Chapter Four
MOMA CALLED SOMEONE WITH A BIG EGO “SUCH A much.” I was certainly supposed to spend time and energy on my appearance, heeding my mother’s remonstrance that women must suffer to be beautiful, but I wasn’t supposed to act prideful about the results. This confusing message left me with only disdain or indifference about the beauty pageants that were endemic to the culture in 1966 (it seemed as if there was a Miss Magnolia Blossom or Miss Local Carburetor Shop being lauded in the papers every other week). I considered beauty pageants dorky and myself anti-establishment: failing gym, cheating in Latin, smoking Prince Edward cigars with Jane, and sneaking out for sex. Ignoring my disinclination to enter such a contest, my cousin Tom Byarly (son of Great Aunt Edith, who crawled into the fireplace) decided that I was the perfect candidate for Miss Teenage Memphis and kept sticking that application under my nose, saying, “Just sign it.” With no real enthusiasm, I signed.
Every aspect of the contest was scrupulously regulated. Instructions for a written test, to be administered at the local Sears Garden Center, were a source of unwitting humor: “there is no way to prepare for this test.... Dress is optional, but try to look your best.... You are encouraged to socialize with other girls while enjoying free Dr. Pepper.” I answered questions such as “How would you achieve world peace?” without a trace of irony.
Each girl was allotted two minutes for a talent routine that was taped early in the week--I sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” while playing the bass ukulele. (“Get into costume immediately, then relax”) The finals were to be broadcast live on WHBQ, the local ABC-TV station. (“Be yourself” and “Use all available knowledge about good grooming.”) I was a nervous wreck that day but declined Mother’s offer of a mild sedative (she said everybody took them). I dressed in the gold and white formal we had selected and then I submitted to the hairdresser, who managed to achieve the perfect flip that had always eluded me.
I head George Klein, the master of ceremonies, announce, “And the winner is....,” but when he said my name, I looked around for a moment to make certain there wasn’t anyone else named Cybill Shepherd in the group. My parents bolted out of their metal folding chairs in the TV studio, beaming broad smiles and clapping wildly while the other families politely applauded. The next day, the Western Union man because a familiar figure at our house, delivering dozens of telegrams from local politicians, beauty parlors, the church rector, even Chris Crump, whom I had beaten with the whiffle bat years ago. The note from one family friend summed up the prevailing sentiment: “As far as your parents and grandparents are concerned, you are already Miss Teenage America, as you are such a sweet, thoughtful all-American girl. If you stay this way, and I’m sure you will, you can never really become a loser!”
My prizes were a Sears wardrobe and a year’s supply of Dr Pepper, which was stacked on our porch almost to the top of the pale green riveted plastic roof. But I also got to represent Memphis in the Miss Teenage America pageant, where the stakes were considerably higher: $10,000 in scholarships, a stock portfolio, and a car. All of the “young ladies” were to be accompanied to the contest in Dallas by their mothers. On one side of us was Miss Indianapolis, on the other Miss Spokane. Every time we left the hotel we were chauffeured in a cavalcade of turquoise blue Comets, escorted by cadets from Texas A&M to entertainments such as a Turtle Derby. (Each contestant got to keep her turtle and a supply of Gourmet Turtle Food.) My scrapbook from that week includes a recipe card for avocadop and a coupon for dinner, noting in my scratchy penmanship: Had to have meal ticket or couldn’t eat-always an important concern to me. The judges were introduced peremptorily at a cocktail party that featured a tomato aspic in the shape of an armadillo. I was thrilled to meet Dick Clark, but on a more practical level I was interested in the director of the American Airlines Stewardess College, something I’d always considered a viable career option, a last resort to get out of Memphis.
When the finalists were announced, I was not one of them. Instead I was named Miss Congeniality, one of the honorary but dubious consolation prizes that included Miss Personality and Miss Sportsmanship. Lying to a reporter from the Memphis Press-Scimitarwho called for an interview, I gushed, “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. All the contestants are best friends already. Last night we had a slumber party, and tonight we’re dancing at a go-go place, but no boys are allowed. It’s a good thing the frug came along since the girls have to dance by themselves.” Failing to make the cut as a finalist was devastating, reinforcing my lifelong anxiety about falling short of perfection. Sad and miserable, I had to swallow my disappointment and participate in the remaining festivities, rehearsing a group song about the spectrum of national contestants (“They’re beautifying Baltimore and out in Santa Rosa, in Louisville and Buffalo and on the Ponderosa”). The winner was an “at-large” candidate from Milpitas, California, whose talent was an “authentic” hula dance performed to a Don Ho record.
Even though I returned to Memphis in defeat, something was changed and would never again be the same: I was famous, publicly acknowledged as beautiful and rewarded for it, different and set apart. I’d imagine a friend’s voice getting a little crispy and impatient, disallowing me any complaint about fatigue or boredom or a bad hair day. The president of the pageant did offer me a summer job at the shows he produced for Six Flags over Texas--my first professional offer--but my parents wouldn’t let me live away from home by myself. I was still somewhat useful to pageant officials, who asked me to appear at a party for the next year’s Miss Teenage hopefuls. “Actually,” said the letter from the director of public relations, “all we want you to do is smile prettily when you are introduced and mingle with the girls, convincing them to enter the contest.” Smiling prettily seemed to be my talent.
