Fat Chance by Deborah Blumenthal Read Free Book Online Page B

shoulder. Not a smart move to be caught by the publisher while gawking at movie-star pictures when all of America is waiting for my next column. I open up one of “Melanie’s pages,” a picture gallery of “gorgeous Mike.” There’s a shot of him in a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket at a movie premiere; hair gelled back, dark eyes sparkling, dressed in a tux at the Emmy Awards; shirtless in a tight bathing suit playing basketball at the beach. I enlarge it.
    In another, his arm is locked around the waist of his current flame, French model Jolie Bonjour. Clearly, she is having many bon jours these days, thanks in large part to the fact that she’s probably the one broad who fits into those stupid size 0 clothes, or worse still, 00, that always piss me off because they’re made to fit only anorexics or eleven-year-old adolescents, in which case they belong in the children’s department. To boot, Miss Bonjour is barely drinking age, and has luminescent blue eyes, and poreless skin. Was there even a word in French for zit? And that platinum hair. No wonder hair color manufacturers offered five hundred shades of blond that were used by more than a third of the women in the world. Now, brown hair, on the other hand, came in something like three shades. Light brown, medium brown and dark. End of story. Dullsville, really.
    The plastic-Barbie image of perfection never died. No matter that if Barbie’s body were translated into human scale, her measurements would be 38-18-34. So what if no one on the planet had those proportions, women still wanted them.
    At least, to their credit, Barbie’s manufacturers were now giving the dolls wider waists, smaller busts and closed mouths, a far cry from “Lilli,” the prototype for Barbie—dating back forty years—who was a German doll based on a lusty actress who was in between gigs.
    This poupée smiles widely in every shot. No wonder. Mike Taylor’s arm was hooked around her waist.
    I open up interview after interview with Taylor. Thank God for the Internet. Actually, his life was an open magazine—just this past month the six-page cover story in Architectural Digest with the headline: “Perfection in Pacific Palisades.” It began with a double-page spread showing the cobalt blue of the Pacific as a backdrop to the bright Southern California sun glinting off the polished steel of the Nautilus machines in his sprawling home gym. Fifteen behemoths in all, each with a precise function, either to tone and strengthen a specific muscle group, or offer an aerobic challenge. A trainer visited as often as the postman, the story said, to take him through the routine.
    Sotto voce, Taylor admitted that he loathed exercise, but his romantic roles made it mandatory that he stay in shape. Legions of fans just waited for the moment when they would glimpse his contoured physique as he pulled off a snug T-shirt and fell into an embrace with a lush-lipped nymphet.
    â€œPart of the job,” he said.
    According to the cover story, Taylor had been in Los Angeles for twelve years, but had quickly gained fame and fortune after a TV pilot based on the lives of a group of elite NASA astronauts was picked up for a regular series on CBS.
    In The High Life, he played womanizing Scott Bronson, a rocket scientist who joined the space program and rose to become one of its top advisors, a job which had come to define who he was. His exalted standing didn’t hurt his appeal to the nubile NASA recruits—whom he had a reputation for quickly bedding—or the thirty-million fans who watched—captivated by Mike’s work—his long-term relationship with a curvaceous fellow astronaut, his secretive one-night stands, and all the bizarre twists and turns that his life took on this earth and beyond. In addition to the show, he told the writer that he spent weekends and vacations making films.
    â€œExhausting? Sure, but my