Fabio Fitness
Get in loser, we're skipping leg day
Fabio Lanzoni is a lot of things: 90s pop culture oddity, romance cover model legend, paranoid bigot, and Harbinger of Avian Death. He’s a whispered curse on the lips of romance readers: Please they say, he doesn’t represent us. Romance has changed.1
Fabio’s rise to fame as a romance cover model was unprecedented, and although he’s had many long-haired muscle men attempt to follow in his footsteps, he’s still the only cover hunk who has successfully crossed over into the mainstream. Three decades after his rapid ascension, he’s now a multi-millionaire, setting fire to his reputation of The Gentleman by ignoring historical romance author Anne Stuart’s advice to him in 1992: “Pretty men should be seen, and not heard.”
When the People in the 90s Podcast chronicled their difficulties with getting in touch with Fabio for their episode in 2021, they chalked it up to his newfound media reticence. But as someone who has tracked all of his statements and interviews from the past decade, I’m sure they could have gotten him on the record much more quickly if they phished him from a fake Fox News email address. Since 2017 Fabio’s revealed to right-wing outlets that he loves guns, hates California’s Prop 57 that allows people with a non-violent felony to be eligible for parole without “enhancements” to their sentence, and thinks the lack of muscle hunks on mainstream contemporary romance covers are due to the “progressive woke movement.”
I’m trying to piece together Fabio’s life for a Reformed Rakes deep-dive, and one thing I’ve discovered is that this is no hard-right pivot, but the natural dissolution of a carefully crafted parasocial fantasy. I came to this conclusion the normal way: by disassociating to a 1993 workout tape called Fabio Fitness.
The Dilettante
In a 1993 article for LA Weekly, Arion Berger wrote that “Fabio does the minimum and reaps the maximum: he’s an efficient machine.” The LA Times agreed: “He can’t write, but he has a new book out, a romantic fantasy tellingly called “Pirate,” which debuted earlier this month at No. 37 on USA Today’s bestseller list. He can’t sing, but he has a CD out, tellingly called “Fabio After Dark,” in which he moans his romantic philosophy between other people’s songs. He can’t act, but he plays the billionaire owner of a Puerto Vallarta hotel in a critically ravished new TV show called “Acapulco H.E.A.T.”
One thing Fabio emphatically can do is work out, but Fabio Fitness only capitalizes off of his celebrity while leaving all of the heavy-lifting to his cohost, aerobics champion Brenda Dykgraaf.
“How do you pronounce Dykgraaf?” I wondered after the opening credits, as I watched the pair awkwardly shuffle to the camera as though they had just discovered the concept of movement. The introduction from Fabio was no help. “Hi, welcome to Fabio Fitness. This is BRENDA, a friend, and an expert in exercise.” In Fabio Fitness, nobody gets a last name.2
Brenda Dykgraaf does almost all of the instruction. It’s not until the seven-and-a-half minute mark that Fabio offered his first piece of advice, to “keep your abs tight so your back is perfectly straight.”
“Yes sir!” said Brenda.
Fabio Fitness is an arm-heavy workout (35 minutes of the video’s 56 minute runtime, which includes warmup and cooldown) interspersed with strange dream sequences mid-lift. One minute you’re in a studio listening to Brenda, and the next you’re watching Fabio, sans green tank top, perform the routine alone atop a New York City skyscraper.
Fabio moved to New York City from Milan when he was nineteen years old, much to his father’s dismay. His father, Sauro Lanzoni, was a wealthy owner of a conveyer belt factory who hoped Fabio would work for him as a mechanical engineer. (“My son has been ruined by women,” Sauro told People in 1993.)
In interviews in recent years, Fabio has attempted to bootstrap the tale of his journey to America, but his tendency to brag mitigated his success. True, he arrived in New York without help from his wealthy family, but he still had $3,0003 of his own money, earned by modeling for the likes of Italian Vogue, and a place to stay with a fashion photographer friend. According to Fabio on the podcast The Inspiration Experience, he had only been in New York for one day before barging into the famous modeling agency, Wilhelmina, sans appointment. They offered to represent him on the spot, but this was not enough for Fabio. He then went to the rival modeling agency Ford, was offered representation there, and then was hand-picked by renown photographer Barry McKinley for their upcoming GAP campaign, where he was paid over six figures to fly to Hawaii and pose with Kathy Ireland and Andie McDowell.
Interestingly, Fabio’s cover modeling career was initially a moment of professional decline. He was making bank in the early 80s in high fashion campaigns, but by the time he was discovered by cover artist Elaine Duillo in 1985, he was languishing in obscurity as a fitness model.