EVERY CHILD IN MEMPHIS GREW UP UNDERSTANDING that it was the cotton capital of the world, that the crop had dominated the economy, even the society of the city since before the Civil War, when a major slave market provided the necessary labor of industry, and cotton brokers dotted the waterfront, transacting business at a cotton exchange that rivaled Wall Street. King Cotton still occasioned the biggest social event of the year, the Cotton Carnival. From the time I was a little girl, I stood with the crowd awaiting the Carnival king and queen, who were chosen from the wealthiest and most prominent families in town. They arrived on a flower-bedecked barge, blindingly lit and dressed in shiny rhinestoned costumes, at the historic downtown steamboat landing, lined with cobblestones that were said to have been brought to North America as ballast on Spanish galleons and towed upriver by mules. The local country clubs named royal princesses to the king and queen’s court, and Chickasaw’s board of directors appointed me their representative in 1968, a commission that could not be refused, whatever my disdain for pageantry. I had to make an appointment with the “modiste” who was making the princess costumes, after receiving a mimeographed sheet of instructions: “You are to bring sixteen (16) button white fabric gloves for evening and ‘shortie’white gloves for day costume. You are to bring small button pearl earrings (no loops or “dangles” please).... A rhinestone tiara is to be worn with your nighttime costume. A deposit of $5 will be required.... You will be responsible for furnishing two pairs of shoes—plain, closed heel (opera), closed toe pumps. NO FLATS OR BALLETS, PLEASE. Hose for your daytime costume will be furnished.... MOST IMPORTANT: Wear the foundation garment you plan to wear with your costumes when taking your measurements and for fittings.”
There were no blacks represented in the Carnival--they had their own separate Cotton Makers Jubilee--and the only black people I knew were domestics or warehouse workers at Shobe, Inc. Memphis was still cleft along rigid color lines, with segregated barbershops and libraries, and there were COLORED ONLY signs with figurative hands painted in dark colors pointing to different drinking fountains and rest rooms. The local movie house had a colored box office and seating up in the nosebleed section of the balcony, a brutal sauna on humid summer nights. In 1965, when a maverick theater operator at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center screened A Patch of Blue and Sidney Poitier actually kissed a white woman, the audience reacted with an audible “Whoooa.” Blacks were admitted on a different day at the Mid-South Fairgrounds every fall and attended the Negro school a mile away from my own. There is still, in a public park across from the University of Tennessee Medical School, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in rural Tennessee. Despite an ongoing controversy, it’s allowed to stand because he was a famous Civil War general. Once, when I was very young, my grandfather and I saw the hurried scattering of spectral white gowns and pointed hoods, illuminated by the glow from a burning cross, as we drove through the “other” part of town. The sight of the Klan in full regalia strikes fear in the heart of even a little white girl and an old white man.
“Da-Dee, who are the ghosts?” I asked. “Don’t bother your pretty head,” he answered, but he put his foot to the gas pedal.
Like most of the people in that time and place, my family had a tacit code of “benevolent” racism: my grandparents treated their black housekeepers with familial fondness and support, dispensing hand-me-down clothes and leftover food with the fraudulent magnanimity of the times. Waiters and bellhops were addressed by their first names, whatever their age, and I shelled peas on the back porch of the lake house with a kind and dignified elderly lady named Annie who had to call me Miss Cybill. It would have been unthinkable for me to challenge the views and vernacular of the older generations. Even though I was enlightened by the climate of civil rights activity, I did nothing. There were black kids in my high school class, unknown to me and my circle of friends. Our connection to black culture was through the music of the times, Jr. Walker and the All-stars spoke to us in a different way from how our parents had related to the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers, although I hardly examined the societal ramifications of the soulful sounds.
In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Poor People’s Campaign to Memphis in support of the mostly black striking sanitation workers. Hundreds of men who hauled garbage and dug sewers gathered at a rally to hear him say “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” and strikers wearing sandwich boards that read I AM A MAN were maced and tear-gassed on Main Street. Local news reports portrayed King as an irresponsible agitator who had goaded the rabble to violence. Shops were vandalized, and we heard that the train from Chicago to New Orleans passed through Memphis without stopping. The National Guard was called out in armored tanks that moved through the streets on rubber tracks--my friend Jane and I went driving around to see them rerouting traffic, sending people home. Some of the locals acted as if the turmoil was a huge personal inconvenience, but others treated the presence of armed guards in our midst with a comically misplaced sense of southern hospitality, pressing sandwiches and doughnuts on them. Rubbish in sacks and cartons was piled everywhere, and delicate ladies swooned at the mention of rats. The Mississippi River and the network of open drainage ditches in the city combined to host a sizable rodent population--it was said that a rat could traverse the city more quickly by ditch than a person could by car. And they were big enough to mount and ride. I once went to a “Sunset Symphony” picnic near the river and remarked on a cute little cat wandering near the water. “Not a cat,” I was told.
I was standing with friends on the colonnaded veranda of my high school in the late afternoon of April 4, just weeks before our graduation, when we heard that Dr. King had been shot, and within a few hours, the world way beyond Memphis knew that he was dead. The Lorraine Motel was a few miles away, too far to hear the firecracker blast of the assassin’s bullet or to see Dr. King’s friends trying to scrape his blood from the balcony, but too close for comfort to my family and a large part of the city’s white population. My father made sure his luger was loaded, and Moma called to say that Da-Dee had moved a shotgun down to the front hall.
There was a pall over the city for weeks, a sense of fear and chaos, with stringent early curfews and the intensified presence of militia. High school proms were canceled by municipal decree, as was Cotton Carnival, and I was not displeased to be a princess in absentia. When I passed a black person on the street, I averted my eyes with a searing flash of shame. I felt absolutely responsible for the murder. I knew the expression “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” although I was not to assuage my guilt with action for another twenty years. But after the initial shock, nobody in my little microcosm talked about the shooting. It became unmentionable. Palm Sunday fell three days after Dr. King died, and there were green fronds decorating the white pillars of our church but no sermon from the pastor about healing the wounds of race relations in our community. Commencement exercises proceeded on schedule but I recalled no mention of the assassination.
