"Who Killed Lolo Ferrari?: The Mysterious Death of a European Tit Queen"
On March 5, 2000, French Porn Star Lolo Ferrari Was Found Dead. Three Years Later, No One's Quite Sure If She Committed Suicide, Accidentally Overdosed or Was the Victim of Homicide at the Hands of Her Husband.
Photos by Mark Kismet
Every year, French porn star Lolo Ferrari, who lived just a 20-minute drive from Cannes, descended on the famous film festival, causing hordes of paparazzi to swarm around her.
Photographers were naturally attracted to the over-the-top, bleach-blond bombshell, who possessed two of the largest breasts in the history of mankind; she had a reputed 71-inch bust. Lolo was simultaneously grotesque and beautiful. With her blunt-cut bangs, almond-shaped eyes and supersized lips, Lolo resembled a plastic-surgery-loving, smut version of Brigitte Bardot.
The voluptuous starlet would strut in skintight pants and adorned with pounds of gaudy jewelry, including at least one ring on each finger. Her nipples, which were the size of silver-dollar pancakes, would peek out of her low-cut, pink-spandex top to the delight of ogling spectators.
"To walk down the street with her— people would literally stop their cars, because she [had] such a shock value—this huge-boobed girl with a tiny waist, skinny legs, wearing all this gold and pink," recalls Mark Kismet, director of Hustler Video's Busty Beauties series, who photographed the human oddity in France.
Then, on Sunday, March 5, 2000, the larger-than-life sexpot was dead. Eric Vigne, Lolo's husband/manager, said he discovered his wife's motionless body early that afternoon in the upstairs bedroom of their house. She was 37 years old.
Although she was never a household name in America, Lolo was well-known throughout Europe. Her fame grew as fast as her breasts, which, thanks to the large number of augmentations directed by Vigne, were gargantuan at the time of her death.
With the help of her Svengali-like husband, Lolo parlayed her freaky figure into a moderately successful career. Often billed as having the largest breasts in the world, Lolo starred in porn flicks, posed for numerous men's magazines, performed a nightclub act, dabbled in pop stardom with a couple of singles and even became a television personality.
Lolo (née Eve Vallois) was born into a wealthy French family and was raised in La Baule, a chic resort community. Her father was a senior official in France's nuclear-energy program.
Growing up, the young, green-eyed Eve was a bright student, whom everyone considered pretty. Even so, she was never satisfied with her appearance. "I've never felt comfortable with my body," admitted Lolo.
Lolo was estranged from her family and had not talked to them in years. "Every time they saw me, my parents told me to get my breasts shrunk and take off my rings and cut my high heels down," recalled Lolo. "When someone tells me something like that, I just want to die."
"I was a dreadful mother," admitted Lolo's mom, Catherine Vallois, after her daughter's death. "I hated my body, and I wanted my daughter to hate her body and hate herself as well."
Lolo began her surgical sojourn in 1990. "For my mouth, we removed my cupid's bow, tucked the mucous membranes up to my nose, and filled my lips with collagen." In the ensuing years, Lolo would also 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 proud of 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 molds for the aeronautics industry," he once boasted. "The designer made the molds, and I gave them to a prosthetics maker who produced the empty silicone implants. It took a long, long time to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. Each [implant] was filled with two liters 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 feel wonderful in clinics. I love the feeling of general anesthetic—falling into this black hole and knowing I'm being altered as I sleep."
Besides deriving pleasure from the procedures themselves, Lolo seemed relatively pleased with her surgical results. "Having a big bust comforts me," Lolo 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 there are medical problems; you can't stretch the skin any more."
"The bags were as hard as this table top," remembers photographer Mark Kismet, knocking on a wooden desk. "They were like rocks; there was no give." (In her sex films, Lolo and her co-stars didn't so much grab her breasts, but rather rubbed them as they would two huge crystal balls.)
Ferrari became something of 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 a regular on the BBC's late-night television show Eurotrash.
"She could have been huge in the U.S.," says Kismet. "She would have made a fortune, because you just don't see girls with that size boobs, and they don't make them that big in this country anymore. She could have been rich beyond rich, because she loved to perform; that was her thing. She really liked to be in front of the camera and be the best she could be—if it was singing, modeling [or acting in] videos." Unfortunately, Ferrari never made the trip to America, as she was deathly afraid of flying. She feared that the cabin would depressurize, 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.
