“Which would madam prefer?” Elizabeth Taylor’s waiter asks her in the 1973 film Ash Wednesday. “Perrier, Vichy, Apollinaris or Crodo?”
“Well,” deadpans Taylor, looking down mournfully at her meal — alcohol banned as part of the miracle treatment in a Swiss clinic that will restore her youthful beauty — “whichever goes best with roast beef.”
Beyond my own neat little Swiss table for one, a trim green lawn slopes down towards the lake, the gentle blue of which terminates in the Dents du Midi, dusted with snow, askance in the distance.
In front of me is a study in exhaustion of all the interesting things you can do — on a plate — with a carrot. No roast beef for me. Or meat. Or alcohol. Or caffeine. Or gluten. Or dairy. And barely any sugar. I have two glasses of water. One has had extra hydrogen ions added to it, which sounds like the libatory equivalent of zero plus zero.
For a few days I am a guest of the Clinique La Prairie, the medical spa on Lake Geneva that in nine decades has established an almost mythic status in the luxury of living longer — and more beautifully. Most sanatoria fight diseases. But when you are this rich, you fight time itself.
Some months ago, in writing an article about one of the largest frauds in Swiss history, I had snarkily mentioned Clinique La Prairie in passing: an executive’s wife had used company funds to pay for a stay (US$250,000). Soon after publication, the clinic got in touch: perhaps I would like to visit?
In the first instance, I thought yes, because, well — voyeurism: the opportunity to move around one of the most rarefied enclaves of the super-rich, incognito. Just 30 guests stay at the clinic at any one time.
More robustly, I was curious — and this I pitched to my editor — at how in the wake of a global pandemic, Switzerland’s historic palaces of health were faring, with illness and mortality still so raw in our cultural psyche.
And finally yes because of, being perfectly frank, personal vanity: I’m in my late thirties, and I barely have the patience to stay in the bath for five minutes, let alone on a massage table or in a spa, but I am conceited enough to have started fretting already about the effects of time.
Suburbia for millionaires
Clinique La Prairie (or CLP, but never La Prairie, because that is the trademark of the eponymous ultra-luxury skincare brand that was sold off as a separate business in 1982) is tucked into the outskirts of Montreux, at the eastern end of Lake Geneva.
It comprises a mini-campus of buildings set back from the lake shoreline, in a hinterland of upscale 1970s apartment buildings and belle époque villas, dotted with palm and mimosa, that are the vernacular of the Riviera vaudoise. A suburbia for millionaires.
There is the original clinic — a prim building with mustard-yellow sun awnings that could pass as a family pensione. There is the medical centre — a 1990s PoMo monstrosity of blue glass. There is the main block of accommodation — the Château — a former girls’ school. And there is the modern, gleaming spa and reception complex. The whole effect is manicured, but not grand.
The money here goes on personal attention, not architectural theatrics. CLP’s staff elevate blandishment to art, but then there are seven of them for every guest. I am here for a “detox-reset”, the entry-level treatment the clinic offers.
Taylor’s Ash Wednesday was not explicitly set here, but there is no doubt about the pedigree of the “cellular therapy” she receives — injections of foetal cells from unborn lambs. This is the paracelsian witchcraft that made CLP’s name, pioneered by its founder Dr Paul Niehans in the early 20th century.
The almost biblical queerness of the procedure was not lost on at least one fan: Pope Pius XII (whose wartime record might be most charitably described as not-infallible) was an early client. While on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in the 1950s, the story goes, he secretly dispatched a papal nuncio to the clinic to fetch a pot of face cream.
A roll call of other visitors includes Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, Konrad Adenauer, Bernard Baruch, Thomas Mann, Hedda Hopper and Charles de Gaulle.
My detox programme — in common with CLP’s modern approach — is more down to earth: a tightly controlled selection of foods, herbal teas and waters, and, each day, a sample range of physiotherapeutic treatments.
Soon after arriving I sit down for tea with CLP’s chief executive, Simone Gibertoni. He took over the running of the clinic in 2016, appointed by the chair of the company, Gregor Mattli, son of owner Armin Mattli, with a brief to transform it into a global super-brand.