As a graduation present, my grandparents gave me a trip to Europe: the beginner’s three-week tour with a group of students from the local high schools, through London, Geneva, Madrid, Lisbon. We had to skip Paris because of the student riots against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that meant extra time in Italy and my first exposure to its masterly painting, sculpture, and architecture. I had inexhaustible energy for museums and basilicas, panoramas and piazzas, never-drying underwear hung on Juliet balconies and dark-haired boys who flirted in charmingly accented English limited to “Hello, beautiful.” And the trip occasioned an epiphany. Looking up into the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I was overwhelmed by the power of those frescoes--the creation of Adam with God’s outstretched hand and the last judgment of Christ--but my eyes drifted to the image of a half-clothed female.
“Excuse me,” I asked the guide, “who’s that big ol’ muscular woman reading a scroll?”
“That is the Delphic Sibyl,” he answered. My name, a name I’d hated and heard mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the spelling tweaked). And why was a pagan symbol on the ceiling of a Christian chapel? Because it was a Sibyl who prophesied the coming of Christ. And there were lots of us. In Roman mythology, the guide informed me, Cybele was a supreme being called the Great Mother of the Gods, rchitec temple in her honor was erected on the site now occupied by the Vatican. The high priestesses known as Sibyls were named for her, and their oracles were so respected that they guided imperial policy for Roman emperors.
I know how pretentious and melodramatic this sounds, but something in me clicked at that moment in that place of such beauty and grandeur. I’d never been exposed to fine art-hell, the closest I’d gotten to classical music was 101 Strings of Mantovani. It was as if the world had been in black and white, and suddenly there was a new palette. There seemed to be a personal message in the chapel for me: the existence of a female deity before the time of Christ symbolized the limitless power and potential achievement of women. If God is a man, then woman is not created in his image, limited by a celestial glass ceiling. But if the holiest of holies is female, then women can do anything. I have a droll friend who says she doesn’t believe in God, only in signs from God. I believe in both, and the Sibyls were a little calling card from the divine. The visual stimulus of great art was sensuous and powerful, and it made me long to do something creative. Modeling was not what I had in mind.
MODELING GOES BACK A LONG WAY IN OUR FAMILY: when my grandfather was a toddler, he wore a wide-brimmed hat and pulled a red toy wagon in a turn-of-the-century advertisement for Shapleigh’s Hardware. My first paying job, in my junior year of high school, was for Coppertone, made by the Memphis-based Plough Corporation. (A dump truck backed up to a photography studio fitted with fake palm trees and poured in a load of white sand.) It must have been a slow news day when Ken Ross, a staff photographer for the local paper, asked me to pose, without pay, for a few seasonal photos in which I scared some Halloween goblins. He was a scout for the Model of the Year pageant, the brainstorm of a man named Stewart Cowley who owned a modeling agency in New York City, and Ken put my name on a list of suggested entries. When Stewart called, my parents thought I was too young to consider leaving home but decided it was only polite to meet Cowley at the Peabody Hotel when he came to look over the local pulchritude. Our appointment coincided with the ritual marching of the ducks through the Peabody lobby: In the 1930s the hotel manager returned from a weekend hunting trip having partaken of a little too much Tennessee sippin’ whiskey and thought it would be fun to put some of his live duck decoys in the lobby’s ornate marble fountain. The enthusiastic response from guests begat a tradition: every morning at eleven, under the care of an exalted bellboy called the duckmaster, a gaggle of English call ducks descend in the elevator from their home on the roof to spend the day splashing in the fountain, and every evening at five they return. It’s one of Memphis’s prime photo ops.
Stewart Cowley had been a theatrical agent before World War II and had a certain flamboyant flair--there were framed photos of two large standard poodles in his suite. I didn’t know that his contest idea was contemptuously referred to as Stewart’s Folly by his New York competitors--my parents simply told him, “Maybe next year.” The first Model of the Year contest drew a huge audience when it was telecast on CBS--so much for Stewart’s Folly, although another man claimed Cowley had stolen the idea, and he spent so much time in litigation that he was known as Suin’ Stew. When he returned to Memphis the following year, I was planning to study art history at Louisiana State and was still disdainful of anything that smacked of a beauty pageant. My mother insisted that I show him the courtesy of turning him down in person, and I went to the hotel in defiant disregard for my appearance, wearing cutoff jeans, with skin tanned mahogany and unwashed hair too blond from the sun. We sipped sweet iced tea, a southern tradition with its overkill of sugar, whileCowley chatted about the rewards awaiting the contest winner: a contract with his agency and $25,000 guaranteed in modeling fees the first year.
I’d rehearsed a smug little speech about having a higher calling to study Italian art. “I’m really not interested in being a model,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cowley replied. “You have a good chance of winning here in Memphis and going on to New York.” There was a twinkle in his eye as he dealt his trump card. “And you’re a helluva lot closer to Italy in New York than in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
My father was cutting the grass and my mother was sitting on the front porch in a wrought-iron chair when I returned from the local Model of the Year pageant. There was a huge pile of yellow roses poking out the window on the passenger side of the 1960 Ford Fairlane I’d inherited from my great-grandmother, which required putting your foot flat to the floor every time you accelerated.
“What in the world is all that yellow?” Mother called as I pulled in the driveway.
“I won,” I said.
