The Bizarre Life (and Death) of "Mr. Organic"

On June 7, 1971, Jerome Irving Rodale appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show." The elder statesman of a growing organic food trend, he gushed about the health benefits of his diet, boasting that he “never felt better” and that he “decided to live to a hundred.” But after a commercial break, as Cavett interviewed his second guest, what sounded like a loud snore rose from Rodale’s end of the couch. The audience twittered, thinking that he was pulling a prank. But Cavett knew. When he looked over at Rodale’s bloodless pallor and gaping mouth his suspicion was confirmed—America’s most famous natural-health figure was dead of a heart attack at 72. It was almost as if, having sought fame for decades, finally achieving it was too much for Rodale's heart to bear. A first-generation American and son of a Lower East Side Jewish grocer, Rodale had always dreamed of making it big as an entertainer. In the 1930s, he self-published entertainment guidebooks—The Clown and The American Humorist—but they flopped. In the early 1960s, he authored or produced 30 health-themed plays, many of which were performed in his off-Broadway vanity project, the Rodale Theater. These, too, bombed commercially and critically, and Rodale angrily rebutted his critics in page-long ads he took out in the New York Times. For over two decades, Rodale also dispensed nutritional and lifestyle advice in his monthly magazines, Organic Farming and Gardening (est. 1945) and Prevention (est. 1950). In their pages, Rodale summarily rejected postwar medical advances. “Isn’t there a better way of conquering polio than jabbing all the children in the country with a needle?” he wondered in a September 1955 Prevention article. And he made wacky, unfounded claims about what causes and cures various diseases. “Rimless glasses” and saltwater cause cancer, Rodale contended, whereas the earth’s “electricity … aids the body to combat cancer." Foreshadowing the counterculture’s pastoral idealism, he wrote in an October 1955 Prevention editorial, “We must go back to nature, if we wish to live long. … We do not have to stop the advances of technology [but] we must not industrialize and technologize our own bodies.”...more