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- [00:02]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts.
- [00:06]
Ed Connors
In the Caesar's Palace Hotel on the Strip is an exact copy of the statue of David that's in Florence.
- [00:18]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
In a rotunda surrounded by shops stands the muscular naked body of Michelangelo's David, the original Italian beefcake carved in 17ft of smooth white marble.
- [00:30]
Ed Connors
It's in its own little space. I think a lot of people miss it.
- [00:33]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
A skylight above casts a halo of light around David's stone curls. Here in Las Vegas most famous and flashy hotel, the rotunda provides an oasis of calm away from the neon lights and the clink and whir of the slot machines. Ed Connors comes here whenever he's in Vegas. He stands gazing up at the statue, surrounded by a curious group of young men and women, all of them extremely buff.
- [01:03]
Ed Connors
We had a convention there. Most of the 25 years that I was one of the owners of Gold's Gym, I would take bodybuilders I knew to show them that statue because this was the ideal for male beauty back in the Michelangelo's age, and that was 500 years ago. But that was actually inspired by the Roman and Greek sculpture that was being unearthed in Italy at the time.
- [01:30]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Ed appraises the chiseled physique with his architect trained eye. He points out the features to his bodybuilding proteges.
- [01:37]
Ed Connors
Michelangelo captures what I consider a perfectly shaped square shaped pecs, which you either have or you don't. Just the placement of the nipples or the way the chest is shaped. You could have a square shaped or a U shaped chest or a V shaped.
- [01:55]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
As well as running Gold's Gym, Ed takes an interest in nurturing new bodybuilding talent. And these are the kind of things he looks for in a future star.
- [02:03]
Ed Connors
I wanted these young people to see that there was this emphasis on beauty even 2000 years ago.
- [02:12]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
This replica statue is a shiny new American version of that beauty ideal. And if the bodybuilders put their minds to it, they could be that too. In flesh and blood. Maybe they could be even better. In the 1980s, body image ideals are undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Muscles are becoming a part of the new American dream, a new way to make up for your inadequacies. Show yourself off as the picture of health or win status and respect. But there are also contradictions and limits built into this new ideal. Whether your jacked body is going to prove socially acceptable or sexually desirable is a matter of who has the muscles and who's doing the gawking. And in 1986, William Dillon, Dan Duchene And David Jenkins have just launched their international steroid smuggling operation. They're perfectly positioned to help supersize this cultural shift and to profit from it. I'm Natalia Melman Petruzella from BBC Radio 4. This is Extreme Muscle Men episode four Perfect Square Pecs it's the spring of 1986 and Dylan and the gang's steroid operation has gotten into a groove. The plan that he, Jenkins and Duchenne cooked up to manufacture steroids in Mexico, smuggle them across the border and counterfeit them with European or US labels is actually working like really working. Each week, bulging suitcases of steroids arrive like clockwork. And William Dillon now has a wallet full of cash and a house full of luggage.
- [04:09]
William Dillon
If you're getting 20 free suitcases a week, what do you do with all those suitcases?
- [04:14]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Dylan's got an unlimited stash of America's most popular steroids. At a time when the US authorities are starting to crack down on suppliers and he cannot keep up with demand.
- [04:24]
William Dillon
I would ship almost probably five, six days a week.
- [04:27]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Dylan sends the boxes of steroids out to his network of handpicked distributors in different states. They in turn send sell the little vials and tablets to individual gym rats all over the country. Soon he doesn't need that Hughes Aircraft job anymore.
- [04:42]
William Dillon
I was a mechanical engineer, so I was making $70,000 a year. I left Hughes when I was making as much in a month as I was making in a year at Hughes.
- [04:51]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Oh my God. How long did that take to get there?
- [04:54]
William Dillon
About six months.
- [04:55]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Wow, unreal. Dylan says he didn't splash the cash around, although he did make an exception for family.
- [05:03]
William Dillon
I paid for my brother's weddings, I helped my brothers in college, I helped my mom and dad on things, but never did anything to give anybody really any clear indication of a where the money was coming from or how much money there was.
- [05:20]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Dylan tells his parents that he's making money training people at the gym. He invests in a couple of Gold's Gym franchises. Otherwise he keeps things pretty low key. Dan Duchene had no qualms about living the high life with his steroid earnings. One day he calls Dylan over to his house for a drink.
- [05:36]
William Dillon
He goes, you gotta drink this. And I go, why? He goes, cause it's $30,000. I go, you spent $30,000 on a frickin bottle of wine? Why, you like wine? He goes, no, but I wanted to do it. I wanted to say that I had a $30,000 bottom.
