Jay Rayner Meets Fabio Lanzoni

Absolutely Fabio

Whenever he and his bulging biceps graced romantic-novel covers, sales rocketed. Now he's pushing 50, peddling protein drinks and looking good on it. Jay Rayner meets the ultimate Italian stallion

There are a whole bunch of striking things to take in on meeting Fabio Lanzoni for the first time: the four huge Rottweilers that are likely to press their faces up against the window of your car as you arrive, a riot of sabre tooth and floppy pink tongue; the 200-odd motorbikes, and the shimmering, penila bonnets of the supercars parked out front of his ranch-style mansion; the hilltop aspect of the house itself. But none is as mesmerising, as completely awe-inspiring, as Fabio's tits. I had heard tell of them before, of course, had even studied photographs of them. They are practically on the Californian tourist trail. But nothing prepared me for the thrill of meeting them in person. They are monumental, as if two of the uprights from Stonehenge have been half-inched from the Wiltshire landscape and stuffed down the front of the gym-workout top he is wearing when he bounds down the curving drive to meet me. I swiftly become intrigued by how they move, how they stretch and shift, these two super-powered plates of prime male breast meat. If he were a woman, of course, this would be a disgraceful admission. You can't just stare at breasts like this. But with Fabio - like Madonna and Sting he is, to the American public, a man with only a first name - focusing on his chest seems entirely reasonable. Sure, there's the breeze-block square jaw, and the glossy, sunlit curtain of shiny hair, and the tree-trunk arms. But it is that chest that defines him, that has propelled him through a career as broad as the distance between his nipples (sorry; I'm clearly obsessed). He has been a model, has graced the covers of thousands of romance novels and has even put his name to a few of them. He has run a fashion company, made headlines for scrapping with George Clooney and, famously, once killed a goose with just the bridge of his nose (it flew into him during the maiden voyage of a new rollercoaster he was endorsing. Could have happened to anyone). But now he has reached a landmark. Fabio, a man entirely defined by his looks, is turning 50 and I've come out to his home, deep in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles to find out how he and his pectoral muscles are coping. "Age is just a mental thing," he says when I point out the impending birthday. "I prefer to be 50 and look 41 rather than the other way round." And if you were hoping for greater insights than this, for eloquence that pierces the very heart of human existence, perhaps you should go looking elsewhere; for insight and profundity is not what Fabio does. He does male better than almost anyone else on the planet. A stereotyped, caricatured version of male, of course, all testosterone and sinew, but male all the same. Not that he's inarticulate. The man can talk, the burr of his Northern Italian accent still there, if gentle, in a rather attractive fashion. But what comes out is as hokey and homespun as the plot of, well, a romantic novel. He has lines on God - "I was raised a Catholic but I don't need a middleman" - on family, which he calls "the foundation of life" even though he has somehow omitted to create one of his own, and on what he looks for in women: "I like a girl with old-fashioned values - and they are very hard to find, particularly in LA." Still, there is something intriguing about him. He is the ultimate self-made man, every stretch and bulge of meat forced into place. I believe him when he says he has never used performance-enhancing drugs to get into shape nor had any work done, even to the bridge of his nose after he totalled that goose ("It was a miracle, I tell you. It was just a cut"). For a man whose entire career has been based on how he looks, he seems staggeringly at ease with passing into his 50s and gives the impression that he thinks he may be able to outrun the ageing process. All of which may be testament to the calming powers of exercise-induced endorphins from his daily gym habit. Fabio is high as a kite on the headlong pursuit of his own beauty. It has always been this way. He was born in Milan, the son of a wealthy factory owner. If anybody ever tells you that Italians are, by dint of their DNA, obsessive foodies, send them to meet Fabio. "My parents always used to complain about my eating habits," he says. "I was different. I was wrong. Everything had to be plain or boiled. I was 14 before I ate pasta with tomato sauce. My dad would take me to the best restaurants and all I would eat was rice with olive oil." His obsessions lay elsewhere. As a teenager he began working out, and competed as a skier until at 18 he broke his leg, and gave up competitive sports. He moved to New York and became a model, did campaigns for all the big jeans companies, including Gap and Levi's. And then, on a regular basis, he'd go along for shoots, which, he was told, were being used for the covers of books. "For 18 months I didn't know what they were," he says now. "I just did the job." One night he was in a Miami nightclub when a woman approached him and said he looked just like the man on the cover of the romantic novel she was reading. As home was close by, she fetched the books. Which was how he discovered he was a god in the world of romantic fiction, the single most used male model in the heaving-bosom, ripping-bodice world. He was later told that sales of books went up by more than 60% when he was on the cover. "So the publishers came to me and said: 'Why don't we put your name on the cover too and sell even more?'" Fabio said why not. In the early 90s he quit modelling, and with the help of a ghost writer became a romantic novelist, too. He has no qualms about declaring his lack of authorship. "Hey, in America everyone has a ghost writer." I ask him if his romantic-novel fame helped him to get more "action". He looks at me as if I'm an idiot. "I always got action," he says slowly. I suggest he must have his pick of women. "I always try to choose good girls. To be turned on, I have to have something more than looks." I understand that, I say, but perhaps over the years he has benefited from the presence of girls who were, shall we say, less than "good"? He shrugs. "I cannot stand ditsy women." Certainly he's found none that he wanted to spend his life, or even a portion of it, with. "A lot of women in this country have lost their morals. It's all about what you can do for me, where you can take me in my career. They never marry for love." He sounds bitter, I say. "Not bitter. I had true love once. I