Found an interesting story about Rachel !
Moving Past Her Flexing Days // McLish Builds Image NowPosted: Sunday, November 12, 1989
Rachel McLish hates to be showy, but she's about to move into a 10,000-square-foot "major residence" in Rancho
Mirage, Calif.
She isn't big on the idea of a TV series, but will consider work in film and TV specials. She doesn't want to make an
exercise video, preferring to reach the public through her books Flex Appeal and Perfect Parts.
One has to be discriminating. This is Hollywood, after all. McLish is at a 30ish crossroads, the time when this former
international body-building star could augment her fame a la Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or let it atrophy like muscles
on a couch potato. Choices now will determine her endurance in a town that disposes of starlets like Styrofoam.
Three years ago, this two-time Ms. Olympia - the woman credited with bringing glamour to weightlifting - was ready to leave
Los Angeles. She thought she'd move home to South Texas and get a condo on the beach. But then she met Ron Samuels,
once labeled by Money magazine as a "supermanager" known for "cannily turning little known starlets into million-a-year stars."
Rachel McLish stayed in California.
Now some of her careful choices are coming to fruition. She has just clinched a lucrative clothing deal with K mart,
she says, which introduces a "Rachel McLish for the Body Company" exercise line in January. In October, she starred
in CBS' Women of the 21st Century, billed as an entertainment special exploring "woman's commitment to a physical life."
She also stumps, along with celebs such as Cher and Sheena Easton, for Health and Tennis Corp. of America - for whom
she popularized the maxim, "Before you primp, you've got to pump."
Near the top of Benedict Canyon, where L.A.'s amber haze starts to lift, she comes to the door of fiance Ron Samuels'
brick house - looking almost delicate amid the masculine setting of beige and black. But then McLish radiates contradiction:
toughness and charisma, ambition and nonchalance. Her very appearance is a mixed message of ladylike sexuality: She
wears a proper red pantsuit with a midriff-cut tank top.
If this sloe-eyed brunette of Spanish, Mexican and German descent seems like an enigma, her role in body building
is easier to peg. She took her drive and "genetic gift," as she calls it, to rise to the top of what was a fringe
sport - helping a generation of women lose their fear of muscles.
As Samuels drives east, he ponders McLish's progress in Hollywood. Formerly wed to TV's Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter,
Samuels secured some of the early big TV salaries for women, including Lindsay Wagner and Jaclyn Smith.
Samuels first saw her in a magazine when he was casting a short-lived TV cop show. He thought McLish would play
well opposite lead actor Michael Nouri. Over lunch, McLish told him she wasn't interested in the series, "but we wound
up dating and being together ever since," he says.
"You either know a lot about me - or you've never heard of me at all," McLish says with a brilliant smile.
In body building, they know her.
"Before she goes on stage, before she does anything, there is a rapport with the audience," says Ben Weider, president
of the International Federation of Body Builders. "The only person who has that kind of charm is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When he competed for Mr. Olympia, all he had to do is walk on the stage, and the crowd was howling."
That star quality netted McLish the 1980 U.S. Woman's Body Building Championship, Ms. Olympia titles in 1980 and 1982,
and the 1982 World Championship. It catapulted her to the role of international fitness promoter.
Her visibility rose further with Pumping Iron II: The Women, a 1985 documentary-style film that cast McLish as the temperamental
queen of weightlifting. In the film, she places third in competition, rattled by the presence of the musclebound
Australian powerlifter Bev Francis.
The conflict in the sport - between bulk and beauty - was real. McLish left competition in 1984 - the year she placed second
in a Ms. Olympia contest - because she thought the sport was turning toward manly muscles and steroid use, of which
she is a vocal opponent.
"What's important about McLish is that she never used drugs to get the physique that she had," Weider says. "After
her, women started to use a lot of steroids, and they became much too masculine." Since 1985, the federation has conducted
steroid tests to try to reverse the trend. McLish's departure turned out to be her gain. Almost immediately,
Michigan-based Health and Tennis Corp. of America hired her as a spokeswoman.
"I've been around the world, and I've met wealthy people. And that doesn't mean you have anything going for you,"
McLish scoffs. "That doesn't mean you're a person of character." With her two highly detailed exercise primers behind her,
McLish is toiling on two more books: one on back care, another a textbook for personal trainers.
When McLish comes home to Harlingen, Texas, to visit, everyone gets fit. "She can work you to death, and make you think it's a lot
of fun," says Jeanine Woolweaver, a longtime friend in hometown Harlingen.
