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Where body prophets like Patrice Donnelly dare to tread, ingenious profiteers are sure to follow. The sexy-fit look has generated a booming business. Pop songs like Newton-John's Physical and Diana Ross's Work That Body scampered up the charts. Exercise records have broken out of the vanity-house ghetto: Mickey's Mousercise has sold more than 350,000 copies. New magazines like Fit and New Body are preaching an enlightened narcissism. Fitness gurus, from Richard Simmons to Kathy Smith to that rock-hard perennial Jack LaLanne, start the TV day with exhortations to slim down and tone up. At the movies, the new actresses are quirky and resourceful, and so are the characters they play. "The old image of a star actress," says Larry Mark, vice president of production at Paramount Pictures, "was of a beautiful woman lounging in her peignoir, popping bonbons while she painted her toenails. Now it's a taut body in shorts doing jumping jacks. Juiciness is out; angularity is in."
Actresses used to publish breathy memoirs; today they write about deep-breathing exercises. Victoria Principal, who plays J.R. Ewing's saintly sister-in-law on Dallas, has been a fitness buff for years. "In my publicity photos they used to airbrush the muscles out of my arms," says Principal, who jogs up a mountain three times a week. Now she has her revenge: The Body Principal is soon to hit the bookstores, where it will join the dozens of other glossy guides like Jane Fonda's — on weight lifting and weight reducing, on holistic medicine and pregnancy therapy — that crowd the special display tables devoted to the fitness fashion.
The traditional glamour industries, which might have suffered when the new woman jogged back to nature, have found ways to adapt.
Says Actress Valerie Harper, who as TV's Rhoda Morgenstern lost weight and grew muscles while the home audience watched: "Now you can buy $50,000 worth of the no-makeup look." That look is an increasingly profitable part of the clothing industry: Danskin, leading manufacturer of tights and leotards, does about $100 million in sales annually. In the Sunbelt, where warm weather discourages women from buying next season's Paris original, jock chic is rampant. With men and women flaunting tanned, exercised bodies, the fashion is sportswear: headbands, tank tops, jogging shorts and running shoes. In offices and at informal dinner parties, the high-casual look has become acceptable. Exercise togs appear in the windows of a Rodeo Drive boutique; and at night, on Sunset Strip, young prostitutes parade in gym shorts and leg warmers.
Even that last outpost of anorexia, the modeling agency, is being renovated into a new-woman spa. Observes Eileen Ford, who runs her own top agency in New York City: "Models used to look fragile, plucking their eyebrows and wearing pancake makeup. God, they looked terrible! Now I get girls in here who are so fit they've got legs like Muhammad Ah'. That's not ideal either, but it's part of the '80s look: a firm body, healthy hair and skin, and a look of serene determination in the eyes. Today, health is beauty. You can't have one without the other."