She Loathed the Word “Leper”

Olivia Breitha was a happy eighteen-year-old in Hawaii, engaged to be married, when one day in 1934 she had a skin test at a Kauai hospital. She didn’t know what she was being tested for — she was at the hospital for a stomach ailment. But two days later a stranger appeared at her family’s home and bundled her off to a leprosy hospital. She would never see her fiancé again. Three years later, by legal decree, she was sent to the Kalaupapa leper colony on Molokai. There she worked as an orderly at the settlement hospital, caring for patients more disfigured than herself, as Breitha remembered in her 1988 memoir, Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa. Signs were posted around the settlement specifying whom and what the patients were allowed to touch. "My gracious, a patient was not even permitted to touch any automobile that a non-patient rode in," Breitha wrote in her book. “They would take your baby away whether you wanted it or not.” Losing all sensitivity to heat or cold, she was in constant pain as her fingers wasted away. New medications halted the progress of the disease, and in 1969 the residents of Kalaupapa were at last legally permitted to leave. Breitha was moved to write the memoir after seeing what she described as an insensitive reference to Hansen’s Disease on the TV show MASH, then fought valiantly to get people to stop saying the word “leper,” which she compared to a racial slur. Earlier this year, she was miffed at journalist John Tayman’s book The Colony . Remember that one? It was about Molokai, but its cover displayed a picture of Italy’s lovely Amalfi coast. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, she accused Tayman of “stealing” from her book. Tayman said he hadn’t. Breitha died two weeks ago at her Hawaiian home. Aloha.

When visiting an orphanage last week in poverty- and AIDS-ravaged Malawi, Madonna handed the starving children copies of her book about mean girls enlightened by a fairy, The English Roses. (A collectors’-edition boxed set including the original and the new sequel, The English Roses: Too Good to Be True, goes on sale next month for $150.) While there, a small boy “won the singer's heart during an hour-long play session after she handed out copies of her book,” as reported at DailyIndia.com. “Madonna was shown a number of pictures of boys at the orphanage but fell for David. She played with him on the floor and took him to the church.” Then she adopted him. Then her publicist told the press that she hadn’t. Then the boy’s father came forth and said she had. Which revealed that the 13-year-old boy isn’t an orphan. Nevertheless, little David “will be very happy in America,” his father said. His birth father, that is. His adoptive and official father is soon to be Guy Ritchie, who didn’t want to adopt anyone, according to DailyIndia.com, and why would DailyIndia.com lie? (“Madonna has finally had her way and adopted an African child, overriding hubby Guy Richie's inhibitions about adoption,” the article says.) But ... America? Does that child’s poor birth-father not know that Madonna is now a fake Briton who talks with a fake British accent that comes and goes like a will-o’-the-wisp? “The singer said she sees England - and not the US - as ‘home,’” according to the BBC. “‘I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home.’” The Ritchies live on a 1,000-acre estate, Ashcombe, where Madonna keeps a “flock of chickens.” She also goes hunting on the property. For animals. Which she kills. “To me, Ashcombe is a reflection of me and my husband in many ways, because it reflects our willingness to make a commitment," the author-hunter-singer-adopter is quoted as saying. (A commitment to what? Dibs!, too, would like to make a commitment to thousand-acre estates anytime.) It must be so cool to be so famous (for something) that you can just start writing books if you want to and people will care. And write blog postings about it. Screw the meritocracy, screw it!