The East Coast/West Coast Exercise Phenomena : Brains and Brawn Stereotypes Shattered by Demographics : Muscling Into a Fitness Regimen

The look was long, appraising. Slowly, with the same clinical detachment she might reserve for some recently defrosted relic of a Pleistocene health spa, her eyes traveled the length of his body, from loafers to pinstripe suit to button-down collar shirt.

Finally, the assessment, cushioned as gently as possible. “Face it,” this slender lily of Lotus Land said. “You have an East Coast body.”

East Coast body, West Coast mind. Wimps and airheads, beachboys and braintrusters. In the battle between the seaboards, the cliches die hard.

In the face of a growing body of data, however, such assumptions may be on their way to extinction. Under the heading of so-much-for-stereotypes, a recent Gallup Poll shows more Easterners than Westerners now jog for exercise.

Equally stunning, the same study has the East horning in hard on another steel-belted precept of life in 1987 America. If Westerners, so it is said, are virtually required by law to claim membership in health clubs, fully 10% of Easterners now worship regularly at such temples of tone-up. That’s just 2% fewer than in the fitness-crazed West.

Westerners, meanwhile, seem equally manic about exercising their brains. Neither Harvard nor Yale nor Vassar nor Wellesley, nor the whole East Coast academic establishment combined could refute findings by Denver’s National Demographics and Life-styles Group that Westerners outread Easterners, ranking 2% higher in the national average among readers.

Further, group president Jock Bickert contradicts the notion that Easterners have a monopoly on opera and ballet with reports that Westerners stand 18% above the national average in arts-events attendance, while Easterners registered just 15% above average.

Facts and Media Blitzes

And then there is Blue Cross of California’s legendary TV commercial. When an older couple wanders onto a beachful of bodies beautiful, their bewilderment seems to summarize the plight of the nation’s sagging middle. Says the husband to the wife: “This sure ain’t Nebraska.”

But facts, figures and media blitzes can scarcely compete with attitudes that seem to assume that Easterners and Westerners have evolved from separate solar systems. “Easterners have bodies,” said T George Harris, New York-based editor of American Health magazine, “but they hate them.” Counters Los Angeles celebrity photographer Harry Langdon: “Westerners are more concerned about the color of their hair than anything intellectual.”

Maybe so, but none other than William F. Buckley, titan of Eastern intellectuals, is known to break sweat on his exercise bike several mornings a week, and has taken to writing about his yearly stint at a fat farm. And wasn’t that Hollywood muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger, nibbling canapes and trading bons mots in the salons of the Upper East Side?

Something is changing, certainly, a kind of transcontinental transference of intellectual and corporeal images and expectations. Just possibly, observers such as John R. Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, suggest, the nation may be on its way to shedding its Puritanical asceticism and embracing the ancient Greek ideal that mind and body could be traffic-stopping at the same time.

Nevertheless, Searle cautioned, “We do have in this country a certain stereotype of the intellectual, what he is supposed to look like.”

Translated into simple American English, intellectual means Eastern.

At the school of medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Kenneth Vaux, a professor of ethics in medicine, contends that the differences in East-West ideals reflect contrasts in cultural roots. “The New England Puritan-Pilgrim mentality is still pervasive from the East through the Midwest,” Vaux said. “But the West is a newer community, shaped more by Asian cultures whose art, for example, is some of the most erotic in the world.”

Other Differences

Even religion is involved, the social scientist argues, noting that Catholicism in the West, for example, is likely to be Latin-based rather than the more rigid Irish or German types prevalent in the East.

Westerners openly enjoy their body “obsessiveness” because they live under what Vaux calls a strong amnesiac element. “They’ve put aside their family traditions and roots, all of which influence how you think about your body.”

Easterners also care about their physical appearance, Vaux believes, but they talk about it in terms that Westerners find righteous and overly intellectual. For Easterners, he says, “Body training is about building stamina against the brutal weather, or the dog-eat-dog business world. The language is survival terms.”

Or, as Thomas F. Cash, an expert in the psychology of body appearance, dubbed the classic East Coast style: “Studious looking.” Said the professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., “We’re talking Ralph Nader. Lean and hungry, intellectually hungry. When the phrase totally awesome comes out of someone’s mouth, they say, ‘Excuse me?’ ”

Less charitably, bicoastal trainer-to-the-stars Jake Steinfeld offers this analysis of the typical Eastern male body: “concave chest, lean arms, a stomach like a Buddha and legs like a bird.”