The Author
I was listening to Brenda Dykgraaf instruct me on proper form for an overhead press when I noticed something on the wall behind her, to the left of her head. It was a poster of Fabio I was familiar with: he’s lying on a beach, strategically placed to make it appear as though he could be nude (Fabio does not pose naked), looking the camera dead in the eye. This poster was tip-in for Fabio’s 1993 authorial debut, Pirate.
In 1992 Fabio was on the rise: a hotline (1-900-93-FABIO), appearances on Regis and Kathie Lee, A Current Affair, Maury, and a steadily-growing fandom in romance readership who took notice when he posed for four iconic Johanna Lindsey covers in a row, all illustrated by Elaine Duillo: Defy Not the Heart, Savage Thunder, Warrior’s Woman and Gentle Rogue. This was the beginning of his bad blood with romance authors. The increased attention loosened his tongue in 1992 when People Magazine quoted his boast that “no one remembers who writes these books, but they remember Fabio.”
Fabio later argued that he was misquoted, but the damage was done. That same year, when Avon announced that Fabio would author (as in, he would dictate plots to his ghostwriter, Eugenia Riley) three romance novels for the then-lofty sum of $100,000, the resentment grew. Anne Stuart (queen, icon, mother!) called Fabio “a bimbo.” Historical romance author Kat Martin agreed, telling the Associated Press that “everybody has their talents. His talent is, he has the most incredible body you’ve ever seen.”
If you are imagining me simply watching Fabio Fitness on my computer as I write this, you have underestimated my commitment to the bit. I’m actually somewhat of a celebrity workout aficionado: I’ve sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons, I’ve chanted “I FEEL LOUSY” with Estelle Getty, and I’ve gotten my ass kicked by Jane Fonda. As of this writing, I’ve completed Fabio Fitness five times, enough to where I have Fabio and Brenda’s banter (generous of me to call it that!) memorized.
Fabio mostly mumbled encouragement throughout the video while Brenda took the lead, but at one moment he paused to offer an extended bit of dialogue that has worked its way into my daily affirmations: “Working out your back is very important, because when you wear that beautiful backless dress you’re gonna look very sexy, and everybody will notice you.”
It’s obvious that Fabio Fitness was created for women, because the motivational backless dress makes a regular reappearance. “Think of the backless dress!” Brenda gushed mid tricep extension.
I wasn’t thinking about the backless dress. I was thinking about how Fabio’s manager was arrested for trying to defraud the Cuban government by selling them nonexistent coffee beans.
The Manager
Fabio was originally represented by a woman named Rhonda Gainer, who Fabio parted ways with because he felt like she was marketing him as a beefcake and not trying to get him acting gigs. The man who would skyrocket him into popularity was his next manager, Peter F. Paul, an energetic, Paul Giamatti-esque figure with sunglasses, pinky rings, and another big idea perpetually on the horizon.
According to the Washington Post, “Peter Paul's life had spooled out like a B-movie, complete with the usual cliches: double crosses and death threats. So he was a natural to land in Hollywood.” He started as a hotshot international lawyer in Miami before his first big scheme went awry in the late 1970s. Paul and his cronies planned to sell the Cuban government 3,000 metric tons of coffee beans that they didn’t have for $8.75 million. They hired a freighter, planning to sink it, and then claim that the beans were lost at sea.
Instead, Paul was charged for possessing cocaine with the intention to sell, along with attempting to defraud the Cuban government. He plead guilty, was sentenced to eight years for the cocaine possession (three for the coffee fraud, to be served concurrently), and was released shortly after three years.
In a roundabout way, his next brush with the law brought him to Fabio. Paul attempted to cross the border into Canada under a false identity in the early 1980s, then was arrested again for violating his parole. He was sentenced to time in a California prison, and after his release he rebranded as a celebrity manager, with Fabio as his star client.
Fabio’s breakneck pace in 1993, his breakout year, was a Paul orchestration: the book, the album, Acapulco H.E.AT. and the talk shows. But Paul also helped Fabio craft an extraordinary fiction that journalists made a meal of- that the man could be your lover, if only he had the time. “Fabio’s personal longings have taken a backseat to a mission that fate—and his Beverly Hills business partner, Peter Paul, 47—has placed in his path,” wrote Michael Small in 1993’s People cover story.
“Fabio is able to make every woman he meets believe that he would love to spend the rest of the evening with her. It is the chance and tragedy of other commitments that keep them apart. If only this were, say, a flaming pirate ship instead of a crowded mall, things would be different. They would be together. Forever,” wrote Kathy Merryman in The News Tribune. “That is why his promoter, Peter Paul, travels with him. He’s an edgy guy in a black suit. He constantly checks his watch.”