- [05:56]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Dylan's keeping his eyes on the prize the farm he dreams of buying back in Illinois. And he also knows that it's guys in small towns just like the one he comes from who are fueling their booming steroid business.
- [06:08]
William Dillon
I grew up as one of those kids. I would have taken him for sure. Who doesn't want to get ahead? Easy.
- [06:15]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
He's onto something. The ring has arrived at just the right time to tap into a market of people all over America who want to get ripped quick. None of this would have been possible even a decade or two before being jacked wasn't always desirable. Take a look at Hollywood's leading men and you'll see how the ideal male physique has evolved. We've come a long way since Clark Gable teased us with a question.
- [06:42]
William Dillon
Perhaps you're interested in how a man.
- [06:44]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Undresses in his Oscar winning turn in It Happened one night, Frank Capra's 1934 Rom com for Columbia Pictures, there's a famous scene where Gable strips off his shirt in front of his leading lady, Claudette Colbert. You know, I once knew a man.
- [06:58]
Ed Connors
Who kept his hat on until he was completely undressed.
- [07:01]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
The scene caused a sensation. Hollywood legend has it that men across America threw out their undershirts after watching the film to imitate Gable in his bare chested glory. Now, I don't know if that's true, but the scene is revealing in multiple ways. If you'll notice, the coat came first, then the tie in the shirt. Gable looks like a pretty standard slim guy, a little definition in the arms maybe, but certainly not a juiced up action hero. And if you think of the other classic icons of the silver screen in the 30s and 40s, your Cary grants and Gregory Pex, there's hardly a single chiseled AB or bulging bicep among them. And that's because bulging muscles were associated either with lower class manual labor or narcissism that was seen as unmanly. Those are the kind of attitudes Gold's Gym bodybuilder Joe Trocholi came up against when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s.
- [07:59]
Joe Tricoli
I would say that my father was probably one of the better built men.
- [08:03]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Joe grew up in a family of Italian immigrants in New York. Joe's dad did gymnastics, so he was in good shape. But he definitely didn't approve of something like bodybuilding, which after all was all about appearance, not athletic performance.
- [08:16]
Joe Tricoli
He would do these funny poses and stuff, but making fun of bodybuilding. It wasn't like he thought it was something positive himself. He laughed about it.
- [08:26]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
But when Joe got A weight set. The very first bicep curl changed his life forever.
- [08:31]
Joe Tricoli
It was just love at first. Flex, I guess you want to call it. I mean, the moment I picked up dumbbells and barbells and started working out that flushed feeling that people call the pump, where your muscles become engorged with blood. It's just something that you feel like somebody filled you with some superhero juice or something.
- [08:54]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Bodybuilding was an escape for Joe from the hardships of his childhood, but he felt like he had to hide his love for it.
- [09:01]
Joe Tricoli
I was told right away by people, this is something not to want to do because you're a weirdo. People who do it are freaks or this or that.
- [09:11]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
For most of American history, the idea of exercising in your own spare time, let alone bodybuilding, was just not on the agenda for most people. Even by the time Joe was born in 1960, it was still kind of a subculture.
- [09:26]
John F. Kennedy
I welcome this opportunity to speak to the people of America about a subject which I believe to be most important, and that is the subject of physical fitness.
- [09:37]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
It's March 1962, and President John F. Kennedy is standing on the lawn of the White House. A light breeze ruffles the leaves on the trees behind him as he addresses a television camera.
- [09:48]
John F. Kennedy
A country is as strong really as its citizens, and I think that mental and physical health go hand in hand.
- [09:56]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Two years before this speech from the White House Audio collection was recorded, Kennedy had written a piece in Sports Illustrated called the Soft American. Around the turn of the 20th century, industrialization ushered in a new era of white collar desk jobs. It also made food more affordable and abundant. Americans, with their plush lifestyle and rich food and sedentary office jobs, had gone soft. And Kennedy wrote, softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation. During the Cold War era, physical fitness was framed as a kind of civic duty essential for military readiness.
- [10:36]
John F. Kennedy
I hope all of you will join in a great national effort to build a strong and better America through physical effort and through the drive and force we bring to our daily lives. Thank you.
