The Lure of Absinthe

This green alcoholic beverage has had a colorful career since its debut in the late 18th century. Flavored with wormwood, fennel, anise, and other herbs, the beverage has a bitter, licorice flavor and a high alcoholic content. Drinking it was supposed to bring on hallucinations. 

 

Absinthe reached the pinnacle of its popularity in the Roaring Twenties in Paris, where the bohemian population of writers and artists made it their trademark beverage in spite of it being illegal. Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway are associated with absinthe. 

There were several ways to consume the drink, but the most famous one involves placing a sugar lump on a slotted spoon held over a glass of absinthe, then pouring ice water over the sugar cube. The beverage turns milky. 

Many countries banned the production of absinthe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was believed to be more dangerous than other alcoholic beverages. After this was disproved–it has no hallucinogenic effects after all–it gradually became legal. In 2007, it became legal in the United States, so you can buy it if you like. Personally, I can’t stand licorice-flavored drinks like pastis, ouzo, pernod, or anisette, so I’ll pass. 

Poison Booze

The trouble with Prohibition is that it made liquor illegal . . . which made it impossible to regulate. Historians estimate that by the time Prohibition was rescinded in 1933, about 98% of all liquor contained poisons of some sort. Scary, huh?

Part of the problem was greed, part was amateur manufacturing. Adding embalming fluid gave bathtub gin an extra kick, so that was not uncommon. Some say this was the introduction of fruity mixed drinks, which were invented by bartenders to cover up the bad taste of the illegal hooch. Adulterated booze was known as money rum, sometimes bathtub gin. It was seldom real rum or gin, just moonshine, and it was often deadly.

Seems everyone knew someone who had died or gone blind after drinking bad booze. It probably happened far more often than anyone today appreciates–without any reliable statistics (it was illegal, after all) we can’t really know the extent of the devastation. Estimates by historians today suggest that during the first year of Prohibition, one thousand people died from adulterated liquor. By the fifth year, the annual toll had risen to four thousand. Why didn’t this cause more of a scandal? Remember, communications in that era were weak. People didn’t know much about what was going on in other states or even other parts of their own state. It’s a very sad side of the madcap “Roaring Twenties.” 

The Jack Pickford Scandals #2

     In 1916, Mary Pickford’s little brother Jack married Olive Thomas, a beautiful Ziegfield girl who had transitioned successfully from stage to silent film. Here is Olive in her famous Vargas calendar pose.  And here’s how a contemporary described them: “Two innocent-looking children, they were the gayest, wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway,” wrote Frances Marion, a prominent Hollywood scriptwriter who knew them well. “Both were talented, but they were much more interested in playing the roulette of life than in concentrating on their careers.” Both were also alcoholics, cocaine addicts, promiscuous, and infected with syphilis.

     Though publicists sketched lives of blissful love and devotion, Olive and Jack had way too many issues for a successful marriage. In Paris in 1920 for what was billed as a second honeymoon, the couple stayed at the Ritz and frequented the popular nightspots. Back at the hotel after a wild night that was rumored to have included plenty of cocaine and alcohol (remember—no Prohibition in France), Olive drank a large amount of bichloride of mercury, something often prescribed for syphilis and meant to be applied topically. She died a gruesome death a couple days later in a French hospital.

     Contradicting stories abound. A police investigation and autopsy ruled the death accidental and Jack and the body were quickly shipped back to America. But some thought Olive had committed suicide, others thought Jack had poisoned her, still others believed she had intended to poison Jack but made a mistake.  

     Here’s the New York Times headlines from that day.

PARIS AUTHORITIES INVESTIGATE DEATH OF OLIVE THOMAS

 Police Seek Evidence on Rumors of Drug and Champagne Orgies

REFUSE TO RELEASE BODY

Former American Officer, Sentenced for Selling Cocaine, One of Those Questioned

PICKFORD IN DOCTOR’S CARE

Police Have Not Yet Obtained His Story of How the Actress Drank Poison

     Read the whole article at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9403E2D61E3CEE3ABC4952DFBF66838B639EDE

     Jack married two more times, each time to a pretty Ziegfield showgirl, and each time, the marriage ended in divorce or separation with rumors of infidelity, physical abuse, and substance abuse. Like Olive, Jack died young and in a hospital, a victim of his lifestyle and various addictions.

Popular Poisons Part II: Mercury Bichloride

In the days before antibiotics, physicians used mercury bichloride (also called mercury chloride without the “bi”) to treat a variety of diseases, notably syphillis. Highly toxic, odorless, and colorless, it was meant to be applied topically to the sores that developed as this disease progressed. It was also used in very diluted form (1 part to 1000) for tonsillitis.
Several deaths during the Roaring Twenties brought this poison to the attention of the entire country. The first was the death in Paris of silent film star Olive Thomas, wife of leading man Jack Pickford whose sister, Mary Pickford, was the foremost actress of her day. Whether Olive’s death was accidental, as Jack always claimed, suicide, or murder was never determined. The French were quick to ship the body, Jack, and the scandal home to America where the controversy raged for months. No definitive cause of death was ever established. To read more, check wikipedia or http://www.silentsaregolden.com/articles/lpolivethomasdeath.html
Another highly publicized death occurred in 1925 when a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by the head of Indiana’s powerful Ku Klux Klan. She managed to get hold of some mercury bichloride pills and swallowed them. She died a few days later after having had the presence of mind to accuse the Grand Dragon in signed testimony. Her written words were instrumental in convicting the man of murder, and the resulting publicity destroyed the KKK in Indiana. Details at wikipedia or http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8390
Mercury bichloride was available at drug stores, sometimes by prescription only, sometimes not. Depending upon the state, a person who purchased poison of any sort was supposed to sign a register so there would be a record of the transaction. (We still have to do that for some drugs today.)

I use mercury bichloride and the poison registries in my second novel (yet to be published). If anyone has access to drug store “poison books” from the 1920s, I’d sure like to see a genuine example!

Popular Poisons of the Roaring Twenties

Popular Poisons of the Roaring Twenties. A great senior thesis topic, huh? And why not? It’s a fascinating subject, not to mention a necessity when writing about murder and suicide in the 1920s.  

Part One: Arsenic.

One of the oldest poisons is arsenic. Because symptoms of arsenic poisoning are so fuzzy, it has been a murder weapon of choice since Roman times, if not earlier. There are legitimate uses, of course, the main one being pest extermination, and arsenic has appeared on the shelves of general stores in America since general stores first appeared in the colonies. A variety of brands developed over the years, including my favorite (and the one I use in my novel): Rough on Rats.

Don’t you love that name? So alliterative, so growlingly fierce. You just know Rough on Rats is going to eliminate your problem, critter or human–especially when you see the marketing images of a dead rat with his little paws in the air.

                                                                                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

Or this other great visual of the chaos that occurs when you fail to use Rough on Rats:

                                                                   

Caption says: “All this trouble might have been avoided by the use of our Fifteen Cent box of Rough on Rats. Clears out Rats, Mice, Flies, Bed-bugs, Ants, Roaches, Mosquitos, &c.” 

I’m trying to locate an actual package of Rough on Rats for my collection of Roaring Twenties ephemera . . . no luck yet but I have one of the country’s leading experts in period store merchandise on the look-out for me. Suzanne of Squashapenny Junction has tens of thousands of merchandise antiques and collectibles (ie, old but not antique) crammed into her old store in Doswell, Virginia, and she constantly travels all over the U.S. to find more.  (I’d put in a link but she doesn’t own a computer . . . her inventory is in her head.)

Coming next . . . Poisons Part Two: Mercury Bichloride