Lolo Ferrari: Article.
Suzy Is A Headbanger
to her life and death which may or may not be of interest.
HAUNTED: Lolo Ferrari, who died in March, underwent 25 operations on her body
in a bid to recreate herself. Psychologists now believe that she suffered from
dysmorphophobia - an irrational belief that one's body is repulsive
The sad life and death of the girl who found a sick sort of fame but who wanted
only to be loved
Dominic Utton
On the evening of March 5, Lolo Ferrari, the 30-year-old actress, singer and
television presenter, was feeling unwell. Prone to black moods anyway, she
called it a day and went to bed. As well as her regulation 12mg of prescription
uppers and antibiotics for a sore throat, she took a number of sleeping pills
before slipping under the covers and settling in her customary position on her
side.
Her enormous breasts - according to the Guinness Book Of Records the biggest in
the world, at a size 54G and weighing 6lb 2oz each - precluded her from
sleeping without a bra, or on her front or back.
That night, she asked her husband and manager Eric Vigne to spend the night
downstairs. "She had wanted to sleep alone," he says. "So she could feel at
ease and cough without waking me up."
When he finally ascended the stairs on Sunday morning she was dead.
The autopsy's original verdict was death by natural causes but a more detailed
test revealed it to be the result of a lethal overdose of her various
medications. In an interview, she once revealed: "There are moments when I
disconnect totally from reality. Then I can do anything, absolutely anything. I
swallow pills. I throw myself out of windows. Dying seems very easy then."
There was no note, yet those who know the details of Lolo's precarious
existence have not ruled out suicide.
Earlier this week Vigne was released by French police after being questioned
about his wife's death. Serge Pautot, his lawyer, said: "They are working on
the theory that Lolo's life could have been saved if somebody had acted fast to
call a doctor.
"Lolo's parents are blaming him for failing to come to her assistance. They
have laid a complaint, alleging, in French legal jargon, that he took advantage
of the fact that she was in a weak condition. But my client did not realise his
wife's life was at risk."
It is the last twist in an extraordinary story of love, ambition and self-hate
that in just 15 years took Lolo from a quiet, intelligent, sporty schoolgirl to
a sad and lonely freakshow death. Her legacy is to be found on a thousand
Internet sites, in back issues of the Sunday Sport, in a couple of porn films
and in lurid reruns of the Channel 4 show, Eurotrash.
And it's all the same: a girl who might once have been pretty rendered
cartoon-like by cosmetic surgery, a peroxide-blonde, collagen and silicone
nightmare mugging for the camera, one (or both) hands inevitably supporting her
greatest assets.
Although outwardly proud of her role as the ultimate in male breast-fantasy,
Lolo was tortured by inner demons that drove her to greater and greater
extremes of self-mutilation. Some need to keep going under the cosmetic
surgeon's knife, to keep pushing her distorted body to the limit for the sake
of her leering fans, drove Lolo to the point where suicide must have seemed as
valid an option as life.
Born Eve Valois in 1970 at la Baule, a seaside town in western France, her
childhood seemed outwardly unremarkable. After graduating with a respectable
baccalaureate she was expected to pursue a career in medicine or teaching.
"She was a bright girl and did well as a pupil," says Vigne. "She was built
just like any other fairly well-endowed teenage girl. So sports were no problem
for her."
But behind the unremarkable facade lay a home life riven with unhappiness. "My
mother told me I was ugly and stupid," Lolo once revealed. "She said I was only
good for emptying chamber pots. Actually, I'm like my mother. She thinks she's
ugly, too. When I was born, it was herself that she saw and she stuck all sorts
of negative stuff on me. She did all she could to stop me living."
Lolo's father was no help either. "He was this macho guy who was never there
and deceived my mother openly. So she revenged herself on me. She told me I was
revolting, too, that no one would ever want me. I wanted to change my face, my
body, to transform myself. I wanted to die really."
Lolo was 17 when she met Vigne and just about messed up enough to go along with
whatever ideas the 39-year-old had for using her body to get rich. She was
working as a barmaid in a discotheque, and quickly graduated to stripping and
go-go work. They were married within a year, and within another two, Lolo
embarked on the series of operations that were to change her life.
"She was a wonderful, intelligent, sensitive girl but she had a lot of
hang-ups," says Vigne. "She loved to show her body off and in 1990 she had her
first breast operation. She had it partly because she wanted a bigger bust for
herself but she also thought it would get her more work in clubs. She was
right. The work flowed in."
