Breasts (7 page)

The era of the boob job was about to arrive.

AT FIRST GLANCE, THIS HARD CITY OF OIL DERRICKS, PIPELINES,
and banks might seem an unlikely place for such a defining moment in the natural history of breasts. But in addition to its status as the oil and gas capital of the country, Houston in the 1950s was emerging as a major medical hub, in no small part because of the city’s oil and gas wealth. MD Anderson Cancer Center had been created in 1941 as part of the University of Texas system. Houston’s Texas Medical Center, including several nonprofit hospitals and schools, was well on its way to becoming the largest medical center in the world. At Baylor College of Medicine, where Cronin worked, a cardiologist named Michael DeBakey had just pioneered a procedure
called patch-graft angioplasty with a Dacron swatch, a celebrated technique still used today. Plastics and chutzpah were revolutionizing medicine.

Add to this a lively burlesque scene, the city’s embrace of petro-fueled commerce and technology, and its particular brand of cowboy entrepreneurialism, and Houston was perfect for the Future Boob mantle. Cronin was ambitious, and he’d been thinking about the breast for some time. He was aware of the practice of silicone injections and dismissed it as no good. But when he saw the new blood bags, he reasoned that if the filler substance could be contained in a sac, many of the collateral problems would be solved. He and his chief resident, Frank Gerow, found a receptive audience at Dow Corning. Working with the company, they designed an implant using a silicone rubber bag filled with silicone gel. On the back of the bag, they added several patches of Dacron in the hope that it would bind to the chest wall and keep the sac from ending up in an armpit. Accounts vary about how they tested it. Some authors say they tested it in six dogs, but Dr. Tom Biggs, who was another resident of Cronin’s at the time, told me they tested the implant in only one. She was, he recalled, a pound mutt named Esmerelda. When Esmerelda survived the surgery, the doctors called it good. (Esmerelda was not as delighted by her new profile, however. She soon chewed the implant out.)

Next, they needed a human volunteer.

IN 1962, TIMMIE JEAN LINDSEY WAS A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD
woman with a hard life behind her. After her mother died of cancer, she dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen, left home, and married a gas-station attendant. Six kids and twelve years later, she
kicked him out for being a slouch and an alcoholic. She then fell hard in love with a steelworker, who talked her into getting a big tattoo. A red rose on her right breast said, “Fred,” one on her left breast, “Timmie,” and in between bloomed yet another rose. But Fred was a womanizer and things didn’t work out. At a checkup, Timmie Jean’s doctor audibly gasped when he saw her chest. Feeling ashamed and depressed, she went to Houston’s public hospital, Jefferson Davis, for dermabrasion. That’s where she met Cronin’s chief resident, Frank Gerow. He was another man with a plan for her breasts.

I found Timmie Jean in a small unincorporated town east of Houston. With both Cronin and Gerow dead, she is, on the fiftieth anniversary of her historic implant surgery, the best remaining artifact of the era. Nothing in Houston commemorates the event or the hundreds of millions of dollars that breast implants would soon be pumping into the medical and legal communities. But then again, Houston is not a looking-back kind of place.

“That’s how it all started,” said Timmie Jean, who’s now seventynine and, to my jaundiced eyes, surprisingly healthy for having been a surgical guinea pig. A robust and gracious redhead, she works the night shift at a nearby nursing home that no doubt houses a few people considerably younger than she. She welcomed me to the same house in which she has lived for the last fifty years, though the house, much like her chest, has undergone some augmentation, including a couple of small additions to the original shotgun floor plan. Tan with red shutters, it sits not far off Interstate 10, next to a boat-and-generator repair shop and across the street from two large chemical holding tanks. We sat on a couch covered with crocheted afghans in a room crowded with pictures of her children and grandchildren. A straw-hat collection decorated one wall, and in the next
room, an upside-down pink umbrella served as chandelier above the dining table. Now a widow, Timmie Jean shares the house with her daughter Pamela.