Retailers fuel the East Coast/West Coast body debate by putting the issue in the context of dresses and suits. Western women who wear expensive, designer sportswear, they say, require smaller sizes than their Eastern counterparts. Sizes 2 and 4 sell better in the West, said Susan Jones, a buyer of designer sportswear for Saks Fifth Avenue stores across the country, while the opposite is true for the large sizes, 12 and 14.

In the West, fashion designers report, even the most conservative of women seem more comfortable exposing more of their body than do women in the East. “In New York they want their skirts to mid-calf length,” said Adolfo, designer to First Lady Nancy Reagan as well as many of her West Coast pals, “but in Beverly Hills they want them much shorter, to just below the knee.”

For men, the “ideal” suit size, 41 long, sells equally well on both coasts. But men’s outerwear reveals little about the package inside: Baggy suits hide a multitude of sins.

“Men are far more concerned with their overall build in the West because of the way they dress so much of the year,” said Jeff Byron, a men’s clothing buyer for all Saks stores and a recent transplant from Los Angeles to New York. “It’s not necessary to be an Adonis in the East. More men in the West seem to think so.”

In a nationwide body image survey--the Body-Self Relations Questionnaire, or “Berserk,” for short--Thomas F. Cash and his colleagues expected that body perceptions might reflect some geographical identification. To their surprise, Cash said of the study published in the April, 1986, issue of Psychology Today, “We found very few differences.”

Study Results

For example, Cash said, “One of the things we looked for had to do with the whole notion, as we have heard from our colleagues in Southern California, that if you are not involved in some sort of physical fitness activity, then you have absolutely nothing to talk about. We would have expected that folks in California would have been much more oriented to their appearance, but we didn’t find anything that said these Southern Californians are somehow different than the rest of the country.”

At Milwaukee’s Marquette University, psychology professor Stephen L. Franzoi has reached much the same conclusions in his own studies of the way Americans evaluate their bodies. “My research doesn’t show any differences in the way people pay attention to their bodies,” he said. “It seems to be similar on both the East and West coasts.”

Still, Franzoi added: “I think there is a stereotype. I think the East Coast has a stereotype of the West Coast body, and the West Coast has a stereotype of the East Coast body.”

Market studies support the stereotype. A statistical survey by the National Sporting Goods Assn. conducted early this year showed Westerners buying more athletic shoes and active sportswear than people in the East. Of athletic shoes shipped in 1985, the study revealed, 20.1% went West, 16% East. Aerobic wear was divided 20.6% to 11.1%, with the bulk to the West. Warm-up suits, however, were split almost equally: 16.8% to the West; 16.5% to the East.

In the bicoastal biceps pump-off, the West Coast physique seems to be taking the lead. With a Western celebrity client list sparkling with names like Harrison Ford, Priscilla Presley and Stephen Spielberg, trainer Steinfeld decided early this year to take his muscular message to Manhattan. In nine months his private clients in New York numbered 68--more than half the 107 individuals he has helped crunch into shape in Los Angeles for the last nine years.

“The East Coast is in a fitness craze, and they are definitely lagging behind the West Coast,” said Steinfeld’s partner, Tina de Lemps, owner of New York’s Body by Jake exercise studio. “They want tight, firm bodies here.”

‘Softer’ Bodies

But Steinfeld believes that the women he sees practicing the grueling Jake Run in New York have a long way to sprint before they catch up. “Eastern women’s bodies are softer,” he said. “They may be skinny but that doesn’t mean they’re in good physical shape.”

If Steinfeld’s partner De Lemps recoils at the prospect of turning her clients into Western body clones--”We think of West Coast women as air-brains in many ways. We think we can be smart and fit,” she sniffed--Steinfeld has a few ideas of his own about the way Easterners relate to exercise.

“They’re uppity about it in the East,” Steinfeld said. “I work with baronesses and tycoons who refuse to train outside; they don’t want to be seen. As if lifting weights is manual labor and that’s lower class. They don’t believe smart people lift dumbbells.”

He calls his East Coast clients “intellectual exercisers,” explaining, “They love all the high-tech bull.” Automatic staircase conveyors and jogging machines are popular items among his New York clients’ private gyms. “Westerners say forget all that and just run up the bleachers at UCLA.”

Mother Nature Cited

Two years ago, aerobic exercise pioneer Gilda Marx closed her flagship studio in Los Angeles, deciding to concentrate on her seven salons along the Eastern seaboard. Even her East Coast teachers carry more body weight, Marx soon observed. And women in the East, she said, seem less eager to work out with weights than the women she has coached in the West.