Stewart Cowley tempered my victory with a dose of reality. ‘You’ll have to lose at least thirty pounds,” he announced and handed me a mimeographed copy of the grapefruit diet. I consumed two strips of bacon a day, plus meager portions of canned tuna and cucumbers, washed down with black coffee and Tab, each meal followed religiously by half a grapefruit (occasionally, for a hit of exotica, broiled). Perversely, during this starvation routine, I lay around the house reading cookbooks and a twenty-five cent booklet called “Count Your Calories” that detailed the difference between boiled pigs feet (185 calories) and pickled pigs feet (the way I liked them, at 230 calories). All I thought about was food. Once I sneaked into the kitchen at 3 A.M. to polish off some leftover lamb chops that hadn’t been ravaged to my mother’s satisfaction.
I lost twelve pounds but claimed twenty-eight on the Model of the Year application, and that September, instead of registering for Art History 101 at Louisiana State University, I went to New York for the finals. I was familiar with the skyline from the movie King Kong, one of my childhood favorites, but nothing could have prepared me for my first view of the city as the plane circled La Guardia Airport: Manhattan on a platter, rising from its slim, precarious perch between two rivers, with the crush of people and their island mentality, all wanting access and egress at exactly the same time. The other contestants were registering at the Waldorf-Astoria with their mothers, despite the fact that they all seemed stunningly grown-up. I called home in a panic, and my mother was on the next flight. As she walked through the hotel lobby, she passed one willowy Miss Somewhere after another. “I swear,” she declared when she called my father to report her safe arrival, “I don’t know what Cybill is doing up here with all these beautiful women.”
The walls of the Stewart Modeling Agency were covered with intimidating pictures of Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, and Marisa Berenson, behind the “bookers” with telephones attached to their shoulders and big volumes of rate cards for all the girls, who were never called anything but girls. (The stars didn’t have a rate. Their fees were unquestionable and unmentionable.) My outlook improved when I went to the CBS studio and started trying on various outfits. Looking in the mirror at my gold sequined bikini and long hot-pink cape with a hood trimmed in matching sequins by Oleg Cassini, I thought: Maybe I have a chance. I also thought: Losing is really a drag--let’s try winning for a change.
I watched a tape of the pageant recently, and it feels like going on an archaeological dig, pulling up unfathomable shards of the past. The broadcast, which preempted Mannix, opened with a song: “Who’s that walking along the street, so cool, keeping a groovy beat.... She doesn’t mind you will have to stare, great in everything she wears.” A silver pleated curtain rose to reveal a group of go-go dancers writhing in front of the contestants, who stood, frozen, on a stepped platform. The helmet-haired hostess, Arlene Dahl, sat at a table behind a pitiful arrangement of carnations that seemed to be strategically placed to conceal her bosom. The dimpled and equally helmet-haired cohost, John Davidson, commented, “This is a girl watcher’s dream come true.”
There was some speculation about the career ambitions of the contestants. “Do you think these girls always wanted to be models?” Davidson asked with some gravity.
“Not necessarily, John,” answered Dahl. “Some wanted to be nurses, airline hostesses, and more often than not, movie stars.”
The emcee, Jack Linkletter, summoned each girl to center stage for an interview, each of us having been instructed to do a little pirouette as we reached him.
“Do you want to have a large family?” he asked one.
“No,” she said without a touch of irony. “I think maybe six or seven.”
He asked a girl from Iowa to make the noise of an egg-laying chicken and commented about another, “This is a very ambitious girl in the sense that she has a lot of ambitions.”
Everyone was wearing so much eyeliner and shadow, such heavy false lashes, that we looked like sleepwalkers. Davidson and Dahl did the fashion commentary.
“The accent this year is on chains,” said Dahl, “to circle the waist or wrist or just to call attention to a pretty face.” “Or maybe to keep a girl at home with the chains,” chimed in Davidson.
When my turn came, I approached Linkletter, wearing a crushed red velvet coat with black gloves and boots and a cossack hat--actually a rather elegant look, considering the possibilities, which ran to tartan tam-o’-shanters and orange leather boots. I was terrified, exhausted, overwhelmed, and no doubt starving, and I looked it.
“In last year’s Miss Teenage contest,” Linkletter said to me, “you were Miss Congeniality. And you got to travel to Europe.”
“Oh, yes,” I gushed, “it was wonderful.”
“Which do you like better: European men or American men?” “Oh, I like them booooooth,” I said in a breathy drawl.
“Are they different?”
“Oh, there’s all different varieties, American men and European men.”
“See how congenial she is?” said Linkletter.
Instructions were to walk as if I were floating, like a geisha, my heels never touching the ground, when I paraded down the runway in the “Fun” segment of the program. Other contestants were consigned to pseudo cowboy chaps and space suits. The girl who followed me was wearing a hat so hideous, all she needed was a dangling price tag to look like Minnie Pearl. I had practiced flinging open my sequined cape in front of every available shiny surface until I had the move nailed, and I sold that bikini. I thrust my hips into the turn at the end of the runway, exposing a slice of midriff that hadn’t been so flat since I was ten and never would be again. Winning was nothing short of a calculated decision, but it was emotional beyond my initial contemptuous expectations. All that sentiment had been held in check until the moment of triumph while I smiled and made the right turns. There’s something devastating about winning, almost like walking across the bodies of the others, feeling the responsibility of the torchbearer for the beauty Olympics. It’s almost too much to bear. When you see a pageant winner crying, those are not crocodile tears. You don’t cry that way when you lose.
