Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Diabetic

You know, it’s easy to feel like a gimp and a loser when you have diabetes. There’s the change in lifestyle, the loss of all your favorite foods (”okay, you can have ONE chocolate chip, but don’t blame me if you slip into a coma”) and the general feeling that you just aged twenty years in a single doctor’s visit. But worse than that, there’s the persistent image of the diabetic that permeates our culture, the one where we’re all fat lazy smokers without a molecule of glamour in our couch-ridden bodies.

With that in mind, I decided to seek out some famous diabetics, at least some of whom would hopefully be, you know, Beautiful People. And by golly, I found a few.

Famous diabetic entertainers include Jack Benny, Halle Berry, Wilford Brimley, Delta Burke (and “Designing Women” co-star Jean Smart; not a good show to work on if you like fun snacks in the green room), Phoebe Cates (her son with Kevin Klein is also diabetic, type 1), Dale Evans, Jackie Gleason, Aunty Jemima (I didn’t even know there really WAS an Aunt Jemima), Gordon “WKRP” Jump, Kevin Klein (see above, Phoebe Kates), Jerry Mathers (”as the Beaver”), Curtis Mayfield, Mary Tyler Moore, George C. Scott, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Mae West, Vanessa Williams, and Jane Wyman.

Famous musical diabetics include Hoyt Axton, Johnny Cash, Carol Channing, David Crosby, Miles Davis, Freddy Fender, Ella Fitzgerald, Mick Fleetwood, Jerry Garcia, Dizzy Gillespie, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, B.B. King (you knew that already), Mahalia Jackson, Waylon Jennings, Patti LaBelle (you knew that, too), Peggy Lee, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Elvis Presley (that’s why he didn’t want you stepping on his blue suede shoes; ow!) Giacomo Puccini, Clark Terry, Tiny Tim, Luther Vandross and Neil Young.

Diabetic writers? We got ‘em. Piers Anthony, Ernest Hemingway, Mario Puzo, Anne Rice and H.G. Wells.

There have been plenty of world leaders with diabetes, including Yuri Andropov (leader of the Soviet Union for about ten minutes in the 1980s), Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Haitian leader Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, Soviet premiers Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikita Krushchev, NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, South Africa’s Winnie Mandela, Chilean dictator and bad guy Augusto Pinochet, Egyptian leader Anwar Sedat and Cambodian King Norodam Sihanouk.

And don’t forget famous industrialist, aviator and kook Howard Hughes.

So there you go, diabetics of the world. You may now allow yourself to feel fancy.

(via Famous Diabetics)