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Daily Mail
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Diet-obsessed TV star who got Hollywood hooked on first rapid weight loss pill before scandal brought it down has stark Ozempic warning
To the stars, it must have seemed too good to be true - a miracle pill that would help them shed those last few pounds in time for the weekend's red carpet. The product was StarCaps, a powerful diuretic. Nikki Haskell, the drug's creator, claims celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Winslet, Chelsea Handler, Ivana Trump, Beverly Johnson and even President Bill Clinton were all taking it. Haskell befriended many household names ranging from Michael Jackson to Imelda Marcos, and even brought her pal Donald Trump with his new bride Ivana to the opening night of Studio 54. StarCaps hit the scene in the 1980s and swept Hollywood by the '90s, with billboards up and down the Sunset Strip splashed with slogans like 'Dare To Be Thin' - but that was before an explosive scandal brought the whole enterprise crashing down. In 2008, Haskell was sued by an NFL star who got suspended when he tested positive for a banned substance that can be used to hide steroid use. He blamed StarCaps, triggering a rollercoaster of legal drama that left Haskell bankrupt. Now, Haskell exclusively tells the Daily Mail about the rise and fall of the original Hollywood weight-loss hack, and how she became the 'scapegoat' for the ultimate juggernaut of American professional sports. Who Is Nikki Haskell? Haskell, who calls Hollywood hot spot Craig's her 'favorite fast food restaurant,' has watched her weight like a hawk all her life. She is not opposed to Ozempic and its 'phenomenal' impact, given the 'huge crisis' of obesity in America, but she also takes pains to draw a distinction between the potent diabetes drug and what she maintains was her own 'natural product.' Her mother 'put me on a diet when I was born' and wanted her to be 'born married,' she quipped over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge. Haskell's go at matrimony yielded less than fairytale results - two failed marriages to the same man - but the first divorce got her $18,000 that she successfully invested, leading to a career as one of the first female stock brokers on Wall Street. When she got tired of finance, she moved to showbiz, hosting a globetrotting interview program called The Nikki Haskell Show that pioneered the formula subsequently turned into a sprawling industry by series like Entertainment Tonight. Brooke Shields, Giorgio Armani, Andy Warhol, Sophia Loren, Kevin Kline, Liza Minnelli, the Trumps, the Marcoses, all wound up chitchatting with Haskell on camera. In April 1977 Haskell brought her pals, the newlywed Trumps, to the opening of a buzzy new Manhattan nightspot called Studio 54 - but The Donald was 'not a club person,' and when they arrived at the venue at what was apparently the preposterously early time of 10:30pm it was still being painted. 'So they weren't even playing any music yet. We were there when they dropped the first record and we stayed there for awhile,' she said. 'So when we we went out the back door, there were thousands of people pushed against the door. This is the back door, not even the front door. They went all the way around the block. So that's what happened. People couldn't get into Studio and because they couldn't get in, it became a hit.' How It Started 'It took me 10 years to become an overnight success,' Haskell says now. By 1986, surrounded by an army of showbiz connections and with supermodel Beverly Johnson as her best friend, Haskell was poised to create a product that would eventually grow into a Hollywood sensation. Enter StarCaps, billed as a natural diuretic made from garlic and papaya, capsulized in Peru and then priced at $100 for a bottle of 30 tablets. Unlike the injectable Ozempic, which has helped users shed over 100lbs, Haskell's diet pills would only 'flush you out' and enable a few pounds of weight loss. Tireless and determined, she hustled around to the drugstores herself, hawking her product to the leery owners and being turned down again and again. Her ship finally came in when she had lunch in New York with Liza Minnelli and then took her to the upscale Madison Avenue pharmacy Boyd's, where she made an attempt to finagle StarCaps onto the shelves - and got an unexpected helping hand from the city's spiraling crime problem. 'I was pitching the product to the owner and just then a woman yells out: "I've been robbed! I've been robbed!" Like right in the middle of my sales pitch,' said Haskell. 'Everybody walked away. I was like hysterical.' Luckily, the fact Minnelli was at the scene of a theft at a swank Upper East Side redoubt meant Haskell got a call from the famous gossip columnist Cindy Adams. 'And I told her what happened and she wrote the first story about the StarCaps,' Haskell proudly recalled. The product was then featured on the popular tabloid TV show Hard Copy, and the business was off and running. She hit the road as a saleswoman for her pills, dashing around to drugstores and conventions, occasionally with Beverly Johnson in tow. 'It was really a hard job,' she says now. 