WORKING OUT AND EATING OUT

In the land of big appetites, Hollywood, the passion for good eating in restaurants is coupled with a craving for looking good. The town that takes meetings over breakfast, lunch and dinner is also the Industry that rakes pneumatic stars (Brando, Taylor, et al.) over exquisitely tended mesquite coals.

Hollywood transformations (drug-induced weight loss, altered hairlines, teeth pulled to change the curve of a cheek) used to go on behind the scenes. Now everybody’s interested in how the stars keep fit. Fonda’s got her tapes and Taylor’s writing a book about it. But there’s still a sort of magic to it all; they may be rich and thin, but still the stars seem to eat in restaurants every night. How do they do it?

Scene: The beauty reaches for a pickle. Her trainer grabs it, puts it back into the bowl. She lights a cigarette. He takes it from her lips and stubs it out. She orders a martini “very, very dry.” “Very, very nothing. Cancel that,” he says. She wants coffee, he demands milk. “Look,” he says, “everybody’s got a body. Right? An’ the better they take care of it--the better. Now with an athalete--like you or anybody . . . it’s even more important. Twice as. Ten times . . . .”

A couple of meals later, training momentarily forgotten, the beauty, Pat (Katharine Hepburn) and the trainer, Mike (Spencer Tracy) are eating “huge planked steaks and baked potatoes” and falling in love. The prescient Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin put their finger on a nerve back in 1952; the “Pat and Mike” rejoinders mirror a real part of Hollywood life. “You don’t expect to be watching me every minute out of 24 hours--out of every day, do you?” a horrified Hepburn says. “If I have to, sure,” the laconic Tracy replies.

In post-Tracy days, personal fitness trainers have come into their own. Everybody in Hollywood seems to have one. Calendar spoke with four of the hottest trainers in town about working out and eating out. For although Dan Isaacson, Jake Steinfeld, Jackson Sousa and Douglas Brooks are each basically concerned with exercise, each gauges the importance of diet at between 50% and 80% of the effectiveness of any training regime.

“I stay in the trenches with everyone I work with,” says Dan Isaacson. “Calls come in 24 hours a day. People out to dinner call from restaurants all the time, even from New York. ‘What can I substitute?’ they want to know.”

Isaacson, whose personal training company, “Winning Results,” has guided the workouts of hundreds of performers from Linda Evans and Ann-Margret to Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Reeve, came to prominence five years ago when he whipped his first private client, one John Travolta, into snake-like shape for “Staying Alive.”

A former parks and recreation administrator with an athletic club background, Isaacson employs a staff of four full-time trainers who go out on location as frequently as they go to private homes, training people at all hours of the day.

Each client receives an individualized diet with a software program detailing the regime down to the last gram and calorie. “Getting the right diet is not difficult,” says Isaacson, “as Chevy here will tell you.”

A lean Chevy Chase sticks his head into the door of Isaacson’s office, as if on cue. “Dan put me on a great diet. Fruit in the morning--like a melon or grapefruit and then a carrot juice around eleven. That really perks me up. Oh yes.” Chase tugs on his shorts, which are falling down.

“Lunch--this’ll knock you right out--is a baked potato and soup. Then when I’m really together, I take a nap because I’m so bored with what I’ve been eating. I come over here (Isaacson’s private gym near the Burbank Studios) and work out. At night, I basically eat the ‘Fit for Life’ diet. I don’t mix carbohydrates. I have chicken or fish with vegetables and soup and, you know, a piece of devil’s food cake.”

Can he go to any restaurant?

“Only the ones that let me in.”

Isaacson interjects, “Our clients have made some pretty drastic changes. Mickey Rourke lost about 40 pounds preparing for ‘9 1/2 Weeks.’ But even when they’re on restricted programs, they still go out for dinner and just order carefully. We only give people a six-day diet. The seventh day is flexible. People have to have some choice, some way to surface, or the diet never becomes a way of life. On that seventh day, they eat what they crave, sometimes certainly to excess--but that’s good too, to a degree, because then they recognize that they don’t want to do that anymore.”