"When she comes here, I know I'll lose three or four pounds," adds JoAnn Boggus, another chum.
Even McLish's mother, Rachel Elizondo, goes along with her daughter's regimen of drinking a purple-hued vegetable broth
to cleanse the body. "I enjoy having McLish home. We fast together," says Elizondo.
But then, McLish always had the gift of persuasion.
"She knows exactly what she wants and she's not afraid," says her older sister, Yolanda Acosta, a Harlingen school
counselor. "She always attracted people." And like her four siblings, McLish always was athletic.
Fitness was basic to the family, says McLish. In fact, she tells the story of how her mother rejected an aristocrat's
marriage proposal because he was ugly - and she wanted to have beautiful children.
McLish credits her father, who died last year, with instilling drive and confidence in his offspring. The neon-sign-maker
worked in the back of the family's two-bedroom frame house and lifted weights in the garage as a hobby. McLish liked
to watch.
"She was the baby with the barbells," recalls her mother. "Rachel grew up with that."
In the strict Catholic household, McLish sewed her own clothes and did odd jobs to pay for her cheerleading uniform and camp.
She worked her way through Pan American University, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at a local health club. She taught exercise classes
and ended up club manager. After her 1978 graduation, she formed a partnership to build
the Sports Palace health club in Harlingen. Along the way, she began to lift weights in earnest.
Her calves were already strong from ballet - she still can squat 210 pounds - but, like most women, McLish hadn't developed
her upper body. "It came naturally to me. I didn't have to work too hard to try to force my body to do something
it wasn't equipped to handle," she says.
She called her workouts "toning," not body building. She didn't want to alienate women.
By the time she read about plans for the first U.S. Woman's Body Building Championship in 1980, she had been training
for four years. She entered, she says, to publicize the expansion of her health club to Brownsville and Corpus Christi.
She went to Atlantic City alone, and won.
One footnote to the contest was the loss of McLish's family surname. She entered as Rachel Elizondo McLish - the last
name based on her short-lived marriage to college sweetheart John McLish. In competition, the middle name was dropped.
Now the only place you'll see Elizondo is as the middle name on McLish's driver's license.
Her routine remained brutal for years. In training, McLish would jog three to five miles in the morning, ride 30 miles
on her bike in the afternoon and put in two daily weightlifting sessions at the gym.
Such efforts created a shape that still draws accolades.
"She is a perfect example of what a woman should be," says Roy Zurkowski, chairman of Health and Tennis Corp.,
the country's largest health club chain. "The fact that she looks as great as she does, and exercises religiously,
she adds a great deal of credibility to the industry."
In the early 1980s, McLish was putting on two pounds of muscle a year, reducing her body fat level to 6.4 percent
(compared with her current 13 percent - still about half the U.S. female average). She was developing as fast as
she could, short of using steroids, she says. But not fast enough.
"Women's body building got ahead of itself. It grew prematurely, artificially," she says. "They said `What we want to see
is more muscles' - especially after the movie (Pumping Iron II). Once you see the ones who are ultra-muscular, you look
at someone like me and say, `Well, where's her muscles?' "
"I think at the time of the movie, she was feeling threatenedby the new wave of body builders," says the Australian,
Francis, a six-time world powerlifting champion who now owns a gym on Long Island.
"She realized the sport was going beyond her. It was time to move on and do other things."
Though McLish loved competing - the sense of control and accomplishment - she says her body is better off now.
"Although I might have looked really healthy, I was really ill," she says. "When you push your body fat to that low
of a level, your defense system goes haywire.
"I will never do that to my body again." McLish's body remains her job - but not her only one. Speech
lessons have removed all trace of Texas. She studies flamenco dance and German. And she reads movie scripts, cautiously,
in search of the rare project she feels is not demeaning to women.
Every couple of months McLish returns to Harlingen - not to her girlhood home, but to the modern, three-bedroom brick
dwelling she had built for her parents.
McLish believes she was able to parlay weightlifting into a wider career precisely because "it wasn't an end-all for me."
As she warms up her lines about "fit, function and fashion" to promote the K mart venture, McLish says she doesn't worry
about her next career move.
"The most important thing is to do the best you can in the present," she says. "That will always lead to something
else. The human body and the psyche always strive for more. "You always want to top what you just did."
(Diane Reischel writes for the Dallas Morning News.)
