Your Daily August, 07th

Dr. 90210

A Day in the Life of Dr. Nip/Tuck

By Sanjiv Bhattacharya
Published: Dec 14, 2007

Everyone who’s anyone in Beverly Hills goes to Robert Rey to have work done. He’s now so famous he even has his own TV show. Sanjiv Bhattacharya spends an eye-opening day in his beautiful world.

“Is he here yet?” An anxious TV producer checks the lobby of Stage 26 at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood. She works for The Insider, a top rated tabloid gossip show, where the presenters, the crew and the production team are all waiting to shoot a segment about Hilary Clinton – specifically, the rumour that she has had a nose job. The trouble is, the guest expert hasn’t arrived – the cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Robert Rey is over an hour late. An hour. The producer checks her watch for the hundredth time and starts to pace.

Then, suddenly, the doors swing open and in bursts a man wearing a sharp grey suit, a luminous orange shirt and a leering grin. “Hey pretty girl!” he exclaims. The doctor is in! Instantly, the room is filled with the smell of his cologne and the sound of his endless, exuberant chatter. “How did you get so sexy, so shredded, so hot?” he says to the receptionist, and promptly starts punching and kicking the air like a boy who just discovered Bruce Lee. One sidekick narrowly misses the receptionist’s face, making her jump back. The doctor laughs. “Ha ha ha! All my suits are made so I can kick!”

Dr. Rey is without question the most prominent plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, if not the world. He’s not only a surgeon to the stars but a star in his own right, thanks to his show, Dr. 90210, which launched in 2003 and quickly became the highest rated show on the E! television network. Its success inspired a rash of reality plastic surgery shows, like Extreme Makeover and The Swan, and today, it boasts a worldwide audience of 1/3 billion viewers every night (Dr. Rey’s figures).

But Dr. 90210 is less about surgery as about Rey himself and his manic lifestyle. By day we see him perform boob jobs for a cavalcade of strippers, porn stars and insecure college girls. And by night, he’s doing martial arts while his wife, Hayley, the mother of his 2 children, waits in vain for him at their palatial home in the hills. Hayley doesn’t approve of his martial arts, which he frequently jokes is something he does “to get away from the wife.” So in the last series, we saw Rey go for his Tae Kwon Do black belt, while Hayley developed an eating disorder – already a skinny girl, her weight dropped to 88lbs. This year, Rey tries to make it up to her in his own eccentric way. When Hayley leaves for a trip to Canada, he reorganizes her closet, arranging her clothes according to season and colour.

When I decided to shadow him for 24 hours, I expected an outsized personality. Just not quite this big – Rey is a one-man commotion. He is constantly late, prone to changing his mind, and he moves at a breathless pace. Just a few hours in his company is exhausting – he has the energy of a precocious child on a sugar-fix. And yet he’s 46 years old, a remarkably well preserved 46 at that – Rey has a six pack and not a line on his face. On his way to the car, after his TV spot, he tells me, “I’m pretty ripped for my age, you probably want to know what I eat, right?” OK, sure. “Right, every morning I have 10 egg whites and then a bowl of raw oatmeal with bananas and wild honey. Then I eat like 7 or 8 small meals - surgery, eat, surgery, eat, all day long. Lots of protein like chicken, turkey and fish. About 20 yogurts a day. And half a bottle of ketchup.”

Half a bottle?

“Sure! For the lycopene. It’s important for men – prostate cancer. I’m serious.” With that, he jumps into his gleaming black Porsche and tears off to his surgery, just around the corner from Rodeo Drive. He works in an elite medical building, crammed full of top surgeons and dermatologists – the address that everyone who’s anyone visits to “have work done.” And of all the surgeons in the building, Rey is the most famous. It’s no accident – he’s a tireless self-publicist. In his waiting room, every inch of wall space is plastered with his press clippings, whether in English, Portuguese (from his native Brazil), or Spanish (he’s a star throughout Latin America). All of them are framed.

Typically, Rey has a busy day ahead – four breast augmentations (by far his most popular procedure) – and he’s already running hours late. The patients are getting impatient. So wasting no time, he ushers us into the surgery to meet his first – Melissa, a slender 24 year old dance instructor from Orange County. “Hey pretty girl!” exclaims Rey, sweeping back the curtain. Melissa is sitting there, topless, with her boyfriend sitting by her side. “See how my girls are so pretty? In a country that is 60% overweight, all my girls look like this – how is that possible?”

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