CHAPTER 17
The Bust Boom
Let’s talk about glands.
In the ’80s and into the ’90s, there was a booming trade in the surgically enhanced breast. Many young women, including a sizable number in their late teens, believed that a more bountiful bust could help boost their self-esteem, reinforce their womanhood (a freighted concept, to be sure), or fortify their presence and essence. Many Boomers joined them. Some breast cancer patients received implants during reconstructive surgery.1 Others were looking for a sense of renewal after bearing children or for social cachet or for a way to hold back the tides of age. The cosmetics culture promoted the procedure as relatively safe. The popular culture regularly featured unapologetically amplified models and actresses.
And yet thousands of women who had previously received implants were falling ill. Starting in the mid-’80s, the lawsuits mounted. Court cases detailed incidents of ruptured devices, compromised immune systems, connective-tissue disease, and myriad infirmities. In December 1990, a distressing and, as it turned out, highly influential report on Face to Face with Connie Chung aired interviews with alarmed patients. On the broadcast, pathologist Douglas Shanklin described the silicone implant as “an unproven, probably unsafe medical device.” Congress held hearings. The next year, the FDA requested a nationwide moratorium. Class-action attorneys filed suit. Women in droves had their implants removed, often swapping in saline substitutes. In 1995, the ax fell on Dow Corning, the nation’s main supplier of silicone-gel implants. The company, ravaged by litigation, sought bankruptcy protection, eventually settling with 170,000 claimants.
Then, astoundingly, the implant bounced back. A series of comprehensive studies failed to find demonstrable links between silicone and significant disorders. Between 1992 and 1998, the number of breast enhancements actually increased fourfold, with more than half of all recipients ranging in age from nineteen to thirty-four.
In the midst of this ebb and flow, a perplexing photo was published. It appeared in the August 1995 issue of Texas Monthly. And it was the centerpiece of a cover story by Mimi Swartz entitled “Silicone City: The Rise and Fall of the Implant—Or How Houston Went from an Oil-Based Economy to a Breast-Based Economy.”
The picture showed a Houston-area nurse named Cyndi Lovell with her daughter, Melissa. They posed together, poolside, in bathing suits. Photographed from above, mother and daughter were depicted smiling, showing off their bustlines. Cyndi—possessed of 400cc implants—had recently offered to pay for her daughter’s surgery, reportedly asking her one day, “So, do you want your breasts done for high school graduation or college?” (The article did not state Melissa’s age, but she took her mom up on the offer.)
When I saw the picture at the time, I did a double take. If American mothers were endorsing their kids’ cosmetic surgery, then there’d been some sort of overhaul of the intergenerational mind-set. While researching this book, I came across the photo again. And I was determined to find the surgeon who’d transformed Cyndi and Melissa—and many a Houstonian.
His name is Franklin Rose, MD. In the Houston press he is called the Body Baron, the Michelangelo of Plastic Surgery, and, simply, Breast Man. I figure that if anyone can help me understand the reason for the bust boom of the 1980s and ’90s it is Dr. Rose, who agrees to meet with me.
A month before my visit, he mails me a DVD: a copy of the 1997 HBO film Breast Men. It is a cautionary tale. Actor David Schwimmer plays a cosmetic surgeon who becomes, in a word, obsessed. Schwimmer’s character snorts cocaine off a woman’s chest. He has bosoms painted on the bottom of his backyard swimming pool.2 And—spoiler alert—he is eventually killed when a truck smashes into his Corvette because he’s too busy staring out the window at a busty woman in a convertible. (In one scene in the movie, Dr. Rose gets a shout-out—by name.)
As I drive into Houston from the airport, I see massive storage warehouses. I pass billboards for strip clubs, for a “High-Caliber Gun Show,” for Slick Willie’s Family Pool Hall. Here and there are signs on no-frills, men-centric stores with two-by-four-letter names: COLD BEER, USED CARS, BAIL BOND, SAM’S CLUB, VALU PAWN, WING•SPOT, SUITMART.
