From Kirk Douglas to Robert Downey jnr via Jane Fonda, Hollywood’s most adept shape-shifters have long owed their bodies – and their careers – to a personal trainer. But are these muscle-bound kings of pain becoming a little too powerful?I lived with Halle Berry for three years,’ announces in the most matter-of-fact of tones. Meanwhile, a chiselled specimen by the name of Brad Bose has been openly cohabiting with Robert Downey jnr in the latter’s London town house while he prepares for the shooting of Iron Man 2. And back in Los Angeles, a Frenchman called Sebastien Lagree is freely conceding that, yes, you could describe his relationship with Ben Stiller as torrid and intense. Before rushing to check back issues of Heat for any Hollywood scandals you may have unaccountably missed, you should be advised that Pasternak & co’s relationships with their respective actors are far more intimate than any mere affair could hope to be; they’re personal trainers, a position in a Hollywood potentate’s retinue that’s become as vital as agent, PA, or Kabbalah liaison in terms of clout and prestige. ‘These days, stars will check each other’s bodies and say “who’s your trainer?” in the same way that they check each other’s clothes and ask who their stylist is,’ says Bose.
It’s likely that personal training has been around as long as human vanity. Pictographs on Egyptian tombs indicate that weightlifting may have been practised as early as 2500BC; by 500BC, the Spartans of ancient Greece were strength-training under the aegis of clan elders; and more recently, no travelling circus or freak show of the late 19th or early 20th century was complete without its immoderately muscled strongman. But it was 20th-century Los Angeles where the body cult developed into today’s physical-industrial complex.
In the Thirties, a fitness fanatic named Jack LaLanne took early advantage of the city’s climate and outdoor culture to open one of the world’s first health clubs in Oakland, and started working out in public at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, where the Works Progress Administration had erected a wooden platform for that express purpose. Other ‘health bohemians’, male and female, joined the craze, their toned, symmetrical physiques acting as 3D billboards for their groundbreaking routines.
Muscle Beach had disappeared by the late Fifties, although a version survives just up the boardwalk at Venice Beach. By then, LaLanne was exploiting the new medium of television to exhort housewives to ‘get up, exercise, and feel good!’ while Muscle Beach contemporaries like Harold Zinkin invented the Universal weight-training machine and displayed his resultant pecs in numerous Hollywood sword-and-sandals epics. It was Zinkin who nurtured Kirk Douglas’s and Charlton Heston’s killer abs through their Oscar-worthy performances in Spartacus and Ben Hur (and Douglas kept the faith, employing a personal trainer for daily workouts until he was well into his nineties).
The boom continued into the Seventies, when Joe Gold founded the first of his chain of Gold’s Gyms, and nutritional supplement pioneer Joe Weider helped discover a gap-toothed Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose debut in the Pumping Iron documentary took clandestine bodybuilding culture mainstream. And long before Dr Kenneth Cooper coined the word in 1968, Gilda Marx (daughter-in-law of Marx brother Gummo) had been teaching ‘aerobic’ dance classes at her Encino home; but it was only when she whipped Jane Fonda into shape for the movie California Suite, and Fonda became a pioneering proselytiser for the Hollywood-fitness crossover with her best-selling 1982 Workout video, that the term entered common parlance. Stars like Fonda were tapping into the new socio-cultural mood in Hollywood, according to Sebastien Lagree: ‘The partying and overt drug-taking of the Seventies were out,’ he says. ‘Suddenly it was cool to be fit and toned, and that fitted in with all the new action movies that were being produced in the wake of Star Wars, that demanded a certain level of physical prowess from the actors.’ He pauses, and casts his eyes around the branch of Le Pain Quotidien we’re sitting in, a few minutes’ jog from the body-licious enclave of West Hollywood. A few buff young things are scattered around, taking decorous sips from varicoloured nutrishakes. He grins. ‘That’s really when this town became an El Dorado for personal trainers.’
The power-latted, chocolate-voiced Lagree’s odyssey to the pinnacle of personal training is emblematic. He was born in France, just south of Paris, and developed an early obsession with working out, employing a personal trainer himself when he was barely into his teens.
He moved to Hollywood when he was 17, hoping to make it as an actor, but found his body attracting more attention than his ability to deliver lines. ‘People would come up to me at auditions and on movie sets, asking if I was a trainer,’ he recalls. ‘I picked up my first clients solely through word of mouth, and within a few years I was making $100,000 a year, while all my actor friends were still really struggling.’ Lagree’s first celebrity client was Courtney Love; he would take her for meditation sessions on the beach in an effort to soothe her psyche (one reason, perhaps, that Legree stresses that every client remains a work-in-progress, rather than a finished product). But in a town of four million people, inflated by thousands of arrivistes calling themselves personal trainers, you need some cutting-edge contrivance to enable you to stand out from the herd.