All the fame and plastic surgery in the world never made Lolo truly happy. Ferrari was known to suffer from severe depression and anxiety—two conditions that often accompany Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a rare psychological condition characterized by an irrational conviction that one's body is never attractive enough, which some experts believe Lolo suffered from. She turned to alcohol, as well as antidepressants and other pills. Thus, to many observers, it seemed no surprise that Lolo had overdosed on prescription medications and finally become the lifeless blow-up doll she so desperately wanted to resemble. However, questions soon began to emerge as to whether or not the death was intentional.
At first, Vigne told authorities that his wife would never have committed suicide, but he later changed his story. According to Vigne, Lolo had been planning her own funeral soon before her death, visiting a funeral director and picking out a white coffin in which she hoped to be buried with her favorite teddy bear. "She wanted to be a star, but she couldn't bear living," says Vigne. "She often said she'd kill herself if I wasn't there, and a few times she tried."
Perhaps tellingly, Lolo recorded a song just before she died, a bluesy number entitled "Set Me Free." 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 demise, 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.
After being questioned, Vigne was released. Then, two years later, a curious thing happened: A team of three police scientists reported that the medications in Lolo's body thought to have caused her death had not completely metabolized. More significantly, the team concluded that Ferrari had died of suffocation. They detected cyanosis of the lips, nails and hands, a symptom of asphyxiation in which deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood creates a blue tinge.
Some people speculated that the former Miss Tits Europe, who couldn't sleep on her back because the weight of her breasts interfered with her breathing, may have been strangled to death by her own mammaries.
French authorities, however, have a different theory. In late February 2002, almost two years to the day after Lolo's demise, Vigne was arrested on suspicion of homicide and spent more than a year in jail.
There were some discrepancies between Vigne's statements and those of his neighbors. Witnesses said that they saw Lolo come home at 9 a.m., but Vigne claimed that his wife had slept throughout the night. Vigne's story is further contradicted by evidence that Ferrari had eaten breakfast—an improbable occurrence if, as Vigne claimed, she had slept in.
Lolo's mother hired an attorney, Michel Cardix, to go after Vigne, whom she blames for her daughter's death. "The best revenge would be to pour acid on Eric's face," she once asserted. (Cardix refused numerous requests to comment on the case.)
"There isn't any material proof of suffocation or strangulation," insists Michel Pautot, Vigne's attorney.
"That's why we say that Mr. Vigne is innocent."
But if Vigne did kill his bride, what would be his motivation? "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."
Vigne himself called Lolo "the goose that laid my golden eggs."
Even after his wife's death, Vigne found a way to cash in on the big-busted beauty: He sold a picture of her lying in her coffin to a German television company.
The prosecutors believe that Lolo had plans to leave her husband, citing that he was already in the process of promoting a new act: a pair of implant-enhanced sisters, called the Silicone Girls, whose breast augmentations had been financed by Vigne. But Pautot maintains that the large-breasted siblings were always part of the act, being backup singers for Lolo's gigs. Perhaps worse (in Vigne's mind) than her possible desertion, Lolo reportedly told friends that she was considering removing her breast implants.
There was some media speculation that jealousy was another possible motive, though this seems unlikely. It was well-known that Lolo was romantically involved with a police investigator from Monaco, an affair that Vigne was thought to have tolerated. (He did let her fuck guys onscreen, after all.) Kismet doesn't think Vigne was the jealous type. When Kismet photographed Lolo, the always-pleasant Vigne would just go to sleep during the photo-shoots, unlike most suitcase pimps, who hang over every shot.
"It seemed to me that he really didn't care [if she cheated] as long as she was famous," says Kismet. "It's odd that he should kill her; it doesn't make a lot of sense."
After spending a year in jail, Vigne was finally released in March 2003. Vigne (and the European tabloids) await France's trial of the century. Perhaps then we will finally learn who—or what—killed Lolo Ferrari.
(This article first appeared in the September 2003 issue of Hustler Magazine)
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