Page "Divine (performer)" Paragraph 39

Divine had suffered from problems with obesity ever since he was a child, for the reason that he " liked to eat ... and eat ... and eat ... and drink gallons of Coca-Cola ", with his hunger being increased by his smoking marijuana daily, an addiction that he would later publicly admit to.

According to Bernard Jay, in the last few years of his life, when Divine began to realize that his career in disco was coming to an end and he was struggling to find acting jobs, he began to feel suicidal and threatened to kill himself on a number of occasions.

Meanwhile, Dutch friends of Divine gave him two bulldogs in the early 1980s, on which he doted and named Beatrix and Klaus after the Queen Beatrix and her husband Prince Claus of the Netherlands.

On numerous occasions he would have his photograph taken with them and sometimes use these images for record covers and posters.