It's a Hotel! It's a Gymnasium! It's...Superspa!

What in the name of naturopathy is this? A hotel for reducing and toning? Superhealth training for senior narcissists? More than $400 a week to be starved and steamed and advised to give up the sauce? Well, yes. This beautiful blonde Swedish chiropractor with her staff of beautiful Swedish and Norwegian instructors is busy cajoling, begging, teasing, flattering, insulting, bouncing, singing, grunting and altogether urging a coed group of affluent senior citizens, junior senior citizens and senior junior citizens to put aside unhealthy ways and take up whole-grain cereal, dancing to jazz, stretching and limbering and improvement of body, lower back and soul.

Dr. Drummond, the resident physician, examined me in. "Lub-dub, lub-dub," he told me.

"What?" I asked.

"Your heart," he said. "It says lub-dub, lub-dub." I was glad to hear it. "You may notice that I wear a saffron-colored medical robe," he went on. "Like a monk. I used to practice in Hillsborough, near San Francisco. But I was always orientated toward prevention. I've found lots of pathology, but your heart is sound."

"Lub-dub," I said.

"That's right," he said.

Then the secretary gave me my first day's schedule:

9:00 Facial

9:45 Spa Exerc.

10:30 Sun Bath

11:15 Yoga

12:00 Water Exerc.

Lunch

2:00 Herbal Wrap

2:45 Massage

3:30 Gym

4:15 Class Work

After that came rest, dinner and, in the evening, a session of peaceful contemplation, lectures or sneaking out for drink and food. This is a $10,000,000 operation devoted to the sculpting of the bodies of such as Mrs. Burt Lancaster, Glynis Johns, Terry Moore, Jill St. John, the Gabor sisters and mother, Joan Caulfield, Jonathan Winters and many others. "We work our guests like slaves and treat them like kings or queens," said Dr. Anne-Marie Bennstrom. "Some of our exercises were invented by Leonardo da Vinci. Others I yoost invented myself. Aldous Huxley was very grateful for his treatments until he died."

Eager to begin my rejuvenation, I joined a class that very afternoon. I dived into my regulation blue sweat suit and danced to jazz as a marvelous Scandinavian girl leader sang, "I got a hammer," and shouted, "Ow! oh! ooh! ah! ouch! that hurts! good! good! good!"

We were as little children again. We were commanded to be as little children again. We obeyed the command.

"Hup! Ho! Hi! Hoo! Oh! Ah! Yippee! Wah! Now relax." We relaxed.

During the rest period a famous movie producer complained: "Didn't you think the no-cal broth wasn't hot enough this morning?"

Anne-Marie Bennstrom, our leader, overheard this remark and pounced on him. "You darling! you cuddly, oo, little boy," and she clutched him by the ears. "Mmm, yummy. You yoost better believe me. But we don't want an excess of hydrochloric acid in your little tummy, do we?"

Later the movie producer, tangling his fingers lovingly in the hair on his chest, explained to me, "We're not drinkers, lushes, alkies, boozehounds or a bunch of physioneurotics. We're fatt, that's all--is it a crime, I ask you?"

"No," I said.

"Fatt," he repeated with disgust. I noticed that everyone here seemed to pronounce the word fatt with an extra t of lingering dread. "We're here to spend our money creatively--getting thin. Creative slimming."

Peace to the belly. Peace to the spirit. Peace. Skoal!

Next morning he snitched to Anne-Marie on his wife. She had sneaked out that evening for a brandy alexander. For reward Anne-Marie pulled his ears, and for punishment shook her finger gaily at the wife.

High on grape juice at the cocktail hour, still wearing her blue sweat suit, a lady confessed her program for the future. "I had me a nose bob, I had me a name bob, now I'm really going to get healthy--slim."

Another said thoughtfully, "When I got preggers, I lost my lovely figure. Now I'm fatt." She paused to think it over. Oh, could she but melt those too too solid jowls, wattles, humps, blobs, rolls and the nighttime terrors of growing old. "If only I can tone it up," she said, "I'll be a happy girl."

Dr. Drummond strolled by, pink and stately.

