure that
would have been true for them An if she'd had
the slightest idea of the harm she could do. In fact,
(29:14):
I think it's true for most of us. Remember those
blood donors in Bosnia. These were altruistic people. They'd 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
(29:34):
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
(30:02):
sources for this episode include Gene Tierney's autobiography Self Portrait
and Adam gra and David Hoffman's study in psychological science
It's Not All About Me. For a full list of references,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
(30:23):
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonon, Carter,
and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
(30:48):
Rachel Hanshaw, Cobnor Holbrook, Smith, Greg Lockett, Massa Munroe, and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weissberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz,
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Danielle Lacan
(31:10):
and Maya Canning. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
Host
Tim Harford
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