Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird. Mark Dolan
still in fifteen-year-old mode, says ‘fine’. Like it’s not fine.
Woody continues the lecture. ‘Because she knows she’s gotta keep ‘em till she’s got enough money to retire, so long as she’s not fat she can remain till maybe she’s seventy years old…’
What??
He goes on, back to his favourite part of the sales pitch. ‘She’s a commodity. Coz there’s no one in the world like her. No one – that’s it.’
So several things have emerged in this subtly explosive chat. First of all, Woody is more than Minka’s ‘manager’. They reside together, and in fact I am to discover later that they are married and even have a son. Woody is defensive about protecting Minka’s image to her fans as sexy, single and available. I have to respect this. Minka might be at the glamour, or even, sleazy end of the entertainment industry, but anyone in a magazine, TV show or movie has to perpetuate a certain persona that plays to their fanbase’s fantasy. It’s the nature of showbusiness. That’s why for all those years, we had to labour under the illusion George Michael was straight. And that Little and Large were funny.
But what’s disturbing is that Minka and Woody do not have a united front, on Minka’s front. This is genuinely troubling. It doesn’t seem that Minka is the driving force in this quest for mammoth breastage. I am concerned that Woody’s perception of his wife as a commodity supersedes any husbandly concerns for her physical well-being or, at the very least, her physical comfort. Otherwise why would he bark that she can carry those edifices around until she’s seventy, when she clearly wants to have them out in a year or two? Surely it’s her call, isn’t it? A man of Woody’s generation might not have included Germaine Greer or Naomi Wolf in his bedtime reading (I had Woody down as a strictly Wilbur Smith man; no offence Wilbur…), but surely the most misogynistic, unreconstructed male wouldn’t question a woman’s sovereignty over her body and what goes into it? Would he?
The problem comes back to Minka being both a commodity and a wife. The ultimate conflict of interest. With her long mane of oriental hair and proud posture, Minka isn’t unlike a prize racehorse and Woody her diminutive jockey, complete with whip. I can see how their marriage, and the life they live, is based on Minka’s breasts. This woman is an emotional and economic prisoner in her own body. How terrifying is that? Imagine being owned by your own body. Now obviously the likes of Kate Moss have to eat a lot of salad to keep the body they are selling, and an athlete certainly doesn’t always feel like getting up at 5 a.m. to go running, to stay at the top of his or her game. But Minka’s sacrifice is one which affects totally, let there be no doubt about this, her quality of life. And almost unquestionably her health.
One clue to this is that getting to be as big as Minka is now illegal in the United States, and the technology with which she inflated her chest is no longer available. Minka is one of a handful of ‘living legends’ in the world of big breasts and Woody is right to suggest that there’s no one like her anywhere else on Earth. That’s because Minka is part of the rarefied ‘silly string’ generation. A tiny group of women who experimented in the early 1990s with a special material which produces fantastically enormous breasts. It’s impossible to be as big as Minka with silicone, as silicone is an extremely dense, heavy material. Gravity would prevail. So various plastic surgeons experimented with a material developed during the Vietnam war to help heal open wounds. This special fabric fuses with skin tissue and expands with water and matter to form an extra skin, for where it had been blown off by an understandably belligerent Vietnamese soldier. This doctor speculated that something which does this for a wound may have the same effect in the cosmetic arena. The results were startling. Women like Minka had the silly string inserted and day by day their breasts grew in size. To the point where it was feared the breasts might eventually explode. Indeed some of the early recipients of this procedure went back to have their breasts drained as they were getting so big.
Mercifully this practice was later outlawed amid concern about the health risks. But a tiny number of now ageing ‘silly string’ ladies – Minka, Maxi Mounds and Caila Cleavage – still trade on their look because essentially it’s impossible to look like that now. So they have a unique selling point, albeit a freakish one. They are the embodiment of a frankly disturbing period in the history of plastic surgery. They reflect a time when plastic surgeons were about as vigorously regulated as your local hairdresser, and when the patients were human guinea pigs, willing participants in an extremely risky experiment that might ultimately claim their lives. And they paid for the privilege. One such victim was Lolo Ferrari. Lolo’s story is a well-known one, and her untimely, mysterious death casts a dark hue over this world of big breasts. And perhaps that is her legacy. Because not only is it almost impossible to be that big in the twenty-first century, but with Lolo’s passing, the comedy of her appearance – often paraded on TV shows like Eurotrash – segued, almost instantly, into the macabre, and tragic.
Woody and Minka met in Minka’s native South Korea when Woody was in the military. Given the age gap between them, and the fact that Woody brought her to the USA, a picture was emerging of a relationship, both in business terms and personally, that was unequal. Apart from the money, I want to get a sense of what motivated Woody in this whole endeavour. Is Minka’s appearance purely business?
‘Woody, do you think that Minka’s look is attractive?’ I ask.
‘I…yes. I like big-breasted women, personally always have,’ he says.
‘So you’re a big boob man,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘As far as you’re concerned, you’ve lucked out then,’ I suggest.
‘Yeah,’ he says. Then there’s a crunching gear change I don’t see coming. ‘If it wasn’t for her I’d be dead – that’s one thing.’
Eh? I’m not expecting this. What does he mean?
‘I have cancer,’ he says.
‘Do you?’
‘Yeah – I’ve been in remission for nine years,’ he says, rightly proudly.
I shake his hand by way of approbation. And view him as a human being for the first time in our encounter. Over on the small dinner table, one of the Chihuahuas is licking from the bowl of someone’s unfinished breakfast.
‘Yes, I’m a cancer survivor,’ he says.
‘Congratulations,’ I say. ‘So why do you feel she’s helped you survive cancer?’
‘Coz she’s taken care of me.’
‘Right,’ I say. We’ve got pathos here. It’s emotional. Woody’s eyes are filling with even more water than before. The juxtaposition of this pornographer being cared for by his wank-fantasy nurse/wife takes the bizarre nature of this union to a new level. It’s like Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, but with massive tits. I’m already looking forward to the film, starring Jim Broadbent as Woody.
‘Whereas probably no one in my condition one year ago would have took care of me like that…’
Minka’s full lips turn upwards. Oh my God, she loves him. I’m confused. And so I should be. That’s love.
We go upstairs on the softest, mushiest carpet I’ve ever stepped on. The Americans do mushy like no one else. The carpets are mushy, the suspension on their cars is mushy and 98 per cent of the food is too. Americans like things to be soft and squashy. I think it fits in with the first of the two American obsessions: comfort and convenience.
We make our way conveniently up the staircase to ‘the office’, inside which is a large computer, an ironing board and a green parrot. The parrot is called Buddy and he is Woody’s. Why do certain members of families appropriate certain animals? Surely if an animal lives under one roof, it belongs to all the inhabitants. Rusty was our gorgeous German Shepherd when I was growing up. He belonged to me, my brother, my two sisters, and my parents. In fact he belonged to hundreds of people, as I grew up above a pub in Camden in London, and anyone who purchased a pint of Ruddles