STAR MAINTENANCE: UNWRAPPING AN INDUSTRY
Every Hollywood star's image depends on a support system of trusted health, fitness and beauty professionals. Meet the elite.
By Sue Russell

Gwyneth Paltrow makes $10 million plus per picture. Madonna’s net worth is reportedly $613 million. Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell have parlayed their looks into mini-industries. Mel Gibson supposedly earned a cool $100 million just from his film, ‘The Patriot’. With that much money at stake, you can bet stars don’t skimp on their skincare.

But newsflash, they aren’t born looking perfect. Behind every beautifully toned celebrity body and immaculately groomed star is la crème de la crème of personal trainers, yogis, aestheticians, plastic surgeons, hair stylists, makeup artists, even brow-shapers and bikini-waxers.

In turn, the stars’ perfect images impact the massive industries supported by the spending of we mere mortals. In l999, American women alone forked out $21 billion on buying cosmetics and last year, close to half a million indulged in the three most popular cosmetic surgeries—liposuction, breast augmentation and eyelid surgery, in that order. Health club industry revenues climbed to a whopping $10.6 billion.

What does it take to be called to duty to cater to stars’ health, fitness and beauty needs? Word of mouth is the main motorway to the celebrity kiss of approval. True talent will out but innovation, entrepreneurship and a dash of spirituality don’t hurt either. A zippered mouth is essential.

New York dermatologist, Dr. Laurie Polis’s celebrity client list includes Madonna, Kate Moss, Mel Gibson, Naomi Campbell, Drew Barrymore, model Nikki Taylor. "No, I can’t say what they have done, I have to be like a priest!" she protests. Yet since Mel Gibson was once photographed leaving her office, she is free to confess, "We love it when Mel comes in! He’s delicious."

Polis is a woman with a vision. Her hot new "medi-spa", the Soho Integrative Health Centre and Mezzanine Spa, sits on the cutting-edge of the fast-growing integrated healthcare world. Polis created a haven where western and eastern medicine could meet, then threw in the latest skincare treatments, plus a spa and an elixir bar.

It’s one-stop shopping for the time-impaired. A three-storey facility with fifteen doctors under one roof including an obstetrician/gynaecologist, an ear, nose & throat doctor, an internist, an opthalmologist and a plastic surgeon. Here, pap smears meet homeopathy and thousands of years of Indian and Chinese medical tradition in the form of ayurvedic medicine and acupuncture.

A licensed acupuncturist herself, Polis wanted a wholistic approach and was bent on overcoming what she sees as, "The fractionising of health care. There really wasn’t a cohesive group where professionals could see and talk to one another and know what each other was doing. So sometimes you had competing or conflicting premises that worked at odds with each other. Now I can pop down the hall to consult with another doctor."

Creating the Soho Integrative Centre was, she admits, "A massive undertaking. And an extra 50lbs and two bottles of Valium later, we’re just about done! I’m deep in the hole financially. I’m not trained in business but I embarked on this because I had some kind of clear mental picture and I know my vision will be filled."

The spa boasts a Monsoon shower with sixty jets: "I always say to my staff, ‘With our Monsoon shower, who needs a lover?’" says Polis. And after seeing a doctor or two, clients might have a Mukhra Facial Lepa (an Indian facial), or aromatherapy or perhaps a little laser hair removal. Compared to your average GP’s office, it’s like, well, night and day.

Scientific purity was Polis’s priority. "As a dermatologist I’ve been privy to the menus of other spas," she sighs. "What impressed me was how much malarky and snake oil and unsubstantiated gobbledegook was being offered. Here everything is run by doctors so everything has to be based in science.

"We are not schmearing creams on that claim to have oxyen in them because there is zero evidence that you can capture oxygen in a cream. We’re not using creams that claim to contain collagen because we know you have to inject collagen to be able to get an effect."

The skin treatments currently generating the most excitement are those that don’t send you into hiding for weeks. Physical peels like microdermabrasion and chemical peels like glycolic or alpha or beta hydroxy acid peels.

"I say it’s like a teeth-cleaning for your face because there’s no down time," Polis explains. "Botox and collagen are wildly popular. The biggest new things are the Cool Touch laser and the Fotolight machine which stimulates one’s own cells to make one’s own collagen."