- [10:52]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
What's really revealing is how much resistance there was to this idea that exercise made you a good American. JFK was mercilessly mocked for promoting exercise. And importantly, the worst thing his detractors could say was that what the President was promoting was turning a generation of American children into vain muscle bound meatheads. He was constantly defending his physical education and recreation programs as not training kids to pose and preen like the muscle beach figures people read about. In Life magazine, calisthenics and low stakes games like kickball were in. Lifting heavyweights was definitely out. The idea that William Dillon would have been making mega bucks selling steroids to ordinary guys even a couple of decades earlier is really unthinkable. Men like Joe Tricoli grew up feeling like outsiders because bodybuilding wasn't seen as manly by the end of the 1970s, as pumping iron made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name. That was finally beginning to change. But up in Canada in the mid-80s, as a young woman, Sandra Blackie had the opposite problem.
- [12:03]
Sandra Blackie
It was pretty uncommon to see women in a gym, let alone muscular women. We were really a minority back then.
- [12:13]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Sandra is the blonde bodybuilder who moved out to LA to be a bodybuilding star and tore up her return flight ticket. Before that, she lived in Montreal. She first got into strength training at about age 13.
- [12:26]
Sandra Blackie
It was like fun. It was empowering. It felt like it was who I was meant to be.
- [12:31]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
But the harder she trained and the more her muscles grew, the more external judgment she had to put up with. One day, Sandra's waiting outside for a taxi. It's a sunny day and she's dressed for the weather. But a guy who's passing by can't stop staring at her with a furrowed brow. Sandra asks if she can help him with something, and the guy responds, are.
- [12:52]
Sandra Blackie
There a lot of lesbians in your sport? A lot of people thought we were trying to become men. I got accused of trying to be a man, and I'm like, no, I just want to be a stronger, more athletic female. I had a guy come up to me, like, right in my face and point his finger right in my face and say, it's still a man's world.
- [13:18]
Eric Alvarez
And he was angry.
- [13:21]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
As long as women have been lifting weights, a muscular female body has been a lightning rod for all kinds of anxieties about gender, sexuality, race, class, you name it. And at the beginning of the 20th century, people also wanted to police the boundaries of who gets to be muscular. One of the first celebrity strong women, Katie Sandwina, used to toss her husband in the air and regularly lifted more than her male challengers. Feminists who were fighting for suffrage would fantasize about a world of sandwinas. While her male fans were careful to emphasize her perfectly feminine proportions, only magnified, and her alabaster skin, plenty of men made gross comments about her, too. Only a very particular kind of muscular female body was acceptable. And those kinds of assumptions have lingered for decades. Have you ever seen a women's fitness program today. Promise it won't bulk you up. I thought so. So it's no surprise that this guy interpreted Sandra's mere existence in the world as a threat to his own masculinity. But women were also weird about what she looked like.
- [14:30]
Sandra Blackie
I remember a lot of them saying, wow, that must take a lot of discipline, but I wouldn't want to look like that.
- [14:40]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
So that's one reason we don't have as many female voices in this podcast about steroids. Despite our best efforts, it's hard for a lot of people to talk about using. But we found that it's pretty socially acceptable for men to want to be big and strong and to do what it takes to get there. For women, that's far less the case, and we get it. So we've spoken with Sandra and consulted lots of archival sources on this topic. But we're also doing what historians call reading the silences and trying to figure out why they're there rather than pretending they don't exist. When Sandra boarded a plane to LA and arrived at Gold's Gym in 1987, she finally found the antidote to the loneliness she'd felt back in Canada.
- [15:25]
Sandra Blackie
Wow, I'm home. I was friends with most of the women I competed against. We used to joke about the bodybuilding ladies being the scary girls. We had jackets that said scary girls on the back.
- [15:39]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Sandra found camaraderie amongst other muscular women at Gold's, and muscles were going mainstream for Hollywood men. But that sense of acceptance and respect wasn't universal. There were some pretty rigid expectations about the kind of masculinity that muscularity was meant to embody.
- [15:57]
Bob Paris
I was bullied terribly in school because I was gay. I was much more effeminate as a little boy. I was not good in sports.
- [16:06]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Eric Alvarez was born in Costa Rica in 1966 and moved with his family to San Francisco at age 12. Eric's biological father was a bodybuilder who had a strict definition of what it meant to be a man.
- [16:18]
Bob Paris
He was tapped to represent Costa Rica and Mr. Universe. He wouldn't do it because he was not willing to shave his chest or his legs. He was just too gay, too effemina. So I was exposed to that internalized homophobia.
- [16:34]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
As a young gay man growing up in California in the early 80s, Eric felt alienated by the mainstream bodybuilding scene.
- [16:40]
Bob Paris
I thought it was negative. I thought it was homophobic.
- [16:43]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Even the biggest stars of the bodybuilding world were subjected to this kind of prejudice. Why not just stay in the Closet.