"Lub-dub, lub-dub," I called to him.

It was time for dinner, which would be served by candlelight, with elegant attention, and would consist mainly of grapefruit. The residents enjoy gourmet starvation, plus hugs and kisses from Dr. B., plus bubbly juice cocktails. Myself, on my high-protein diet, eating a steak, felt like a corrupter of the aged. If Socrates corrupted the innocent youth, I was engaged in subverting the jaded elite of Pebble Beach, Southampton and Beverly Hills. There were also morose starlets and an occasional world-weary muscleman. Few tragedies seem as tragical as the predicament of a girl out of an American-International movie, such as Rat Race Bongo or Surfers from Outer Space, who has awakened one morning to the scales and the tape measure and found an extra six ounces of goose flesh treacherously looped about her middle. Why, that's like modeling a mascara commercial with conjunctivitis: "Icky," she said. Seeking to be useful, I went about taking other depositions from some of the staff and my fellow Ponce de Leóns.

Lisa, a beautiful Norwegian instructor: "It makes me feel good when other people feel good."

Eva, a beautiful Swedish instructor: "I believe that it is much better to watch your health while you still have it. That way I think you can live a much more active and creative life and you will have time to work, read, play around and to be satisfied with yourself. If you are satisfied and happy with yourself you are not so boring for other people."

Millie, the cook: "I've lost a hundred and forty pounds already. I'm still fatt, but I love life."

A happy male guest: "I had me this prostatitis from, I don't know, maybe not living right, but now. But now." He gazed about distractedly. "But now I feel better."

A 22-year-old divorcée: "Mommy and Daddy thought it would be good for me to get away from things and shape up. Oh, I don't know. Do you think I'm getting lumpy?"

Due to malaise and anxiety, a girl can get lumpy. Oh, I don't know.

And so to bed, with a good-nighty-night from Dr. B.

Dr. B. believes in the circulation of the blood. I noticed that everything here helps to circulate the blood. The blood doesn't just lie there in lumps; it moves. For example, watching me eat my high-protein regime--steaks, eggs, anything I wanted--helped the blood get a move on for the starving dieters. Their saliva ran, too. Good discipline. Moral improvement.

"Gelatin is also good for the nails," said Miss Twenty-Two-Year-Old Divorcée. "Not Jell-o, raw gelatin. But cooked. But it doesn't taste good for the tummy, let's face it. Do you like my nails like this, natural? Really like it?"

"Oh, yes," said a chain of liquor stores. "You're lovely, honey." And then to me, with disgust: "Look at you, ingesting all that cholesterol. Well, it's none of my beeswax, is it?"

At first they watched me like greedy children. I ate; my appetite was excellent; I was a sadistic eater. They watched like inmates under terrible punishment; but smiling, smiling, smiling. Someone sighed. It was the movie producer, bound to break the spell of my cruel jaws. He said: "Aldous used to come all the time--Huxley. He really benefited. Jim still comes--Backus. And Burt's wife is here right now--Lancaster. Jim's coming on Sunday."

The young divorcée, sent by her parents, looked cheerful. "Who else comes?" she asked. It was the late late show, brought to life. "Tell me more, kind sir, please do. Frankie? Rock? Is it true Marlon Brando's stand-in, well, you hear lots of things, I don't necessarily believe it at all--is it true--he's actually much slimmer'n Marlon?"

A clap of hands. Off to my facial in the men's facial parlor. It was new to me. This is not the way I usually start my day, with oil, cold, hot, ice, towels, massage and a special sauce for my skin. ("Our lotions are specially made for us by Professor..." I forget his name. It was Hungarian.) The facial lady worked me over with her powerful fingertips, and put me in plastic gloves, hot electric gloves (Continued on page 200) Superspa! (continued from page 125) over hands and feet, and applied softeners, emollients, hardeners, whatever. All wrapped away and submissive, I wanted to shout, "I confess! I have enlarged pores! I abuse my follicles! Sometimes I wash in strong soaps!"

