Silicone City
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Franklin Rose describes the late eighties as a “breast-implant free-for-all.” No one worried about safety; most women’s main concern was how quickly they could get on the doctor’s schedule. “Twins would come in, sisters would come in, and I’d go from room to room,” Rose says of his typical operating schedule back then. Gerald Johnson, another plastic surgeon, recalls that by 1986 he was holding “Grand Teton Days” once or twice a month. “The most surgeries we did in one day was seventeen,” says Johnson. Breast docs accustomed to six-figure salaries saw their incomes soar to between $1 million and $3 million a year. Johnson even built a breast-shaped pool with a nipple-shaped hot tub to celebrate. By 1990, it was estimated that more than one million women had had breast augmentations, and dozens of companies were selling up to sixty kinds of implants. “There wasn’t a pair of breasts we couldn’t give,” says Rose.
And the health care professionals, like the oilmen who preceded them, thought their boom would go on forever. “The cultural influence is such in this city that for a woman to feel attractive usually includes a Mercedes, a gold Rolex, and three or four operations—nose, breast, liposuctions,” Rose told a reporter in 1991. “The Texas woman is a combination of many things, not the least of which is the surgeon’s scalpel.” Doctors Cronin and Gerow had drilled a gusher by tapping deep into the psyches of American women.
The first sign that the breast boom was entering a new phase came, fittingly enough, at Rick’s. In 1989 the partners exchanged allegations of narcotics use, encouraging prostitution, and misappropriated funds. (More than $2 million was unaccounted for, a fact noted by the IRS.) After a bankruptcy filing, the founders went their separate ways. Salah Izzedin went to Dallas and created the Cabaret Royale, Watters held on to Rick’s, and Fontenot created a competitor, the Colorado Bar and Grill.
The times may be different, but Rick’s and its imitators continue to extract money from men eager to see naked breasts. Rick’s and the tonier Men’s Club still lure sports stars intent on handing Houston NBA championships: New York Knicks star John Starks was at the club the night before the last game of the finals last year, and the Phoenix Suns’ Charles Barkley performed on the stage at the Men’s Club before his team lost to Houston in this year’s playoffs. The clubs now support an array of businesses, from architectural firms (Texas Architect recently featured the $1 million renovation of Michael’s) to cab companies (drivers can expect a $5 tip every time they take a customer to Rick’s). Robert Watters estimates that Rick’s has paid close to $4 million in state taxes in its existence. “Imagine the number of kids that we have provided schooling for,” he says without a trace of a smile.
Like any smart entrepreneur, cosmetic surgeon Thomas Biggs has learned to anticipate and adapt to change. A protégé of Thomas Cronin’s, he has performed thousands of augmentations and still remains in awe of the female breast. “It’s a mystical thing,” he says. “No one understands it.” But one thing the wiry and energetic 62-year-old Biggs does understand is panic, specifically the panic of women who have implants and, because of an explosion of negative publicity and lawsuits filed in the early nineties, believe they are hatching horrible diseases in their breasts. “Did you hear those phones ringing?” Biggs asks, cocking an ear toward his receptionist’s desk in his gilded and draped office near St. Joseph Hospital downtown. “Those are implant patients.”
To help other cosmetic surgeons cope with the barrage of anxious and angry patients, Biggs has devised a slide show and lecture titled “Silicone Catastrophe.” He offers psychological advice—“You need to handle these patients very tenderly, because they’re worried patients”—and possible courses of action, such as removing the implants entirely, replacing the silicone implants with saline or the body’s own fat, or doing nothing. Like many cosmetic surgeons, Biggs is in agreement with the dozens of studies from such august institutions as Harvard and the Mayo Clinic that have found no link between implants and disease.
He suspects that an immune-system glitch makes some augmented women sick, though not in the massive numbers reflected in the lawsuits. Out of the more than one million women implanted worldwide, about half a million have filed claims against various implant manufacturers. “Have you ever read Bonfire of the Vanities?” Biggs asks, making an analogy between the breast-implant crisis and the Tom Wolfe best-seller. “You throw all these agendas into a pot and you have a conflagration.”