Variations on the "medi-spa" are springing up across the U.S. In California, dermatologist Dr. Howard Murad really led the way by offering massage, nutritional analysis and acupuncture as part of his practice. He was a pioneer in the use of AHA’s (alpha hydroxy acids) and his Murad Spa and skin care line has attracted Calista Flockhart, Brooke Shields, Portia de Rossi and Whoopi Goldberg.

The Skin Spa is another LA celebrity hot spot. Screenwriter/producer, Jonathan Baker, spun his movie fantasies into a $3 million business in a different venue.

"Spas should be a playground for adults and focus on fun and romance," he says. "This is the only true couples spa in the world, and I have the only mud bar in the world with four muds for different purposes like calming and firming."

In true Hollywood fashion, Baker aims to transport his clients into another world.

"People can watch a good movie and endorphins can be released and they walk out feeling amazing," he says. "The same process goes into a spa and the treatments."

Tori Spelling is a Skin Spa regular. Recent visitors, Pamela Anderson and Marcus Schenkenberg, chose the Endless Courtship from Baker’s imaginative treatment menu. $375 for three and a half hours of exfoliation, massage and pampering, it’s popular with Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, and with David Hasselhoff, John Travolta and Will Smith and their wives.

"They all like it because they go into a room and don’t have to come out," Baker explains. "They get their exfoliation, their masking, their romance, their massages and it’s all done in a beautiful candlelit blue room with rose petals scattered everywhere. You can go to a $10 million day spa like Estee Lauder, it’s all white, and you walk in and feel the money. People love us because we’re small and quaint. You need to be able to smell the roses and to really shut down and relax."

75 staff cater to clients’ every whim. Spa lunches are served outside on the spa deck and Baker is currently building a sleep room, "In case you want to meditate or snuggle up with somebody."

Stars need physical action. The American Council on Exercise has roughly 40,000 certified instructors with some 20,000 now working as personal trainers, so you’ve got to be special to stand out.

In the gym environment, Crunch Fitness leads the way with inventive ideas like gospel aerobics and circus-training classes but sometimes it’s just no-frills chemistry, trust and an understanding that wins out.

For going on eight years, Brian Shiers has put the ‘Frasier’ gang—a now-pregnant Jane Leeves, Peri Gilpin and David Hyde Pierce—through their paces. Among Brian’s other clients: Shari Belafonte and Maria Bello (‘E.R.’, ‘Coyote Ugly’. )

A definite success story, Brian owns the Sports Centre which has twelve trainers, spinning and aerobics classes, two weight training floors and an outdoor pool. Annual profit around $500,000. Membership is $450 initiation fee and $79 per month for the fitness facility, tennis courts extra. Personal training runs $60-85 an hour. That’s a bargain compared to the Sports Club/LA on LA’s hip westside which charges $2,5000 initiation fee plus $210 a month for an executive membership with laundry service and locker and valet parking privileges. (There’s a waiting list for lockers.)

Low-key Brian Shiers specialises in martial arts (Muay Thai Kickboxing and Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do) and is teaching Hunter Tylo kickboxing. "David Hyde Pierce is quite a talented kickboxer too and also one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet," he says.

Sounding like a cross between a psychologist and mindreader, he explains that everyone has a unique energy and unique needs which he must tune into. He sees all the new quirky classes as, "An effort to reinvent the old stuff by mix and match, meant to draw in people who get bored quickly. I think we’re going to see a lot more strange combinations. Doing gospel aerobics and spinning to a live five-piece percussion band is very creative but most gyms can’t afford to employ five percussionists."

Personally, he is more interested in exploring the mind-body connection and finding non-gimmicky ways to deal with the old bugaboos of discipline and motivation. Greg Isaacs, director of Warner Bros Studios’ Private Fitness Centre and the man who trained Kurt Russell for his film, ‘Soldier’, has a similar back-to-basics philosophy.

Pilates and yoga classes are everywhere right now. Pilates, the 70-year old German-invented exercise regime utilising the Reformer, a moveable wooden platform attached to springs that create resistance, was long a secret of ballet dancers. Fans now include Sharon Stone, Courtney Cox, Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster and Candice Bergen.

Yoga is now so popular that the health club trade group, IHRSA, estimates that around 5,000 US health clubs offer yoga classes with their promise of stress relief, extra flexibility and a chance to search for inner peace.

Sting, Christy Turlington, Uma Thurman, Diane Keaton and Willem Dafoe have tried Jivamukti, a rather vigorous style of Hatha Yoga, at the Jivamukti Yoga Centre in New York. People are finding that yoga can be a very powerful healing tool.

