153: Hollywood’s First Weight Loss Guru: Madame Sylvia (Make Me Over, Episode 2)
You Must Remember This
Karina Longworth
4.6 • 15.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Glamorous and shrewd, Sylvia of Hollywood became the movie industry’s first weight-loss guru during the end of the silent era. An immigrant of mysterious origin, she would cannily market herself to clients like Gloria Swanson, who she promised to ‘slenderize, refine, reduce and squeeze’ into shape. But her taste for gossip and publicity would become her downfall in the 1930s when she published a catty tell-all memoir about her star clients. This episode was written and performed by Christina Newland, an award-winning journalist on film, pop culture and boxing at Sight & Sound Magazine, Little White Lies, VICE, Hazlitt, The Ringer and others. She loves 70s Americana, boxing flicks, fashion and old Hollywood lore. She was born in New York and lives in Nottingham, England.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | abad |
| 0:20.4 | Welcome to another episode of Make Me Over, a special presentation of You Must Remember This. |
| 0:34.4 | I'm your host, Karina Longworth. Last week, we learned about an actress who literally |
| 0:41.7 | had several pounds of flesh sliced off of her body in an effort to conform to Hollywood's |
| 0:48.6 | body ideals of the late 1920s. Today, we're going to hear the story of a woman who showed |
| 0:56.4 | up in Hollywood around that same time peddling a novel and possibly sadistic, new way for |
| 1:03.3 | performers to reduce their size. |
| 1:06.3 | Madam Sylvia gets to be interviewed. |
| 1:09.1 | Oh, him. |
| 1:10.1 | If you teach me, Frank, you're somebody that makes ladies look like what they ate. |
| 1:14.9 | Makes peacocks out of, of the W. |
| 1:17.0 | Do you mean a magician? |
| 1:18.7 | No, a magician is somebody to take rabbits out of hats and sewed women and sewed. |
| 1:23.1 | I got it, Frank, that's what Madam Sylvia is. She's a magician. |
| 1:26.5 | Does Madam Sylvia saw women and sewed women? |
| 1:28.5 | Well, pretty nearly. Some of them, she surely demands a pound of flesh and she takes it. |
| 1:33.7 | Today's storyteller is Christina Newland, a journalist who has ridden for sight and sound, |
| 1:40.1 | little white lies, vice, the ringer, and other publications. She joins us remotely from the |
| 1:47.7 | UK. Christina, tell us who was Madam Sylvia. |
| 1:53.9 | Madam Sylvia was sort of an influencer before that term was in common usage. She was a masseuse |
| 2:00.5 | in a dietician and a specialist in beauty, but she was also very good at self-promotion |
| 2:06.9 | and a very canny understanding the way that women were chasing physical perfection at this |
... |
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