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The Beginning

I’m standing in the storefront window of Anne Taylor at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan, trying not to fall asleep. A woman reaches out to touch the sleeve of the wool plaid blazer I’m wearing.

“Oh, my God, she’s real!” she yelps, when I flinch. “Betty, look! She’s real!” She takes a step back and points at me.

“Oh, that’s fabulous,” Betty says. “You can hardly tell.”

I’m freeze modeling, which means standing like a mannequin in a shop window all morning with ten-minute breaks each hour to change clothes. I was chosen because I’m a member of the Twelve Oaks Mall fashion panel, a group of high school-aged models who do fashion shows for free. Now three young girls, about twelve, are standing outside the window, pointing and giggling.

“Look, she’s falling asleep,” one says, as I struggle to stare motionless ahead. And now here comes my mom and my sister. My sister’s the one who got me into this, the one who wanted me to model. I’ve never had any interest in fashion, let alone modeling. My favorite outfit is this long blue skirt that I wear knotted on one side with a white shirt, white leggings, and white cowboy boots. I look like I walked straight out of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but it’s comfortable. My sister, however, has plans for me.

“You’re tall and skinny; you should model,” she said to me one day.

“Why would I want to model? Models are dumb.”

“Who cares? You could make a lot of money. Just do it for a while, make a ton of money, and then you can do anything you want.”

“Like how much money?”

“One of my students makes $800 a day doing Dominos pizza commercials, and she’s 17. She’s got enough money saved to go to college already.”

I hadn’t thought about how I planned to pay for college yet—I knew my Dad couldn’t afford it on his own—but $800 a day! I could buy a lot of things with $800 a day—new clothes, a car, another trip out to California to visit my brother.

One of my five brothers (I’m the youngest of eight kids) had invited me out to visit him at Stanford for spring break, and I’d fallen in love with the Bay Area. I dreamt of getting out of Michigan and moving to a place where there were palm trees, where it was sunny in December, and where it never snowed. After much badgering, my sister convinced me to get some photos taken by a photographer her student knew, and things snowballed from there.

First I was stopped by a talent scout from Elite Model Management in New York while out studying at the local library with my friends. She was a Detroit photographer and asked me if I’d had any photos taken. When I told her that I had, she asked if she could come to my house to see them. She talked to my parents and convinced them to let her take me to a scouting competition at a local mall. There I met a sort of model manager, who took me under her wing. She took me to Chicago to meet the agencies there, and they told me I was too high fashion for Chicago and that I needed to go to to New York.

She set up an appointment for me to meet John Casablancas, the owner of Elite Model Management in New York, the largest and most prestigious modeling agency in the world. John took one look at me and told me I needed a nose job. She had me do a couple of test shoots, and the photographer at one of the shoots asked me if I’d ever considered getting a nose job. That clinched it for me. If I wanted to model, I’d have to get my nose fixed. My sister had had a nose job already, so it wasn’t a foreign concept. My friend’s dad happened to be a plastic surgeon, and she took me to meet him. He said he could write it up as a deviated septum so our insurance company would pay for it. All I needed was $200 for the deductible, and I’d be picture perfect. I scheduled the surgery as though it were a routine checkup at the dentist, and then convinced my parents to give me the money. It helped that my sister was on my side.

Meanwhile, the model manager convinced my parents to sign a contract that gave her 5 percent of everything I earned for the next five years. She organized appointments for me in New York, and I went there with yet another one of my brothers, who lives upstate there. The agencies suggested I go to Europe to get some experience and to build up my portfolio. A lot of models start out in Europe because there are so many magazines there—a Vogue, an Elle and a Marie Claire for every country, plus all of their local magazines. Then I could return to New York and clean up doing catalog and advertising jobs.

But I was 16, and there was no way I was going to quit high school and move to Europe, so I gave up on modeling. I did a few local jobs—shoots for The Detroit News and the Metro Times, a fashion show for Xandra Rhodes, and some mall shows here and there, but I gave up the idea of ever making any real money, especially after I lost an auto show job for which I would have been paid $50,000 a year to travel the country extolling the wonders of the Ford Taurus, Sierra, and LTD. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then the universe conspired to move me to California. First, a friend from school decided she was moving to LA after she graduated and encouraged me to go with her. Then I met a guy who had gone to my high school and moved to San Francisco. “LA sucks,” he said. “Move to San Francisco instead.” Then my brother in New York, after flying me there to do a milk commercial for the American Dairy Association, said, “If you want to go to California, then go. What’s stopping you?” Really? I thought. I can just … go? So I started making plans.