Accordingly, Lagree has spent years developing a system called Pilates Plus – an extreme, weight-bearing version of the exercise programme that is now practised in more than 50 fitness studios, and – the ultimate celebrity sanction – has been featured on Oprah. Bose, a former professional athlete who operates out of a private, ‘paparazzi-unfriendly’ gym in Santa Monica that was once owned by Sylvester Stallone, has come up with a enervating routine called Sisyphus, based on the demigod who was cursed to roll a stone up a hill for eternity; it involves some gratifyingly punishing work with laden pulleys. And Pasternak, who previously worked for the Canadian Defence Department doing exercise and nutritional research, has rolled out the 5-Factor Diet – ‘the diet that’s changing Hollywood!’ – based on a five-week plan of five meals a day consisting of five nutritionally advantageous ingredients, interspersed with regular 25-minute workouts (and created, he claims, by putting together energy-boosting lunches for clients while hanging around the catering tables on movie sets).
All of which means that Lagree, Bose and Pasternak can charge top whack for their services – anything up to $500 an hour, according to Lagree, ‘but Courtney Love would tend to book me for four-five hours in a row, five days a week, for two-year blocks, so you can make pretty good money pretty fast’. But the bigger your star clients, the more you’re inclined to waive precipitate fees in return for ringing testimonials, which are worth their weight in gold – such was the agreement between Lagree and Ben Stiller, who wanted to cultivate a washboard stomach worthy of Tugg Speedman, the narcissistic action hero he played in the Hollywood spoof Tropic Thunder. According to Lagree, it was a case of life imitating art.
‘Ben didn’t want bulk,’ he says. ‘He wanted to be cut and toned. His legs are like tree trunks, and he didn’t want to look like he’d got this ill-proportioned tiny torso on top. He’s really anal about that. He takes it incredibly seriously.’
For Downey jnr, Bose received a clear-cut brief. ‘He’s a scientist in Iron Man, so he couldn’t be too buff, but he’s also a superhero, so he has to be muscular,’ he says. Downey was 25 pounds overweight when he first arrived at the gym, so ‘making him look naturally athletic was a challenge’. Bose employed something called the Vortex, a fearsome-sounding contraption that’s usually employed by martial artists, as well as Jacob’s Ladder, ‘which is basically a never-ending ladder that you climb as fast as you can.’ It seems that Downey, never knowingly under-zealous, embraced the rigour – and Bose – so ardently that he’s shipped the entire programme and its overseer to London to enable him to prepare for the sequel. ‘He’s a fiercely loyal and deeply emotional person,’ says Bose. ‘If he embraces something, he goes all the way with it. He’s pitiless.’
These are high-profile endorsements, but the ripplingly bicepped Harley Pasternak reckons he can trump them through sheer weight of numbers – his website lists more than 100 celebrity clients, from Jessica Simpson to Seth Rogen (presumably another work-very-much-in-progress) via Dido and Miley Cyrus. He’s also an Olympian name-dropper, as in, ‘If Kanye West is training in my studio and he arrives 10 minutes late, and Alicia Keys is coming in right after, he knows that I’ll just stop his session to attend to her; they can’t afford to be prima donnas because they know I give everyone equal weight.’
Pasternak made his name by working with the Hollywood elite on movies being shot in his native Canada. ‘I worked with Jim Caviezel on The Count of Monte Cristo and The Passion of The Christ,’ he says. ‘Then Halle Berry and I started our partnership with Gothika, and she asked me to relocate to Hollywood to get her ready for Catwoman.’ By the time they got to Swordfish, Pasternak reckons they’d created a formidable machine, to say the least: ‘For that movie,’ he grins, ’she said, I want the kind of body where you don’t know if I’m going to screw you or kill you. Or both.’ He leaves a theatrical pause. ‘And I think we more than succeeded.’
Despite such Frankensteinian talk, all three trainers are keen to discourage the notion that they can deploy some kind of magic bullet to morph bodies at will. ‘Hollywood stars are different to you and me, because it’s become part of their job to transform themselves physically for certain roles,’ says Lagree. ‘Then other people see the results on screen and think it’s easy. What they haven’t seen is the intense preparation that goes into it. It takes at least three months of hard training to really lick someone into shape. I’ve had actresses coming to me two weeks before they’re due to start shooting, expecting miracles.’ What about the Christian Bale approach of bulking up for one role (Batman Begins), and starving himself for another (The Machinist)? ‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ says Lagree. ‘That kind of yo-yo-ing can have a chain reaction on hormone balance and mental health. Luckily, actors have money and medical teams on hand to protect them from their worst excesses.’
According to Pasternak, the rise of 24-hour celebrity culture has had a marked effect. ‘Most people want to lose weight because they’ve got a wedding coming up, or they’re going on vacation and they want to tone up,’ he says. ‘Celebrities, these days, are always on. The red carpet thing has become as important as the movie you’re promoting. ‘You’ve got to stay in shape for the premieres and the stylists. The whole world is devouring your body. So, if you’re looked at in that way, you have an obligation to show that you can be fit, but not super-skinny. Take Jessica Simpson; we’ve taken care to keep her toned, but she’s also curvy rather than emaciated.’
All three trainers agree that, when it comes to ultimate fitness goals, there are eternal verities for men and women – ‘men want a six-pack and abs’, says Lagree. ‘The gut is the male obsession, while women are looking at their inner thighs, arms, everything – they want to be taut, but they really don’t want to be manly.’