Sometimes excess is an integral part of the plan. Jake Steinfeld, the Mr. Personality of fitness trainers (The New Yorker called him “ferociously friendly,”), gleefully plans his weekly “pig-outs.” When he’s not running Steven Spielberg, Bette Midler, former Paramount Pictures production chief Dawn Steel, ICM chairman Jeff Berg and Universal Pictures head of production Sean Daniel through their at-home “Body by Jake” workouts or doing spots for Reebok, Burlington Socks and Pierre Cardin Man’s Musk, he’s dreaming of his next meal.

In his weightlifting days, Steinfeld, who used to be the green-painted Hulk on the Universal Studios Tour, would regularly gulp down a Bluto lunch of two chickens and 18 eggs. Now, making MTV videos, doing motivational seminars for Shearson-Lehman (“I’m the Brooklyn kid’s Lee Iacocca”) and acting in occasional films, Steinfeld’s lunch is a bowl of soup or a pasta salad followed by a couple of hard-boiled eggs in his Mercedes 560 SL.

Although he regularly consults with medical friends at Cedars-Sinai on exercise and nutrition questions, Steinfeld’s modus operandi is purely intuitive. “People don’t understand what it is to be a good trainer. They think you have to be a walking notebook on physiology or nutrition. The first thing is personality. Training is all about rapport. You gotta motivate the clients, ya know, wake ‘em up at 6 in the morning and get ‘em out of bed. ‘Get out of here, I’ll pay you double.’ I swear they all say that.

“With food, I don’t have a set prescription. We”--Steinfeld works with his two younger brothers, twins Andrew and Peter--”don’t want to make eating and exercise a second job for the client. They’re hassled enough. Eating in this town is a very social thing, a time to kick back and totally cool out. People like to let go. One of my clients, an executive, even butters his steak. So I just tell him to get back working out the next day.”

Saturday is Steinfeld’s movable feast. “In the morning, I’m on the refrigerator route. You gotta remember, the workout is the business. I only hang out with the clients after our work is done.” (The work: half an hour, at $200 a pop, is usually done at least three times a week.) “But then we eat. At Jeff Berg’s, they give me a full breakfast: omelets, bacon, sausage, fresh fruit. Really tough. Then I go to (screenwriter-director) Jerry Belson’s house. They’re great to me. Then I go to Spielberg’s.

“I gotta tell you about the time Spiels and I had this unbelievable meal at the St. James Club in London. We ordered up room service: five appetizers, five main courses, five desserts. I swear, you gotta do this with the client every once in a while so they know you’re real. They respect you more.

“Then I go to Harrison and Melissa’s (actor Ford and his screenwriter wife Mathison). They have a great refrigerator. At Sean Daniel’s, we have smoothies. Then I go to Dawn Steel’s and have some fruit there, then on to Sally Kellerman’s and have some more fruit. It’s amazing that I don’t weigh 400 pounds. Yeah, I got a very high metabolism.”

If Steinfeld is the “Brooklyn kid’s Iacocca,” Jackson Sousa is the Boston kid’s Cary Grant. An exercise physiologist who has been a personal trainer for 14 years, Sousa has enormous grace, a world-class handshake, a staff of nine and a stellar client list. While he readily reveals his actor clients--they include Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Kelly McGillis and Demi Moore--he’s close-mouthed about the four top-of-the-line major studio executives (three CEOs and one head of production) who work out with him.

Nearly finished with his Ph.D. in sports psychology, Sousa understands Hollywood’s double standards: publicity for “the talent,” low profiles for the front office guys. More to the point, he understands the interworking of body-mind and not just the diet secrets of the stars.

“I’m not interested in food combining or eating for success, I’m interested in what makes someone feel good, in how someone begins to be attentive to internal cues. Diet is 80% of the success of any fitness program. You could exercise all day long, but if you didn’t kick in your diet, you wouldn’t see real change.

“My clients all eat out a lot and often ask me what to do about it. I advise taking in a substantial breakfast, protein at lunch, a really moderate dinner, a lot of complex and non-starchy carbohydrates, fat down to about 10%.

“Most people’s activity at night is minimal, so it’s important to eat lightly then. You can do that anywhere. Last night, I ate at the Ivy at the Shore and had a salad with olive oil and lemon and an artichoke. I’m a regular person--sometimes I eat sugar, drink a beer or have a cigar. I don’t wave a red flag about sprouts. You’ve got all these characters running around in L.A.--trainers, psychic healers, cosmic muffins--with a lot of misinformation. Learning to eat well is actually very simple--it’s not brain surgery, you know.”