know what true love is. True love is forever." So what happened, because clearly in his case it wasn't quite forever? "After five years I screwed it up. She wanted to settle down and I didn't. Even my mother told me to let her go." This, he says, was almost 20 years ago. As to the women of LA, well, that's hardly going to work. "They live in a fantasy world. Too many people are superficial. They only look at the surface." But hasn't he based his entire life on being a fantasy? Isn't he all surface? Not at all, he says. Sure, there is the modelling. And then there is real life, and he wants me to know that, however unreal the pectorals may appear - I still can't stop myself staring at them, as if I'm expecting them to chip in an answer to my questions - "there is so much more to life than the body". There is, for example, business: he has endorsed everything from I Can't Believe It's Not Butter to razors and life insurance, published Fabio's Healthy Bodies magazine, and for a while run a Fabio-branded women's outerwear business that made "millions". He has also had a good sideline in personal appearances, which resulted in the infamous goose incident back in 1999. He had been hired for the inaugural ride of the Apollo's Chariot rollercoaster at Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, accompanied by various women dressed as goddesses. Just a standard day out for Fabio. The rollercoaster came off a peak straight into the flight line of a goose, and when it pulled back in, there was Fabio with blood pouring down his face and the odd feather sticking to him. Fabio attempted to sue the operators of the rollercoaster, alleging it had been built in the flight path of the geese, but settled out of court. It is clear he is a man for a fight. He also made headlines at the end of 2007 when he got into a scrap with George Clooney at a Beverly Hills restaurant. I ask him about it, and quickly he lurches into an expletive-drenched blow-by-blow account of who said what to whom. Essentially it came down to Clooney accusing one of the women Fabio was with - winners of a charity raffle for his company - of photographing him when they weren't, then being abusive, and Fabio intervening by shoving his mighty chest in the film star's face. "I would have decked him in two seconds," Fabio says. "That night he was an arsehole to these women." For his part Clooney later admitted that it suddenly occurred to him that were he to get into a fight with Fabio, he would lose. It presented the former model with some of the most extensive press coverage he has received in years. But now he has a new plan, a business venture he is sure will massively increase his profile. That new plan is stacked up in the airy vault of a living room at the front of the house: box after box of a protein drink under the Healthy Planet Vitamins brand, which he is certain will be a huge success among gym bunnies just like him. He has a warehouse that is full, so the overflow is here in his living room. It's a product used for seriously ill people in hospital, he says. He had tried lots of other protein drinks, but they were made from the by-product of cheese production. This is made from raw milk. It is just so much better than everything else. And so begins a long lecture on glutaminates and colostrums from cows that have just started lactating, and how if you just replace one meal with his product you could lose pounds and build muscle. We stand in his kitchen, which looks like it is used regularly. "But it isn't. I don't cook. I make shakes." He insists on making one for me, chocolate flavour with almost fat-free almond milk, and the moment I taste it I regret having said yes. I'm all for participatory journalism, but really, there are limits. It has all the texture of unset cement and none of the grace notes. It coats the tongue and sits at the bottom of my stomach like a sack of something dead. I can see why his proud, indulgent Italian parents thought there was something "wrong" with this boy if he has a palate honed for this stuff. I have to finish it. I suggest any diet that involved eating a lot of his protein shake wouldn't be much fun. "It's about willpower. People are going to say you look great, that your skin is better." He is in full-on sales mode now, determined that I should go home with boxes of his protein shakes. I need to reshape myself the Fabio way. "The upside is worth it. You're missing a few dinners, but women start looking at you. So which is more important?" I'm thinking "dinner" but say: "Well, yes, I can see your point" as the shake begins to bubble and burp from the depths, as if it's one of those Icelandic gulping mud-pool geysers. Like Fabio, I have unreasonably long hair for a middle-aged man. Like Fabio, I go to the gym quite a lot. But clearly that is where the similarity ends. Though one look at my disappointing chest would have proved that. Repeatedly, as he discusses the virtues of his product, he lurches into engine and motoring metaphors. He wants to explain how we are all essentially "engines" which need the right "fuel" to achieve perfect "performance". These kinds of manly metaphors have never really worked for me, so I decide it would be easier if I got him to take me outside and actually talk about real vehicles instead. He is an avid collector, has 200 motorbikes stacked up and roped off and piled up against each other, plus around $1m worth of supercar: a Porsche, a Lamborghini and two of the same model of Mercedes. (Don't ask me what they are: metal on wheels is the best I can do.) In some ways this is slightly more troubling than the protein-shake chat, for he insists on opening up bonnets and showing me overelaborate engine casings that he keeps polished to a shine, and talking about suspension and torque and horsepower, which means nothing to me. I look out over the vehicles and say: "If I was to suggest you were slightly out of control on the motorbike front, what would you say?" He shrugs. "How about: nobody's perfect?" Fabio Lanzoni photographed at home in Los Angeles, March 2009. Photograph: Barry J Holmes And it is that unabashed, shameless enjoyment of the self that is the most beguiling. No, I may not have a clue what he is talking about most of the time. And there is so much about Fabio that is plainly absurd - from the hair to the bikes, through the cars and the line in hand-tooled touchy-feely philosophy to the preposterous pectorals. But their owner doesn't really care. He's aware of how it looks, aware of the inherent comedy, but it's made him money and he's happy with that. He has his house on the hill, all his own hair, and muscles to die for. So how is Fabio at 50? Just fine, since you asked. Just fine.