It was the lore about a young Graceelly, safely ensconced in the Barbizon Hotel upon her arrival in New York, that pacified my parents when Stewart Cowley suggested it as a place for me to stay. Perhaps Grace liked pink. My room looked like the inside of a Pepto-Bismol bottle, with a narrow single bed and a gigantic bathtub down the hall. The decision was made in haste: I won the contest on a Saturday night, and that Tuesday morning I was shooting on the sand dunes at Jones Beach for Ship ‘n’ Shore blouses. My starting rate was $20 an hour, and during my first month of work I made $6,000, but I spent a small personal fortune on the arsenal of beauty props I was expected to carry: self-adhesive nails, hot rollers, braids, falls, ponytails, hair spray, a ratting comb, and enough makeup to spackle a driveway. To haul it around, I bought a khaki fishing bag at Abercrombie & Fitch--a store on Fifty-seventh Street that celebrated patrician leisure activities--and took out the plastic lining meant for the fish. One of the women at the model agency informed me that I needed fur to look glamorous in New York and set up an appointment at Mr. Fred’s Fur and Sport, where I bought three, count ‘em, three coats: rabbit, possum, and curly white lamb. My shopping expedition was given six column inches in my hometown newspaper, but the midi length of the possum I’d chosen was deemed “overpowering for her delicate blond beauty.” (I wore it to wave from a float in a Thanksgiving Day parade in Charlottesville, North Carolina, much to the consternation of the officials, who were upset about not being able to see tit. and ass. They gestured frantically for me to remove the coat and reveal the skimpy gown underneath, but this particular set of tits and ass was freezing.)
I quickly learned the art of the go-see: I was told to buy a little notebook for my appointments, and every day I’d call the agency for a list of perhaps a dozen magazine editors and account executives who wanted to look me over. Getting the lay of the land required reciting a mantra: the Hudson River is to the west, Greenwich Village is to the south, Fifth Avenue’s in the middle.... Often I’d realize that I was on West Fifty-fourth Street when I was supposed to be meeting a client on East Fifty-fourth Street. I felt a discomfort akin to the theme of my childhood, when I knew that physical attributes were all that counted, but my early foray into modeling was a wonderful opportunity to become accustomed to rejection. Sometimes I knew the reason, sometimes not. I never got the Dentyne chewing gum commercial that I went up for three different times. The ad agency executives ordered “Smile harder,” then “Wider,” then “Less.” Apparently I chew funny.
One day I was summoned to the office of Diana Vreeland, the flamboyant editor of Vogue. She handed me a bikini that looked like three slices of bread strung together and told me to change in a closet. My ass hung out the back, which did not go unobserved--rather rude, I thought, since she had such an odd-looking body herself: all limbs with no waist and a face that seemed to have been ironed.
What many people don’t know about modeling is that the editorial shots in fashion magazines are the worst paying jobs. Catalogs are the bread and butter of the industry, photographed in formulaic ways that were thought to show the cheap clothes at their best advantage. Usually we worked in a studio against a huge roll of paper called no-seam hung from the ceiling. If I tried to make an impulsive, spontaneous gesture, the clothes tended to wrinkle, and the photographer would bring me back to the standard pose-- “One hand on your hip, please, one hand on your throat.”
Location shoots were more interesting, although there was seldom time to explore and enjoy the locations. I was required to make a personal appearance as Model of the Year in Caracas. (I mostly remember the sweet, thick coffee, which jolted me out of jet lag.) I made an Ul Brite toothpaste commercial in Los Angeles, staying at the Continental Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard, which got a reputation as the Riot House after it was trashed by rock groups in residence. (I mostly remember worrying about my eyes, puffy from crying out of sheer loneliness, plus I had a zit on my face that looked like a third eye.) I made a Cover Girl commercial in Bavaria, where the big brewing companies made extra-strength beer for Oktoberfest and waitresses carried three steins on each arm as people danced on tables in steamy beer halls. (I mostly remember wrapping myself in a feather bed in my freezing room at the inn.)
I didn’t make many friends while I was modeling. Competition turned the other girls into enemies--even on a location shoot where we were all working, there was a sense of rivalry about who’d end up with more pictures in the magazine. On-camera “talent” must be protected, which made people suck up, but only until they’d gotten what they wanted. I didn’t trust the editors and account executives, who acted as if I was going to be their best friend for life while we were working together, and then vaporized when the day ended. In the beginning I was afraid to look at the camera for fear that the photographer would think I was looking at him and giving him sexual license. It took me a while to acknowledge that photographers didn’t necessarily want to sleep with me. I felt utterly intimidated about talking to northerners; many people took my thick Memphis accent as evidence of mild retardation.
One who didn’t make those assumptions was a young executive at CBS named James Cass Rogers, newly graduated from Yale Drama School and assigned to the Model of the Year telecast. During a rehearsal break one day, I was sitting in a corner with my nose in a book when he approached. “You don’t look like the sort of girl who’d be reading The Confessions of Nat Turner,” he said.
“Oh, really,” I said, “what does that sort of girl look like?” Our friendship is now in its third decade. Jim always gave me loving criticism--there’s probably nothing more valuable. And he understood that I felt diminished by modeling. It made me financially independent and was occasionally creative, but most of the time I was treated like a prize steer being groomed and readied for a county fair (except I wasn’t supposed to bulk up). He encouraged me to find out what delighted and excited me by taking some college courses, a proposal that was greeted with derision by everyone at my agency. “Models always say they want to go back to school,” said the same person who told me to buy fur, “but they never do. Modeling money is too good, and the life’s too cushy.” Removed enough from childhood tutelage about being a good girl, my new reaction to the words “You can’t...” became “Watch me.”
Stewart Models demanded three days of work a week to fulfill my contract, so Jim suggested that I start with a single English literature course at Hunter College night school. Books had been my best friends in a chaotic household where people said they were happy but didn’t act like it. Books never talked down to me, didn’t care what color my hair was and, to this day, are my most treasured possessions. College was an opportunity to devour the classics, to live inside them: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I learned the tragic bargains people make for eternal youth and beauty.
