Alistair Campbell-mode, rapid rebuttal.
‘She works out every day.’
Oh, well that’s OK then…
Having literally come to grips with Minka’s body, it’s clear to me that these huge breasts can only stay put for a finite period of time. But how long precisely?
Woody’s in no doubt: ‘Ten years.’
Minka, like a teenager indulging in backchat, says sulkily, ‘He says ten years.’
I innocently suggest to Woody that’s a long time to carry that kind of weight around.
Minka doesn’t give Woody a chance to respond.
‘That’s right – you are right…’ she says, glaring at Woody. I now feel I’m in the middle of a fight these two are pretending not to have. It’s awkward. Wading into choppier waters I ask Minka the question again, the one Woody has answered for her.
‘What about you, Minka, what’s your timescale?’
‘I don’t know, maybe two or three more years,’ she suggests.
Woody’s state of permanent shrug has notched up to a passive rage.
I feed the monster.
‘Woody, if she said to you I’m going to see the plastic surgeon tomorrow, I’m going to have it all out because I want to have a normal life, what happens?’
‘I’m out of here…’ he says dismissively.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’m out of here. What would you say? Businesswise – businesswise – it’s gone.’
Minka, still in fifteen-year-old mode, says ‘fine’. Like it’s not fine.
Woody continues the lecture. ‘Because she knows she’s gotta keep ‘em till she’s got enough money to retire, so long as she’s not fat she can remain till maybe she’s seventy years old…’
What??
He goes on, back to his favourite part of the sales pitch. ‘She’s a commodity. Coz there’s no one in the world like her. No one – that’s it.’
So several things have emerged in this subtly explosive chat. First of all, Woody is more than Minka’s ‘manager’. They reside together, and in fact I am to discover later that they are married and even have a son. Woody is defensive about protecting Minka’s image to her fans as sexy, single and available. I have to respect this. Minka might be at the glamour, or even, sleazy end of the entertainment industry, but anyone in a magazine, TV show or movie has to perpetuate a certain persona that plays to their fanbase’s fantasy. It’s the nature of showbusiness. That’s why for all those years, we had to labour under the illusion George Michael was straight. And that Little and Large were funny.
But what’s disturbing is that Minka and Woody do not have a united front, on Minka’s front. This is genuinely troubling. It doesn’t seem that Minka is the driving force in this quest for mammoth breastage. I am concerned that Woody’s perception of his wife as a commodity supersedes any husbandly concerns for her physical well-being or, at the very least, her physical comfort. Otherwise why would he bark that she can carry those edifices around until she’s seventy, when she clearly wants to have them out in a year or two? Surely it’s her call, isn’t it? A man of Woody’s generation might not have included Germaine Greer or Naomi Wolf in his bedtime reading (I had Woody down as a strictly Wilbur Smith man; no offence Wilbur…), but surely the most misogynistic, unreconstructed male wouldn’t question a woman’s sovereignty over her body and what goes into it? Would he?
The problem comes back to Minka being both a commodity and a wife. The ultimate conflict of interest. With her long mane of oriental hair and proud posture, Minka isn’t unlike a prize racehorse and Woody her diminutive jockey, complete with whip. I can see how their marriage, and the life they live, is based on Minka’s breasts. This woman is an emotional and economic prisoner in her own body. How terrifying is that? Imagine being owned by your own body. Now obviously the likes of Kate Moss have to eat a lot of salad to keep the body they are selling, and an athlete certainly doesn’t always feel like getting up at 5 a.m. to go running, to stay at the top of his or her game. But Minka’s sacrifice is one which affects totally, let there be no doubt about this, her quality of life. And almost unquestionably her health.
One clue to this is that getting to be as big as Minka is now illegal in the United States, and the technology with which she inflated her chest is no longer available. Minka is one of a handful of ‘living legends’ in the world of big breasts and Woody is right to suggest that there’s no one like her anywhere else on Earth. That’s because Minka is part of the rarefied ‘silly string’ generation. A tiny group of women who experimented in the early 1990s with a special material which produces fantastically enormous breasts. It’s impossible to be as big as Minka with silicone, as silicone is an extremely dense, heavy material. Gravity would prevail. So various plastic surgeons experimented with a material developed during the Vietnam war to help heal open wounds. This special fabric fuses with skin tissue and expands with water and matter to form an extra skin, for where it had been blown off by an understandably belligerent Vietnamese soldier. This doctor speculated that something which does this for a wound may have the same effect in the cosmetic arena. The results were startling. Women like Minka had the silly string inserted and day by day their breasts grew in size. To the point where it was feared the breasts might eventually explode. Indeed some of the early recipients of this procedure went back to have their breasts drained as they were getting so big.
Mercifully this practice was later outlawed amid concern about the health risks. But a tiny number of now ageing ‘silly string’ ladies – Minka, Maxi Mounds and Caila Cleavage – still trade on their look because essentially it’s impossible to look like that now. So they have a unique selling point, albeit a freakish one. They are the embodiment of a frankly disturbing period in the history of plastic surgery. They reflect a time when plastic surgeons were about as vigorously regulated as your local hairdresser, and when the patients were human guinea pigs, willing participants in an extremely risky experiment that might ultimately claim their lives. And they paid for the privilege. One such victim was Lolo Ferrari. Lolo’s story is a well-known one, and her untimely, mysterious death casts a dark hue over this world of big breasts. And perhaps that is her legacy. Because not only is it almost impossible to be that big in the twenty-first century, but with Lolo’s passing, the comedy of her appearance – often paraded on TV shows like Eurotrash – segued, almost instantly, into the macabre, and tragic.
Woody and Minka met in Minka’s native South Korea when Woody was in the military. Given the age gap between them, and the fact that Woody brought her to the USA, a picture was emerging of a relationship, both in business terms and personally, that was unequal. Apart from the money, I want to get a sense of what motivated Woody in this whole endeavour. Is Minka’s appearance purely business?
‘Woody, do you think that Minka’s look is attractive?’ I ask.
‘I…yes. I like big-breasted women, personally always have,’ he says.
‘So you’re a big boob man,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘As far as you’re concerned, you’ve lucked out then,’ I suggest.
‘Yeah,’
