An Activist Who Knows Smoking’s Perils From Her Own Experience

It’s no secret that model Christy Turlington smoked up to a pack of cigarettes a day nearly nonstop between the ages of 13 and 24. But the 31-year-old quit smoking six years ago, so reports that she has emphysema shocked the fashion world. Fortunately, the damage to her lungs appears to be minimal.

Turlington, whose work for Calvin Klein catapulted her to supermodel status, told the Times of London on Friday that she volunteered to undergo a lung scan earlier this year in New York as part of an ABC news broadcast about women and smoking. The test revealed that she suffered slight damage, commonly referred to by doctors as “early stage emphysema.”

Turlington, who was unavailable for comment, is not feeling ill or receiving treatment, nor is her condition expected to develop into more serious emphysema, according to her spokeswoman Lisa Jacobson. “Christy does feel very lucky that she stopped smoking when she did, and that she averted any serious damage to her lungs.”

The model, who appears in anti-smoking public service TV announcements shown in the United States, has become a prominent anti-smoking activist since her father Dwain’s death from smoking-related lung cancer in 1997.

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Los Angeles artist Hiro Yamagata, known for his celebrity portraits and for lighting up the Los Angeles River in 1998 with a laser installation on the 1st Street Bridge, debuted three new “Solar System” laser installations at a party Saturday at his new Malibu studio, which he calls the Laboratory.

Inside the labyrinthine 15,000-square-foot studio, the three installations look like simple box-shaped rooms. But walk inside, and you enter another universe.

The most mind-blowing installation has hundreds of confetti-like holographic Mylar cubes, about a foot square each, rotating on a motorized spin cycle. Visitors lose their sense of balance amid ricocheting white laser beams, strobe and search lights, which create a multicolored, disco-on-acid feel. One woman likened the experience to “being on the inside of a diamond, looking out.”

The installation (open to the public free by appointment) took a year to complete, including 3,000 hours to install computer programming that changes the pattern of lights every few seconds. “Behind the walls, everything’s wired like spaghetti,” Yamagata said.

Party organizers had hoped Arnold Schwarzenegger would make an appearance, but wife Maria Shriver showed up solo to support the clan--her cousin, Chris Lawford, is Yamagata’s business partner.

Other famous faces present included Tim Allen, Bob Saget, Tom Arnold, Stacy Keach and “Access Hollywood” host Pat O’Brien, who spilled out of his stretch limo with an entourage, smiling for cameras like a real celeb.

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By all accounts, filming the kidnapping drama “Proof of Life” in the Andes mountains of Ecuador was brutal. The crew had the altitude and volcanic eruptions to contend with, not to mention a military coup in Quinto and the death of actor David Morse’s stand-in, whose truck careened off a mountain road.

“It was my vision, my desire to go there, and I was thrilled. You’re not taken to a luxury hotel suite when you get kidnapped,” director Taylor Hackford said at Monday’s premiere party at the Factory in West Hollywood. “I felt badly because there were a lot of tragic things that happened, but we get paid a lot. Why shouldn’t it be a lot of work?”

Co-stars Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan shunned the press inside the bash, a benefit for the Natural Resources Defense Council, undoubtedly to avoid questions about their romance. Seems kind of lame to me. Like Hackford said, they get paid a lot.

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SoCal Confidential runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.