<Archive Obituary> Walter Hudson (December 24th 1991)
Bill Schenley
Hempstead Man Weighed More Than 1,000 Pounds
FROM: Newsday (December 26th 1991) ~
By Susan Forrest and Bill Mason, Staff Writers
Walter Hudson, whose epic battles with his ponderous half-ton bulk
filled news columns and television screens, died Christmas Eve,
apparently of a heart attack, in the Hempstead home he rarely left for
almost three decades.
The 46-year-old Hudson experienced trouble breathing about 5:45 p.m.,
said Nassau Third Squad Det. Thomas Cleaver. Hempstead fire rescue
workers were on the scene within minutes and found him still alive.
They administered first aid, but he died in the king-sized bed
supported by cinderblocks and flanked by the toilet bowl and
refrigerator that made the room his principal living space. He was
pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m.
"He was having trouble breathing," his niece, Lottie Whitehead, 24,
said yesterday in describing Hudson's last moments. "I activated his
medic alert bracelet . . . I was there when he died. He turned his
eyes and looked at me and a tear fell. I said, 'Damn, Uncle Pappy,
don't go.' The tear fell and then he died as I held him . . ."
Hudson, whose weight fluctuated and dropped to less than 600 pounds
under repeated efforts to pare down his weight, weighed 1,025 pounds
when he was weighed at the medical examiner's office after his death,
said Third Squad police Det. Ed Sventoraitis. Relatives disputed that
figure, saying they believed he weighed much less.
Removal of the body was a major production. First, police used saws
and sledgehammers to knock out a section of the wall of his bedroom.
Then they took down a door to the outside. Twelve men slid the body
onto a standard stretcher which collapsed. So police constructed a
makeshift stretcher of plywood supported by oak timber.
The body, wrapped in sheeting, was then hoisted out by 11 Nassau and
Hempstead Village police to a waiting forklift which transferred it to
a prisoner van. The van transported the corpse to the Nassau County
Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy whose results were not
available last night.
"It was an extremely difficult task," said Nassau Police Sgt. John
Woodworth of the Emergency Services Bureau, "because we had to deal
with eight or ten steps in the back porch and soft sand in the
backyard coupled with the weight of the individual. We wanted so much
not to have problems because we wanted him to have the dignity he
deserved."
Woodworth, who was in charge of the removal operation, also headed the
operation to free Hudson four years ago when he was stuck in a
doorway. "He was a helluva nice guy, a gentleman, very polite when I
first met him."
Alexis Blass, 41, of Brooklyn, who worked with Hudson on Walter Hudson
Ventures, a Brooklyn business specializing in clothing for overweight
people, said she had talked to him on the phone earlier Christmas Eve
and he told her he had a cold and felt he was coming down with a flu.
"He was a gentle soul. He meant something to fat people" because he
inspired others to lose weight when his plight became public four
years ago. "We want him to have the dignity in death that he
deserves," she said.
Blass suggested that Hudson might have been weakened by his dieting,
and Whitehead, with whom he lived all of her life, agreed, saying
doctors told the family earlier that liquid dieting had weakened his
body.
But she said cause of death is not yet clear. "They are saying he died
of a massive heart attack. How do they [the media] know if we don't
know yet? We're his family. Don't you think we should know first?" she
said.
"They say he weighed more than a thousand pounds. The medical examiner
we talked to last night said he weighed 600 pounds. How come everyone
knows more than we do? There are so many stories that are
untrue that it's ridiculous." The removal of Hudson's body was
grimly reminiscent of that September day in 1987 when he slipped en
route to the bathroom, became wedged in a doorway and had to be sawed
out by rescue workers. That extrication put Hudson in the forefront of
the news all over the country, and, in turn, sparked a series of
publicized efforts to pare his weight. Hudson's weight varied wildly,
according to various claims.
Comedian Dick Gregory, who put Hudson on his Bahamian diet, claims to
have pared him to just under 600 pounds a few years ago. An Optatrym
commercial claims Hudson once weighed 1,400 pounds and that judicious
use of the diet powder got him down to 520 pounds. Earlier this year,
Hudson estimated his weight at about 850 pounds. At his heaviest his
waist was nine feet around.
