Her Goal Is to Stay Fit in Spirit, Too

The last thing in the world Rachel McLish needs is muscles. I mean, that’s like Dolly Parton being able to cook, Fawn Hall being able to type. Overkill. Who needs it?

When I tell you that Rachel McLish won a contest in Atlantic City, you nod and think, “Oh, sure, Miss America!”

Not quite. Actually, she won the same kind of contests Arnold Schwarzenegger used to win. She’s a hunk. Body builder. Pects and abs and lats.

But wait a minute! If you get an image of an Amazon, a Valkyrie who looks like a cross between Tugboat Annie and the Statue of Liberty, something that would smoke cigars and spit tobacco and bench-press a Porsche, you’ve got the wrong girl.

Rachel McLish--it rhymes with McDish--looks and acts about what you might expect pretty Red Wing did. She’s part Indian and gorgeous.

She has this glorious olive complexion and big brown eyes and shiny hair that is black on black. Put a feather on her forehead and you could see how Pocahontas drove Captain John Smith wild. Longfellow would have written a poem about her on sight.

Why in the world anyone would put a hunk of pumping iron in the hands of this Indian maid is something that will baffle anyone who sees her close up. It’s kind of like Goldie Hawn taking up boxing.

Rachel didn’t really need muscles to go with what she already had. To get anything she wants, she doesn’t have to do anything more strenuous than bat her eyelashes.

When she was brought up in the Rio Grande border country of Harlingen, Tex., the last thing she thought she’d get into was muscle-flexing, body building. Harlingen was hardly a hotbed.

Most girls of that time and place would much rather have spent their time in hair-dressing salons than fitness salons, to have been turned loose in Neiman-Marcus or on Rodeo Drive.

Not Rachel. The first time she walked into a physical fitness club, she was like a kid who had just been locked in a candy store.

Most college women, which is what she was at the time, would have liked to have been put in a room with mink stoles, diamond necklaces, gold bracelets. Rachel’s idea of precious metals or jewelry was barbells, pulleys, chrome weight machines and bench presses. It was Cortez finally coming on Eldorado.

Body builders have a reputation for being the great narcissists of our civilization. The body is their temple, their religion. Their goal seems to be to remain, forever, 21 years old. The whole idea of health foods, of vigorous living, originated with them.

But for Rachel McLish, the object is not cosmetic, it’s psychological. Almost spiritual.

When she came upon her first fitness center, shortly after she had enrolled at Pan American University in Edinburg, Tex., she felt it was almost a mystical experience, Balboa getting his first look at the Pacific, Joan of Arc seeing a vision.

“I had been into ballet and cheerleading but I didn’t exude a fit quality,” she says. “I was what I call ‘skinny fat.’ ”

In other words, the poundage was acceptable but the packaging was not.

“The point of physical fitness is not narcissism or egotism,” McLish says. “It’s well-being. Most people have no idea what it’s like to feel good all over. All the time. People unfortunately take drugs to do it part of the time. But the ultimate rush is the feeling you can get from intelligent exercise. It’s addictive. In the best way.

“Body building was misunderstood. You know, for most people, exercise is an intrusion on their lives. It was fashionable to regard body builders with derision, as freaks, posers. They invented the word muscle-bound for them.

“But great athletes were not fooled. Their fitness programs were not to look better but to perform better. It’s the same thing.”

On Rachel McLish, the results look spectacular. At 128 pounds, 5 feet 6 inches and stacked in a 36-22-35 package, she has won two Ms. Olympia contests two years apart, a Ms. United States contest and a World Professional body building championship.

“Achieving control over your body is one of the most difficult goals to reach,” she says.

In her own case, she notes, she preferred to think of it as body sculpting rather than body building. It was more of a Pygmalion effect. “I used hard work as a chisel,” she says.

People who cannot master their own bodies cannot master their own lives, she believes. It is a lesson being pounded home, so to speak, by Schwarzenegger and, on a more discreet level, by Jane Fonda.

It can be achieved by anybody of any age, McLish says. In a town where Muscle Beach started it all, Rachel is to be part of the faculty of a Pro Muscle seven-week camp beginning Monday on the campus of Loyola Marymount. McLish will work the fourth week, July 20-25.

“Not everyone can have expensive furs, precious jewels, silk dresses or designer suits to put on,” she says. “But everybody can have a body that anything will look good on.”

Looking at her, you’d have to believe it.