"Even doctors will say that a lot of our pain comes through psychosomatic thought," notes the centre’s Adrienne Burke. "If you’re able to control your thought and change your thought from mainly negative to more positive, or to take your attention away from any pain that you might have, well, I know it sounds simplistic but it works."

Courtney Love studies Kundalini yoga with LA’s yogi of the moment, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, a petite woman in a long dress and turban who has worked with Cindy Crawford, Madonna and Michael Jackson. (Madonna introduced Courtney Love to Gurmukh.)

Students at Golden Bridge Night Moon, Gurmukh’s new centre for living, can not only sign up for yoga classes but also programmes based on Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-steps. An ex-hippie herself, Gurmukh began practising yoga 28 years ago. Courtney Love has called Kundalini, with its meditation, chanting and deep, fast breathing known as breath of fire, "better for me than Prozac," and credited it with saving her life. Like Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love takes a yoga instructor along when she’s on tour.

Gurmukh estimates that half her clients are in some kind of twelve-step programme and observes that ending substance abuse can leave a void and depression. "If they fill it with something rich, like yoga and meditation, they don’t need to go back to their addiction," she says.

Spirituality has been news for a while, of course, with Richard Gere following Buddhism and celebrities like Madonna, Jeff Goldblum, Roseanne and Courtney Love—yes, again —getting involved in Kabbalah, a tradition of Jewish mysticism. Of late, talk of Kabbalah has subsided, though, and Deepak Chopra, the endocrinologist turned new age guru, has also faded into the background.

Lately, it’s Gurumayi, the spiritual leader and guru of SYDA (Siddha Yoga Dharma Association), who’s been in the news thanks to gossip column tattle that Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid were fighting over who should keep the guru in their divorce. Gurumayi’s teachings and charisma have indeed attracted stars like Meg and Melanie Griffith, Diana Ross and Lisa Kudrow. Her home base is a 550-acre ranch in New York state.

What’s new now is a blurring of the lines between spas (with many going more spiritual in flavour) and ashrams (with some offering more spa-style facilities). Hence both are being nicknamed "spashrams."

The latest trend in food for the earthly body is home delivered, healthy, ready-prepared meals all calorically and fat-gram sound and made from the freshest ingredients. Ex-ballerina Yolanda Bergman blazed this trail 15 years ago. An LA exercise teacher, Yolanda became a self-styled food cop, literally raiding the refrigerators of folk like Cher, Robin Williams and Anjelica Huston, tossing out all the sugary cereals and preservative-laden foods.

Currently, Yolanda is heavily engrossed in her new workout studio, Class, with it’s ballet barre-based classes. But over half a dozen other companies are forging ahead with home delivered meals. Real Food Daily, owned by an ex-private cook of Danny De Vito’s, has served gourmet vegan food to Alicia Silverstone, Paul McCartney and Woody Harrelson. Michael Jackson’s former chef, Akasha Richmond began Akasha, a service used by Carrie Fisher, Barbra Streisand and Al Pacino.

Nutritionist Carrie Latt Wiatt, the founder of Diet Designs Inc. helps many stars and sends balanced meals or special diet goodies to homes and film locations. Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Heather Locklear and Neve Campbell are clients. Carrie helped Matt Damon stay slim while indulging a pizza craving during the filming of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’. Julia Roberts relished Carrie’s mashed potatoes and a mock ‘fried’ chicken coated in yogurt and herbed cornmeal. A consultation with two followup visits is $200, and a sample 7-day meal plan is $320. Air freight extra.

With the recent boom in Hollywood babies, personal trainers who specialise in working with pregnant women are much in demand. For six months before she gave birth, Cindy Crawford took prenatal yoga classes twice weekly with Gurmukh Kahr Khalsa while continuing to work out with her longtime trainer, Valerie Waters. After the birth, Cindy did some time with Kathy Kaehler, another top LA trainer, to help her get back in shape in a hurry. Kaehler has young twin boys herself and trained Lisa Kudrow and Meg Ryan during their pregnancies.

Elle Macpherson did her pregnancy workouts with NY trainer Julie Tupler, a specialist in "maternal fitness" who worked on strengthening Elle’s back and abdominal muscles to aid a quick recovery of her trademark svelte shape.

Many celebrity mums now favour home birthing. Cindy Crawford, Julianne Moore, Kelly Preston and Thandie Newton, to name a few. Midwife Leslie Stewart, of LA’s Home Birth Service, delivered Richard Thomas’s most recent child and Pamela Anderson’s sons, Dylan, 2, and Brandon, 4.