'I mean, I give myself a lot of credit. I did not take no for an answer.' The Rise... In the 1990s, as the StarCaps craze gathered steam, Haskell had a brainwave that tuned her brand into a part of the Los Angeles landscape. Following on from the era of Angelyne and her pink Corvette, Haskell acquired a string of billboards along the Sunset Strip, with her own trim frame and broad smile prominently featured as she held up her diet pills. She unveiled the first ad at a party attended by Milton Berle and Red Buttons, and the billboards then quickly spread, blaring messages at commuters like: 'You don't have to be a star to look like one,' 'Dare to be thin,' and 'One size fits all.' Haskell had now fashioned herself and StarCaps into a Hollywood landmark, an achievement that hit only a slight snag when her billboards disappeared one day. The company that owned them had, it turned out, been sold to another firm whose CEO Brian Kennedy had taken down Haskell's ads and would only agree to restore them at what she said was a brutal markup. She recalled that over lunch at La Scala on a rainy day in Beverly Hills, he informed her that if she wanted her billboards back she would have to splash out $25,000 a month, at which point she duly dissolved into floods of tears. 'I never cry,' she said. 'I'm not a crier. I'm not a crybaby, and I got hysterical. I don't know. And he went: "No, no, no, whatever you do, here, stop crying."' Having weakened his defenses, Haskell sweetened by the pot by offering him artwork by the acclaimed American painter LeRoy Neiman, who happened to be a friend of hers, and whom Kennedy happened to hugely admire. 'I mean, if I had given him a Picasso he wouldn't have wanted it,' said Haskell. 'He only wanted LeRoy Neimans. I mean, how lucky was that?' Her success did put the occasional crimp in her love life, as when she went on a blind date at the bar of the Sunset Tower Hotel with a man who 'looked like Robert Redford' but appeared not to know who she was. Over dinner, he told her he had no desire for the 'spotlight' and hoped to lead a 'very quiet life' - only for them to stroll out of the hotel and be immediately confronted by the sight of a massive billboard with his date's face on it. StarCaps enjoyed 70 percent repeat business and 'no returns,' she insisted. 'Nobody ever got sick from it, nobody ever had a problem with it. It was a hit. It was flawless.' ...And Fall The beginning of the end came in 2008, when NFL lineman Jamar Nesbit of the New Orleans Saints was slapped with a four-game drug suspension. His system had been found to contain the banned substance bumetanide, a loop diuretic that can be used to conceal steroids or performance-enhancing drugs by flushing them out of a player's system before he has to get tested. Nesbit turned around and sued Haskell, claiming the bumetanide was only in his body because he was taking StarCaps, which he had no idea contained it. Indeed, the StarCaps bottle described the formula as a 'natural extract' of 'papaya and garlic,' with no mention of bumetanide. A cascade of NFL players started pinning the blame on StarCaps when their drug tests turned up evidence of the prohibited chemical. Haskell wound up in court fighting for the life of her company, not to mention the whopping $17 million worth of pills she had just gotten bottled. Six years after Nesbit's drug test, Haskell pled guilty to misbranding StarCaps by failing to disclose there was any bumetanide in it. Now, however, she insists that the product never actually contained bumetanide at all, which she says she knew because she maintains she had her StarCaps tested when they arrived in America after being capsulized in Peru. Haskell's argument is that the StarCaps did not have bumetanide in them when they were ingested in the proper amounts, but that 'if you take a high concentration of something, it becomes another product.' Her guilty plea, she says, was the final result of years of catastrophic legal advice by various attorneys, some of whom 'got me in more trouble than I was already in.' She burned through $20 million of her life savings on lawyers, over the course of a bruising battle that drove her to declare personal and corporate bankruptcy. Haskell says she ultimately gave up and pled guilty because her finances had been depleted and she would have had to 'depose the whole NFL' to keep going. She becomes visibly emotional when discussing the ordeal even now, a decade later, and at times appears as though she might be on the verge of tears. Haskell maintains she became a 'scapegoat' for steroid use in pro football, where the alleged offenders 'went up to NFL Heaven, and they blamed me and the whole thing went away for them, but I lost my business.' One silver lining was that her celebrity friends rallied around her, including Ivana Trump, who was 'very protective of me.' However she had to have her $17 million worth of StarCaps destroyed, a blow that still rankles with her, emblematic of the saga she now looks back on as 'the most devastating experience I've ever had in my life.' Ozempic 'I'm never gonna change my passion for the diet industry and for health and things that you shouldn't be eating,' said Haskell, who noted by way of example that she 'wouldn't drink a Coca-Cola if you paid me.' She takes a nuanced view of the current Ozempic trend sweeping Hollywood, where a drug created to treat diabetes has turned into a galloping weight loss fad because of its function as an appetite suppressant. Haskell feels the 'end result' of the injectable 'has been phenomenal,' given the 'hit' taken by 'the snack industry and the candy industry. All the profits are down because people have stopped eating as much.' Indeed, junk food companies including Frito-Lay, Campbell's, General Mills and Kraft Heinz have suffered financially in the past year, per the Wall Street Journal. 'The only problem is,' said Haskell: 'you're not changing your eating habits. You're just eating less. And the trick to diet is you have to change your eating habits.' Case in point: having had ice cream with lunch, Haskell skipped dinner that night.
