A Peek at the Big Book of Beefcake

Happy holidays, readers. We hope you’ll take this column in the spirit of the season--which generally involves giving other people graft so they’ll like you better in the new year. This is our gift to you. OK, only some of you. The ones we shop with. You know who you are.

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We’d like to present you with an armful of hunks. Unfortunately, the answered-prayers principle operates here: In order to get that many hunks between your measly two arms, the guys are going to have to be two-dimensional. Not that it will be too difficult for some of them.

Anyway, their juicy pictures are pressed between the pages of Don Reuter’s new book, “Heartthrob: A Hundred Years of Beautiful Men” (Universe). Reuter wanted to dissect an important historical trend. Oh, yes. His publisher bravely decided to put out his dissection during the holiday gift-giving season.

“My honest feeling is there are 10 times more male beauty icons than there are female. Men are still the ones who open pictures. [Boys] go to see machismo role models. And girls go to movies to see the men.”

Reuter will now define the heartthrob.

“He’s the person you see in that crowded room. He’s a movie star or the person you see in a bar. It’s a momentary thing. It’s oh-my-God-how-gorgeous-is-that-man? Very few people fall into that category.”

Apparently Johnny Depp doesn’t, judging from his absence from Reuter’s hunk encyclopedia.

“There were just so many people I could fit into the book. Literally.”

But, hey, Johnny’s loss is Donny’s gain. Depp and Mel Gibson don’t make the cut, but Donny Osmond does. You do the math, because this one broke our calculator.

“When I was growing up with my sister in the early ‘70s, Donny Osmond absolutely was it. . . . And then he got cuter in the mid-’70s with ‘Donny and Marie.’ He’s aging much better than people would have expected. He looks like an older, fatherly version of himself.”

Whatever.

We are preparing to deconstruct hunkiness by carb-loading at the Argyle Hotel’s Fenix restaurant. Reuter, an ex of celebrity makeup artist Kevin Aucoin, has already done the heavy lifting--he has completed the long-overdue task of categorizing heartthrobs with his book.

There are pretty boys (Tony Curtis, Leonardo DiCaprio), boy toys (Jason Priestley, Dan Cortese) and frat boys (Chris O’Donnell, Woody Harrelson). There are outsiders (James Dean, Marlon Brando), babe magnets (Sylvester Stallone, Richard Gere) and entrepreneur amours (Hugh Hefner, Howard Hughes). And, of course, for the bad-boy contingent who are also into extreme sports, there’s Dennis Hopper.

Dennis Hopper?

“This man started as a pretty-boy type in his career. Then he did ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and immediately went into psychopath roles. You look at all these men’s careers, and where they started isn’t necessarily where they ended up.”

It’s called growing up. Which is generally outlawed in Los Angeles.