Silicone City
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Late in 1994, O’Quinn turned his attention to the last remaining major manufacturer. He went to trial against Dow Corning. But he also sued Dow Chemical, the company’s billion-dollar parent, claiming it had overseen development of the implant and knew of its defects. It was a huge gamble, the results of which were inconclusive. With tort reform in the air, O’Quinn’s client won only $5 million, and the judge threw out the portion of the judgment that found Dow Chemical partially responsible. On the other hand, Dow Corning subsequently filed for bankruptcy—O’Quinn and his clients are part owners of the company now—and he’s going to trial against Dow Chemical this fall. “I’m gonna whip Dow Chemical with the stinging sword of truth and justice,” he says.
Defense lawyers are not quite correct when they say that O’Quinn has won these victories without science. In a quiet corner of O’Quinn’s firm beyond the clerks installing information on CD-ROM, beyond the wall of videotapes showing patients having their implants removed, is a wall of refrigerators. Some are the kitchen variety, and some are the kind you see at convenience stores, with the word “beverages” written merrily across the top. Inside are thousands of implants floating in cloudy liquids, some in plastic containers, some in glass jars. Some are gray; some have yellowed with age. They are a hideous sight, half human, half not, pieces of women attached to pieces of silicone. They are not just trial evidence but evidence of a second medical boom in implants, this one fueled by attorneys and involving removal and research.
Because O’Quinn will not represent a woman who doesn’t have her implants removed, there are doctors who’ve made millions taking them out. There are doctors making millions off experimental treatments—the kind that have been investigated by Baylor committees and CNN—attempting to establish the existence of silicone disease. The lawsuits have been a jackpot for magnetic resonance imaging centers. Almost every woman diagnosed with silicone illness gets a brain scan (around $1,100) and sometimes a breast scan ($1,800). Pharmacists have made out too. Prescriptions can run as high as $800 a month. Even the hospitals have cleaned up. Controversial neurologist Bernard Patten was the single largest admitter to Methodist Hospital until he retired, after Baylor officials refused to allow him to lecture students about implants. It is not stretching the point to say that his treatment of thousands of implant patients may have kept the financially troubled institution afloat.
“We are the science,” breast-implant patients like to say when confronted with the fact that no scientific evidence exists proving the existence of silicone disease. These women believe that, given time and money, their lives and their body parts will some day be used to prove that the implants are toxic. Perhaps this is the final irony created by a simple invention thirty years ago: The lawsuit boom has forced plaintiffs into a position every bit as experimental as that of the women who laid down on the operating table for Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow.
Eric and D’eva Redding are looking for the perfect pair, and neither of them is all that happy about it. Playboy wants to do a pictorial that could loosely be titled “Girls of the Gentlemen’s Clubs,” and this Houston-based husband-and-wife team—photographer and stylist, respectively—are screening applicants. Eric, who is short, blond, and almost confoundingly good-natured, has taken these kinds of pictures for years; with D’eva he also served as Anna Nicole Smith’s manager from September 1991 to August 1993, the celebrity’s pre-Guess Jeans, pre-Playmate of the Year period. As such, Eric and D’eva are authorities on the changing fashions in Houston topless clubs and Houston breasts, scholarship that can be a burden. D’eva, who is ethereally pretty but canny from time spent on the Vegas strip, can get downright irritable after a few hours of the hand-holding centerfold scouting requires. Nevertheless, the two head for the Colorado Bar and Grill, preparing for more of the same.
The scene has changed since Rick’s was the center of the topless universe. The six-year-old Colorado, otherwise known as Dallas Fontenot’s revenge, has picked up where Rick’s left off, and in so doing has surpassed its predecessor in liquor sales—$300,000 a month—and gestalt. It stands to reason that if Houston has changed in its recovery from the oil bust, the dominant club would change too, and it has. Rick’s was worldly, linked to the boom with its mansionlike decor and status-conscious VIP Room. The Colorado, in contrast, is cavernous and rowdy, a faux ski lodge on the Southwest Freeway that is a regular guy’s twofer, a combination sports and topless bar. TV gets equal billing with dancers at the Colorado. The club has 5 satellite dishes and 51 televisions, including 6 big screens. Other wall decor includes photos of centerfolds who got their start here, beer commercial girls who got their start here, and memorabilia from sports stars who got slowed down here, along with a framed $250 check from professional rake Charlie Sheen, payment for destroying a $3 soap dispenser.