"He wasn't a prisoner in his room" as was widely reported, Whitehead
insisted yesterday. "He was mobile. He never went out. That was just
his own personal thing. And we totally respected that. If someone
decides that they don't feel like going out anymore, hey, fine. That's
what he wanted to do. No one has the right to force another person to
do something he or she doesn't want to do. He went outside in the
backyard.
"He just never liked the streets. He used to say, 'The streets are
scary and I don't think I could make it out there.' The world is not
what it was 28 years ago the last time he ventured outside on the
streets. He said he wouldn't be able to survive out there. He said:
'I'm better off in the house.' "
Funeral arrangements were still being made yesterday. But relatives
said Hudson probably will be buried beside his mother in Evergreen
Cemetery, Hempstead.
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Photo:
http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/kjn/people/heaviest.htm (#5)
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The Life And Death Of A Big Man
By Karl Niedershuh
It seems that there were two Walter Hudsons. The first was Walter
Hudson the 1400-pound fat man, ashamed to leave his bedroom, living
stereotype of the perils of obesity. The fat man who lost 900 pounds
on a liquid diet in just a matter of months. The fat man who designed
clothes for other fat people, so that they wouldn't share his
reluctance to go out into the world. Walter Hudson the media star.
That Walter Hudson was pure myth, a total fiction, created to serve
the press, promoters, and publicity-hounds.
"He never weighed as much as he said, and he never lost as much as he
said," contends press photographer Scott McKiernan, a frequent visitor
to Hudson's Long Island home. McKiernan first photographed Hudson for
Parade magazine, a few days after the notorious accident that brought
the reclusive man to public attention; he'd also taken photos of other
men weighing as much as 1100 pounds. McKiernan judged Hudson to weigh
between 800 and 900 pounds at his peak. Hudson had a delicate frame
and a small head that looked huge in photographs, giving the illusion
that the rest of his body was that much more enormous - an illusion
that Hudson maintained (deliberately or otherwise) by his adamant
opposition to getting on a scale. No one ever really knew how much the
real Walter Hudson weighed. In the end, even the National Enquirer
grew frustrated by his refusal to document his weight, and stopped
running articles about him.
As for Hudson's much-publicized weight loss, McKiernan says he
probably never lost more than 100 pounds-still a massive amount, when
one considers that losing just five pounds puts the body in
starvation-survival mode, but far from the hundreds he claimed. Hudson
drank his protein shakes six days a week, and ate only matzos and
water every Friday as a private rite of penance, but his commitment to
getting thin never excluded bribing his nieces and nephews to fetch
cookies for him. Hudson the cheerful dieter was another role he played
for the press. "I lied a little," he confessed to his diary, after
telling one reporter that semistarvation was easy. "I lied because it
is very hard. It's a struggle every day. They really don't know how
hard I'm fighting."
The other Walter Hudson, the one inside the myth, was a curiously
troubled man, a complex collection of pathological anxieties who found
peace and refuge in three things: the Bible, his family, and food. The
youngest of nine children, Walter was always fat. His childhood was
plagued by strange chills and raging fevers, mysterious sores and
swellings, and other anomalies-some undoubtedly due to the diet pills
he'd been given, some perhaps tied to the causes of his weight gain,
most of them probably psychosomatic. As a boy, Hudson was afraid of
many things. He insisted that his food be put on separate plates so
that the servings never touched: if they did, he was convinced that
they'd poison him. Fearful of contagion, he washed his hands
compulsively, sometimes seventy times a day. At thirteen, already
weighing more than 300 pounds, he suffered injuries in a bad fall that
kept him bedridden for several months. That, he later admitted, "may
have got me thinking that it was easier to just stay in bed."
Life in Bedford-Stuyvesant only served to amplify his childhood fears.
His father left when Walter was still a baby. At fifteen, he saw a
friend perish in a burning building; not much later, he watched
helplessly as a stranger died of a drug overdose at his feet. It was
about that time that he announced to his mother that his legs could no
longer carry his 350-pound body. He took to his bedroom, and refused
to leave it. He only left the house once in the next 28 years, when
his family moved to Long Island. But it certainly wasn't Walter's
weight that kept him in his bed. Hudson was never too fat to walk (he
used a cane to get around), or too embarrassed to be seen. He'd become
nothing less than a classic agoraphobic, transferring all his fears
into one greater phobia, a fear of the outside world.