Almost half the newspaper articles in the early 1990s gave Paul an obligatory shout-out, acknowledging that he was always waiting in the wings, ready to move Fabio into the next venture. Next it would be a fitness book! An appearance on Jay Leno. The iconic I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter! commercials. There’s no shortage of people claiming credit for Fabio’s fame, but Peter Paul is the reason Fabio broke out of the insulated romance fandom and into bonafide celebrity status through sheer cultural ubiquity.
Fabio and Paul parted ways sometime around 1995, but Paul continued to be almost as newsworthy as his former client. In 1998 Paul and Stan Lee co-founded Stan Lee Media, and in 2001 Paul was charged with artificially inflating the price of the company’s stock. Paul had already fled to Brazil by that time, where he spent his days suing the Clintons, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 senatorial campaign, and the FEC over donations he made to a Clinton gala. Paul was hoping his donation to Hillary’s campaign would work as a quid pro quo, getting Bill Clinton on the board for Stan Lee Media, and also that it would earn him a presidential pardon. Instead, Paul’s criminal record was reported by the media days after the gala, and Hillary Clinton said of Paul: I don’t know her.
Paul was unable to fight extradition from Brazil, so he was forcibly returned to New York. Once there, he plead guilty to securities fraud, served four years under house arrest and an additional five in a federal prison.
The Gentleman
In a few of the tricep sets Brenda Dykgraaf counted down to the last rep, then Fabio inexplicably went in for one more. You might say that’s a motivational gym hack, but I’ll call it for what it is: deception.
Almost everybody who meets Fabio has the same story. He’s the nicest guy. Perhaps because of his fan convention days, Fabio views celebrity as a job, with the requirement that you say hello, give a hug, and take a picture whenever asked. This has done wonders for his public reputation.
He’s also a self-appointed gentleman. “No, I don’t do that. I’m a gentleman,” he says in nearly every interview. He’s a girls guy. “He’s the first man to come forward and say, Listen, guys, you’ve got to meet [women] half-way,” Avon’s spokeswoman Liz Perl told LA Times in 1993.
“He seems like he has good manners,” a reader named Carrie told The Courier Journal. “If a lady said no, he’d probably take no. He wouldn’t be the type you had to fight off.” In her essay for Romantic Conventions, Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek quoted Donnamaie White on sexual harassment in her workplace, where she concluded that “these men do not inspire dreams, just disgust. Instead, I dream of Fabio… I have a framed autographed picture of Fabio prominently displayed on my office wall. It keeps me calm.” White would later go on to be the webmaster for the Fabio International Fan Club.
“Call me a romantic, call me a sucker, call me a wishful thinker, but I think some of the man’s thinking, his persona, is what transcended the anonymity of the cover art.” Johnson-Kurek wrote. “There seems to be this rather endearing quality about him that enables him to come across as an affable rather than an aloof Adonis. Was it hype? Was it promotion? Was there any way I’d ever be able to judge for myself?”
I have the benefit of hindsight and archival video footage that Johnson-Kurek did not possess in 1999 when she wrote this, so it is with no judgement that I answer her rhetorical question: promotion. Fabio, the product is not the same person as Fabio, the man. His sensitive reputation, spawned by his manager’s desire to sell things to women, concealed a sycophant who is easily goaded into misogyny. In 1995 Fabio told Howard Stern that his secretary, the “beautiful Chinese girl” that Stern met before the show, had a crush on the radio personality and that she would “come here and do anything you want.” Stern later joked about Fabio’s assistant giving him a blowjob, while Fabio, the gentleman, laughed along.
Fabio has never been publicly linked with a woman, and the only long-term relationship he has spoken of was with an anonymous fellow model in the early 1990s. She ended their four year relationship after Fabio cheated on her, an act that he regrets to this day.
So at the height of his fame he was always single, always looking, and luckily for the women of the 90s, he dated regular girls. “I look into the soul of the person. I don’t choose women for their celebrity or status. To me, people are people,” Fabio told the Chicago Tribune. “If a woman has a beautiful soul and she’s a celebrity, that’s great. But she can be a secretary or a person working at Kmart. I don’t care.”
He doesn’t care so long as they aren’t actresses, that is. "They are always complaining about their work, or how they are not working. About this casting or this part they are hoping to get, and I have to say, ‘Come on, you're a fucking waitress.’” Fabio told Details in 2008. “I don't say that, but I think that, you know, because I'm a gentleman.”
The Product
One thing about fandom that media outlets fail to grasp to this day is that community, rather than the figure it’s centered around, is the primary draw. In Fabio’s 1992 appearance on Maury, the infamous host trotted out a husband and wife duo with the express purpose of interrogating the woman’s— Ellen Wulf’s — fascination with the cover hunk. The audience peppered the Wulfs with questions about their sex life (how unfulfilling it must be, how Ellen’s husband Scott needed to try harder to make romantic gestures) because clearly her fandom was a result of some romantic void. Ellen disagreed, saying that when her friend bought her a copy of Johanna Lindsey’s Warrior’s Woman, she thought Fabio was the perfect model for the hero. “It’s not Fabio that I’m in love with,” she said. “It’s the image.”4 Ellen Wulf would go on to become the president of the Fabio International Fan Club.