Personal trainer Douglas Brooks guides numerous directors, producers, writers and ICM and William Morris agents through 55-minute workouts three times a week. An ex-gymnast and well-educated exercise physiologist with a master’s degree, Brooks sees clients in his efficient space capsule-size studio, the Training Edge, or at their homes. He prefers not to work with stars. “You have to constantly adjust your schedule and be there at their whim. I’m interested in consistency, in working with people over long periods of time.”

“I try to teach moderation in both exercise and in eating. I think ‘eating awareness’ is the point, not ‘diet’ or even ‘discipline.’ We (Brooks is married to fitness consultant Candice Copeland) eat out a lot and we eat very simply, hardly any oil or dairy products, no butter or red meat.

“We actually eat better when we eat out: the portions are controlled, we eat slower, don’t read. We’ve gone out to dinner with clients to suggest to them how to order. People begin to reconsider what a ‘wonderful meal’ is and they’re invariably amazed to find that something made without a drop of butter or cream is not boring at all. They learn that if they order less calorically dense foods, they can eat it all. Inevitably, when people are out with us and picking at their plates, Candy and I are consuming three baskets of bread and everything in sight.”

“I tell my clients to ask for what they want, and that any restaurant that charges a lot of money should be happy to accommodate. If they don’t, go somewhere else.”

Restaurateurs naturally pay close attention to trends in ordering. Here’s the scoop from several entertainment industry hangouts:

Paramount Pictures commissary manager Michael Pearson says executives are ordering fruit cups and dry whole-wheat toast. “We sell a great many of the breakfast specials, which include pancakes and sausages--but generally only to the crafts people on the back lot.”

Berenice Philbin, the day hostess at the Polo Lounge for the past 35 years, concurs: “People are very much watching their weight and orders are definitely lighter now. Many people request our ‘Fitness Plate’ with fresh raspberries, pineapple, strawberries and yogurt. Still, we do a good business with our fresh baked Danish and croissants made right in the hotel. But, after all, these people go at a heavy pace all day.”

Bob Spivack, owner of the Grill, has been in the restaurant business for 20 years. “I really believe that people’s eating habits have changed a great deal--I think lighter eating is here to stay. We serve lot of charcoal-broiled fish and a good many steamed vegetable plates. Our No. 1 seller is Cobb salad with a light vinaigrette. There’s definitely less drinking. Alcohol is a thing of the past. We sell more designer waters than we sell Scotch.”

Craig Ashley, maitre d’ at Morton’s, says that “probably 70% of our repeat customers . . . eat carefully. Virtually every order is altered from the standard on the menu. And the menu to begin with has very ‘clean’ food--potato skins baked in the oven, boneless skinless grilled chicken, a house dressing made only with extra-virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar. People don’t often finish what they eat, and when they do order dessert, it’s generally berries.”

“Light” eating these days is no longer the culinary equivalent of kissing in the air. Cottage cheese lunches are a thing of the past. Next time you go to lunch, look around the room. At Le Dome, that commissary outpost on Sunset Boulevard, a great many power brokers are eating the vertical chicken salad made without salt or fat. Back at Paramount, the steamed vegetable plate is so popular it had to get its own key on the computer.

At Silvio, about 25% of the customers request dishes made without butter, oil or salt. And even at the Palm, where the smallest steak is over one pound, manager Gigi Delmaestro estimates that “maybe 25% of those who come here are on diets.” (The secret, he says, is doggie bags.)

Still, loads of spunky Hollywoodites get restauranted out. Leaving their personal trainers (and personal cooks), some head for the Ashram, that Calabasas boot camp for the stars, where Anne Marie Bennstrom presides over a raw food, 500-calorie-a-day grueling workout.

Bennstrom, a medical doctor trained in Sweden, says the body has little to do with food intake at all. “Bodies change according to the emotions and the thoughts. Dieting is only a trap. It sets off the overeating pendulum. Having a body is a gift. Start feeling and loving yourself more. Your body will change by itself.”

Aerobics? “Nothing but stress,” she says. “If you just have to get your heart up to 140, read the stock market report. The body is coagulated thought. It’s a map, a source of knowledge, our connection with the divine. You cannot work on the physical body alone.”

A post-California cuisine, higher than high concept for this less-is-more, eat or be eaten town.