The man in the chair next to me, who told me he had made a million dollars buying call options last year (Fairchild Camera, Polaroid, Boeing), remarked, "Oh, you'll like this, especially at first." Wistfully: "Then you get used to it. I got two sons, one he's a lawyer, the other he's a second looey in Germany. Slim and straight as rails, both of them. I used to be like that."

When the facial lady finished with me and removed some of the equipment from my body, including her hands, I looked in the mirror and saw that days had been taken from my age. I was ready for yoga.

Our yoga instructor trained at the Ramakrishna Mission in Colombo, Ceylon, with Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondichéry, South India, and at the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy in the Himalayas. He has mild, Oriental ways, and states that, "One may aspire for dexterity and stability of body and also a liberation from the disorders and irregularities which beset the ordinary humanity." He teaches breathing, silence, ease, stretching, "the will for progress and perfection of life." He also served in the Sixth Army Honor Guard and was born with the name Larry Jacobs in Los Angeles.

The herbal wrap consists of being confined like a mummy in drapes of hot linen, as hot as one can stand, with an intense steam of spice filling the air. You cannot move. An attendant smiles at you from on high. If you are claustrophobic, you had better not be. The comparison with the mummies of yore has occurred to Dr. B. She says, happily: "What's good for the dead is good for the half-dead. You yoost better believe me."

Dr. Drummond, asked if this has a differently beneficial effect from, say, sauna or steam conditions, replied with scientific sagacity: "Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, certainly. We've picked up a lot of pathology here lately. See Mr. Dickson over there? Well, he used to have these deep pouches under his eyes..."

Anne-Marie, hurrying someplace, paused to watch the buyer of call options doing an impromptu stretch. "You're yoost unbelievable," she said.

"Am I really?"--the sound of pleasure in his voice. His day was made, though he had earlier learned that Polaroid was reacting slightly.

How to explain the phenomenon of Dr. Anne-Marie Bennstrom? Late 30s, studied medicine in Sweden, invented "High Hopes Day" for Americans, exdirector of another superhealth spa, wife of Robert Prescott, wartime ace and president of Flying Tigers Airlines. Teacher of yoga, and inventor, too. Learning to fly. Skis, writes stories, plays football and golf, and believes in living beautifully instead of dying gloriously. "Draw impurities from the body, that's yoost part of the program," she says. Believes in love. "What protein is to the cells, love is to the emotions. And creative thought to the mind. We are whole persons." Has designed different lunches for different people: the Aphrodite (900 calories), the Venus (1000 calories) and the Hercules ("a husky 2000 calories").

In the "evening inspiration sessions," she can speak engrossingly to any purpose: indoctrination, peace, grace, advice. She knows that the facial must fix a good expression on the face; otherwise, no good. "I'm not yoost interested in the bones," she says. Ladies and gentlemen were taking notes on lined sheets of legal stationery, with pencils supplied by the rosy Scandinavian girls. "Music, charm, no thoughts of war." And also we should go to our local health store and buy granulated lecithin, alpha-tocopherol, brewers' yeast and rose hips. "We want to keep you alive forever and ever and ever," she sang out. "Isn't rose hips rich in vitamin C, Dr. Drummond? You yoost correct me if I'm wrong."

"Very rich," said Dr. Drummond.

"The best foods are organically grown fresh foods. After that come the non-organically grown." Pencils scraped busily on paper. "Eat live foods, children, and live in harmony with wonderful symbiosis."

There was a nervous giggle from one lady who thought that symbiosis might be a dirty word. Dr. B. slipped one in now and then to keep us alert. She also quoted ancient wisdom: "We eat what we can, and what we can't, we can." She blushed to encourage relaxing laughter. On to serious topics: "Put alfalfa seeds or bean seeds in damp jars. Two or three days. Eat sprouts on salad, umm, good. You yoost better believe me. The Chinese have known this for thousands of years. Animals eat alfalfa, too. They live a long time, for animals."

Silence while everyone caught up. Someone whispered: "How do you spell alfalfa?"

"Also grains and nuts. Eat nuts. Have you ever had a date with a nut?"

There was a ripple of appreciative chuckles. A deep note rang in late as he caught on. It was a man who, earlier, in the steam room before our herbal wrap, had said to me: "One thing about the John Birch Society: I got to give them credit."