Vigne may have released the monster in Lolo: another 25 operations were to
follow in the next five years, including work on her lips, cheeks, nose,
forehead, eyebrows, stomach and breasts - 18 on them alone. After they reached
46in they had to be desensitised because the skin was so stretched.
Surgeons were cautious of further operations but Lolo was determined,
eventually enlisting the help of Boeing scientists who were conducting research
into using silicone for instrument panels. The original idea for creating more
work had become an obsession and it could even be that, by the end, Vigne had
little or no control over Lolo's transformation.
But at 54in Lolo was a star, releasing a hit single Airbag Generation,
appearing at countless bars and clubs across Europe and holding down a
Eurotrash slot in which she attempted to do mundane tasks such as play golf
while struggling under the weight of her bosom. A flight to Britain was nearly
cancelled amid fears that her breasts would explode in a pressurised cabin.
Lolo was a figure of international fun, a saucy postcard made flesh. But was
she happy? The answer, it seems, is no.
Psychologists believe Lolo probably suffered from dysmorphophobia, an
irrational belief that one's body is repulsive. "The disorder relates to a
distorted view of the shape of one's body," says psychologist James Larcombe.
"It can be the root cause of anorexia and bulimia. It also leads to self-hate
and self-mutilation. In the case of Lolo, her self-hate manifested itself in an
obsession with changing her body."
When taken to the extreme, the end result of such a need to escape the ugliness
of real life, can only be suicide. "I really hate reality. I want to be wholly
artificial," she said. "I adore being operated on. I love the feeling of a
general anaesthetic, falling into this black hole and knowing I'm being altered
as I sleep."
Lolo's tragedy is that despite her eloquence in interviews, nobody helped her.
Lolo was an industry and it seems that nobody cared about the human being
beneath the silicone and collagen.
A spokesman for The Sport now says: "When she came into the office she seemed
very quiet, very normal. Her English wasn't that great but she seemed quite a
confident person. We would never have guessed that there was anything
psychologically wrong with her." And perhaps they wouldn't want to.
"In some ways, she was always seeking the attention she never received as a
child," says Vigne.
"She loved men looking at her breasts but she said she really developed them to
please herself. Lolo claimed it made her feel better to be that size but it was
clear to me, and to her friends, she was having psychological difficulties.
"She was always drinking alcohol and coffee and taking pills. She took so many
stimulants that she often made herself ill. The autopsy blames an overdose of
medicine but I think she had literally worn her body out."
MadCow57
cancelled amid fears that her breasts would explode in a pressurised cabin.<<
From the June 17 Mariner (boating newspaper, Chesapeake Bay):
Scuba diver Donna Koller was hospitalized after a dive - because her right
breast exploded while she was under water.
Doctors told the 37-year-old secretary from Boston that her right breast
implant had exploded as a result of changes in pressure caused by her deep
dive. She spent several weeks in serious condition with an infection, two
broken ribs, and severe damage to the muscles of her chest wall, then was
released to convalesce at home.
She will need major plastic surgery to repair injuries to her 36-inch D-cup
breast, doctors say.
<snip>
[Koller said,] "The force of the blast tore me up so badly they can't replace
all the layers of muscle and flesh. The told me I was lucky I survived at all.
If my left breast had blown up, they say, it would have blasted into my heart
and killed me."
Brad Ferguson
<madc...@aol.com> wrote:
> >>A flight to Britain was nearly cancelled amid fears that her
> >>breasts would explode in a pressurised cabin.<<
>
> From the June 17 Mariner (boating newspaper, Chesapeake Bay):
>
> Scuba diver Donna Koller was hospitalized after a dive - because
> her right breast exploded while she was under water.
>
> Doctors told the 37-year-old secretary from Boston that her right
> breast implant had exploded as a result of changes in pressure
> caused by her deep dive. She spent several weeks in serious
> condition with an infection, two broken ribs, and severe damage to
> the muscles of her chest wall, then was released to convalesce at
> home.
>
> She will need major plastic surgery to repair injuries to her
> 36-inch D-cup breast, doctors say.
>
> <snip>
>
> [Koller said,] "The force of the blast tore me up so badly they
> can't replace all the layers of muscle and flesh. The told me I
> was lucky I survived at all. If my left breast had blown up, they
> say, it would have blasted into my heart and killed me."
I know the above sounds like something from an Austin Powers movie, but
the story is being reported all over the place in the mid-Atlantic
states (and probably elsewhere by now).
Donna Koller's breast implant exploded at about one hundred feet
underwater, according to reports here.