Perhaps because the mid-eighties were a boom time for implant manufacturers, no one paid much attention to the small number of women who began appearing in their doctor’s offices with vague and myriad complaints—everything from chronic fatigue, weakness, and forgetfulness to rheumatoid arthritis and rare, disfiguring diseases of the immune system, such as lupus and scleroderma. Some even had children born with inexplicable rashes and joint pain. Few physicians made any connection between breast implants and illness, though in 1984, because of consumer complaints, the FDA began requesting more product-safety information from manufacturers. Then came the day of infamy for implant makers and cosmetic surgeons: a December 1990 Connie Chung Face to Face program. The segment featured woman after woman, each more seriously ill than the former, who blamed the Surgitek breast implant for their illness. The show set off a national frenzy among women with implants, which only increased after Californian Mariann Hopkins won a $7.3 million judgment against Dow Corning in December 1991 for her ruptured implants. When the FDA banned the sale of silicone-gel implants one month later, a new kind of breast-implant free-for-all had begun.
The women’s anger was understandable. They had been told their implants would last forever. That did not appear to be so. “By the mid-eighties, women would come in with breasts that were distorted in shape and we would find that the implant was not intact,” says Biggs. To prevent ruptures, doctors and manufactures revised themselves and began recommending replacement of the devices after five to ten years—not such a bad deal for the manufacturers or surgeons, as it happened. But the illnesses the women complained of could not be so easily remedied. For the sickest patients, life became a hellish spiral of fatigue, expensive and experimental treatments, more symptoms, more pain. It was the bitterest form of punishment: Healthy women had purchased a product believing it would augment their vitality; now they believed it was transforming them into wheelchair-bound crones, unable to enjoy dinner out, much less a night of sexy lingerie and unbridled passion.
Everyone abandoned them. Family physicians, unable to determine a physical cause for the women’s malaise, tended to diagnose that great psychiatric catchall, depression. Manufacturers absolved themselves by citing the many pro-implant studies but covered themselves by adding a warning label—inside the sealed package, where it wouldn’t be seen until the patient was on the table, the doctor had scrubbed, and the implant was ready for surgery. Insurance companies didn’t want to take any chances either. Women with breast implants, sick or not, were denied coverage. The fact that there were plenty of fakers, women who called their cosmetic surgeons wondering how they might cash in on what was beginning to look like a legal bonanza, added another dimension to the sense of betrayal felt by the women who were really sick.
Stories of individual reprisals made the rounds of local support groups, fueling the collective anger. The mayor’s wife, Elyse Lanier, was suing over her ruptured implant. One Houston woman made a scene in her plastic surgeon’s waiting room, lifting up her shirt to display her rock-hard mangled breasts to patients awaiting augmentation. Another sliced into her own breast after her doctor refused to remove her implants. But those were isolated incidents compared with the rebellion yet to come. Science or no, women wanted retribution on a much larger scale.
If testosterone could propel a plane, then this chartered jet carrying Houston attorneys John O’Quinn, 53, and Richard Laminack, 44, would be home by now. The two are returning from a bankruptcy hearing in Michigan, one involving Dow Corning, the largest breast-implant manufacturer in the U.S. and a business that these lawyers have practically crushed. In just a scant few years, Dow Corning’s millions—and the millions made by the other manufacturers of the silicone-gel implant—have become O’Quinn’s millions.
“Nobody works harder than we do,” O’Quinn snaps, defensive about a recent Dow publicity campaign suggesting that most breast implant-related autoimmune diseases are the creation of shrewd, exceedingly greedy lawyers. “Nobody gets a better result for their clients that we do. We-do-not-do-this-for-the-money,” O’Quinn adds, slowing his cadence without lowering his volume.
Watching his partner emote, Rick Laminack grins, a wide one that is simultaneously city-cynical and country-genuine, just like his law firm. “We do it because we have hee-ro complexes,” Laminack explains.