"What for?" I had asked, the two of us naked in steam.

He gazed at me through billows of eucalyptus exhalations as if I were suddenly becoming invisible to him. "I went to military school myself," he said, "understand discipline. Two years of college. Made my own way. Said I'd retire before I was sixty and I did. Got myself a nice boat and they're building a better one for me. Custom."

"I got to give you credit," I said, curious about the other topic. But he was off and running, enumerating all the heart attacks and strokes of his friends. He personally took care of himself. Now he had appreciated Dr. B.'s pun. She was saying:

"The vegetable kingdom, children--good. The fermented-milk kingdom--good. Central European peasants live a long time if nobody gets after them to kill them. Good people. Yoghurt. Buttermilk. Yoost put in a little honey for sweetening..."

Dr. Drummond was whispering to me, "We drink three kinds of coffee here--real coffee, Sanka and tea."

Dr. B. glanced at him and the whisperer stopped. "Now we come to a delicate topic," she said. "Some of you got dizzy when you fasted a day. Your breath smells, stinks. Well, it's like house cleaning, you're yoost throwing out the bad garbage..."

There was silence in the new, smelling-of-new conference room of the spa. A terror of death lay over the group. They asked questions about weight, calories, alcohol, sex, golf. Is orange juice better than grapefruit? Why didn't I lose weight today? I'm a big eater, what should I do? I'm a good eater, always have been, what should I do?...I thought of Uncle Vanya and Chekhov's remedy for the terrors: Work, work, work, work. I thought of William James and his prophetic warning to Americans: You will need to find something engrossing, something to seize the passions, a moral equivalent of war.

How do you spell alpha-tocopherol?

What do you do if your husband raids the icebox?

Are you really opposed to medicine?

Dr. Bennstrom, who has found her moral equivalent of war in conducting the cult of expensive health, a vibrant, funny, jazzy and sexy lady, a flying tiger herself, told a story about the American woman's passion for surgery. She was filling out a form. "Tonsillectomy? Yes. Appendectomy? Yes. Hysterectomy? No, I haven't had my hysterectomy yet."

Everyone laughed, and then the deep voice of the John Bircher laughed, too.

"Children!" cried Dr. Bennstrom. "We yoost want to be loved by surgery, too. But ninety percent of surgery is unnecessary if you treat the body right!"

The 22-year-old divorcée had put the tip of her pencil in her mouth. Suddenly she noticed the taste of it and stuck out her tongue. I saw her lips forming silent words of criticism and judgment:Oo, icky. Then she smiled brilliantly at the Mexican waiter bringing fruit-juice cocktails.

Anne-Marie Bennstrom speaks to clubs, appears on television, is writing a book. Her vision extends to health riding rampant over America, perhaps over the entire world, a chain of nonfat farms, with no-cal people learning harmony with their inner natures in an atmosphere of hi-pro yoga, grace, music and lean, supple, sexy lectures and discussions. Books, towels, steam, stretch, sweat suits and the ancient wisdom of brewers' yeast. I, too, am exalted by her. I am crazy in love with her, like everyone else. Am I such a conformist? I ask myself.

This gives me pause. But she is high-protein plus, and lovable. I submit. I conform. I love her, too. She is a guru, a Swedish lady messiah with a sense of humor. When she looks deep into my eyes, she sees me for what I am--a creature who has eaten much refined sugar. Candy bars. Ice cream. Tobacco and alcohol. Yea, for I have consumed cholesterol pies and suffered artery-constricting anxieties. But she cares for me anyway. I can lean on her, and she will help me. She has broad shoulders, narrow hips, elegant legs, and wears lovely pale slack outfits. When she dances, her blonde hair shakes. "Come on now, shake it up!" she cries. "You yoost better believe me." This Swedish dumpling has muscles. She emanates health and power, and would even if she drank beer and ate pork. The power of the (vegetarian) gods has been breathed into her: charisma.

