She was fully in frame, a tall, proud and undeniably beautiful creature, motionless against a blue background, the breeze carrying wisps of her long, blond hair round her body and against the underside of her breast, affirming its roundness. The filming was obviously done at a high altitude, for the blue was as much mountain as sky.
By degrees, the camera angle shifted to the girl’s left. It meant filming directly into the sun, so that her profile was cast into a dramatic silhouette edged with gold, reminiscent of the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the celebrated documentary of the Nazi-staged Olympic Games of 1936. The shot into the sun is such a cliché of commercials that Dryden ought to have been squirming in his seat, but this unhurried treatment seemed to have rediscovered the heroic quality of Riefenstahl’s film.
It was odd he didn’t recognize the girl. One of his mental recreations was naming the girls in TV commercials. He reckoned he knew the face of every blonde, brunette and redhead modeling for ads across the country, if he couldn’t always recall the name. Names weren’t so important. The same girls used half a dozen different ones, and got all the work they could from knitting patterns to nude shots, so anyone with a stake in the advertising business needed to be able to spot them. It didn’t please a company chairman to open a girlie mag and see a full frontal of the same girl who sedulously applied his brand of vapor rub to her wheezing husband’s chest each night on all the major networks. It went completely against good merchandising practice, and it was Dryden’s job to see it didn’t happen; his nightmare that it might.
Goldengirl wasn’t in any of the agency catalogues, he was certain. It was not a face you could forget. There was an elegance to it, a dignity in repose, a marvelous tragic quality about the eyes and mouth that film men would have pawned their Oscars to get under contract.
As he watched the camera’s movement around her, he marveled that a girl so stunning had been ignored by the media. He half-expected some blemish to appear in shot and account for it, scar tissue or a grotesque birthmark.
She was flawless.
The camera had panned completely around her to the position of the opening shot and was zooming in again for a repeat of the close-up, with the navel traveling across the screen like a scarab traversing the desert. When it reached the point where the title had been superimposed before, it stopped.
Expecting a cut to one of the standard postures in the erotic repertoire, Dryden was unprepared, to say the least, when a set of tabulated statistics appeared against the gold background.
The shot moved out, dissolving into a second sequence which made it clear, if the statistics had not, how tall she was. Till now, there had been nothing in frame to compare her with. Here she was indoors, in a gym, and she was not alone. Beside her, at the level of her shoulder, stood a man in a white coat holding a pen: Dr. Serafin.
His voice came over on the soundtrack, Dryden’s first opportunity of hearing it in more than a few terse words. The accent was American, with a trace of central Europe in the clipping of consonants.
‘I want to invite you to look carefully at this young woman, for as well as being singularly attractive, she is one of the most interesting subjects physiologically who has ever appeared on film. This begins to become apparent if we examine her by means of radiography.’
A full-length X-ray was superimposed on the screen, so that the doctor appeared to be standing beside the girl one moment, her skeleton the next.
‘You will see that although she is remarkably tall for a woman at one meter eighty-eight, and one would expect to somatotype her as an ectomorph according to the Sheldon classification, her upper development is unquestionably in the mesomorph range. Notice particularly the width of the shoulders and thorax. The facility of a larger-than-average rib cage allows, of course, for increased lung capacity. An individual’s aerobic capacity, which we define as the maximum amount of oxygen that can be absorbed, transported and used per minute of sustained work, depends on the size of the lungs and heart, the amount and hemoglobin content of the blood, and the mass of muscle tissue. If we now examine the muscular formation’ — the skeleton dissolved into the more pleasing image of Goldengirl fully fleshed — ‘we see that she possesses the well-muscled thighs and calves of women many centimeters shorter in height. The traditional criteria of beauty in women — the relative sizes of bust, waist and hips — are, I would say, in a pleasing ratio, while the back and buttocks — if you would kindly turn round, my dear — have the classic appearance’ — he made parabolas in the air with his pen — ‘of the female form.’
Dryden took a check on the rest of the audience. Valenti was biting the end of an unlighted cigar, and Armitage was leaning forward, with his chin supported by his right fist. Melody blew a small cloud of smoke at the screen.
‘It is a well-documented fact,’ Dr. Serafin continued, ‘that during the last hundred years there has been a tendency for children to reach the age of puberty earlier, grow taller and develop better physiques than their forebears. The trend in linear growth is about one centimeter per decade in the United States and Western Europe. Of course, I am speaking of the average. Already you will find some girls as tall as this one — taller, indeed. You are most unlikely to find one with a comparable physical capacity, and I speak with an experience of forty years of anthropometry. If the trend I described continues, we may expect our idealised woman of the twenty-first century to look like this, with the physiological advantages, the deeper chest, greater lung power, stronger cardiovascular system and muscular development to match her stature. Turn around, my dear. In short, this girl is eugenically thirty or forty years ahead of her time. And that, as you shall shortly see, has some interesting implications.’
The film cut to a shot of the girl in a gold leotard — they knew how to implant their message — standing beside a set of weights.
‘These are training weights of forty kilos normally used by male athletes,’ explained the doctor. ‘She will now give a short demonstration of her agility. This is not in any sense a test of her strength. I should merely like you to observe the fluidity and ease of her movements.’
She crouched at the weight and completed the power-clean movement with smooth control, repeating it nine times, followed by similar repetitions of bicep curls, half squats and bench presses.
‘Her pulse rate, if I took it,’ said Dr. Serafin when the girl had finished and stood breathing deeply but evenly at his side, ‘would have increased to over one hundred and fifty beats per minute during this exercise, but will return to its normal fifty within two minutes. I have undertaken an extensive program of tests and measurements with her over many months, using as a basis statistical data obtained from the Stanford Physical Performance Research Laboratory, the Harvard Physical Fitness Index, the Soviet GTO Mass Fitness Program and the Freiburg Institute of West Germany, and I am able to tell you with authority that this young woman’s performances place her in the top two or three per cent of women, irrespective of age, in each of the tests.’ Dr. Serafin made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘But physiological data are of consequence only to physiologists. An electrocardiograph is capable of exciting me, but I cannot expect it to stir the imaginations of men and women at large. No, there are other tests of physical capacity, rather less precise than the measurements we carry out in the laboratory, but sufficiently validated by mass participation over many years to establish criteria. I refer, of course, to popular sports. Measurable sports. In particular, track and field athletics. Here we have a mass of evidence of the ultimate achievements of men and women in a number of physical activities. Sports journals are filled each year with details of thousands of athletic performances from all over the world.