In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad exposed the sinister unexplored and unowned areas of my psyche. In What Maisie Knew, Henry James let me into the turbulent world of a girl whose parents, just divorced, compete for her affection and approval, a parallel universe to my own. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton seemed to speak directly to me about a beautiful outsider trying to fit into fashionable New York, recognizing “a new ta of peril.” (One book I couldn’t relate to was Beowulf, written in Old English, which might as well be Old Swahili.)
The next semester I enrolled in the College of New Rochelle, a small progressive Catholic school for women in Westchester County, an hour north of Manhattan, which was more willing to accommodate my full-time work schedule. I spent only one night in the dorm, which seemed to vibrate with stereophonic noise. I tried blasting the opera Carmen to counteract Grace Slick down the hall and experimented with waxy earplugs that got stuck in my hair, but I had been out in the world too long to put up with the indignities of shared showers and toilets. I had moved out of the Barbizon (I wouldn’t last long anywhere that men weren’t allowed) to share an apartment with other models, so I made a reverse commute for my classes, taking the train up from Grand Central Station. Blessedly, I was excused from taking statistics and was allowed to bypass the generalized Introduction to Art, proceeding right to History of the Italian Renaissance. It was a highly charged time on campuses across the country, and I voted along with my classmates for a student strike against the Vietnam War--my first political protest. I was an anomaly: a passionate student who didn’t care about grades or earning a degree, and I wanted to learn. I was required to think, and it was one of the happiest times in my life.
Feeling like a frog that needed a bigger pond, I enrolled at Washington Square College of New York University and switched my major to English literature. Studying art history means reading art criticism, much of which is dry as a bone. At least literary criticism uses the same medium it is commenting on. I wouldn’t be studying what other people said about the creative people, but the words of the creative people themselves. Sitting through a Shakespearean play had never been my favorite pastime, but my class on his works was a chance to read and discuss the universal Sturm und Drang still pertinent today--hardly a week goes by that I don’t refer to the lies and betrayal in the unholy trinity of Othello, Desdemona, and Iago.
An anthropology course imparted a daring bit of knowledge: somewhere in the world there were women uncovering their breasts with impunity and covering up their ankles. I knew the stereotype that you could identify a woman’s nationality by noticing which part of her body she tried to hide if naked: an American would cover her breasts, a European would cover her genitals, an Arab would cover her face. Whatever part a woman believed she’d be struck down dead for exposing depended on country, culture, god, or tribe. The idea that there was nothing inherently right or wrong about nudity would justify one of the most important decisions in my future.
Stewart Cowley’s attorney’s best friend had a best friend whose best friend was John Bruno, a wealthy restaurateur who raced Ferraris and ran a family-owned steakhouse called the Pen and Pencil. He seemed both suave and down-to-earth to me: ten years older, Italian, born and raised in Manhattan. On one of our first dates he put on a white lab coat and took me into his meat locker, showing how he had inspected the beef himself, stamping it in purple ink with the restaurant’s insignia. One night we parked half a block from the restaurant after it closed to spy on employees who were stealing meat. (John said that all employees steal, that part of running the business was figuring out how much he could afford to have stolen and still make a profit.) He loved New York, and I got my feet permanently planted in the granite, in the subway and the theater, in Central Park and in the fountain on the plaza of the Seagram Building, where we went wading on a deserted Fourth of July when it felt like we had the city to ourselves.
I was sharing an apartment on Sutton Place with three other models (two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two locks on the door). When I got a bad srep throat, John brought me an Italian chicken soup called stracciatella and held me until I fell asleep. I’ve always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal, going from soup to... nuts, and we consummated the relationship when I recovered. Leaving the apartment, a chorus of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” ringing in our ears, we danced our way toward the East River, not caring that the sky was gloomy and certainly not noticing the piles of steaming dog shit before we stepped in it. (Pooper-scooper laws were not yet in effect, but I later learned the traditional theatrical superstition that stepping in dog doo on the way to a performance will bring luck.) Eventually I asked John to help me find a small apartment of my own and moved into a studio in the East Sixties, with a sleeping loft and a pullman kitchen that cost $500 a month (my day rate was up to $60). I indulged my innate disordered slobbiness, with nothing in the refrigerator but unrecognizable leftovers. (Could it be that the green fuzz ball was once a piece of cheese?)
I’d never even heard of brownstones, the nineteenth-century town houses built from the stones of river quarries up the Hudson, until I saw where John lived on the Upper East Side. When he led me up the spiral staircase for the grand tour, I gasped at a room with grand gilded mirrors, plush curved couches, and Victorian bibelots. “That’s where my mother lives,” he explained. “I’m upstairs.”
He lives with his mother...? I was reassured when I saw his own bachelor quarters, complete with bearskin rugs and leopard upholstery, even as a cover for the bathtub. And John’s mother turned out to be one of his best assets. Frances Bruno was a good head shorter than I and shaped like a Sumo wrestler--she looked as if she could roll right over anyone who got in her way. She had a big nose, short brown hair, and the gravelly voice of an ex-smoker, with an earthy, unedited laugh. She was involved in almost every aspect of the restaurant business, and no task was too insignificant: she had even reupholstered the chairs in the powder room herself. She suffered from bad arthritis and sometimes joined me in the basement swimming pool at the Barbizon, even after I was no longer living there, wearing a thick white rubber cap (although she didn’t put her face in the water) and a bathing suit with a “modesty panel.” Her street wear was more fashionable. Years before, she’d been the head fitter at Saks Fifth Avenue and took me to see how, in the days before computerized everything, the salespeople would send a customer’s money up to the cashier through a system of polished brash pneumatic tubes. She loved to shop, sometimes handing me a suede jacket or a pearl necklace with an apology: “Forgive me, I just had to buy this for you.”