But there are also fads. ‘There’s always a current hot body that everyone wants,’ says Bose, who used to take his male clients’ picture and superimpose it on the body of Hugh Jackman (though he worries that Jackman’s gone a little too far down the Victor Mature route as the beefcake Drover in Australia). For men, the excessively ripped, walnuts-in-a-condom look of Schwarzenegger and Stallone is firmly out, in favour of the toned-but-tenable style of James Franco or Daniel Craig. ‘I get a lot of guys coming in and referencing the powder-blue swimming-trunks scene in Casino Royale,’ says Lagree. ‘Guys like Franco, or Tobey Maguire and Ed Norton, they don’t want to bulk up because they want to fit into a designer dress shirt or a slim-cut Dolce & Gabbana suit.’
As for women, all three trainers posit a happy medium between Madonna (while in awe of her decades of dedication, they’re a little abashed at the resultant girth of her triceps), and Victoria Beckham (’I'm going to get in trouble for saying her name again,’ sighs Pasternak, ‘but isn’t she just too, well, skinny?’) – Jennifer Garner, say, or Niki Sanders from Heroes. ‘It’s a slightly different attitude for female stars,’ says Bose. ‘For men, training is normal, but for women, there’s a little front they have to keep up where the line is that they’re naturally beautiful, they naturally look the way they do thanks to good genes or something, because they don’t want people to know how many weights they’ve had to throw around to get there. They want to keep the feminine mystique.’
All of which is ample reason to keep your friends close, but your trainers closer, though there are signs that the 24-7-365 kind of closeness that some stars demand is beginning to chafe. ‘It’s a symbiotic relationship,’ says Bose, ‘because trainers need celebrities to boost their profile; the first thing any publicist will ask is, whose name can we use? I’ve tried to scale down a bit, but Robert needs me right now, and my wife’s ready to kill me. I have to try and make sure I don’t become a crutch for people. You have to be artful in getting the trust thing together without crossing that line.’
Sebastien Lagree goes further. Gone are the days, he says, when he’d take calls from Nicole Kidman’s publicist at 2am. ‘I have kids now and I can’t be available at someone’s whim,’ he says. ‘It would never end. You become like their close friend and confidante and wires get crossed and it’s unhealthy.’ (Harley Pasternak has no such qualms: ‘I was working with John Mayer the other day and he was like, shall we go for lunch afterwards? And I’m like, I’d love to, but I have to go and work with Bono. And he’s like, wow, OK…’)
Appropriate boundary negotiations notwithstanding, all three trainers predict a ‘beautiful future’ for their profession. ‘There’s stuff that’s on the horizon that’s science-fiction right now,’ says Bose, while Lagree speaks in quasi-mystical terms about a level of ‘mind-body co-ordination’ potent enough ’so that we could train actors to lift up fire trucks’ (though he may just have been infected with a little Tugg Speedman-esque rhetoric). What’s more surprising is that he considers that society places far too much emphasis on the way people look. ‘I think society is getting kind of sick in this regard. So you’re 20 pounds overweight? That’s OK, you’re not going to die. I’d discourage people from going OTT,’ he says forcefully.
‘Everything in moderation, you know? Find a balance.’ And he heads off to put another wraith through their onerous Pilates Plus paces.
‘I’d like to thank my trainer…’ The fitness Oscars, as awarded by Sebastien Lagree
Best Male Body: Brad Pitt
I’ve liked Brad’s physique ever since Fight Club, and he’s really kept it up. He’s got great proportion and I love his overall anatomy. He’s very fit and sculpted but he’s not too big or anything like that. Guys want to be tight. Twenty years ago you had the bodybuilding look, like Arnold, but that’s over. The guys that have the time to work out also have the money to spend on designer clothes, so they need to fit into them. Brad Pitt is really well-toned but at the same time his body is still functional.
Best Female Body: Angelina Jolie (grudgingly)
No one struck me as being in amazing shape this year. Angelina Jolie, I don’t think she’s in amazing shape, but she’s very sexy. That is totally because of body type, that’s genetics, hips or no hips. You don’t really strain for that.
Lifetime Achievement: Jaclyn Smith (female) Harrison Ford (male)
I think there’s a lot of emotion attached to Mickey Rourke, but I don’t think there’s anything to like about abusing drugs for 20 years and now you do a movie, clean up your act in three or six months and then all of a sudden, lifetime achievement! For me, it’s people who’ve taken care of themselves day in and day out. Jaclyn Smith, the brunette who was in Charlie’s Angels, she’s way into her sixties and she looks absolutely amazing: her skin, her body… Harrison Ford is another great example. How old is he? In his mid-sixties? And he’s done a lot of his own stunts too.
Worst Special Effects: Ben Stiller
I’ve gotta tell you, Ben Stiller is really fit, but he has really weird proportions – these long legs and short torso. Ben is really conscious of that, and he never wants to work his upper body too much because if you work his back and make his back too wide, it’s going to make his torso look even shorter than it is.
Source - Telegraph.co.uk
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