“Unbeknownst to me, implants were in development and they were looking for young women to be the first to have them,” she told me in a gravelly Texas twang. “So they brought it up to me. They asked me, would I like to be in a study to have implants? I’d never even dwelled on [my breasts]. I was okay with what I had. After six children I guess they were kind of saggy. I said, ‘You know, what I really want is to have my ears pinned back.’ My brother had teased me my whole life. They said, ‘Yeah, we’ll fix your ears too.’ ”

So in a move that would never pass today’s institutional review boards, Timmie Jean got a cosmetic surgery she didn’t want in exchange for one she did. She went from a size A or B cup to a size C. “I have to tell you,” she said, “they said it would boost my confidence, but I had plenty of confidence.” With new breasts and new ears, though, more men did notice her. But there were drawbacks. At the time, she worked in a dress factory, and as a perfect size 12, she was the in-house model. But her new breasts no longer fit into the shirtwaist dresses of the time. And within five or ten years, she said, her implants hardened and sometimes caused shooting pains in her chest. She wasn’t able to do aerobics or certain exercises because of the pain. She is self-conscious if anyone hugs her. She has also suffered from rheumatism, and has had two knees and a thumb joint replaced, but she doesn’t know if her immunesystem troubles were caused by the silicone in her body or by a life of unceasing hard work.

Around the time of her surgery, the doctors asked her if she knew anyone else for their study, and so she recruited her sister-in-
law and her sister-in-law’s sister-in-law. Over the years, like many women, they also had problems with hardness, pain, ruptures, and symptoms of illness they believed were related to the implants. Her relatives eventually joined a class-action lawsuit against Dow Corning and other makers of silicone implants. But despite her ailments, Timmie Jean never publicly complained about the implants. She even testified before Congress, on Dow Corning’s dime, that she was a healthy and pleased customer. One of her daughters went on to get implants, and so did a granddaughter.

Natural breasts have a shelf life. So do fake ones, and it’s a lot shorter. Silicone implants, even today, last only ten to twenty years, but, amazingly, Timmie Jean is still walking around with the original specimens. She is a living museum. She knows they’ve ruptured, because she’s been screened, but she doesn’t want them removed. “I don’t want to go through that,” she said. (Surgery to remove implants, known as explantation, can be considerably more involved than the original if it requires cutting away dense scar tissue, calcifications, and hard nodules called siliconomas.) Plus, she said, “I fell on my boobs and they saved me.”

Would she do it all again? She’s not sure.

“I’d have to look at my options.”

For now, she’s trying to decide whether or not to return a request from Tom Biggs to examine her. She knows her breasts are of great medical interest. “I suppose I should call him,” she said.

“Would you donate your body to science?” I asked.

She laughed. “No, but they can have ‘em if they want ‘em.”

THE 1962 ENLARGEMENT OF TIMMIE JEAN LAUNCHED TWO CUL
tural tsunamis: a clamor for implants and then, in the 1990s, a
clamor against them. Presenting their work to the third Interwnational Conference of Plastic Surgery in 1963, Frank Gerow, Cronin’s right-hand man, held a cigar and coffee cup in one hand and Dow Corning’s Silastic gel breast “prosthesis” in the other. He reflected the beliefs of the audience when he said, “Many women with limited development of the breast are extremely sensitive about it, apparently feeling that they are less womanly and therefore, less attractive. While most such women are satisfied, or at least put up with ‘falsies,’ probably all of them would be happier if, somehow, they could have a pleasing enlargement from within.”

It soon became the fervent stance of the plastic surgery profession that such women were legitimately diseased, either because of “micromastia”—small breasts—or because of their severe psychic inferiority complexes, a handy Freudian concept in vogue at the time. And where there’s a disease, there’s a cure. One surgeon’s autobiography was filled with slump-shouldered, depressive “before” pictures and gleeful, exuberant “after” shots. The message was clear: bigger breasts could change you from a loser to a winner. As recently as 1982, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery told the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that “there is a substantial and enlarging body of medical information and opinion … to the effect that these deformities [small breasts] are really a disease which in most patients result in feelings of inadequacy, lack of selfconfidence, distortion of body image and a total lack of well-being, therefore due to a lack of self-perceived femininity. The enlargement of the female breast is often very necessary to insure an improved quality of life for the patient.”
¹