Los Angeles Times
24-03-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
At some L.A. restaurants, table bread is the main attraction
When is the last time a restaurant bread basket left a lasting impression? There was a moment when most Eurocentric restaurants in America offered complimentary bread. The basket or plate of sliced bread often acted as a first impression, an indication of the meal to follow and how far the business was willing to go to seduce you. Stale ciabatta could mean overcooked, overdressed pasta. A fresh, warm baguette promised well-executed entrees. Thick tiles of soft focaccia and good olive oil signaled that whatever followed would likely entice. It can be thrilling when the table bread is the main attraction. At Craig's in West Hollywood, I've made a meal out of an ice-cold martini and a basket of bread. There, the flatbread is slathered in honey butter and sprinkled generously with cheese. It's a destination-worthy basket that requires no accouterments. During a recent meal at the Restaurant at Hotel Bel-Air, the selection of house-made signature breads arrived at the table like a shining cornucopia of carbohydrates. The white-napkin-lined silver bowl was brimming with two pointed, hand-shaped ficelle, glossy black truffle brioche buns and a pair of petite, round garlic croissants. Lavash crackers speckled with toasted sesame and sunflower seeds sat tall and straight in a cup to the side. 'Starter bread baskets might seem like an insignificant piece of the dinner experience to some, but to me, it is essential, and can make or break an evening's meal,' says Christophe Rull, executive pastry chef at the hotel. He and a team of two other bakers service the entire property, including the recently opened pastry shop, the Patisserie. 'This is an item that can start your dinner off on the right note and display the expert level of care that has gone into every portion of the menu.' Rull's team works throughout the evening to prepare the various breads and viennoiserie for the hotel. Each of the house-made signature breads, available to order off the menu for $20, is prepared daily and served warm. The baguettes crack and the brioche buns are plush pillows of dough with a whisper of truffle. For the croissants, Rull makes a traditional croissant dough with good French butter and incorporates a garlic confit and Italian olive oil. Each of the flaky layers is infused with the sweet and pungent garlic, like dunking each bite into a bowl of roasted garlic butter. 'The croissants are French, like myself, and are not typically featured in dinner bread baskets,' says Rull. 'I specifically chose these items to show the dexterity that table bread can have.' Luckily, the selections are set, and the garlic croissants will be available for the foreseeable future. 'Many of our regulars choose favorites,' he says. 'If we removed one component of the basket, we most definitely will hear about it.' At Wolfgang Puck's Spago and Cut restaurants in Beverly Hills, the Hearth Baked bread has always been a central part of the dining experience. Spago executive pastry chef Della Gossett's interactive presentation of a box of treasures is meant to be reminiscent of a bento box. It's disassembled at the table with each component individually presented. On top are sheets of carta di musica, delicate and nearly translucent, dusted with rosemary and sumac. Butter and a ramekin of a seasonal spread sits in the first layer of the box. Recently there was a roasted carrot hummus with a stripe down the middle of za'atar-infused olive oil. And at the bottom of the box, a dark, seeded rye bread and an einkorn epi baguette made with einkorn freshly milled by Grist & Toll flour mill in Pasadena. 'The selections are pretty much drawn from inspiration during our travels,' Gossett says. 'For example, Wolfgang was on a trip to Sardinia and loved the carta di musica, so we worked really hard on creating one for our bread presentation, then we sprinkle different herbs or spices according to the season. The dark rye was inspired by our trip to Austria.' A team of three full-time bakers prepares all the breads, including the burger buns, for the restaurant and any special events. 