A rubella-based murder mystery
In 1943, Hollywood star Gene Tierney, radiant at 23 and expecting her first child, volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen to lift the spirits of servicemen. Days later she contracted German measles — rubella — a seemingly mild illness that proved devastating. Her daughter, Daria, was born prematurely with lifelong disabilities caused by Tierney’s early‑pregnancy exposure.
A year after the birth of Daria, at a tennis party in California, a former marine approached Tierney and revealed that she had snuck out of quarantine, while sick with German measles, to meet her idol at that famous venue. In all likelihood, this is how the star had contracted rubella. We now know that rubella infection is the most dangerous in the first trimester which is why Tierney’s early exposure was so devastating. “I have long since stopped blaming the lady marine, myself, God, or Hitler for what happened to us,” she wrote in her memoir.
This tragedy from the movie star’s life inspired the Agatha Christie murder mystery, “The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side” which later became a movie. In real life the hapless actress did not murder her fan, of course, but she suffered from depression. Tierney’s well-cared for daughter lived for six decades, but till the end, her mind was like that of a two-year old.
Rubella’s dangers were only beginning to be understood in the early 1940s. Doctors slowly pieced together the connection between maternal infection and babies born with cataracts, deafness, or developmental delays. By the mid‑1960s, the devastation of rubella outbreaks finally pushed scientists to create vaccines. Since 1971, the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine has been in use.
When childhood shots do their job, they often protect us for life. If a woman got her full set of MMR vaccines as a kid, she usually doesn’t need them again. Other vaccines — like those for tetanus, diphtheria, or polio — can be safely given late in pregnancy. They don’t shield the baby directly, but the mother’s protection gets passed along, giving the newborn a little borrowed defense until it’s time to start their own shots at two months old.
The Center for Disease Control reports that rubella was eliminated from the United States in 2004 but to prevent any reemergence, there can be no letting up the high vaccination rates for children and women of childbearing age. But some parents in the affluent West, have begun to desist from vaccinating their children. Perhaps, they have forgotten what havoc these diseases can wrought, scientists in the field of public health say. Another theory is that parents’ legitimate concerns about the dangers, which vaccines themselves can cause in rare instances, have gone unaddressed. When a child can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons, parents rely on herd immunity—the protective buffer created when enough people in a community are vaccinated that the disease can’t spread easily. It’s a fragile form of protection, built on trust, reciprocity, and the idea that others will act not just in their own interest, but for the sake of those who can’t.
Real-life stories as Tierney’s heart-breaking though they are, offer clarity in an age of vaccine hesitancy. They remind us of what we have been spared thanks to advances in medicine.
PostScript
Across the world from Hollywood, in Chennai, Tamil writer Chudamani Raghavan (1931–2010) was born into privilege—her father a member of the Indian Civil Service. Yet, her life was irrevocably shaped by a moment of misplaced parental tenderness. To spare his daughter the brief pain of an injection, the father chose not to vaccinate her. At age three, she contracted smallpox, which severely stunted her physical growth. Chudamani was homeschooled and lived most of her life within the confines of her home. Yet her mind was expansive—offering profound psychological insights particularly into the minds of educated Tamil women of her era, navigating paid workforce participation for the very first time. What might she have become had she been physically able to move through the world freely? A scholar making presentations at conferences worldwide. A cultural icon beyond literary circles. A sensitive and sensible scriptwriter for Tamil movies. As an ardent fan of her writing, I can’t help but wonder.
Gene Tierney’s Hollywood tragedy and Chudamani Raghavan’s Chennai confinement are separated by continents, yet bound by the same absence: vaccines withheld, lives altered.