The difference in attitude and approach, Marx theorizes, comes down to something as basic as Mother Nature. “In the course of a year in California,” Marx said, “you have more time to show off your toned muscles.”

Eastern women, said clinical psychologist Rita Freedman of Scarsdale, N.Y., author of “Beauty Bound: Why We Pursue the Myth in the Mirror” (Lexington Books), “start to get hysterical in the spring, because suddenly they are going to have to take things off. What they have gotten away with until March is no longer possible, and they panic.”

Recent transplants from one coast to the other tend to take instant notice of the physical differences between the coasts.

Boston-based public relations consultant, Barry Wanger is a self-described San Fernando Valley Boy away from home. Looking past the cold-weather wardrobe that completely conceals his body he lamented, “When you’re dressed in an overcoat, sweater and hat it doesn’t matter what you look like.”

‘Too Busy Sweating’

Now working on Washington’s Capitol Hill, former San Franciscan Tom Sliter justified any slackening of his Western fitness routine by saying, “When you’re suffering through 90-degree summers and 90% humidity you can’t think about your body. You’re too busy sweating.”

Actress Christine Healy came to California from New York last summer to pursue TV and film work. The extent of West Coast “body obsessiveness” surprised her. “In New York, not even people in the theater are as concerned with their appearance as actors are here,” she said. She blames it on a camera close-up mentality that appears to affect everybody, not just performers.

Named curator of photographs for Malibu’s J. Paul Getty Museum 2 1/2 years ago, Weston Naef gave up his job at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the bargain. A man of the mind moved to muscle-land, he now gives California more credit for actually having a brain. These days, the one-time die-hard Manhattanite conceded, “New York seems less the absolute center of the universe.” Though he recently joined a health club, Naef admits he still hasn’t quite gotten the hang of the habits of the natives: “I only go there to shower and shave.”

Something of an Exception

However reluctantly, Naef seems willing to reconsider the possibility that Westerners may be something other than sun-bronzed joggers from outer space. As such he is something of an exception, in the view of UC Berkeley’s Searle.

“I’ve always thought of it this way,” the former Rhodes scholar and one-time Oxford philosophy don said. “America plays a certain role for Europe: They have the idea that we are hedonistic children, unsophisticated in the ways of the real world, but rather charming in our innocence.

“When I got to America,” Searle said, “I discovered that California plays America for the East Coast.”

But Westerners, clearly, are not peculiar in their passion for pulchritudinous physiques. As Nancy Roberts, author of “Breaking All the Rules: Feeling Good and Looking Great No Matter What Your Size” (Viking Penguin) and host of a New York radio call-in show called “Large as Life,” puts it, “It’s a common obsession, a national obsession.” Warns Roberts of the focus on beautiful bodies: “I think it diverts a tremendous amount of our mental and emotional energies away from other things in life that are more important and ultimately more satisfying.”

In fact, so pervasive is the body awareness phenomenon that editor T George Harris chose to devote the entire January, 1987, issue of his American Health magazine to the subject. Indeed, Harris has taken it a step further in the current issue, exploring out-of-body experiences as a second stage of the body awareness trend.

Majority Exercise

To support his contention that health is the new expression of American individualism, Harris cites a Gallup Poll of February, 1985, conducted for his magazine showing that 59% of adults surveyed practice some regular physical exercise, and that large numbers of them report increased job satisfaction, higher self-esteem, even improved sex lives as a result. This equating of health with performance of body and brain, Harris believes, makes both coasts receptive to what Harris has come to refer to as “this carnal age.”

Francesco Scavullo, the New York photographer for whom every celebrated beauty of the past 30 years has posed, goes Harris one better, elevating exercise to the status of “the new religion.” At age 57, Scavullo now works out every morning at a fashionable Manhattan health emporium called the Vertical Club. Admitted Scavullo of his conversion to the cult of the steel-toned body, “I never used to go.”

A “shift in the cultural center of gravity,” Berkeley’s Searle said, may force Easterners to revise their views of Westerners as a region of iron-pumping airheads. And as Easterners strive to firm their collective torsos, Westerners may start thinking of them as fellow Superpeople, rather than a coastful of Clark Kents.

But some things will never change.

“To this day,” Searle said, “people have trouble accepting me as a professional intellectual when they see me on the ski slope.”

The story was reported by Mary Rourke in Los Angeles and Elizabeth Mehren in New York.