The Strongest Spice : This Stunt Woman Is Blend of Toughness and Femininity

Her first day on a motorcycle, Spice Williams was ordered to stay away from the hills. It came as no surprise to those who knew her that she immediately headed for the first steep grade she could find and juiced the engine. The bike shot up the hill as Williams put a death grip on the handlebars. She would have made it all the way down the other side, too, had the motorcycle not decided to roll over and break her ankle.

Normally at that point, most people would have sought medical assistance and never again climbed aboard a two-wheeled vehicle. But Williams, a striking redhead from North Hollywood, never has been described as normal. She continued riding that day for another three hours, then went to the hospital. Eight weeks later, Williams resumed her motorcycle journey and conquered the hill on her first attempt.

“Spice is a very tough lady,” said Gene LeBell, who was instructing Williams the day of the accident.

Actress, stunt woman, body builder and professional wrestler, Williams has had to be tough to survive. How’s this for tough: At 18, she was thrown through a car window, almost died on the operating table and was told she’d never walk again; on the road a few years later, billed in a rock ‘n’ roll band as Sugar & Spice with her identical twin sister, she overdosed three times on drugs.

Tough is getting up and going back for another ride. “I know what it’s like to die, and I know what it’s like to be down so low an ant could step on me,” she said in slightly more colorful terms. “When I was on the road during those band years I was so poor I was eating ketchup soup with crackers. One morning I woke up in Montana and it was so cold my hair was frozen. I asked myself, ‘This is show biz?’ ”

When the answer turned out to be no, Williams quit the band, returned home and detoxified from years of abusing pain-killing drugs that “had turned into recreational drugs,” she said. “Getting off the road was literally a matter of life or death. I had to learn that not everybody’s elevator went all the way up. I needed to get back here and discover something worth living for inside me.”

That was nine years ago. Williams, who admits only to being in her 30s, turned to acting as the means to find herself and channel her enormous energies. But she took a different route than other actresses.

“I went on a quest,” she said, “to rearrange my body.”

Williams began with a vegetarian diet that included megadoses of vitamins and minerals and as many as 80 free-form amino acids a day. Then she took up body building with a passion. The result is a combination of beauty and brawn. While becoming a statuesque 5-7, 123 pounds, she has managed to enlarge all the pieces while keeping them in proportion.

Whether in an evening gown or a form-fitting leotard and tight pink halter--”I’m not subtle”--she is noticed wherever she goes.

“When Spice walks into a room,” said makeup specialist Dick Westmore, who is working with her on a movie, “she sends off sparks. Everybody is focused on her.”

Not only can Williams turn men’s heads, she probably can snap them off. Her strength is well known in the stunt business, as is her ability to crack up the set with an X-rated quip. “Spice can be just like one of the guys,” LeBell said, meaning that she likes to hang around with men, not be one.

It makes Williams bristle to hear suggestions that her buffed physique and locker-room demeanor make her anything less than a woman. “Men have this image of women,” Williams said. “We’re not supposed to have bigger muscles or we’re not feminine. Look at me. I’m as feminine as they come.”

Williams flexed a bicep and got more than a few approving nods at the Power Source, a Burbank gym where she is training for an upcoming film called “High Voltage.” Working out six days a week for three or four hours, Williams is chiseling her body into a real-life She-Ra to star as Electra, an ordinary woman who becomes a cartoon-like superhero through an electrical accident.

If the film is a success and the producers, Greg Crosby and Desi Arnaz Jr., go through with their plan to market Electra dolls, guess who could wind up as a role model? Thanks to Spice Williams, millions of little girls may soon begin flexing their muscles without sacrificing their sex appeal.

“I want to change the way women are looked at,” Williams said. “As far as I’m concerned, Twiggy invented anorexia and bulemia. Women base their self-esteem and confidence on whether they can fit into a Size 7 dress. That’s not right. I want to take that burden off women and break the conventional formula. You can be sexy and strong at the same time.”

Then she proved it. After wrapping elastic bandages tightly around her knees, she ducked into a squat machine and got ready to lift more than 300 pounds with her legs. Her trainer, Kevin Kuwada, leaned over her. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Strong,” she said. Kuwada smiled wickedly, taunting her. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble doing 10 reps,” he said.