Everything Frances did seemed sophisticated too, not just going to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center but eating afterward. (Dinner was at six o’clock when I was growing up.) She ordered steak tartare and so did I. I didn’t know from tartare; I figured it was steak, and how wrong could you go? When the plate of ground raw meat arrived at the table, I didn’t want to admit that I had no idea what I’d ordered. I took a bite, managed to swallow, and asked, “Isn’t this too rare for you?” Frances always poured water into her wine, saying, “... or else I’ll be tipsy.” And she was so easily, physically demonstrative. I felt that her hugs were untainted by any envy or reservation. That time had passed with my own parents, who conveyed a subtle discomfort about physical affection. Puberty and lies had distanced us.
Christmas 1968 should have been a triumphant homecoming for me. When the Commercial Appeal was delivered to our house, I was on the cover of the magazine supplement. After dinner, my father and I took one of our traditional walks around the neighborh, where a suburban building boom had created lots of new construction. We hadn’t gotten out of our yard before he said, “Your mother doesn’t turn me on anymore.”
Long pause. My first thought was: I don’t want to hear this. I felt as if I was outside the scene, which looked small and distant, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. But I said, “So who does?”
And he answered. “Her name is Ellen. She’s my secretary. She’s quite a bit younger than I am.”
My father was never supposed to leave, no matter what his behavior to my mother, no matter how she might have failed him. They were, after all, the best jitterbuggers in Memphis. For years I asked my mother, “Why did you and Dad stay together if you were incompatible?” and she always answered, “It was a perfect relationship. We were so in love.” I remember reading somewhere that the urge to defend your failures can be so strong that you invent another world to inhabit, a cocoon of denial in your own head and in the public eye. My mother had invested in a kind of fantasy goodness about my father, and it wasn’t until years later, when I’d confided the worst heartache of my life, that she acknowledged her futile convictions about her husband and the societal pressure to stay married. You get to know the bad mask of a person, she would say, and you stay, hoping there is a good person underneath who really loves you and will never leave.
My father always said he left Memphis with nothing but the shirt on his back. In truth, he drove away in a white Ford LTD, with a nice severance package, having failed to usurp control of Shobe, Inc., from Da-Dee. He married Ellen, then divorced her, then remarried her, and along the way they had a daughter, Mary Catherine. They were living in St. Louis and he had stopped paying my mother alimony. I begged her not to have his wages garnisheed, which got him fired because of the corporate policy at the company where he worked. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with his liver, and the doctor said he’d be dead within the year, a censure that seemed to impress him. He stopped drinking, and when he rented a vacation cabin in Ponca, Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks, I went to see him. The opposite of in vino veritas is that liquor can camouflage the true person, and in sobriety my father turned out to be lively, kind, intelligent, unpretentious, fun. But mostly he was alive.
JOHN BRUNO LIKED SKINNY MODELS, BUT HE FED ME A little too well. He belonged to the oldest gourmet society in the world, called La Chaine de Rotisseurs, and wanted to eat in a different restaurant every night. The meals were glorious--silken smoked salmon with fat capers at The Colony, foie gras and duck a l’orange at Quo Vadis--but disastrous for my figure. The paradox of modeling was that I represented the cynosure of female beauty, selling an illusion of perfection, and the tacit promise of an ad or commercial with my likeness was that those products and services would make other women look like me, but in my private life, even I couldn’t look like that me. The moment the Model of the Year contest was over, I started gaining weight, back up to my prestarvation pounds. On weekends I went running around the Central Park reservoir with John, but he couldn’t join me on the days he worked, and I felt unsafe going alone.
Every week I’d pass thinner, younger, prettier girls on go-sees, and John made disparaging comments about my ample hips and thighs, even as he was ordering a Grand Marnier soufflé from one of his gourmand buddies. Twice I stuck my finger down my throat after a meal but fortunately found the experience too repulsive to make it a habit. The average model of my height weighed no more than 108 pounds (110 was considered fat), and I weighed 150. Nothing ever fit. I didn’t fit. On a photo shoot for Vogue, the editor had to cut the dreses up the back and affix the butterflied pieces to my skin with Scotch tape.
Sometimes when we were shooting on the streets of New York, the magazine would rent a big black limousine, the driver would look the other way, and that would be the changing room. I’d jump out, do the picture, and jump back in again. Once when I was doing a Glamour shoot, the editor handed me a long-sleeved shirt that would not go past my elbows and pants that would not go past my knees.
“What size are these?” I asked, poking around for a label.
“These clothes are French,” she said with a sniff.
“Well, these are not French shoulders,” I said. “My elbow must be the size of a French woman’s thigh.”
“You can go home,” said the editor with a sigh. Getting paid to go home was one of my favorite days of modeling.
On a shoot in Saint Martin, the other model had spent much of the past year in Mexico, obviously sitting in the sun with iodine and baby oil, and it was the middle of winter in New York. When we lay on the beach together, we looked like the black and white keys on a piano, and I was told to stay out in the sun so we would “match.” I had baked myself for years, but this time I had an allergic reaction, and the next morning, my eyes were swollen shut. I stayed indoors for twenty-four hours with compresses of wet tea bags, but it didn’t do any good. I got paid for not working that time too.
Most models casually took appetite suppressants that were pure speed, professing satiety after nibbling what I considered hamster food. Practically everyone smoked, a habit I’d avoided because of childhood pneumonia, with the added incentive of my mother’s hacking cough as morning reveille and evening taps from her three packs a day. On location for Glamour in Key West, my roommate was a former Miss Universe who convinced me to try her prescribed amphetamines.
“Are you sure they won’t make me feel weird?” I asked. “And aren’t they addictive?”
