Overweight and fifty something, any offers to have “good” done to me are treated with the deepest suspicion. When “health farm” and “gym kit” are mentioned as part of the basic requirements for a stay in Clinique La Prairie, which I thought only existed on the pages of fashion magazines found in dentists waiting rooms, suspicion deepens to paranoia. With a deep sense of foreboding, borrowed sneakers and unhelpful assurances from editors resolutely staying behind their desks that “you will enjoy it,” I took a tumbrel to the Swissair flight that would finally deposit the wreckage of the body I inhabit in Clarens, near Montreux where the clinic sits in the voluptuous green folds of the brooding mountains.
Shame was further compounded when I discovered I would be traveling with two female companions, young enough to be my daughters and who needed shaping and beauty treatment about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.
You have to hand it to the Swiss; their precision and efficiency is genetic and they seem to carry it with them wherever they go. The Swissair flight left on time to the minute, the food was served by smiling and well pressed hostesses who tut-tutted in a kindly sort of way when I left my knife and fork not quite parallel to the sides of the tray.
Needless to say, we touched down to the second; no surprise after the pilot had with commendable attention to detail informed us that we would be “landing in 17 and a half minutes.” We did; I checked.
We were met by the affable Felix, who has chauffeured for the clinic for decades and has a handshake that would crack walnuts, in a gleaming S-class Mercedes. Immune to probing questions about previous guests of the clinic and who he had met over the years, he was the foretaste of the code of absolute discretion that contributes so much to the success of the clinic.
Yaël Bruigom, the clinic’s marketing and PR manager positively radiates wellness and efficiency. She is tall blonde and perfectly groomed woman of a certain age who positively glows with health and energy. Greeting us and barely breaking stride hefting my 30kg suitcase, she introduced us with a dentist’s dream of a smile and precise Germanic English, to the stairs, “which we will climb. Do not use the lifts; it is good exercise.” Clearly I needed it and she did not.
The clinic achieved its fame from a touch of inspired research in the 1930’s. Paul Niehans joined what was then a local clinic, to do general surgery. Blood transfusions had been made possible only recently and Niehans had the idea that if he could give living blood cells then why not transfer other cells?
He started what he termed “fresh cell therapy” giving ‘non differentiated cells’ — we would call them stem cells now — to individuals with specific diseases and for hormonal insufficiency. He got his raw material from unborn lambs because he felt that embryonic cells would work best. His intuition was good, it worked with spectacular success and attracted the rich and famous, notably Charles Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich.
A meticulous record keeper, Niehans noticed from his statistics and by keeping in touch with his patients that after they received the serum, for a year or two they felt fantastic “a general appreciation of a feeling of well-being,” said Dr Thiery W?lli, the Medical Director, another incredibly vital looking 58 year old.
Reassuringly for me, he confided that the treatment does not work on people below 40 — and 50 is even better. So, the world is not really for the young, after all. So just how old was the delightful Ms. Yaël, then?
This inspired Niehans to believe that the serum — a cocktail targeting 14 different organs — reactivated some processes in the body and connect it with anti-ageing. Niehans became world famous again from the “fresh cell therapy” cocktail as an anti-ageing treatment. Frank Sinatra, Churchill, Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Somerset Maugham, Conrad Adenauer — the list of patients was impressive.
The injections of serum, repeated every two years, do not prevent ageing. W?lli says ageing is not a disease; however, as it happens, regular injections coupled with the fitness, diet and lifestyle plan the clinic provides its guests with, keep failing systems running and in good condition; so the onset of age is much less debilitating. With life-spans lengthening, W?lli contends that the clinic’s services are about maximizing quality of life.
When W?lli arrived at the clinic in 1991, he suggested to the owner that they turn the clinic into an anti-ageing clinic with full medical facilities and beauty and fitness programs included in the marketing mix.
“Lifestyle is 90 percent of my job,” W?lli says. “Medicines can be prescribed, people accept those easily. Much more important and difficult is to convince them to do what they can do for themselves” The innocent looking schedule neatly deposited next to the healthy looking fruit basket in my balconied bedroom indicated that I was about to be introduced to some self help. Stretching, it said, with Monsieur Laurent. I could do that.
Turning up in a gym with ancient track suit and well worn sneakers fazed our M. Laurent not at all. In the company of some other anonymous ovoid guests Laurent, who I am convinced was previously ballet-master for the Spetsnaz and seems to be able curve so far backwards he can hook his feet under his chin and smile at the same time, assisted us in “feeling the stretch” — as he blithely put it — in parts of my anatomy I had no idea contained muscles.
