Pursuit of Perfection

By SCOTT BROWN

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.