“Not at all,” she answered. “I take them every day.”
She assured me there’d be no unpleasant side effects, and I’d watched her sleep sound as a baby, so I swallowed a few pills. I lay a wake all night, sweating and staring at the ceiling, my heart pounding as if it was going to pop out of my chest and my teeth gnashing like a hungry beaver. When she woke up and asked, “Would you like--” I quickly said, “No, thanks.”
The photographer on that shoot was a man named Frank Horvath—scruffy and obese, partly shaven before it was chic, wearing supersize dark army fatigues, utterly unappealing and initially interested in me. At our first meeting, in a dark room at the magazine offices, he’d looked me up and down for about two seconds, shrugged, and muttered, “Okay, she’ll do,” and left the room. We were working at Hemmingway’s house in Key West, with a resident collection of six-toed cats living in the garden, and Horvath didn’t bother to knock when he came into the room where I was being dressed by the editors, demanding of no one in particular, “Is she ready yet?” We were working on a second-story veranda, and he hadn’t even shot a whole roll of film before he said, “You’re not very good at this.” I stared at him, struck dumb by his blunt candor. “Stop posing,” he said. “You’re trying too hard, and you’ve developed some bad habits. Just think, be in the moment, actually see what you’re looking at.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was giving me my first acting lesson. The camera captures what you’re thinking, so it had better be something besides: if I hold my hands like this, I’ll look thinner. Jimmy Cagney said that acting was stand up tall, look the other guy in the eye, and tell the truth. what Horvath led me to that day was a kind of photographie veriti.
Glamour put me on the cover and used 101 photographs of me inside that issue (my grandmother counted) followed by seven Glamour covers that year. The era of Twiggy and Jean (“the Shrimp”) Shrimpton was over, and there seemed to be a little window of opportunity for a healthier look, personified by Tiegs and me. Everybody is supposed to have a better side, and I was always photographed from the left for covers, but Richard took this as a challenge. “Let’s try the right side,” he’d say each of the half dozen times we worked together, but his “cover tries” were never used because editors were unaccustomed to seeing me that way.
Sometimes the photographs looked like another person altogether. By the time they’d been retouched, there were no flaws, asymmetry of any kind. Things you didn’t know you had were eliminated from your face. I’m still shocked at what Kodak did on the full-length cutout of me that stood in drugstores to introduce the first Instamatic camera--there wasn’t a dimple or ripple of flesh. The countertop version had a mechanical arm that swung the camera up and down, rubbing an unfortunate line across my face. I inherited the cutout that my grandmother kept in her garage (she said “Hi” to it every time she pulled in), and one year my caretaker stuck a Santa hat on its head and a sign that said MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL. I still have my original “Breck girl” portrait too, an idealized vision of a woman, all misty and dew-eyed like a Stepford wife. These relics seem to migrate to my home in Memphis. Maybe they talk to one another when I’m not around, like the toys in Santa’s workshop that come alive at night.
I was clueless about the future beyond modeling, but not out of contentment with the status quo--I was frantically trying to figure out what was my Job in the universe. Stewart Cowley was opening a talent division to maneuver models into lucrative television and film work. He suggested that I meet a man who’d made a violent, low-budget, successful movie and was preparing to direct the sequel. The gold-leafed hotel suite was far more sumptuous than I expected for a B-list mogul. Stewart brought me upstairs but left quite abruptly, whispering “I’ll be right back” while I arranged myself on the sofa. As we were talking, Mr. B-list took my elbow and steered me to one of the tall windows overlooking Central Park. Then his hand moved from my elbow to my shoulder, he leaned in close and thrust his tongue down my throat. Naively, I asked what was going on.
“‘This is a scene in the new film,” he said. “I thought we’d rehearse.”
I pushed him away saying, “I don’t think this is working for me,” just as I heard a knock at the door signaling Stewart’s return. I made an excuse about needing to be somewhere else, and the moment we were in the hallway, I hissed, “Don’t ever leave me alone with one of those creeps again!” I never knew whether his sudden departure was prearranged or an innocent mistake.
With the memory of that lechery still fresh, I learned with some trepidation that Roger Vadim had offered me a screen test for a film called Peryl, and I insisted that a chaperone accompany me to Los Angeles: my booker at the agency, Donna DeCita, whose sister is Bernadette Peters. We stayed in the grizzled old Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where some of the regulars were wandering around the lobby in their bathrobes. Because there was no script yet, I was instructed to rehearse a scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I sat on the lawn reading lines with Vadim’s assistant, who then drove me to Malibu for the screen test. Vadim was tall and slender with thinning hair, a creamy shirt that he said was made of Egyptian cotton. Three years of Memphis high school French didt help me understand a word as he conversed with a French actor named Christian Marquand (also tall and slender with thinning hair), whose home we were using for the audition. I definitely knew what the term ménage a trois meant and was glad for the chaperone.
Most of the test consisted of filming me, with no sound, dancing to the Rolling Stones singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” (The old-time Hollywood producers, many of them German, would refer to this as “M.O.S.”--mit out sound.) The film never got produced; I was told that the financing fell through. But I had started something interesting with the assistant (younger, hairier, and shorter than either of the Frenchmen), and as my friend Wanda used to say, “How do you know if a shoe fits unless you try it on?” A few weeks later, I lied to John Bruno and flew to San Francisco for the weekend. The assistant picked me up on a motorcycle and strapped my suitcase to the back. I kept looking over my shoulder as we rode, expecting to see the highway littered with my bras and underpants. Vadim later offered me a role in Pretty Maids All in a Row, but the character was set to die, early and gruesomely, in the girls’ rest room of a high school. I declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat, and my acting career was stalled at the gate.