“A good stretching once a week is enough,” he said. As relief flooded through my veins amid the crackling of sinews returning to neutral he added cheerfully, “but for you, more tomorrow at 9.15.”
With that, we were shepherded off to the Aqua Gym. Where does the clinic find these egregiously healthy, fit people? I speculated it must be the serum; later, I got it later from an insider that in a lot of cases it was. Clearly it works.
Miss Nina, a perfectly sculpted — 30, maybe 40 or even 50 plus, here you just cannot tell —blonde gymnast in a bathing suit encouraged us to do what was disguised as gentle exercise in the water. Determined to make the best of it with relatively easy exercise, I found my aquatic companions either cheating or doing better. So encouraging and attentive was Ms. Nina that during one particularly exotic exercise she chirruped “Ah! You’re hyper flexible!” Me? No dear thing; dislocated.
Glowering damply at the schedule, precisely two minutes after Aquagym I found I was due for “Microdemabrasion [sic] and mask.” Now, for what I rather hopefully think of as a butch six foot 200 pound ex-rugby player, male beauty treatment as an idea makes my skin crawl. On the basis that this was the most famous and expensive health clinic on the planet and in the spirit of journalistic integrity, I ended up on a bed, face in a mask under the gently manipulative pair of hands attached to one of the clinics beauticians. I could not quite accommodate the idea, but by the end of the session, just before the facial sandpapering, (Microdemabrasion) I could see its merits and was almost enjoying it. “You ‘ave a wonderfully t’ick epidermis, M’sieur Roger,” my beautician purred in an engaging French accent. Goes with the job, dear.
And certainly, after both treatments, my lustrous companions on the trip alleged they saw an improvement. Damming with faint praise?
But it was nothing compared with being strapped onto a couch with only swimming trunks on while a ridiculously young woman attached electrodes to bits of flab and connected them to something stolen from the engine room of Starship Enterprise. “I don’t want to cause you pain,” she said disingenuously, “Just tell me when to stop.” Why, I thought, do I not believe you?
Can you imagine the temptation she must have had to resist with some odious world leader connected to half a power station? I asked, as a matter of professional interest, who she had electrocuted in the pursuit of beauty. It was met with a disarming smile, a discreet change of subject and a noticeable increase in voltage. More steel in the backbone than meets the eye here.
At the end of the first day’s schedule, the beacon of dinner shone bright. The menu read like something raved about by gourmets in the glossy magazine stuffed in the pockets of Felix’s Mercedes and the presentation was straight out of Vogue. How could “Cannelonis de feuilles de blette au framage de chèvre maigre” followed by “Contrefilet de bœuf au four” and “Tulip au filo glaceé au yaourt maigre et kiwi” possibly be healthy?
Not only was it, but every calorie in the menu was counted, every ingredient checked. My companions had identical dishes, but with only two thirds of the calories. I was nearly embarrassed.
As Dr. W?lli said, it’s about lifestyle and what people can do for themselves. To further that gastronomically, you can even buy the recipe book. Subtle people, these Swiss; best chocolate on the planet and they give you a recipe book to stay slim. Dr Juan-Carlos Pages, the resident plastic surgeon, confirms the “quality of life” ethos of La Prairie when he contends that psychologically you feel better after changing the shape of your body. “Is that not good for health?” he asks. Point taken. Many of his patients come for aesthetic surgery (face-lifts, liposuction and the like,) knowing that it is not the complete solution but it forms the first — or last stage — in a regimen of sports, diet and life-style changes.
Whilst the clinic sells its services expensively, you cannot buy health. W?lli has patients from the Middle East who he says simply cannot accept that. “They always think that they can buy things — they don’t think they have to do anything. They want the shots, but want to go on smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, over-eating and following a sedentary life style.”
They were probably a very strong people 200 years ago before the oil boom. Now the oil governs and it has changed the lifestyle.”
That really is the message that the clinic wants you to carry away after your biannual service. W?lli indeed uses automobile imagery when he describes the process. “You cannot choose to be born with Rolls Royce or Lada genes,” he says. “But with regular servicing and maintenance, the Lada will last a very long time.”
With the six day stay at La Prairie with the medical checkups, beauty and fitness programs and revitalizing serum injections starting at about SR30,000 and rising to over SR50,000 for the full Imperial Suite package, servicing yourself can be expensive. But as W?lli points out, once every two years and the adoption of the take-away lifestyle package the clinic provides, you have to ask if SR300 a week to feel and look like million is worth it.
The fact that over two-thirds of the clients are regulars and the surreal energy and well being the “older” staff exude, it is cheap at the price.
I’m saving.