This is a town with a macho, frontier spirit that has long been evinced by its derricks (signifying the oil boom) and its rockets (the aerospace boom). As NASA’s home base, Houston was the Southland’s capital of the can-do ’60s. It became the place where visionaries introduced the ersatz triumphant: indoor stadiums and outer-space gadgetry; artificial turf and the artificial heart. (In the 1990s came the artificial deal: Houston-based Enron would turn creative-accounting fraud into a science, becoming the consummate financial casualty of the early 2000s.)
It was in Houston, in fact, that two surgeons, Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow, in 1961 first used silicone gel to artificially expand the proportions of the female breast. “They got the idea,” writes Alex Kuczynski in her book Beauty Junkies, “after gazing at a plastic sack of blood hanging from a pole during a transfusion.” Franklin Rose, as it happens, is among a cadre of Houston visionaries, chiefly male, who foresaw vast promise and profit in the bionic breast.
I meet Rose in a rush, at a party. Dark-framed glasses. Blinding white teeth. Bald crown. Strong, finchlike profile. Rose—fifty-nine at the time—is unfailingly convivial, solicitous, and, now and again, genuinely tender. Yet he presents himself, as do many surgeons, as constitutionally incapable of conveying modesty. Even so, judging from the warmth and the wide respect he receives throughout the evening (and for the next forty-eight hours), I sense that I am in the presence of a good man of goodwill.
Franklin Rose’s camera-ready smile defaults to high beam. He speaks with a soft Mr. Rogers cadence, enunciating deliberately. Tonight, though, we are in a hurry. We hustle through Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. Waiters zip past us and diners stop him to offer compliments. Rose seems to relish seeing and being seen.
We are heading to a banquet room for a benefit dinner. The event has been spearheaded by the doctor’s wife, artist Cindi Harwood Rose. Along comes Dr. Michael Ciaravino, a dashing young plastic surgeon. Rose introduces us, lavishing Ciaravino with praise: “Here’s the next holder of the big breast record. Go to thebodydoc.com.”
“I’m doing close to eight hundred a year,” Ciaravino says with pride, and showing great deference to Rose.
“Houston is an implant city,” Rose asserts. “More per capita than any city. And Michael puts in more than anyone in this city.… He does more than anybody in the world.”
With Ciaravino out of earshot, I inquire about the percentage of women on the premises who have had that kind of work done. “This crowd is an 80 percent plastic surgery crowd,” Rose says. Later, he adds, “In my estimation, Houston is a very overaugmented city. I don’t really go to the nightclubs much anymore, thank God, but I go out to the restaurants and sometimes it all looks so overaugmented to me. And I’ve done five thousand.”
The evening is resolutely about breasts. The gala helps support the Rose Ribbon Foundation, a charity established to honor Cindi Rose’s sister Holly Harwood Skolkin and others who have battled breast cancer. Each year the group offers reconstructive surgery, at no charge, to recovering cancer patients, many of whom lack adequate health insurance. As guests mill about, I look down at the place settings at our tables. On every plate rests an appetizer of two pert porcini ravioli, each adorned with a small mushroom. Am I simply imagining twin nipples?
I am a bit dizzy from the cocktail hour. In rapid succession, Franklin or Cindi or both have introduced me to society columnists and philanthropists, to a Wildenstein, a teenage beauty pageant winner, and the fashion model Ursaline Hamilton. I meet the Roses’ daughter, Erica, twenty-seven—a veteran of The Bachelor reality-TV franchise and an aspiring entertainment lawyer—who looks fetching in a low-cut spaghetti-strap dress. (All three Roses have made the reality-TV rounds.)3 In every direction, there are plunging necklines and strategically placed jewels.
At one point during cocktails, Dr. Rose draws my attention to Jessica Stern Meyer, a socially connected artist and jeweler from a wealthy Mexican family. Meyer greets me and, without much prompting, offers a closer look at the pendant on her chest—created from bullets normally used in .357 Magnums and .45 automatics. “My [jewelry] line is called bulletgirl.com,” she says. “I get ten thousand blanks at a time—delivered to my door by UPS—that I fashion into rings, earrings, bracelets.” (Her grandfather, I learn, manufactured bullets. She takes the ammo and—as the Bullet Girl website puts it—“unearth[s] the beauty in something meant for destruction.”)