Home Birth Service favours the Bradley method over Lamaze. "It’s a more relaxed breathing that is less tiring for a labour," says Stewart’s colleague, Cheryl Schroeder. Mother and midwife also bond nicely in meetings in the months before the birth. Water births are fairly popular and couples who don’t have a big bathtub can rent birthing tubs. At home, parents are freer to set the mood.

"Some have low light or candlelight, some just natural daylight, some just like it really dark and quiet," says Schroeder. "Others like a little music that they usually pick beforehand that’s very relaxing or soothing to them."

The complete service, including postnatal checkups, costs between $3,200 and $4,000. While home birthing is still controversial in some quarters, it seems to have a real appeal for the alternative medicine crowd.

Speaking of alternative medicine, herbal elixirs are setting the cash registers jangling across the US. George Clooney and Meg Ryan have sipped herbal tonics at Golden Cabinet Medical Healing Centre in LA, owned by Drew Francis, O.M.D. (Oriental Medicine Doctor). Reishi mushroom extract is a big seller because it is believed to tune up liver function and therefore make you look younger and healthier.

Back-to-nature crazes notwithstanding, facelifts are still on the rise according to the AAFPRS (American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery). A 10% annual increase in facial surgeries between l996 and l998 reflects a whopping 31% increase in the number of such procedures on men.

Liposuction is now the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, up by 32% since l998. Female breast augmentation is up by 26%. Yet most stars would rather confess to alcoholism than to having had cosmetic surgery. Dr. Richard Fleming and Dr. Toby Mayer, co-directors of the Beverly Hills Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery and clinical professors at the University of Southern California, don’t blink at going to extremes to guard their famous patients’ privacy. Their lips will stay sealed even after their patients’ deaths.

Some stars pay to close down the practice’s three operating suites rather than risk being recognized. A half-day shutdown could easily bump their bill to $30,000–$40,000. Some celebrities spend over $100,000 a year and the work is clearly lucrative, yet Dr. Fleming laughs at the idea of ever being his famous clients’ equal financially. "They’ve never paid me $20 million for three months work!"

Recently, Dr. Fleming read a magazine interview with a patient who credited her wonderful figure to her diet, exercise and herbs. "I’d done liposuction on her about three months before," he laughs. "That was not mentioned. But I can respect that."

Stars are insecure and hypercritical by nature and because the camera magnifies even the tiniest flaws they might opt for a facelift at 35, roughly a decade before other women.

"Celebrities can be demanding," Dr. Fleming admits. "And just because they’re celebrities doesn’t mean I’m going to work on them. I’m not going to work on someone if their expectations are unrealistic."

Celebrity or not, if he suspects he has a facelift junkie on his hands he will refer them to a psychologist for evaluation before lifting a scalpel.

"It’s very rare that anybody takes offense at that," he explains. "If they truly do I know I’ve made the right decision."

Fleming keeps emphasising that the natural look is the trend of the moment. "I’m seeing less demands for a Melanie Griffith type of nose, Pamela Anderson breasts," he says. "People don’t want that, they want the natural result. Celebrities also. They don’t want to be the brunt of the tabloids’ jokes."

Yet he acknowledges that Hollywood has its share of faces that look stretched to ripping point and lips that look as if they’ve been blown up with bicycle pumps.

"The lips really started with Barbara Hershey in the film, ‘Beaches’," he says, "which drew a tremendous amount of attention to the aesthetic importance of pouty, full lips and well-defined lips. But then there’s the Melanie Griffiths of the world. There are many different techniques to augment the contour of the lips but again it has to be natural."

Enter the Fleming and Myers Lip Tuck procedure. Another procedure popular with famous patients is their Cleavoplasty which subtly fills out the depressed cavity some women have between the breasts that can look unappealing in low-cut gowns. "We most frequently take fat from another part of their body and do liposculpting to improve the contour of their chestbone."

Perhaps buoyed by the success of slender stars like Calista Flockhart, Gwyneth Paltrow and Lara Flynn Boyle, overtly fake-looking breast implants are now officially out. Pamela Anderson led the way in 1999 in having her bosom downsized. Demi Moore looks as if she might have followed suit. Roseanne admitted to having her breast implants removed in l999 saying, "I had ‘em out because they got hard." Several Beverly Hills surgeons have confirmed the trend but won’t name names.

