The Swan Finalists

On the day of The Swan pageant finale, close to a thousand guests—mostly families and friends of the contestants and the producers—pass through metal detectors, pick up their entry badges, reluctantly give up their cameras, and find their seats in the VIP section of the soundstage (adjoining the American Idol set). Under a fake deep blue sky sparkling with lights, fans wave homemade signs; "Las Vegas is Betting on Belinda." "We Love Rachel," "Chica bam Cristina, We Love You."

"It takes a village to make a woman beautiful," says Swan creator and executive producer Nely Gálan in her welcoming remarks to the crowd. And the villagers are all there—the two plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentist, psychotherapist, exercise guru, dermatologist, Lasik eye specialist, choreographer, pageant coach, and hair-extension technicians.

Backstage, ten makeup artists, ten hairstylists, and nine dressers fuss over the Swans, the nine final contestants of this surgical interpretation of Cinderella.

In the pageant, each woman is introduced with her "before" video and a heartrending confession. Beth Lay is first, a gangly Plain Jane with drab hair, a gummy smile, and wire-rim glasses. Her painful confession is that her husband kissed another woman. But Lay doesn't have the nerve to leave him, fearing that "no man will ever love me again." A silhouette of a curvy women appears on a scrim, which rises to reveal the new, improved Lay, now a blonde knockout in a strapless black gown slit up to the legal limit. Wolf whistles and cheers follow. She looks fully capable of turning consonants on Wheel of Fortune.

Lay's parents and husband, carrying their four-year-old son, mount the steps to the stage. It is the first time they've seen each other in person in four months. This is one of those lump-in-the-throat moments that make reality TV worth watching. Lay sweeps the little boy into her arms; the audience dabs at tears, Then an anxious murmur goes through the crowd. Uh-oh. The child twists away from her, trying to get out of her arms. It seems that he does not recognize his mother. Quickly, the house lights come up, and Lay and family are hustled backstage to get reacquainted. After a 45-minute pause in the taping, Lay's "before and after" scene is reshot from the top-minus the family moment-and there are no reunion scenes for any other contestant that day or in the pageant that airs three days later on national TV. A retired psychiatric nurse in the audience whispers, "I wonder if there'll be any divorces next week."

The Swan, of course, is Fox TV's reality series that critics and viewers love to berate but can't stop watching. The Swan is Extreme Makeover meets The Apprentice, with a touch of Survivor thrown in. By Nielsen standards, the show is a big hit, and in October, a second season begins with a fresh gaggle of Swannabes. The Swan is also being exported to a dozen other countries, starting with Germany, and will be seen around the world. And next month, Regan Books, publisher of the bestselling Zone Diet series, will publish an inspirational self-improvement guide with makeover edicts on practically everything except how to perform one's own surgery.

Gálan, the former head of entertainment at Telemundo, believes that "beauty is power" and sees competition as incentive. "What would motivate me to get in shape?" she asked herself when planning the show. "If I was in a movie naked, or in a beauty pageant." Gálan also confides that she has had Botox, collagen, Restylane, and tooth veneers herself "and I want a boob job, but I have to find the time. If something bothers you, you have it fixed," she says. "I'm not ashamed. I don't make a secret of anything."

But despite its success, The Swan puts a lot of noses out of joint, and not just those of the contestants. USA Today called it a "plastic surgery horror show." Rosie O'Donnell denounced it, saying it sets women back 30 years. Plastic surgery associations said it creates "unrealistic expectations." And The Boston Globe lambasted the women's "rubbery lips eerily cast from the same mold" and "teeth from the same box of Chiclets," while comparing the pageant contestants to "a fleet of flaming drag queens...in trashy lingerie struts." And those were the good reviews.

Viewers of plastic-surgery makeover shows, while transfixed, also seem to have little sympathy for the suffering of beauty seekers who go under the knife, unless they are correcting a birth defect, it is a curious phenomenon of cosmetic surgery that most people view others' complaints about sagging cheeks or breasts as vain, while they see their own physical dissatisfactions as valid.

The Swan provides a cosmetic-surgery candy store to the contestants, who can choose the procedures they want and refuse those suggested by the show's two plastic surgeons, Randal Haworth and Terry Dubrow. Kelly Alemi, a 28-year-old graduate student from Baltimore, rejected Haworth's recommended nose job and cheek implants, because she and Dubrow didn't think she needed them. Still, her surgery took eight hours, says Dubrow and included a brow lift, check-fat removal, lip enlargement with abdominal fat ("not butt fat," she says), saline breast implants, and liposuction under her chin and from her waist to her ankles. Her recovery was excruciating. "I couldn't walk for two days, and I couldn't turn over in bed for three weeks," she says. "But all my life I wanted other people's features—Angelina Jolie's lips, Jennifer Aniston's hair, Demi Moore's body, and big boobs." And now that she has acquired reasonable facsimiles, "people want my features," she says proudly.

Alemi isn't the only Swan who refused certain procedures. Haworth admits that some of the women cancelled their lip lifts when they saw the swelling it caused in those who had the operation first. Neither this nor the yeast infections some of the women suffered are mentioned on air. Besides their handlers, a round-the-clock nurse, a psychotherapist, and Gálan, the Swans had only one another to talk to and confide in. All their surgeries took place within a period of four to five weeks, and the women recovered as a group in mirror- and phone-free apartments in a condominium complex in Marina del Rey with a view of the Hollywood sign.