I got a second after-school job to save money for the move. I spent my English classes sitting at the back of the room drawing up plans—how much money I needed, when I would leave, and where I would live and work once I got there. There were details to work out, like how I was going to get to California. I didn’t own a car and didn’t have money to buy one. My parents weren’t willing to help me out because they didn’t want me to go, and I was too young to rent a car. I could have flown, but then how would I take my life’s possessions? I wasn’t going for a couple of months; I was going for good.

Then I ran into the mother of an old grade school friend and discovered that she had plans to move to California, too—to Santa Barbara. I convinced her to move to San Francisco instead, so we could share an apartment. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law got a job in LA, and my brother needed someone to drive his pickup truck cross country from Michigan. I saved money to buy a cap for the truck and had a friend teach me how to drive a stick. All this went on while I was taking the SAT and AP exams, writing college application essays (to please my parents), and acting as the vice president of my senior class.

I arrived in San Francisco on July 7, 1988, and I had a tougher time finding a job than I expected. I eventually got one selling T-shirts at a tourist shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, but I hated it. I wanted to work in a restaurant where I could eat good food and make good tips, but instead I was folding T-shirts all day. I wasn’t even allowed to operate the cash register. My money was running out fast, so I began to sell my clothes and return unused Christmas gifts for cash. Before long, I was dining on 50-cent burgers at Burger King and drinking tap water for lunch. I was broke.

I tried attending classes at City College in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco, but coming from a private school, I couldn’t stand the way the teacher condescended to us. If we worked really hard, she said, some day we may be able to go to UC Berkeley. Of course I was going to go to Berkeley, you ninnywinny, I thought, and never returned. So there I was, broke, without a college degree, and feeling very very trapped.

“Just call that model manager woman,” my roommate said. “Go to Europe, make $5000, and then come back and go to school.”

So I called her. She set up appointments for me with the three biggest agencies in San Francisco, and all three agreed to represent me. I went with Look because it had the best reputation, and within a week they had me doing test shoots and meeting agents visiting from Paris and Milan. The agents asked me to go to Europe for the shows, whose castings were three weeks away.

“Pourquoi pas?” I said. What did I have to lose?

I stopped in Michigan on my way to Paris to see my family and put some of my things in storage. While here, I agreed to do one last job for the fashion panel, and now here I am, a real mannequin, the French word for “model.” I’m excited to go to Paris. I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve taken four years of high school French, so at least I can conjugate my verbs. I figure with my good business sense, I’ll do well. I plan to model for a year, make as much money as I can, and then apply to UC Berkeley next fall. Until then, Paris, j’arrive!

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L’Arrivée

The taxi driver deposits me on rue Etienne Marcel, at the corner of the six-lane boulevard de Sebastopol. The buildings are dirty but beautiful, their windows like shiny fat women wearing white wooden shutters for jackets and black lace balconies for skirts. Tiny Peugeots and Fiats idle impatiently at red lights while I drag the brown tweed suitcases my parents gave me for Christmas across the street to number 62, the Marilyn Gauthier Agency. I step into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen, stack my suitcases one on top of another, and squeeze in sideways beside them. I’m relieved to have made it through the airport maze with its giant glass wormholes that suspend travelers over the seven-floor terminal, but I’m worried that Marilyn won’t like me, that she’ll think I’m not pretty enough or outgoing enough, and send me home.

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror as I rattle and hum my way up to the third floor. I examine my new nose, wondering whether Marilyn will notice that I’ve had it fixed, and then pop a tiny zit that has formed beneath my left nostril. The elevator door opens out onto a hardwood floor, and I step out. I’m about to meet one of the most powerful modeling agents in the world, the person who could make the difference between a lucrative international career and a dead-end job selling T-shirts on Fisherman’s Wharf, and I can’t stop yawning, a peculiar response I have to fear.