At dinner I am seated next to Franklin’s wife. Cindi Rose is a painter, sculptor, former columnist, and fixture on the Houston social scene. She is vivacious, spiritually attuned, and—not unlike her husband, as I soon discover—unfiltered when it comes to discussing her accomplishments, her professional passions, and her private life. I soon hear about the beauty-pageant titles she collected in her day (Miss Austin Beautiful, Oklahoma University’s Miss Venus, Miss Mod Bod, and so on), and I see that she has maintained her striking looks and figure into her late fifties.
Three curious things happen as we dig into our ravioli. First, she tells me, “We were married, then divorced, then married again.” (More on this shortly.) Next, she says, without my asking, “My body’s natural”—as if I might assume otherwise given her husband’s profession.4 Third, Cindi describes her lifelong calling: silhouette portraiture.
She suddenly whips out a tiny pair of surgical scissors and a sheet of black silhouette paper. And she begins cutting, freehand, right there at the dinner table as other guests look on. She examines my profile intently, asking me to stare straight ahead. “There’s only about twelve people in America,” she tells me, snipping away, “who do what I do.”5 In under a minute or so, she produces a disarmingly accurate likeness of my profile, and affixes the jet-black cutting onto textured white paper. I am at once mesmerized and weirded out. While sitting at dinner, I have been elevated (into an artist’s model) and reduced (to an object, literally to a body image). It dawns on me that both Franklin and Cindi Rose share a specialty: silhouette art.
The evening’s mood keeps shifting. A woman named Stacie is introduced to the attendees and approaches the front of the room. She is the daughter of one of the night’s guests of honor—a woman who underwent post-mastectomy reconstruction only days before. Stacie tells the crowd, “Just to see [my mom] smile again when she took off the bandages was awesome. ’Cause she’s so pretty.” The audience is soon tearing up, applauding. At our table, Cindi explains, “We make forty to one hundred thousand dollars with the dinner, [which covers] ten free reconstructions a year.”
Things pivot again as Cindi tells me a story over dinner. It is a signature ’90s tale that I later explore with her husband and those in the Roses’ inner circle.
“The divorce was 1990,” she says. “We were divorced seven years. Then we got married seven years later.” The seven-year cycle, she mentions, echoes those prescribed in the Bible—for crops, for debts, for the term that a servant or a worker can toil.
The breakup, I learn, occurred largely because the good doctor had been getting overly familiar with one or two of the women he’d been surgically enhancing. One night, says Cindi, “a beautiful friend pulled me aside at a party, with tears in her eyes, and said, ‘Your husband is having an affair.’ The next day, another friend, a former model with true psychic powers, told me, opening a newspaper [and] showing me a write-up, ‘This is your husband’s girlfriend.’ He was dating a Penthouse Pet.… My husband was eating the cookies from the cookie jar.
“I made a split-second decision,” she says. “I divorced him so fast. People were throwing themselves at him. They thought he was God because he made everyone beautiful.”
Franklin Rose later gives me his version. “Cindi and I were apart for a while and at the time I operated on Lynn Johnson, the Penthouse 20th Anniversary Pet.”6 Moving the discussion away from Johnson, he continues, “There was a period of time when I was the house plastic surgeon for Penthouse. I was kind of like Bob Guccione’s guy in the ’80s and early ’90s. They’d fly girls in. Guccione had this ominous, scary penthouse. It was kind of like a descent into hell. There were Dobermans or mastiffs. It was very lovely, but menacing. There were a lot of evil vibrations surrounding many of these patients. People who use their bodies as a conduit to make money—it all kind of merges. If you look into it, there was a lot of sexual abuse. I don’t think it brings positive, angelic spirits into your life.”