Nine hours after the finale taping started, under a blizzard of confetti, Gálan crowned Rachel Love-Fraser, a 27-year-old construction-company clerk, "The Ultimate Swan." For the losers, being sprung from "plastic-surgery prison," as some of them called it, was enough of a consolation prize. "I was running in the halls of the studio screaming, 'We're free, we're free," Alemi says. "'Oh, my God, we can make phone calls and be normal,'"

Then the women headed home to life without publicists, bodyguards, drivers, therapists, and one another. Ten days later, a newly confident Alemi stands at the front door of her Baltimore condominium, 45 pounds lighter, with her 34 D "Hollywood boobs" (as she calls them), her sprayed-on tan, and her long blonde extensions. On her cropped, scoop-neck T-shirt, "bebe" is spelled out in rhinestones; a sliver of taut midriff peeks out above the waistband of her pants. A "Welcome Home Kelly" sign hangs from the living-room ceiling, left over from the party Alemi and her boyfriend, Bob Moxley, threw to watch the pageant on their plasma TV. Stacked on an end table in the living room are multiple copies of People, US Weekly, and TV Guide, all with features about the pageant. "US compared me to Pamela Anderson. And Simon Cowell said something nice about my makeover, I got more press than anyone," Alemi says, seemingly immune to the criticism of the show in almost every story.

"You were never that ugly," says Alemi's oldest friend, BettyAnn Kehl, criticizing the show's rendition of Alemi. "They made me out to be the ugliest girl on the East Coast," adds Alemi, who flip-flops between sympathy and disdain for her former self. She was a flight attendant with US Air for five years, then became a licensed makeup artist for Prescriptives. How unattractive could she have been? Moxley, a Baltimore County police officer, says he always loved his girlfriend's face, comparing her to Sarah Michelle Gellar; but he is in awe of the new Alemi. "My girlfriend went to Hollywood and came home a supermodel." Alemi puts it more accurately; "Our sex life was zero for three years, and we made up for it in three days. Before, I wouldn't let Bob see me without clothes on. Now, I run around naked." At that, Moxley darts out of the room, blushing.

The couple has a diamond engagement ring on hold at a local jewelry store. Stopping to visit the stone on the way to lunch, Alemi is as frank about its imperfection as she is about her own.

"It has a spot, but it doesn't show," she says, with a frown.

"You don't have to tell," the salesman suggests gently.

Gálan warned Alemi and the other Swans that returning home might be rough. Alemi certainly faced a lot of adjustments, starting at the airport, where she was greeted with screams of recognition. Back in Baltimore, at a local crab shack, a waitress passed her table five times to steal glances. At an Orioles game, a player slipped her a note asking, "Can I sleep on your couch?" (She returned the note, saying, "If you don't mind my boyfriend being there.") And shopping at Sam's Club, a girl behind the counter "freaked out, asking me for an autograph," Alemi says. "I signed, 'Dream Big. Believe in Yourself."

And as much as she liked the hair extensions—$3,500 of human hair welded to her head—they ended up in a plastic bag of Swan memorabilia. "I couldn't brush my hair for three months. You had to order special shampoo. The extensions were beginning to fall out, and replacing them was expensive." Soon the Botox in her brow and the perm in her eyelashes will wear off.

Alemi receives frequent calls from fellow contestants, and it's clear that not all the Swans are getting a hero's welcome. Some relatives and friends who had taken care of the contestants' children resent the Swans. And while some of the women don't want their old life, they haven't quite figured out what to do with their new one.

A month after Alemi's homecoming, Moxley claimed the ring and proposed during Fourth of July fireworks, Now Alemi is trying to convince someone to pay for her wedding. "I'd get married on TV in a heartbeat," she says. "That would be fun—a fairy tale America helped me achieve," In fact, she has proposed the idea to Fox and written to 20 magazines asking if they'd like to subsidize her big day. "I feel I'm worthy of having someone sponsor our wedding. All they can do is say no," she says, with a shrug of her shoulders, In her pitch letter, Alemi wrote, "I am very lucky and would like for the rest of the world to see that good things do happen for good people." She went on to suggest that readers who "probably fell in love with our love story" could "choose all of the details for the day," (The letter got one response from a local wedding magazine.)

Alemi is incredibly grateful to The Swan and says that she owes her newfound self-respect to the show. Now she would like a role in the sequel, believing the Swans should have a say in who gets the next crown. (Gálan hasn't responded to this request.) Alemi wouldn't mind having a television career like her role model, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a finalist on Survivor: The Australian Outback, who replaced Lisa Ling on The View, or a job announcing hockey games, And she's open to posing for Playboy. "If Playboy pays us a lot of money, I say OK. I just have fake boobs. I'd love to show off my masterpiece."

Alemi may have to stop dreaming soon, She is unemployed, and the weekly stipend (she won't say how much) provided during the whole Swan experience just covered her bills through the summer. The second Swan season will begin with a where-are-they-now episode about the first group, and Alemi is feeling the pressure to succeed before a new bevy of Swans turns her group into last year's pillow stuffing. Alemi laments, "No one calls us [from the Swan team], and we feel forgotten. We're stuck looking for jobs." Still, even after a tabloid columnist recently called her "Miss Piggy," Alemi says she would do it all over again. Like many cosmetic-surgery patients, she believes her transformation is not a mask but her true, more authentic self. "I don't remember that former person, and I don't miss her," she says, "I worked really hard to lose the weight. And I don't feel fake. Period."

Considering the risks, the anxiety, the pain, and the awkward readjustment to her real life, what would she tell someone considering similar surgery?

"I'd say, do it. Make an appointment tomorrow, because you'll feel better about yourself." And, she adds, with her new Swan savvy, "If you can find someone else to pay for it, that's even better."