Australian Penthouse

By Dan Kapelovitz

On March 5, 2000, French porn star Lolo Ferrari was found dead. Nearly a decade later, no-one’s sure if she committed suicide, overdosed accidentally, or was the victim of homicide

Every year, French porn star Lolo Ferrari would descend on the Cannes Film Festival, causing hordes of paparazzi
to swarm. Photographers were naturally attracted to the over-the-top, bleach-blonde bombshell, who possessed two of the largest breasts in the history of humankind.

Lolo was simultaneously grotesque and oddly beautiful. With her blunt-cut fringe, almond-shaped eyes and supersized lips, she resembled a plastic-surgery-addicted smut sister to Brigitte Bardot. The voluptuous starlet would strut in skintight pants and adorned with pounds of gaudy jewellery. Her nipples—roughly the size of pancakes—would peek out of her low-cut, pink spandex top to the delight of ogling spectators.

“People would literally stop their cars [for her], because she had such a shock value—this huge-boobed girl with a tiny waist, skinny legs, wearing all this gold and pink,” recalls video director Mark Kismet, who photographed Lolo.
On Sunday, March 5, 2000, the larger-than-life sexpot was dead. Eric Vigne, Lolo’s husband and manager, said he discovered his wife’s body early that afternoon in the upstairs bedroom of their house. She was 37 years old.

The exact cause of Ferrari’s death remains unclear. The initial coroner’s report concluded that Lolo died from either an accidental or intentional overdose of prescription medications. Later, authorities placed blame on Vigne.

BIRTH OF A BOMBSHELL

Lolo (née Eve Vallois) was born into a wealthy French family and was raised in La Baule, a chic resort community.
Growing up, green-eyed Eve was a bright student, whom everyone considered pretty. Yet she was never satisfied with her appearance. Lolo’s self-image problems may well have been rooted in her unhappy childhood, during which her mother made her feel insecure.

“My mother told me I was ugly and stupid,” Lolo once said in an interview. “She said I was only good for emptying chamber pots.”

“I was a dreadful mother,” admitted Lolo’s mum, Catherine Vallois, after her daughter’s death. “I hated my body, and I wanted my daughter to hate her body and hate herself as [much as I did].”

Lolo’s life forever changed in 1987, when she met Eric Vigne. The two married within the year. Eve changed her name to Lolo, derived from the French slang for tits, les lolos, and adopted the last name Ferrari. Lolo’s Svengali-like husband wanted his wife to change more than just her name, and in 1990, Lolo’s long surgical sojourn began. “For my mouth, we removed my cupid’s bow, tucked the mucous membranes up to my nose, and filled my lips with collagen,” she claimed proudly.

In ensuing years, Lolo would submit herself to rhinoplasty, silicone injections and numerous other cosmetic procedures. However, the majority of the surgeries served to increase her bust—as much as her skin could stretch without tearing.

Vigne was extremely pleased with his über-breasted creation. “I calculated the volume, the diameter—I drew up the plans, and I took them to a guy I know who designs fuselage moulds for the aeronautics industry,” he once boasted.

“The designer made the moulds and I gave them to a prosthetics maker, who produced the empty silicone implants. It took a long time to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. Each [implant] was filled with two litres of serum. A bit later, we increased it to three.”

An all-too-willing victim, Lolo enjoyed going under the knife. “I adore being operated on,” gushed the star of Double Airbags and Planet Boobs. “I love the feeling of general anesthetic—falling into this black hole and knowing I’m being altered as I sleep.” Aside from deriving pleasure from the procedures themselves, Lolo seemed relatively happy with the surgical results. “Having a big bust comforts me,” Lolo once said. “It makes me more sure of myself. I’m like a transvestite; I’ve created a femininity that’s completely artificial, but I’d like to have even bigger breasts. I can’t, because you can’t stretch the skin any more.”

“The bags were as hard as this tabletop,” remembers Kismet, knocking on a wooden desk. “They were like rocks; there was no give.”

Lolo’s fame grew as fast as her breasts, and she parlayed her freaky figure into a successful career as a cult celebrity. Besides being featured in porn flicks and XXX magazines, Lolo had a nightclub act in which she performed her bouncy Euro-disco single Airbag Generation, and she was also a regular on the BBC’s late-night television series Eurotrash.

“She could have been huge in the US,” says Kismet, “because you just don’t see girls with that size boobs, and they don’t make them that big in this country anymore.” Unfortunately, Ferrari never made the trip to America, as she was deathly afraid of flying. She feared that the cabin would depressurise, causing her breasts to explode. A prisoner of her own altered body, Lolo was also said to be constantly worried that a fan would jump up onstage and puncture her titanic tits. Fame and plastic surgery failed to make her truly happy, and she turned to alcohol, antidepressants, and other pills.

DEATH OF A BOMBSHELL

At first, Vigne told authorities that his wife would never commit suicide. He later changed his story. According to Vigne, Lolo had been planning her own demise soon before her death, visiting a funeral director and picking out a white coffin in which she hoped to be buried with her favourite teddy bear.

Interviews with Lolo seem to support the suicide theory. “All this stuff,” Lolo said, pointing to her massive mammaries, “has been because I can’t stand life. But it hasn’t changed anything. There are moments when I disconnect totally from reality. Then I can do anything, absolutely anything. I swallow pills, I throw myself out of windows. Dying seems very easy then.”

Three months after Lolo’s sad passing, Vigne was arrested for ‘non-assistance to a person in danger’, the same charge that French authorities considered for the paparazzi who took photos of Princess Diana as she lay dying in her wrecked Mercedes-Benz in 1997.

Vigne was questioned and released. Two years later, a team of three police scientists reported that the medications in Lolo’s body thought to have caused her death had not completely metabolised. More significantly, the team came to the conclusion that Ferrari had died of suffocation. People speculated that Lolo, who couldn’t sleep on her back because the weight of her huge breasts interfered with her breathing, may have been strangled to death by her own boobs. French authorities, however, had a different theory: In February 2002, Vigne was arrested on suspicion of homicide.

Lolo’s mother hired an attorney to go after Vigne, whom she blamed for her daughter’s death. “The best revenge would be to pour acid on Eric’s face,” she once asserted.

“There isn’t any material proof of suffocation or strangulation,” insists Michel Pautot, Vigne’s defence attorney. “That’s why we say that Mr Vigne is innocent.”

But if Vigne did murder his bride, what was his motivation for doing so? “Eric earned his income through his wife,” says Pautot. “His wife was his breadwinner and he was her agent, so he got commission off of her. He wouldn’t have any interest in killing her.”

Prosecutors believe that Lolo had plans to leave her husband, but after spending a year in jail, Vigne was released with no charge.

We may never learn who—or what—killed Lolo Ferrari.

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