First Interview
The first person ever to interview Gene Miles was, quite appropriately, Patrick Chookolingo, the dean of Trinidad journalists. That interview, done for the August 1963 issue of TV and Radio Times, is reproduced here in its entirely.
Gene Miles
On Saturday, December 9, during the morning hours, Gene Miles won her last battle.
She won a battle to die.
For, “Gene could have been alive and well as the rest of us, if she wanted to,” said a personal family friend, Dr. Valance Massiah, who is still visibly shaken by death of the popular model, who ended up on the Skid Row of this nation, two years before she died.
Dr. Massiah said that just a small operation – a minor one – could have cured Gene, but she refused to take it time and time again.
In fact, when Dr. Massiah gotthe news of the girl’s death, he was waiting in his office at the Port of Spain General Hospital for her, to try to persuade her for the umpteenth time to have that vital piece of surgery.
She never took it.
So she died … stretched on the floor of her room at her mother’s home at Glencoe, Carenage, where she lived through the good days, and just before the end came – the bad.
But what was Gene suffering from?
She had two injuries. One physical. One mental.
For two years now, Gene had been suffering from internal bleeding – haemorrhage!
She was warned by doctors about it. She lived through two blood transfusions of three pints of blood the first time, and two the second, as she toyed with death.
Internal bleeding was the physical injury, but the mental injury was much worse.
Gene was a strong-willed person, who fought a battle against corruption in this nation.
When she saw her causes come to nought, she took to alcohol.
Gene was an intelligent girl, and it is perhaps when she realised that her drinking had taken her to Skid Row, that she had made up her mind to die, because she had reached the rock bottom of life.
Dr. Valance Massiah said that time and again, he had psychiatric friends plead with Gene, to take “the cure”. But this too, she refused.
Gene refused everything that would have made her a new woman again; everything that would have given her life.
She preferred alcohol and death.
The tragic story of Gene Miles, has brought tears to the eyes of thousands in Trinidad and Tobago, who witnessed the rise and fall of one of the most beautiful women around; and who mourned her death at her funeral this week.
The story of Gene Miles is one that has touched the hearts of men inside government circles.
For this is where she had made her greatest mark.
Dr. Massiah said: “Her story is a sad and tragic one.”
People began noticing the change in Gene Miles as far back as late 1969, when the cool look of one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most desired women, was changing into that of a worried, nervous, edgy person.
People began whispering that Gene Miles was going mad.
She was forcibly taken to St. Ann’s Hospital early in 1970.
She stayed for 24 days, when she ran away from the hospital and treatment.
Everyone who saw Gene after she had passed through St. Ann’s realised that this was the beginning of the end for the brave woman from Glencoe.