There is also the darker side of her life, which led her to wander the world and live off berries and grass in the Mexican jungles, and surely this is the history and nature that give her the important cloud behind her silver lining. She speaks little of the darkness, but it is there. She won some important battle. Conquering her own devils has brought her power over herself and over others. She is not one of your ordinary naturopathic lady chiropractors.

One night Princess Gina, the clairvoyant, came to talk. She was a princess from Texas, wearing a pale blonde fur, with brilliant blonde hair and heavy shoulders and a bit of a dowager princess' lump on her back. She explained that she saw the future, but it's easy, since the future is the present and there is no past. "I used to be mentally ill," she said, "but then I let God enter my heart and body. Now there is no future, and I see it clearly." Most of the healthers thought her peculiar, but one lady took her to her room for a private consultation. Who knows in what form may repose the ultimate truth about fitness?

As Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus: "In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation.... In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead."

Of course, this was a reasoning on the possibility of suicide in the light of the absurdity of human life. Camus was not considering eating lo-cal, synthetic-fluff, imitation gelatin strawberry dessert. Camus added, with his genius for the familiar, "Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion."

I learned that these people were serious in a way I found difficult to conceive. When I reached for the honey at table, someone admonished me gently, "Very calorific."

I remarked that this honey was taken from bees fed on saccharine, and at once, hungry hands came forward.

A 220-pound mass builder sat with his legs in the pool and read a book on yoga. He told me that it was his first novel in years. "When I work, I work," he said, "and when I play, I play." He looked at Lisa, beckoning us to a game of water volleyball. "Let's go to work." And to Miss Twenty-Two (not her real name): "OK, now, on the job! Get those earth movers rolling!"

She looked at him as if she knew him from someplace, but where? She had just put on her eye make-up. She had just lost a husband to a secretary after less than a year of married bliss. She was just all tuckered out from divorce and her facial and writing postcards and losing four ounces yesterday. And this stranger wanted her to play water volleyball.

"Into the pool," said Dr. B.

Miss Twenty-Two slid, pouting, into the pool. She was a good sport, anyway. Her make-up was waterproof. And water volleyball is exciting, fun, and toning to the places where the lumps hadn't ought to be.

Dr. B. watched shrewdly. She nuzzled the 220-pound yoga scholar and said, "Hum, you yoost have a little dry skin. I send you a package of the professor's cosmetics, hokay?"

It might easily be imagined, by the perverse and derogatory, that the institution of El Rancho Superhealth means a sterile, loveless place, where the plump enter chagrined and puffy and come out slimmed down but still chagrined. No is the correct answer to the anxious question implied; yes is the correct answer to the other and hopeful question. The prisoners of flab are friendly and searching; they think of their loosened ends when their lives are at loose ends; warm mating cries can be heard in the vasty realms of health, above the clink of the no-cal beverages. As the flesh disappears into steam and power in the dry air, rising invisibly above the winter residences of Frank Sinatra and Dwight David Eisenhower, the spirit also expands; the soul needs company; the meaning of life is a shared meaning. The prisoners burn to know; combustion seeks combustion; and, as we all agree, a log cannot burn alone. Another log must lean near it. Ergo, and praise vitamins, the spirit aims to test its new muscles in the calisthenics of toned-up eros. The rooms and suites in which the converts to ideal and permanent robustness--those elegantly appointed rooms in the style of Palm Springs Regency--are too comfy to be left lonely, unshared, with things undone which ought to be done. A certain creeping down of hallways is inevitable. Widow of Savings and Loan meets erotic, maddened Bircher! Last decade's number-11-ranked starlet finds rich saccharine daddy!

There is a drifting and a slippage of familiar marital arrangements as the inmates float in the never-never, yet comfy-comfy world of the body's penultimate fulfillment. Yea, for there is health in us.

In the morning, there are also averted eyes at breakfast.

But in yoga class or facial therapy, all is comprehended in the great chain of being.

By herbal sheets time, philosophy and deep sweat have taken over. Stoicism. Clean pores.

In water volleyball, new friendships spring up.