“There’s a group of us that get together and exchange books, discuss books, and we’re having a cover contest coming up,” another woman from the audience commented on Maury. “As a matter of fact Fabio is entered as our favorite cover guy.”
The much-heralded fantasy of Fabio is not actually predicated on women who believed Fabio would actually date them, but journalists who couldn’t conceptualize Fabio Mania as anything but a literal mass hysteria. The Gentleman is fake, but he survived the 90s unchallenged. It’s no coincidence that now that he’s got less to sell, he’s more comfortable subjecting the world to his execrable birdbrain opinions.
When Fabio came out swinging against lack of machismo on modern romance covers last year all I could think was who gives a shit?
I would say, “Give this man a journal” but that would be asking too much of him. Avon no longer pays for his ghostwriter.
Me, Elsewhere:
If you enjoyed this piece then you will really enjoy the inevitable two-part Fabio deep dive on the Reformed Rakes podcast. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe and you’ll be ready when the episodes drop later this year.
Speaking of Reformed Rakes, recent episodes include Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran, and Graciella (the hilarious @grapiedeltaco) joined us for an episode on A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera.
Source Timeline:
Apr. 1992 - Fabio | Maury Povich
Jul. 13, 1992 - “Rankled romance writer: Pretty men should be seen, not heard” – Bob Cook, Associated Press
Feb. 8, 1993 - “A Man for All Paperbacks” – Amy Wilson, Detroit Free Press
Sep. 23, 1993 - “ON LOCATION WITH: Fabio; Please, Judge the Book by Its Cover” – Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Oct. 4, 1993 - “Love for Sale” – Michael Small, PEOPLE
Nov. 5, 1993 - “Superhunk Fabio mesmerizes mall crowd” – Beverly Bartlett, The Courier-Journal
Oct. 31, 1993 - “Ohhhhh Fabio!” – Mike Capuzzo, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Dec. 12, 1993 - “Fallen for Fabio” – Kathleen Merryman, The News Tribune
Dec. 16, 1993 - “He’s Eating Alone Tonight: the mystique of Fabio’s H.E.A.T” – Arion Berger, LA Weekly
1995 - Fabio | Howard Stern Show on E!
Jun. 27, 1996 - “He came, he hugged, he conquered” – Cheryl Lavin, Chicago Tribune
1999 - “I’m not a Bimbo: Persona, Promotion, and the Fabulous Fabio” by Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek, Romantic Conventions
Oct. 9, 2005 - “House of Cards” – April White, The Washington Post
Jan. 14, 2008 - “Fabio” – Karl Taro Greenfeld, Details
May 17, 2017 - Fabio: Don't give up your guns | Varney & Co
Mar. 26, 2018 - Fabio | Really Famous with Kara Mayer Robinson
Aug. 11, 2021 - The Search for Ultimate '90s Hunk Fabio - Jason Sheeler, PEOPLE
Nov. 18, 2023 - “The world right now is ‘upside down’: Fabio” | Cavuto: Coast to Coast
Jun. 20, 2023 - “Romance novels ditch hunks for ‘squishy-centered’ men — Fabio calls it ‘hogwash’” – Jerry Oppenheimer, New York Post
Jun. 2, 2021 - Fabio Lanzoni | The Inspiration Experience
Two things: Regarding Avian Death, the media had a field day when in 1999 a goose hit Fabio in the face when he was riding a rollercoaster called Apollo’s Chariot at Busch Gardens. Fabio contests this, saying that the goose hit a video camera, and a piece of the camera ended up hitting his face. Second point: I was thinking of the way Patty Hearst screams “Please, fashion has changed!” in Serial Mom before Kathleen Turner brains her with a payphone for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. Perfect Movie.
Her last name is pronounced DYE-craff, the “g” is silent.
That’s late 70, so calculators put that around the $13,000-$14,000 mark in today’s currency.
Johanna Lindsey’s Warrior’s Woman is a particularly hilarious example of a book that Fabio is "perfect for.” In Warrior’s Woman Lindsey built a world of hyper-masculine comedic He-Men barbarians, and the hero, Challen, is the drag-you-by-your-hair sort. It’s self-aware, it’s camp. Barbarella meets Star Trek.
I have nothing impressive to say but I must let you know that "I would say, “Give this man a journal” but that would be asking too much of him. Avon no longer pays for his ghostwriter" GAGGED ME while I was reading, 10/10
JUSTICE FOR BRENDA