Of the split with Cindi, Dr. Rose reflects, “I guess there were actually two or three girls I sort of dated. [I would call it] more ‘dalliances’ than anything else.… Our offices in those days [were filled with] young, beautiful women. It’s hard to describe.… When the plastic surgeon does a transformative experience for them that’s even more benefiting of their beauty, they fall in love. It’s crazy. It’s weird how that happens.”
Rose confesses that back in the ’90s, upon walking into Rick’s Cabaret—then the town’s leading gentlemen’s club—he would be besieged by dancers, many of them his patients. “I was David Schwimmer,” he says, referring to Schwimmer’s character from the TV movie Breast Men. “I’d walk in and it would be an absolute swarm.” Did they offer him private dances? “They would do whatever you wanted them to do. These were women who made money with their body and it wasn’t like they drew a line at this, that, or the other thing. They were happy [to oblige]. And I was kind of happy-go-lucky in those days myself.
“There was a period of time when I was the team plastic surgeon for the Houston Rockets”—during their 1990s wonder years—“and I operated on a number of the players’ wives and some of the cheerleaders. And so I had front-row seats. I would walk in with some spectacularly beautiful girl and there was kind of more attention placed to her and to me than the basketball game.”
The gentlemen’s clubs of the era, Rose recalls, “were brand-new, fresh-built.… It was so accepted. Now it’s a bunch of tacky girls with tattoos and stuff. But back [then] it was [packed with] beautiful girls—[one, for instance,] who might be an SMU girl on college break for the summer. It was a whole different crowd.… And I say that not with a sense of nostalgia or a sense of self-protectiveness. It’s true.”
Sharon St. Romain-Frank used to run Rose’s public relations. She recalls two particularly memorable scenarios from the early ’90s. One day, she had a contract that she needed Dr. Rose to sign. Instead of meeting at the office, she says, he asked her to bring the paperwork to Rick’s Cabaret. And there, according to St. Romain-Frank, she found her boss seated amid his handiwork: “He was wearing his [surgical] scrubs—blue-green—in the strip club.”
Another time, she remembers, “We had a party at a high-rise. He came in late. And he had five girls from his shoulders to his fingertips.… He walked in like P. Diddy. Can you imagine? I grabbed his hands. They were so sweaty. I said, ‘What are you trying to do?’” St. Romain-Frank remained close to both Cindi and Franklin Rose, she says, “during the whole period when he was dating the Penthouse Pet. And I prayed for him daily. I am Christian Baptist.… Cindi and I have always been great friends. She would cry to me. She always knew he’d come back. And he did. Dr. Rose is a wonderful, very smart, kindhearted human being. He’s driven. He’s gentle. [But] Houston became one of the capitals of the country with all these strip clubs… and he was seduced by what was going on because he was so good at what he did. And now he’s turned it around.”7
Rose compares his circumstances to those of another figure from the decade: Bill Clinton. “I had the opportunity to meet and chat with him up in Aspen,” he says. “He’s a really bright guy. Of course, he was excoriated, as well you know, for his ‘lack of values,’ if you will. But in my own life, per se, I kind of lost my moral compass in the late ’80s, early ’90s, personally speaking. You’re thirty-five years old. You’re surrounded [by] dancers, models, actress-wannabes, people who were gorgeous. You get lost.… But in your heart of hearts, you knew this wasn’t a good life.”
Was there a moment, I ask him, when he hit rock bottom?
“I don’t know,” he says haltingly. “Go ask Tiger Woods. Who knows what happens in that environment?… You just get frickin’ seduced, you know? Repeatedly. I was doing a lot of what we call the ‘virgin augmentation’ on the young, beautiful crowd of Houston. And after a while, it’s sort of like you fall prey, seduced by the patients and the lifestyle, you’re so immersed in it all the time.… When you’re younger, the things that seem important to you, [such as] hanging out with the young and beautiful, kind of get revved up. The divorce rate among breast-augment surgeons in their thirties and forties in L.A., Houston, Dallas, or Miami approaches 100 percent”—a statistic I cannot confirm.
