TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/1118130.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 87 lines

                                                                                HEALTH, Page 88

CALIFORNIA

Pursuit Of Perfection


BY SCOTT BROWN


    "I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so
luscious."

    -- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself


    Manhattan native Henry Jaglom was appalled when he
arrived in Los Angeles 26 years ago. To his Eastern eye it
seemed that every billboard and bus bench in the city screamed
out with advertisements extolling the rewards of the perfect
body. "Coming from New York, you have an open-mouthed reaction
to the way things are defined by the physical out here," says
Jaglom, a filmmaker whose exercise previously consisted of
walking and an occasional bike ride. "I thought it was all so
superficial. I was very disdainful."

    Soon, however, Jaglom made peace with and even embraced
the fitness cult of California -- although, ironically, he gets
more exercise in Manhattan than in L.A. because people actually
make a habit of walking in New York City. His latest film,
Eating, is about women's struggling with society's message that
a gorgeous physique is the ultimate virtue. The movie, says
Jaglom, could have been set only in California, where people
seem to talk more openly -- and obsessively -- about their
bodies than anywhere else. "It's the healthiest thing about this
place," says Jaglom, who divides his time between New York City
and Los Angeles. "People say what they think here. They're not
embarrassed about saying, `I'm concerned about my body.' In the
rest of the country, they don't admit it."

    Jaglom's observation is a considerable overstatement,
since by now fitness has become a nationwide preoccupation. But
California, especially Southern California, was where the cult
of the perfect body began and remains most frenzied: the
birthplace of triathletes, personal trainers and the 24-hour
gym; a place where celebrities have their Ferraris valet-parked
at trendy sports clubs and smoking ranks higher on the list of
social no-no's than drowning kittens. It is where Tony Roberts,
portraying a Broadway actor who finds success in Los Angeles in
the movie Annie Hall, explains that he has encased himself in
a foil-like eternal-youth suit because it "keeps out the alpha
rays . . . You don't get old." It is the place where cruciferous
vegetables were first worshiped. As the millennium draws near,
a refurbished Muscle Beach stands as a clogged monument to the
mesomorphic, hikers and bikers create traffic jams all over the
diminishing wilderness, and rolfers and herbologists find
themselves more in demand than ever.

    Even in health-conscious California the real cultists
represent only a small minority of residents (most Californians
worry more about housing prices, rising taxes, gangs and traffic
congestion than about the contours of their deltoids). Yet the
body addicts have pushed the pursuit of the flawless physique
to its furthest extremes, etching forever the notion of
California narcissism upon the psyche of the nation. For these
fitness fanatics the goal is not just to look good but to look
perfect. And if perfection cannot be achieved through exercise,
to resort to surgery to attain it.

    "My patients are already working out in gyms; they're not
98-lb. weaklings," says Dr. Brian Novack, a busy Beverly Hills
plastic surgeon who offers a dizzying array of body-altering
operations. "Here, the emphasis is not getting a face-lift when
you need it, but getting one before you need it." Lately Novack
has immersed himself in a hot new field: implanting silicone in
men in search of chiseled pectorals, firm buttocks, bulging
calves and strong chins. One wonders what Walt Whitman would
have had to say about that.