Inside, a pale woman with thick, dark ropes of hair instructs me to wait on a black sofa beneath a photo of a buxom, almost fat, model. When no one is looking, I stand to glimpse my reflection in the glass of the photo behind me. Together we are the before-and-after photos of a cancer survivor, she healthy and smiling with florid cheeks and golden locks, and I emaciated and pale, my brittle, bleached hair shorn to an inch. I don’t understand why anyone thinks I could model. I don’t look like the girls in fashion magazines. I don’t look like a girl at all with my boyish face and cropped hair. And it’s not like I’m fashionable. I don’t know the first thing about what’s in and what’s out, who’s hot and who’s not. I sit down quickly as two buxom women, one blond and one brunette, appear in the foyer. They’re both wearing décolleté sweaters, knee-length wool skirts, and high heels. In my jeans, hightops, and baggy wool sweater that’s pilling at the sleeves, I’m sorely underdressed for this high fashion capital. I would have changed into something nicer, but I don’t have anything nicer. When the one on the right introduces herself as Marilyn, I see that she resembles the woman in the poster, except that she has dark, curly hair and a hooked nose that my plastic surgeon would have been quick to send for surgery. Her disarmingly sad eyes make me like her right away. Her assistant, Siobhan, has a pug nose and an imperious regard, but a warm smile that makes me like her, too. They look at me and exchange some words in French. I hold my breath.

“Come along, dahling,” Siobhan says in a British accent, motioning for me to follow. I exhale. I’ve passed the first test.

In the booking room, four agents, called bookers, sit around a large, round table—all dressed to kill: Kevin in a designer cowboy shirt, Anne in a fur-collared blazer, Etienne with a silk scarf around his neck, and Ulla in cat-eye glasses. A chair remains empty for Marilyn, who looks like a Balla painting in her constant flurry of motion. I’m taking everything in, memorizing their clothes, their mannerisms, and the intonation of their words. I want to be a straight-A model.

I was an oops baby, the last in a line of eight kids, born nine years after my brother. “I’m an only child with seven brothers and sisters” I told my parents after learning about the psychology of birth order in my high school Psychology class. I was too tall and too thin to be beautiful, or even very pretty. I had abnormally dry skin, and I wore my pants pinned at the sides so they wouldn’t fall down. I thought models were dumb and superficial and only gained a passing interest after a girl I lifeguarded with told me she had earned $800 in one day. I was from a middle class family and went to a private high school where a lot of girls had a lot more money than I did (In fact, I think all but one of my friends had more money than I did.) And I wanted money. I wanted the entitlement that came with it, the confidence, the carefree attitude, and the STUFF—fancy homes and cars and clothes. Our Catholic school uniforms were supposed to make us all equal, but you could tell who had money and who didn’t by the cars they drove to school, the jewelry, the hairdos, and the clothes they wore on non-uniform days.

In addition to money, I wanted adventure in my life. Maybe it was all the books I had read—from Danny Dunn, Time Traveler to Around the World in Eighty Days. I had wanted to study abroad during my junior year (Switzerland, so I could heli-ski) or do Outward Bound in New Zealand, but my parents couldn’t afford either one. I was bored to death with suburban Michigan with its strip malls and house parties, and I wanted to see the world, to ride subways in big cities and travel to foreign countries and learn foreign languages. I guess French class fostered my particular interest in Paris.

I also wanted romance. I’d been a romantic since I was 14 (again, maybe thanks to all the books I read), and I fantasized constantly about meeting the perfect boyfriend—gorgeous, funny, intelligent, nice—and living happily ever after. But while I was reading books, the more popular, more outgoing, more beautiful girls were getting the guys.

Modeling offered it all—money, foreign travel, validation and the chance to meet gorgeous guys. I think my mom filled my head with those romantic notions, too. She was always reading romance novels and watching television (including “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and General Hospital”), and she was enthralled by glamour—wealth and fashion and romance. She would tell me, “No guy will date a picky eater” when I wouldn’t eat my greens, instead of “They’ll make you healthy and strong.”

I’d always been a serious student, and planned on earning a PhD one day, so it was out of character for me to ditch college to move cross-country to San Francisco, and then on to Paris, by myself at 18 to work as a fashion model. I guess I was a daydreamer, someone who fantasized about living in Thornfield Hall—the whole fairytale lifestyle as I mentioned above. But is that enough motivation? Or is there something I’m missing? I didn’t have a bad childhood, didn’t come from a broken home (although it was plenty dysfunctional). Is wanting money, adventure and romance enough to entice you to follow me for 300 pages through Europe and Japan? Or do I need something more?

Below is the first modeling picture I had taken after I cut off my long copper hair, shaved it up the back, and bleached it platinum. I was living in San Francisco, and I was 18.