- [16:52]
Sandra Blackie
I mean, you're bodybuilding Mr. Universe, you fall in love.
- [16:56]
Joe Tricoli
And when Rod and I met, we found a spiritual bond between each other.
- [17:00]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
This is bodybuilder Bob Paris on Oprah. In 1989, he was at the height of his career, competing in Mr. Olympia and with a world championship title under his belt. And he and his husband Rod Jackson had just come out publicly. After this interview, Bob said he lost 80% of his business instantly and that he received multiple death threats. But even if acknowledging it publicly could be dangerous, gay men had always been an important part of gym culture. When Eric Alvarez was a teenager in San Francisco in the 1980s, his life took a turn when he joined a local health club.
- [17:37]
Bob Paris
I started working out and I became more muscular and more masculine. I started fitting in, into gym culture. So it went from a culture that I used to fear to a culture that I became part of.
- [17:50]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Eric discovered that he liked lifting weights. And in the bars and clubs of San Francisco's Castro district, he began to make friends with other people in the city's gay scene and specifically the gay gym scene. He got a job working at a gym and even started picking up modeling gigs.
- [18:07]
Bob Paris
Gay man had begun opening up their own gyms. My body started sprouting up. I started getting a lot of attention. It just made me feel good. It gave me self confidence that I didn't have before.
- [18:18]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Eric ended up devoting his career to fitness as a personal trainer and an author on the history of gay gym culture. And he looks back on the 80s as a turning point in the history of fitness. Personally, but also much more broadly.
- [18:35]
Bob Paris
I saw the height of the AIDS epidemic. The AIDS epidemic had a profound effect in setting standards of masculinity on muscularity, not only for gay men, but for men in general. The use of steroids became life saving for a lot of men who were wasting, because even though there wasn't any effective medications to treat the HIV virus and aids, one of the biggest reasons men were dying was that they were wasting. And steroids, especially testosterone, were found to allow a man to prevent that wasting from happening.
- [19:16]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Today, treatments for HIV have improved dramatically. Now that there are effective antiviral drugs available, far fewer people with HIV experience wasting, where you disproportionately lose lean muscle mass. But back in the 80s, when those drugs weren't available yet, testosterone was seen by many as a legitimate treatment for wasting syndrome. And there are studies, including in the respected medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine, that showed it was effective.
- [19:44]
Bob Paris
The situation created an army of bodybuilders out of a community that was previously ostracized in mainstream gyms.
- [19:55]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
In the 1980s, there are all these different contradictory ideas about what a ripped body means. You've got men like Joe Ciaccoli, who grew up feeling not man enough because they were into bodybuilding, who now see bodies like theirs in action movies. Women like Sandra still pushing back against the idea that muscles are too masculine. And gay men using steroids to both bulk up and as a potentially life saving treatment. Or Eric, who carved out a niche in a fitness world that could often be homophobic. But whatever people's reasons for hitting the gym, more and more of them were doing it. And as Joe learned, with new body ideals come new pressures.
- [20:39]
Joe Tricoli
At the time, I won Mr. USA United States bodybuilding Championships. Okay, great. I look back at that now and I can appreciate what I look like. At the time, I saw myself as completely inadequate. I was embarrassed to take my clothes off. I was embarrassed to have the title. I felt like everybody was looking at me the way I looked at me, which was, how could you have won?
- [21:05]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
When William Dillon was training at Gold's in the 1980s, he saw firsthand how easy it was to develop a distorted idea of your own reflection.
- [21:14]
William Dillon
You look in the mirror and you might look just like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perfect body, but it's never perfect to you. Your triceps are a little bit too small, your chest is a little bit too wide. You know there's always something wrong that you need to fix.
- [21:31]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Over at the Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, a young academic named Dr. Harrison Pope saw these kinds of anxieties borne out in his research on male body image. He was a keen weightlifter himself, so in the 1980s, he began studying anabolic steroids and the people who used them.
- [21:49]
Eric Alvarez
A number of the guys who came into my office referred to suffering from bigorexia. And the term bigorexia was a term that had been coined in the bodybuilding underground to describe being uncomfortable and thinking that you were not big enough. Despite working out and taking steroids and getting muscular, they continued to see themselves as too small when they looked at themselves in the mirror. And this was one of the driving factors that kept them going in their weightlifting and also in their steroid use.
- [22:21]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Based on the research Dr. Pope has done since then as a professor of psychiatry, he says that the biggest driver of steroid use isn't performance enhancement and competitive muscle building. It goes deeper than that.