For three decades, Cronin and Gerow and their colleagues rushed to fill (as well as to create) the demand for larger breasts. Mastectomy patients represented 20 percent of the total. For them, implants would stand in for what had been brutally cut away with the cancer. For the rest, though, implants promised youth, a certain kind of confidence, and lots of attention. The implants came in three sizes, small, medium, and large. The largest was called “the Burlesque.” (It’s worth noting that at 340 cubic centimeters, it is now merely the average size used in Houston. Implants in the Midwest and East tend to be smaller, as well as less popular.) Gerow reputedly liked big breasts, and it apparently wasn’t unusual for him to take a look at an unconscious woman on the operating table in whom he had just placed implants, decide she could handle bigger ones, and redo the whole thing.
²
With royalties on the devices, the men made a lot of money. So did a lot of other surgeons. One Houston doctor boasted that he could perform as many as seventeen breast augmentations a day. He built a breast-shaped swimming pool for himself, with a Jacuzzi for the nipple. If it were up to me, that would be the site of the nation’s implant museum.

By 1985, one hundred thousand women were getting breast augmentations a year, adding some thirteen thousand gallons of silicone gel annually to the nation’s mammary capacity. By 1992, two million women had implants, fueling a $450 million industry.

Especially in the beginning, women from the entertainment industry represented an outsized portion of patients. These were also the women clamoring for silicone injections, a practice that continued well into the 1970s and was mostly performed by “cosmeticians.” It was cheaper and easier than undergoing implant surgery. From its illicit origins in Japan, the option was popularized in the United States by San Francisco’s Carol Doda, credited with being the country’s first topless go-go dancer. In 1964, while dancing at the Condor Club, she underwent forty-four injections of silicone, turning herself into an overnight sensation and winning the title of “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” It is no understatement to say that Doda changed the landscape of breasts. By 1965, she was appearing in Las Vegas and insuring her mammary assets for $1.5 million. In 1968, Tom Wolfe immortalized her anatomy in
The Pump House Gang:
“Carol Doda’s breasts are up there the way one imagines Electra’s should have been, two incredible mammiform protrusions, no mere pliable mass of feminine tissues and fats there but living sculpture—viscera spigot—great blown-up aureate morning-glories.”

Doda dangled her glories before San Francisco’s power brokers while dancing the Swim, the Twist, the Frug, and the Watusi. She did this to live music from a white hydraulic piano that moved up and down. Now that’s entertainment. (A word about that piano: it once again made headlines in 1983 when a bouncer shtupping a stripper after hours on said piano was crushed to death after accidentally activating the hydraulic system. The trapped woman waited several hours to be freed by a janitor.)

Thanks to Doda’s volcanic success, the pneumatic look became de rigueur for any self-respecting topless dancer, and patrons came to expect it. The strippers instantly saw their tips increase.
Corresponding with the popularity of hometown implants, Houston became the strip-club capital of the world. Rick’s Cabaret anchored the city’s club scene. The club’s average bust size was a 38D, according to the
Texas Monthly.
Founded in 1983, it supplied more models to Playboy than any other club. At one point, it was American Express’s largest charge customer. Setting up franchises across the country, it went on to become the first publicly traded strip joint. Big breasts were going national.

I looked up Doda, half expecting her to be a tenderloin junkie long dead from some sort of silicone poisoning. But once again, my knockered preconceptions were knocked upside down. Doda went on to live a long and rather fabulous life. Now well into her seventies, she currently owns a lingerie store in a fashionable San Francisco neighborhood and makes occasional appearances with her band,
The Lucky Stiffs.

Despite the contribution by Doda and her followers to the GDP, federal regulators were not on board with silicone injections. Because the substance was being injected, the FDA classified silicone as a drug in 1965. Alarmed by its poor quality, the agency then prohibited Dow Corning from selling industrial-grade silicone to medical or beauty practitioners and restricted the use of the “medical-grade” stuff to only eight doctors for controlled studies. Even so, an underground trade flourished. An investigation revealed that by 1975, more than twelve thousand women had received injections in Las Vegas alone. There were reports of infection, gangrene, necrosis, and amputations. By 1971, at least four women had died from silicone embolisms, clumps of silicone that had lodged in their lungs or brain. The press covered stories of “Tijuana silicone rot.”