When I arrive at Utopia Plastic Surgery and MedSpa, in a shopping complex in Houston’s upscale Galleria area, I meet the office staff: five fresh-faced women in blue scrubs. One of them is Stacy Tompkins, a friendly, athletic blonde in her forties. Franklin Rose’s patient coordinator since 1993, she takes me back in time.
“In the ’80s and ’90s,” she says, “it was adult entertainers and dancers doing their breasts. And by the late ’90s it became Sunday school teachers and preachers’ wives who wanted to wear big sweaters in the winter so people wouldn’t notice as much and then sort of ‘grow into it’ by summer.… I was raised in church—Baptist—and I’ve never come across anybody who’s judged plastic surgery [in Houston]. I’ve never felt judged.” Stacy takes out her medical chart to tick off her own cosmetic procedures, which she says began in her early twenties and significantly “helped my self-esteem.… I had my nose done in 1995. I did liposuction in ’96 and ’99. I did my breasts in ’98. I did my eyes really young. I’ve had minor skin procedures. I’ve had tons of injectables too. I was Dr. Rose’s first Botox patient… in 1997.” Today’s patients, she says, range in age from their teens (“usually seventeen-eighteen is okay, it’s when they quit growing”) to a recent first-timer (“age sixty-eight”).
Tompkins gives her perspective on the wilder side of the practice during the 1990s. Their former office, in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, was located close to the gentlemen’s clubs, she says. “There would be girls who would come in and want to trade favors for surgeries. That’s why he always had me in the room. We had one girl do a back bend against the wall and said, ‘Look what my breasts do!’ And I thought, ‘Oh, Lord,’ you can’t believe that these girls would have the gall.
“He was known for the breast. He was always more experienced than other plastic surgeons in town, so we dealt with really beautiful girls—a different class. Back in the ’90s [some of] the higher-end dancers had their sugar daddies. They were kind of wild. The [Houston] Rockets were winning and people were running around with the Rockets. It was the appeal of the ‘bad girl’ lifestyle. Some of the younger socialite daughters… from wealthy families saw that life of nightspots and topless bars as an appealing lifestyle that they wanted to emulate, so society girls would want the procedure. They’d want to look like that, act like that.
“In the ’90s,” she continues, “everybody wanted big, big breasts. You’d know when a woman had it done. Now women are staying in the C sizes, a sporty look. I don’t know if it’s that Dr. Rose’s getting older and maturing [but I think] it’s an overall trend.”
Part of Tompkins’s job at that stage was to lend an ear. “I would spend an hour on a consultation, like a hairdresser, listening to their marital problems. One lady ran her husband’s Corvette into his garage, on purpose, because she found out he was cheating. And then [he] paid for her to have the full gamut: breast ‘aug,’ lipo, tummy tuck, to keep her from leaving him. Back then these people had so much money that if the husband did something wrong, he had a lot to lose. So the wife could pull the strings.”
The doctor and I continue our conversation in his office, then over lunch, then in a few follow-up talks and emails. “In the ’90s,” Rose recalls, “it was just, ‘Let’s make this girl the hottest, most beautiful girl in the world.… Let’s do her nose, her lips, her breasts, and we’ll really make her just beyond beautiful.’… In the early ’90s, I remember a patient came in, she was Miss Florida Mud Wrestler or some crazy shit. And I put in 1400cc implants, which were huge. And, I mean, she said, ‘Well, couldn’t I have had a little more fullness here?’ It was nuts. It’s like two basketballs.” (Rose uses silicone and occasionally saline for his current procedures. To this day, he says, he considers the FDA’s short-lived moratorium “just a pile of shit.… I defend the silicone-gel implant immensely. This is the safest biomaterial ever invented for such use.”)
The doctor does not apologize for his part in the equation, arguing that one’s inner confidence, grace, and “a happier focus in life” often come from one’s outward appearance. (“In the Torah,” he says, “there are many references to [the virtue of] possessing great beauty.”) But he recognizes a deep-seated problem in the culture’s “beauty obsession.” The cause, he insists, is a decline in values. “The complete emphasis on body versus spirit is accentuated now. It is unhealthy. There is [a concentration] on values that might be superficial instead of values that are more substantive—the values of family, of religion, of morality.”