- [22:34]
Eric Alvarez
We did a study where we recruited over 200 weightlifters, about half of whom had used steroids, and the other half of whom had never used steroids. And among the questions that we asked them was we asked them about preoccupation with body image when they were young teenagers. Between the ages of 13 through 16, the people who scored high on the body image scale were the ones who had by far the greater risk that they would ultimately take steroids.
- [23:03]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
And in the bulked up 1980s, all those new body preoccupations set the stage for a steroid revolution. One day, Joe Ciccoli was helping the owner at a gym in Fort Lauderdale where he worked out do some remodeling.
- [23:20]
Joe Tricoli
We were taking down the acoustic panels on the roof to redo the bathroom. Literally hundreds, if not a thousand needles came dropping, deluging like raining needles on the floor. They literally came down like the heavens were falling. What was happening was there was a bench that people would sit on in front of the lockers, and then the ceiling was eight feet high. So as they would stand on it, most men could easily reach that ceiling. And so they would get done with the needle, stand up on this little bench, reach their hand up, and just slide it into the acoustic panels. And we ended up literally filling up a 55 gallon garbage can full of these needles. That amount of needles didn't just come from true hardcore competitors because there weren't a lot of us in there. So it had to be an array of people. That's when I realized how widespread it was.
- [24:27]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Joe says that he never used steroids, although he was tempted.
- [24:31]
Joe Tricoli
As a human being, we all want our efforts to bear fruit. And I literally work out seven days a week, and I literally live it. And it's difficult to see others who put much less effort, who have a laissez faire attitude towards it, and they're achieving things beyond you.
- [24:54]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
In 1983, he stepped away from competing in the sport he'd loved because he didn't like the way things were changing.
- [25:05]
Joe Tricoli
I realized that the drugs were just so crazy, it just wasn't feasible for me having children and to be doing that. I had a limitation of what I was willing to do. And I realized that the sport was just leaving me or taking off into a bad zone.
- [25:21]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Joe wasn't prepared to take the risk of using steroids, but plenty of people were. As a new era of male beauty dawned, the steroid black market was expanding to meet the growing demand for muscles. When the authorities looked into steroids in 1987, they estimated that the black market for anabolic steroids in the US was worth $100 million. For William Dillon, that meant big business.
- [25:48]
William Dillon
Honest to God, I was running a business. That's the only thing that I was doing. I was lifting and I was running a business. And I wasn't trying to redo the world. I was trying to get what Dylan needed. Needed to get out of California and to get back to Illinois.
- [26:05]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Dylan might have wanted to keep his head down and save up for that farm back home. But the trouble with controlling a massive portion of a growing black market drug supply is that eventually it attracts some attention. And as more people across America began getting ripped, it's only a matter of time until the authorities start to wonder how. One day in 1986, Dan Duchene shows up at one of his various P.O. boxes to drop off a shipment of steroids. So far, so usual, but this time something is different.
- [26:40]
William Dillon
He went in and the person that was there that waited on him kept tapping his hands on the table and on his knuckles. He wrote FBI. He knew, knew that they had already been there looking for him. And then he called me, said, I think they're coming, they're coming.
- [27:00]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
That's next on Extreme Muscle Men. The producer of Muscle Men is Caroline Thornham. The assistant producer is Mohamed Ahmed. The editor is Kathryn Godfrey. Sound design by Daniel Kempson. Original music by Silverhawk AKA Cyrille Poirier. Our production manager is Cherie Houston. Our commissioning editor at the BBC is Dan Clark. Max O'Brien is the executive producer for Novel and I'm Natalia Melman Petrozella, your host and executive producer. Extreme is produced by novel for BBC Radio 4.
- [27:51]
Jane McSorley
In December 1969, Muriel Mackay vanished from her London home.
- [27:56]
Bob Paris
We have your wife. It will cost you a million pounds to get her back.
- [28:00]
Jane McSorley
Two men targeting Rupert Murdoch's wife Anna had abducted Muriel by mistake. It was the first high profile kidnapping in British history and the tabloid press were hooked.
- [28:11]
Joe Tricoli
Was she alive?
- [28:12]
Natalia Melman Petruzella
Was she dead?
- [28:13]
Jane McSorley
The police were baffled.
- [28:15]
Eric Alvarez
It's the most hideous crime, kidnapping. It's worse than just a straight murder.
- [28:19]
Jane McSorley
And Muriel's family was thrown into a nightmare that continues to this day.
- [28:24]
Sandra Blackie
I just want to find my mother's body.
- [28:26]
Jane McSorley
I'm Jane McSorley and this is Intrigue. Worse Than Murder. Listen on BBC Signs.