There is nothing like a challenge to motivate Williams. “Huuuuuuu! Uhhhhhhh!” she gasped each time her straining thighs raised the bar. After finishing the 10 repetitions, she sprung out from under the weights, breathing heavily. When she went into serious training six months ago, Kuwada worked her so hard she would throw up.

“I tested her to see what her boundaries were,” Kuwada said. “But I found that she’s one of the few who give it their all all the time. She is a very intense lady.”

Although Williams recently beat out U.S. champion body builder Diana Dennis for a Michelob commercial, she doesn’t consider body building as anything more than an adjunct to her acting career. “I bill myself as an actress who happens to be a body builder, a stunt woman and a wrestler,” said Williams, who appeared in the TV movie “Getting Physical” with such top women body builders as Lisa Lyon and Rachel McLish.

Although Williams doesn’t compete on the pro wrestling circuit, she shows up occasionally as “Spicie” n ESPN wrestling programs and has made more than 100 wrestling videotapes, which air regularly in Vienna. Adoring Austrians swamp her with 3,000-4,000 fan letters a week, she said, “And I’m the female Hulk Hogan over there.”

Her athletic ability has given her a successful career as a stunt woman whose credits include “Fall Guy,” “Mike Hammer” and “St. Elsewhere.” Eight years ago, LeBell, a longtime stuntman, made Williams his protege, teaching her judo, falls, motorcycle jumps and other dangerous stunts. But the learning process wasn’t easy. As tough as Williams is, LeBell is tougher.

“Gene and I butted heads at first,” she said. “But he took me aside and told me, ‘You’re talented, but keep your mouth shut and I’ll make a stunt girl out of you.’ ”

LeBell and Williams often employ a routine at auditions. They go in to see the producer together and stage an argument that escalates to the point where Williams hoists the 240-pound LeBell over her head and throws him across the room. They usually get the job.

“If success doesn’t find Spice,” Kuwada said, “she’ll find it.”

Before she caught the show-business bug, Williams wanted to work on other people’s bodies, not hers. “I like to play Florence Nightingale,” she said. Born Marcelyn Ann Williams, the daughter of a prominent chemist, she spent her idle childhood hours in a lab playing with scientific apparatus instead of dolls. But her plans to be a nurse or a doctor ended as soon as the rock ‘n’ roll job materialized.

“Spice was always a daredevil,” said her twin, Jackie Padgett. “As kids, we’d do a lot of crazy things, but I’d always be scared and she wouldn’t be--ever. I guess she takes after my father. He was free and wild. When he taught us to ride horses, if we fell off, he’d put us right back on without showing any sympathy. He taught us to swim by throwing us in the pond.”

Williams was a gymnast at Grant High, working in her spare time as a nurse’s aide at a convalescent hospital. She and Jackie also toured the country doing promotions for McDonald’s as the “Golden Girls.” In high school, the twins would take the other’s tests--Jackie was better at English, Spice was good in math.

“We did a lot of naughty things, pretending to be the other one,” Spice said, “until it came time for boyfriends.”

On the road with the band, “I always muscled us through,” Spice said. “Jackie always had more finesse.”

After the band broke up, Jackie married the bandleader, had a child and stayed in the music business as a singer/songwriter. Never a body builder, Jackie looks like the old Spice, and the producers of “High Voltage” are going to use her as Electra before the accident magically transforms her character into a female Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Spice is also weight-training for her current role as an alien in “Shockwave.” Winning the role over several well-known women body builders, including McLish, Williams won’t be recognizable in the film--she is enveloped in a head-to-toe black rubber body suit that hides her features but accentuates her muscles.

Every day on the set in Monrovia, she has to be pulled and pushed into the costume by Westmore. Only her mouth shows. Her tongue is dyed blue and fake fangs are glued over her teeth. Wearing the suit is an ordeal: It cuts off circulation, dehydrates her and forces her to sweat, which causes chills. After being encased in it for five hours one day, she couldn’t feel her arms and legs but didn’t complain.

“I didn’t want to be a candy-ass,” she said. “I wanted to see how long I could take it.”

That’s Spice Williams, tough as always. Or, almost always. It seems there’s another side to her.

“I keep myself strong so I can take care of everybody else,” she said. “But underneath all this is a scared little girl.”