By evening and dinner, rosy blushes greet the trays of melon and yoghurt. Love blossoms afresh. With so much pummeling and discipline, with so much bathing and showering, who can keep his heart empty of desire? With so many exertions, who will not seek to exert himself? Loins may be slim, but they are not fulfilled without the hope of a quiet chat with an attractive stranger who is also a connoisseur of slimmed loins. And strangers are not strange in the community of health. The jaded young and the refreshed middle-aged look with narrow, hopeful eyes at their fellow physicometa-physicians.

The first day I was a bit self-conscious and ashamed of so much concern with my diet, my body, my spine, my muscles, my flab. Aren't there other issues in this world? I thought. Wars, disasters, births, loves? Is losing weight the last frontier in America?

But then I was health-washed. Pretty soon my body seemed the only thing that mattered, and when a lady began to tell me--over her protein drink--about her former husband (weak, passive, disturbed, rich), I was impatient and just wanted to discuss her spine.

"He never took a real interest in the children. He was like a child himself. He ate the kid's cereal even: like nourishing him, you know? Competing."

"How was your facial today?" I asked her.

"He wanted me to mother him all the time."

"Did you do your knee bends with less pain?" I asked.

Dr. Drummond explained to me: "I had me a good practice and I come down here because Anne-Marie asked me to. Feel my heart. Lub-dub, lub-dub. Strong."

The man who had made a million dollars last year in call options: "What I have for breakfast--I have citrus, eggs, toast, coffee, and I laid off drinking the beer which I used to do all day. Ten pounds. In one week I lost ten pounds, with a nice big dinner, too. If anything makes you think, it'll be that fact."

His audience whistled.

"My advice is--fight it. Get your new suits a little small, and then fight it. You want to get into those new suits, don't you? So stop the beer every hour."

His wife: "You still haven't got your knees down there, honey. Down to where they're supposed to be when you bend, honey."

"Yeah, and I suppose you got three gold stars in yoga class. Naw you didn't. I didn't see you exhaling so slow."

"Wah! hoo! go! yeah!" said a Swedish girl. She restarted the record of I Got a Hammer. "Hammer out the evening, yoo-eee!" she cried.

Dr. B. explained: "We keep the enthusiasm high, and hope it'll carry over past the couple hundred dollars they spend here. Lots of wives do the man's exercises with him in the hopes he'll yoost stick with it. Maybe he will."

El Rancho Low Calorie is one of the odder symptoms of the mid-century American mix of affluent unease. Ridicule and spite come easy to the spirit when we consider the other troubles of a world which demands money and effort, and then examine the jazz dancers in their blue sweat shirts, exploring what seems to them to be the last frontier, the poundage across belly and down buttock. But surely Camus here again has a wise and simple remark to make: "Any authentic creation is a gift to the future." Miss Twenty-Two lost six ounces across her tanned, pleasing, divorced middle, and regained a sense of meaning. She would strive in her life on earth not to be icky, for such--unickyness--can be her gift to the future.

Morose legend has it that Ponce de León failed to discover the Fountain of Youth in America. But as it often happens, the myths are stronger and perhaps even truer than the facts. If there is no Fountain of Youth, there are at least a few trickling tributaries. Anne-Marie Bennstrom, intrepid explorer, seems to have opened them up to intensive use, and so long live her smorgasbord of masochism, pampering, exhortation and natural rhythm! The emerging peoples have their Peace Corps, the poor have the Poverty Corps and the neglected rich, once abandoned to soggy plumpness by a heartless world, now have the proliferating descendants of the original Golden Door. Both the young and the middle-aged aspire to permanent youthfulness--that vision of ideal reality which is one of America's great innovations. Miss Twenty-Two was fresh and delightful. So was Jim Backus. In their honor. I wrote a little poem:

When (and if) we grow old and die, We'll just join the Big Health Club in the Sky.

At the end of my stay, I was sad to be demobilized out of my blue sweat shirt and sweat pants. A mere civilian in the heavy raiment of real life again, belt, keys, buttons, zippers, I suffered an access of nostalgia for the merry days of purity and fitness, those days of super-health rampant. Ave, Anne-Marie! Skoal! And tomorrow, dear friend, I'll try not to be fatt.