Gibertoni, an Italian with a background in consulting and cosmetics, is sharply dressed, quick to charm and knows his business inside out. Branding is his métier. Under him, CLP has already opened mini-clinics in Madrid and Bangkok. Two more clinics will open this year: one in Doha and a full-scale “longevity resort” in China.
As well as this, Gibertoni says, CLP is looking to become a more everyday part of its clients’ lives — not just a wellness Shangri-la they escape to every two years. An app, the promise of regular remote consultations, and a range of supplements — which you might glibly think of as the world’s most expensive vitamin tablets — will extend CLP’s business reach. This is not just canny business, but also more honest healthcare.
“Despite all the money being put into this in Silicon Valley, there is not going to be a magic molecule that stops ageing anytime soon,” says Gibertoni. “Longevity is a journey.” And CLP, he says, is the best place in the world to undertake it.
Luxury v science
In recent years, longevity has become the biggest buzzword in the US$1.5 trillion (NZ$2.4t) global wellness industry. Looking younger, or feeling younger is no longer enough. Now you must be younger.
In essence, this was the original promise of Niehans’ cellular therapy, decades ahead of today’s vogue, making CLP a trailblazer. Quite what that counts for is up for discussion: the clinic’s website claims Niehans achieved “spectacular” results with his injections, though for my money, all you probably need to know is that he also claimed they could treat “homosexual and lesbian tendencies”. He was, in other words, a crank.
Regardless, modern longevity science is more cogent: ageing, it contends, is simply the breakdown of our cells’ abilities to read the ageless DNA “blueprint” they contain. A 13-year study by Harvard scientists published only last month found this “epigenetic deterioration” to be the “primary driver of ageing in mammals”.
Using a battery of highly sophisticated biochemical tests — including a full genomic blueprint in record time — CLP promises its modern clients it can identify and micro-target the specific elements of their lifestyles that cause this damage. On offer, in place of a miracle injection, is a bespoke health plan: a personalised lifestyle change, geared to slowing down age. My detox-reset was a taster of this.
As I pad around, robe-clad, from day to day and treatment to treatment in an atmosphere of calm, textureless luxury, however, I often find myself wondering where the cosseting ends and the science begins.
Some of the treatments I couldn’t help but be sceptical of: sitting in an infrared device resembling an iron lung for 45 minutes and having hot oil slowly dripped on to my forehead (after a blitz in a cryo tank), were both deeply soporific, but I can’t believe they did much for my cells.
On the other hand, there were sessions that highlighted evident shortcomings in my lifestyle: the deep-tissue masseuse — a slight, elderly woman of evident talent and with a penchant for physical manipulation subtly short of violence — struck a chord when she pointed out how unbelievably tense my muscles were. Quite how activated my lymphatic system was after two hours of muscular abuse, I did not know.
But that my hypervigilance and back problems would complicate sleep, and mental health, as we discussed at length, was enlightening and made me think of permanent changes I needed to make after I left. Even — heaven help me — yoga?
There was, I felt on reflection, absolutely something to be said for the clinic’s holistic approach.
Back to the carrot: was a carrot ever so delicious? I had expected the dietary strictures of my time at CLP to be the biggest bore. In fact, they were the opposite. Lunch and dinner were three-course meals that were inventive and delicious. (Evidently not everyone felt so. Midweek, two teenagers from a large extended family turned up to lunch with two big McDonald’s bags.)
In absolute truth, after just four days, I had not felt healthier or fitter in months. I was sleeping deeply and well. And yet...
The evening before I left, I stayed up late in my room, trawling the internet for articles on ageing and the point of all this. There is a moral question, of course, about having so much money that you can buy treatments that will, in promise at least, take a class of humans closer to becoming demigods. But even before that, I think, comes that hoary old cliché of whether a longer life, or even a more beautiful looking one, is a better one.
None of us wants to feel old. The cure can’t be found in a syringe, a pill or a pot of cream, the longevity (née wellness), industry now knowingly tells us. But I’m yet to be convinced we’ll find it in a diet, or a lifestyle, either, regardless of how meticulously crafted and how expensive to maintain they are.
- Sam Jones is the FT’s Austria and Switzerland correspondent. He was a guest of Clinique La Prairie. A five-day detox-reset, including accommodation, costs from SFr9800 (NZ$16,797)
Written by: Sam Jones
© Financial Times