Compared to the 1960s, he asserts, today’s “pop culture is more risqué, it’s more promiscuous than ever. It’s like Rome before the fall. Rome was a very immoral culture. Body image and perfection were revered in those cultures. The culture over the last couple of decades is not far off.… We’re heading toward an abyss—and I’d say it all started with the early 1960s.” The turning point, he says, came with Playboy magazine and the ethos it espoused. “I was born in the 1950s,” he says. “The Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet morality was cast aside for a Hugh Hefner morality.” That era, he says, was shaken by the approval of the birth control pill in 1960 and the introduction of the implant the following year. “Then, in my estimation, really, the cat got let out of the bag after the JFK assassination.… All of a sudden, drugs became popular.… To me, at least, it has just been a general decay of moral value ever since.”
Franklin Rose, even so, is still suturing while Rome beckons.
He confesses a fear. It is one that all of his peers face: “The inevitable day when every plastic surgeon has to hand over his scalpels.” And on that day, I ask, what does he foresee missing most? “It’s just so pretty,” he responds. “Everything about plastic surgery and wound-healing is so beautiful. And I don’t mean that in a vainglorious way. The patients are so nice—at least in my practice. They’re so beautiful, kind of, inside and out. And I know: to be one of the biggest plastic surgeons in a very large metropolitan area like this, it’s a great blessing. But as you continue to age you know that you can’t do it forever and ever. Sometimes I tell Cindi, ‘I hope there’s a place to practice plastic surgery in heaven.’ She gets a kick out of it.”
After their years in the ’90s wilderness, I wonder, how did the Roses recover their love?
Cindi believes that fate intervened. One night at dinner a man whom Cindi calls the Rose “family astrologer”—also a financial planner and photographer—“said, ‘In exactly two months’ an old boyfriend would come back in my life.… We consult with him all the time [and he is] never wrong.” Two months later, in December 1996, a good friend “who is psychic,” she says, informed her, “Tonight is going to be a special night for you.”
Sure enough, Cindi returned home from a date that evening with a man who, she says, expressed a desire to settle down. “He kind of wanted the whole program, ‘I would love to have a future with you’… and I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to give him a chance.… I’m tired of being single.’… We were sitting on the couch talking and my phone rang. It was like one in the morning.”
It was her ex-husband, of all people—a man who, despite their having been in contact over seven years, had never once kissed her or even held her hand during their time apart. As Cindi recalls, “He said, ‘I’m in the emergency room. It’s a sign from God.’ He [described how he’d been] bringing the children [daughter Erica and son Benjamin] home from the Rockets game. He said he felt pushed by an angel, that he felt pushed on the shoulder, fell over in front of the house… onto the ground, and he dislocated his shoulder.” Cindi—who says she had had no clue that Franklin would be the one destined to come into her life—followed his instructions. She explained the situation to her date, bid him good-bye, collected Franklin from the ER, and brought him home. “We were intimate that evening.” And they woke up the next morning as a couple. They would remarry soon thereafter.8
Franklin’s account matches Cindi’s. “I fell for no apparent reason,” he remembers. “It was almost a Wizard of Oz–like tumbling.” After shoulder surgery, he says, “I could have taken a taxi. For some reason—Cindi and I were cordial [at the time], not warm—I called Cindi, and she said something like, ‘I was expecting your call.’… I spent the night. And the next morning our little eight- or nine-year-old son, who was forever trying to engineer some way of getting Mom and Dad back together, came bouncing down into the bedroom and said, ‘Hi, Dad.’
“It was really weird,” Rose continues, attributing their reunion to the Almighty. “It was just meant to be, somehow, through the greater cosmos.” (Franklin and Cindi, both descendants of rabbis, have become more observant since their reconciliation.) As for the idea that an angel nudged him, he resists that characterization. “No, no, no. That’s not true. I did not mention an angel.” Then he retreats, admitting he may not have been in his normal mind-set. “Maybe I did say ‘an angel.’ They gave me Valium and Versed that night—standard-issue protocol in the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder.”