This route to self-restoration worked, in its fashion. Hudson was able
to lock most of his anxieties outdoors. Reporters described him as a
peaceful and contented man, happy, deeply religious, almost
Buddha-like in his tranquillity. "I'm not scared to go outside," he
insisted. "I'm not afraid of people because if I was I wouldn't be
having my picture in the magazine. It's just that the things that go
on I just don't like. I figure I can't hide from it, but I just hate
to see it."
Never did he think of himself as ugly, or disabled, or anything less
than a functional human being. Living in the bosom of a family that
accepted every one of his peculiarities-his size, his Cherokee braids,
his phobias, his reclusiveness, and even his compulsive
cleanliness-restored both his physical health and his mental
equilibrium. He came to think of himself as a healer, a shaman,
warding off disease with oils and potions. "People say, 'You believe
in that old hoodoo?' But it's not that," he said. "I've got cures that
the world has not yet seen." Long before he ever had a girlfriend,
he'd earned the nickname "Pappy" through the love and attention he
bestowed on his nieces and nephews. As unashamed of his body as the
newly-created Adam, he told Jet magazine that the reason he didn't
wear clothes was that he simply felt freer without them. He didn't
think of his size or his appetite as unusual. "I just ate and enjoyed
it," he said.
What Walter ate is a matter of conjecture. Prompted by his handlers,
he told People magazine that he dined on three ham steaks or two
chickens, four baked potatoes, four sweet potatoes, and four heads of
broccoli. He admitted to loving cake, soda, and potato chips. But he
also asserted in several interviews that he only needed to empty his
bowels once every month or two. This strange phenomenon was
characteristic of at least one other extreme heavyweight, Jon Brower
Minnoch, who owed his massive size to the fact that his body stored
every drop of liquid it could absorb, including the waste water in his
digestive tract. Minnoch, who topped 1400 pounds, shed more than 900
pounds of water during one hospital stay. He was never a heavy eater.
As for Walter Hudson, however much he really ate, it wasn't enough to
explain his size. "I don't think that if you took a normal person, and
fed him 6,000 calories a day, and kept him in his room, he would
become as fat as Walter," mused his nutritionist, Dr. Jimmy Carter of
Tulane University. "He is extremely efficient in storing calories."
The days of peacefully storing calories ended abruptly when Walter
Hudson became a celebrity. On a September morning in 1987, returning
to bed from the bathroom, he slipped and fell to the floor, wedging
his body in the door frame. He was trapped there for hours, until
rescue workers sawed him free and rolled him back to bed. His ordeal
attracted a flood of media attention. Within a month, that attention
had shifted to self-appointed nutritionist Dick Gregory, who told
anyone that would listen that Hudson was using his Bahamian Diet plan.
Gregory had signed a $100 million contract to promote the Bahamian
Diet, and Walter Hudson was just what he needed to earn that money.
Sales of the diet powder soared.
Hudson stood in awe of Gregory, putting him in the role of the father
he'd barely known. But Gregory was at best an abusive parent. He told
the press that Hudson weighed at least 1200 pounds, and that he was
miserable. He brought in aides to watch Hudson around the clock, to
make sure that he consumed no more than 1600 calories per day. He
posed Hudson for the cameras in a black-and-white striped shirt and
pants: a prison uniform, to emphasize the idea that he was a prisoner
of his own body. "They were designing to make him a poor, pitiful fat
person," complained one of his friends. "Just because he's big, that
doesn't mean he can't be happy, too."
After three months of nonstop promotion, Gregory announced to the
press that Hudson had lost 400 pounds, and set a date and time for his
prodigy to take his first trip outdoors. When Hudson failed to perform
for the cameras, Gregory left in a huff, taking his project director,
his "holistic health specialist," and his public relations people with
him. He left a single memento behind: a set of refrigerator magnets in
the shape of a pizza, a hot dog, a waffle, and a taco, a perverse joke
from the ex-comic. He returned to Hudson's side only once after that,
to have his picture taken at the funeral.
Gregory's departure opened up the floodgates. Hudson the fat man could
sell newspapers, but Hudson the dieter could sell diets, and that's
where the money is. Getting him thin would have been the coup of the
century for anyone's diet program. Everyone wanted a piece of Walter.