The women are different here too, in keeping with the frat party atmosphere. One dancer even wears glasses, a double-breasted jacket, and pearls—“My interview outfit at A&M,” she says pertly, though presumably she wore a skirt to her appointment at the college. But most profoundly, the number of augmented breasts appears down by half, a barometer of the state of the silicone-gel implant. Some women have silicone, some have FDA-approved saline versions, some are even remarkably, naturally flat-chested. In this era of diminished expectations, it appears, any breast will do. The dancers, representing an astounding multicultural mix, look like what they are—likable self-starters from places like Sharpstown or Baytown, whose fantasy is to make enough money to pay the baby-sitter. They know the women who made $600 a night didn’t always make it by dancing.
This reality quotient poses certain problems for Eric and D’eva, who trawl the club for prospects without much success. They’ve seen most of the women and their breasts here tonight.
“You’ve changed,” Eric says to a tiny, wide-eyed blonde who greets him with an embrace.
“Yeah, I grew out my bangs,” she says, not quite catching his drift. “What are you doing here?”
Eric explains about the pictorial, and the woman shakes her head, mumbling something about her thirty-pound weight loss.
“Lemme see,” he says, not convinced.
She grabs the strap of her stretch top and pulls it down, exposing her breasts. “Can you airbrush these out?” she asks, indicating the ripples on her chest, evidence of the saline implants her weight loss now accentuates. The arbiters of breast style confer wordlessly. D’eva looks dubious, but Eric makes an appointment.
“Playboy still wants the girl next door,” Eric says. “It doesn’t matter if she has implants or not, as long as they look natural.” He can fix in the darkroom what the surgeon could not.
“I was a guinea pig,” says Timmie Jean Lindsey, the implant pioneer, “but I was treated so royally I didn’t feel like one.” Her life and that of the implant have remained eerily entwined. She continued to see Gerow over the years, and the two became friends of a sort. When the doctor suggested she recommend the surgery to her friends, she did, sending in her sister-in-law; when the controversy erupted over the safety of the implants in 1991, she agreed to go on a local morning TV show with Gerow and later appeared before the FDA to say that she had no complaints. She enjoyed the days when women recognized her on the street and whispered confidences: “I wouldn’t trade ‘em for the world,” they said of their implants.
Timmie Jean doesn’t like to dwell on that dark time in the seventies, a period when her body seemed to turn on her. She had joint pain, rashes, dry mouth, dry eyes, and chronic fatigue. “I had all the same symptoms of those others,” she says referring to the women who a decade or so later started suing implant makers, claiming the implants made them sick. After several years and several doctors, the best Timmie Jean got was the standard diagnosis of depression. She took her medication and felt her sadness lift but still had physical problems. A few years ago, her right knee joint was replaced, a problem some might relate to silicone-induced rheumatoid arthritis, and some might relate to growing old. No one really knows.
Though lawyers have approached her over the years, Timmie Jean has never had any desire to sue. Her sister-in-law did and so did Timmie Jean’s daughter, who has implants and a form of lupus. Both are now awaiting awards from the global settlement, joining women who are deathly ill and women who have little wrong with them beyond a vague dissatisfaction that a cash award might cure.
Timmie Jean has come to the point where she has outlived a lot of people who mattered. She misses her husband and, oddly enough, she misses Gerow, who, struggling to comprehend a painful divorce and the thousands of lawsuits filed against him, died of a stroke. But Timmie Jean is different from Frank Gerow and all the other people whose dreams and drive reside in the small bags of silicone still nestled in her chest. For better or for worse, she has no passion for either perfection or profit, and immunity that has made her a bit player in this narrative, one in which one of the loveliest parts of a woman’s body was turned into a laboratory for the impatient dreams of men and the secret self-hatred of far too many women.
That was even true last November, when she fell, landing on her chest, and her doctor found a small tear in her 33-year-old implant. “Let’s wait and see what happens,” he told her, and Timmie Jean agreed.