For men, chemical peels and laser resurfacing are growing in popularity but men definitely consider sagging jowls and a balding head a real workplace liability. Dr. Fleming and Dr. Mayer are experts in natural-looking hair replacement techniques.

"The old tufted hair transplant appearance is not acceptable," says Dr. Fleming. "It looks like they have dolls’ hair. In the Fleming-Mayer Flap, we raise a banana-shaped piece of skin from the side and back of the head and rotate it to the top. The advantage is that whatever the uniform density of the hair on the sides of their heads they will get in the bald areas, so it’s much thicker, more immediate. Celebrities cannot take several months off, they need immediate results."

A facelift by Dr. Fleming costs $10,000. Rhinoplasty (a nose job) is $7,000 but the price rises to $9,500 if it’s a redo of another doctor’s work which it is 63% of the time. A Browlift is $5,500, Cleavoplasty, $2,5000, and Lip Augmentation with the Liptuck, $5,000. Someone who wants the works might easily spend $30,000.

Privacy-obsessed stars often pay to take a nurse home with them. Alternatively, they hole up at a recuperation spot like Shantique or Hidden Garden in Beverly Hills. (The latter is where singer James Brown’s wife Adrienne died two days after liposuction. However, reportedly she had heart disease and took the illegal drug PCP which she’d carried in with her. A lethal combination. )

Both sanctuaries run $400-$500 per night and Hidden Garden has a $650 a night his’n’ hers suite for couples who like to go under the knife together.

A current must-have item is the perfectly shaped eyebrow. Bobbe Joy opened her makeup studio in Beverly Hills after twenty years as a freelance makeup artist. Clients include Lucy Liu and Helen Hunt. Recently, Bobbe "resuscitated" Jennifer Tilly’s brows, teaching Jennifer that brow thickness should always be balanced against the size of the bottom half of the face. Bobbe also custom-mixes products. If a client’s shedding tears over a discontinued lipstick colour or makeup base, she’ll concoct the recipe for $35, then keep it in her files.

While Bobbe is still building her business financially, the seven sisters behind Manhattan’s J. Sisters International Salon have a $2.3 million a year hit on their hands all thanks to the Brazilian bikini wax learned in their native Brazil. $45 delivers a Playboy centrefold-style defuzzing of the nether regions done with natural warm pine wax, muslin strips and a few ouches. Gwyneth Paltrow, Vanessa Williams and Kevin Bacon’s missus, Kyra Sedgwick, are customers.

Inspired by the yoga boom, the Dharma Pedicure has proved the winning idea for Julie Serquinia’s LA manicure and pedicure haven, Paint Shop. A $40, 55-minute treat "guaranteed to soothe the sole," it includes reflexology and works on selected nadi (electrical pathways believed to in turn energize the body’s chakras). Melanie Griffith is a customer.

The British connection is also alive and well on the US celebrity scene. John Frieda is behind LA’s hot hair salon of the moment, Sally Herschberger at John Frieda. It’s in-demand star stylist, Sally, who cuts Meg Ryan’s hair. Mark Hayles, who is from Leeds, is a top makeup man in New York. He has his own new product line and works with special client Uma Thurman plus Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Liz Hurley, Kate Winslet, Cindy Crawford…and Fergie.

Former freelance hairstylist, Colin Booker, a Mancunian whose ex-clients include Raquel Welch, Candice Bergen, Andie McDowell and Faye Dunaway, works on Brenda Blethyn when she’s in the States and has been Jane Leeves’ hairdresser for five years. Recently, Colin joined ‘Frasier’ so now does Peri Gilpin’s hair too. A recent triumph was coming up with Herbatint, a herbal colourant he could use on Jane while she is pregnant.

"I have a very wonderful life," admits Colin, who has a white Mercedes, a white ’64 Cadillac, a white Ford F150 Crew Cab and a Harley Davidson parked outside his home. "I’m so grateful. I say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a little coal miner’s son from Manchester!’ It’s all such a thrill. Like going around the country with Craig Ferguson and Brenda Blethyn for the film ‘Saving Grace’. You’re treated like a king. You’re wined and dined and limousined.

"My career has been financially incredibly rewarding. The most I ever made was $5,000 for one hour. Don’t forget, though, I did a three year apprenticeship where I earned less than a pound a week! In those days I worked for cat food!"

Night & Day magazine, UK, 2000
All Rights Reserved. Copyright will be strictly enforced.