'You wouldn't think that in the land of gluten-free that we would have that much bread, but we almost sell out of our bread every night,' she says. The bread service is equally popular at Cut, where executive chef Drew Rosenberg says nearly every table orders the From the Hearth bread. And most of the bread is made during the dinner service, with guests dining at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. all treated to warm, fresh bread. The bread selection might change a few times a year, but recently there were pretzel knots and a round of focaccia studded with onions cooked for 12 hours, until the sugars develop and turn tawny and jammy. The dough is baked in a cast-iron pan to create a light and airy structure with a nice, crusty bottom. A handful of crackers is blanketed in shaved Parmigiano Reggiano and a blend of herbs de Provence dried at the restaurant. On the side, Vermont cultured butter and Rosenberg's take on muhammara, made with red peppers and pomegranate molasses. The dip is arranged in a dollop over some Sicilian olive oil and vinegar. 'What's the best possible outcome in a world where you have to charge for bread now?' Rosenberg says. 'Now with the costs of labor and goods, you really do have to charge, and I think of it as a full experience or dish where someone is probably going to spend more than $20 for it, so it better be really good.' At Superba Food + Bread in Hollywood, the 'bread + all four spreads' is the most expensive dish on the menu, alongside the hearth-roasted Mary's half chicken. Both are listed at $29. The presentation is enough for a small crowd, with a boulder of sourdough grilled and brushed with enough butter to permeate the four inches of dough. Cooked polenta adds texture, moisture and a distinct nutty flavor to the porridge and polenta levain. It's sprinkled with sunflower flower seeds, pepitas and flaxseeds for some added crunch. The baguette is sheathed in everything bagel seasoning. 'Bread is in our name, so clearly we are committed and passionate bakers,' says chef Elisha Ben-Haim. 'We will often create a new dish for the menu that demands a new bread accompaniment. Equally so, we will get inspired and build a spread and dip around it.' While each of the breads satisfies on its own, the dips warrant their own praise. The smoked trout could have come from your favorite deli, crowned with roe and bits of pickled onion. Salsa macha and honey meld into a smoky sweet mess on top of smooth whipped cheese. Charred eggplant is sweetened with pomegranate molasses and strewn with walnuts. Then there's the 'really good butter + salt,' appropriately advertised and good enough to serve as the focus of a cheese board. Though the complimentary bread course is waning at most restaurants, the concept lives on at Gucci Osteria in Beverly Hills, where diners are treated to three varieties of bread, one butter and a whipped cheese spread at the start of every meal. 'The main reason we are offering the bread course is because it represents Italian tradition,' says chef Mattia Agazzi. 'It's something you always have on the table and it's one of the best ways to highlight ingredients.' Agazzi's walks to the farmers market dictate the specific flavorings for the breads. At a recent dinner, I was offered a basket of ciabatta crowded with chunks of briny, fruity Kalamata olives; a poppy seed-crusted sourdough; a lavash cracker made with eggs and butter; and a rosemary bun fashioned out of pastry dough rolled with fragrant rosemary. Each evening, Agazzi's team makes ricotta cheese and lets it sit overnight. The next morning before service, the cheese is whipped into a stark white airy spread and generously seasoned with cracked black pepper. Imagine swiping your bread into the remnants of a bowl of cacio e pepe. If this specific pairing of breads and spreads sounds appealing, you'll want to visit as soon as possible. 'We don't have a timing for these,' he says. 'We just change it whenever we feel like it.' The complimentary bread service at Alexander's Steakhouse in Pasadena registers as the first bites of an elaborate tasting menu, with no less than three breads and three varieties of butter. The Hokkaido milk bread is soft, squishy and a tad sweet. Jet-black squid ink imparts a marine-laced hit of umami to a classic French baguette and the Manchego cheese bread features a tempting swirl of the nutty cheese. The restaurant's extensive selection of domestic and imported Wagyu is on full display in the accompanying butters. Beef is butchered in-house daily, with the Wagyu fat and other trimmings repurposed into a honey and rendered Wagyu fat butter and a butter infused with Wagyu morsels. To allow the bread flavors ample attention, there's a round of plain European-style butter too. 'Our bread service is more than just a welcome bite, it's a carefully considered course within the meal,' says general manager Jose Banuelos. 'Served between the starters and the main course, it offers a moment to pause and reset before the grand Wagyu experience unfolds.' The steakhouse goes a step further and ends each meal with a tall cloud of cotton candy. It's enough of a first and last impression to encourage any diner (this writer included) to commit to a second visit.