Nutritionists, hospital administrators, advertising men, and talk show
hosts all fought to exact their own personal pound of flesh. A parade
of diet gurus passed through his bedroom, offering a quick fix or a
quick buck, pushing protein, exercise, psychotherapy, and biofeedback.
Richard Simmons sent his champion dieter to try to coax him into the
fold. A company called Optatrym put him in a 30-minute TV commercial,
claiming that he'd used their protein powder to lose over 900 pounds.
(Gregory promptly sued Optatrym for $50 million.) Another company used
him as front man for a line of women's clothing. Practical jokers
would call to ask if he wanted to star in an ad for Twinkies, and he
would half believe them. After all, it was no stranger than anything
else that had happened in his life.
The diet gurus told Walter Hudson that he was destined to become a
star. All he had to do was lose weight, and he could have everything
he'd ever wanted. It's easy enough to convince fat people that a thin
body makes everything wonderful. Imagine the visions of glory that a
man must have when he's already famous just for being fat. Imagine the
promises, the temptations, and the outright lies that coaxed him from
his private world and into the spotlight. Gregory told him that Bill
Cosby and Michael Jackson would perform in his living room as he got
thin, convinced him that Washington and Hollywood would hang on his
every word. Still terrified of leaving his house, Hudson told his
diary dreams of walking the sidewalks of Paris, of floating on the
canals of Venice, of preaching in the streets like Martin Luther King.
Anything was possible, anything at all, if only he got thin.
So Walter Hudson played the game as he was taught. He let himself be
cast in the role of an addict. At more than 800 pounds, he found
himself too small for the part he had to play, so he exaggerated
himself to fit his new persona. He claimed to have eaten impossible
meals, while maintaining that he only had one bowel movement per
month. He claimed to have reached impossible weights, though he never
lost his mobility. He claimed to have achieved impossible weight
losses, though he refused to step on a scale. He learned to say, and
perhaps to think and feel, what others expected of him. And it all
worked, to a degree. His Associated Press obituary stressed his career
as a dieter as much as his exaggerated size.
Walter Hudson never got thin, though he sipped his protein shakes for
three full years, until a doctor finally told him that Gregory's
formula was "tearing his stomach up." As soon as he switched to solid
food, all the weight came back. That was enough to shatter even
Hudson's sanguinity: "He was bitter over the travesty of liquid
diets," says his niece. He started another diet, a different diet, and
was losing weight again when he came down with the flu. Three days
later he was dead.
To call his death unexpected would be a gross understatement. Only
four years ago, when he was first discovered by the outside world,
Walter Hudson's health was nothing short of remarkable-not merely
remarkable for someone his size, but remarkable period. Once Hudson
got over his childhood ailments, both real and imagined, he was never
sick a day in his life. He'd never even had the flu before. "He
possesses a morbidly obese body that is mindbogglingly sound,"
reported The Daily News. "His heartbeat is regular. His kidneys and
lungs function normally. Says Dr. Gerald Deas of Downstate Medical
Center, who regularly examines Walter: 'His cholesterol and blood
sugar levels show the chemistry of a healthy 21-year-old.'"
So how did it happen that this man, who consistently confounded
doctors with his good health, came to die so suddenly this Christmas
Eve? What had so transformed him in four short years that he couldn't
even survive a common virus?
The simplistic answer offered by the medical profession is that his
heart was never designed to supply blood to so many pounds of flesh.
Yet to accept the fact that it had done so for years without showing
the least sign of stress, yet failed utterly at the first sign of a
minor illness, is to swallow the proverbial camel and strain at the
proverbial gnat. The politically correct answer is that dieting killed
him. It may well have done so. Hudson's main source of nutrition for
three years was a liquid diet with a dubious reputation for provoking
sudden cardiac failure. Yet I see Hudson somewhat differently: not as
a victim of dieting, but a victim of the mythology and marketing of
dieting. I see a clear case of murder by media. Walter Hudson was a
man who was promoted to death.
Fame killed Walter Hudson. Like so many celebrities before him, he
fell into the crack between image and reality and couldn't get out.
How paradoxical it is that death, which changes everything, changes
nothing. The real Walter Hudson is dead. The myth of Walter Hudson
will live for years to come.
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Five things Walter Hudson reportedly ate for breakfast every day
1.) 1 lb. of bacon
2.) 2 lbs. of sausage
3.) Dozen eggs
4.) Loaf of toast
5.) Coffee