A Model Time

(This essay was originally published on my now-defunct essay blog.)

It first happened to me when I was thirteen.

I was still behaving like a grade schooler, collecting bubble gum cards and pasting pictures in a scrapbook. I still listened to the Bee Gees while other boys my age were just getting into the Rolling Stones. Then I saw her.

She was a model in a newspaper ad. Her hair was obviously blond despite the black-and-white image. She posed seductively, her gleaming lips gently parted, her eyes staring straight ahead. She was doing what I learned later was known as making love to the camera. I felt a sinking sensation in my throat that I’d never experienced before. I sighed in a tone suggesting both contentment and despair. Who was this woman? I never found out, but she was the one who led me away from comic books to my discovery of women . . . and fashion models.

High school in the early eighties was a lonely experience for me. I never had a girlfriend to take to the movies or hang out with at the mall. At the same time, a new generation of comely young women was beginning to appear on fashion runways and magazine covers. I think there were only two or three active models in the late seventies who were mainstream celebrities; Cheryl Tiegs, of course, was one. Most models, like the one in the newspaper ad who helped me begin my journey out of childhood, were anonymous. Then the eighties began, and overnight there was an explosion of famous models. These women who graced the covers of magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vogue were my high school romances.

Most teenage boys at the time were infatuated with Carol Alt, the era’s most famous brunette, or Christie Brinkley, the era’s most famous blonde. They certainly appeared in enough annual editions of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Oh, they were pretty, to be sure. But Carol and Christie never did much for me. They seemed to be generically beautiful, all sparkle and no spark. Kim Alexis was the best and possibly the only reason to check out Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. Feminist wrath against the swimsuit issue aside, Kim Alexis looked like she belonged in a sports magazine. She had such a muscular, athletic physique, she could easily have been featured in Sports Illustrated as an Olympic champion. As a swimmer? Not in a bikini, of course, but she even looked hot in a swim team regulation tank top.

If I wanted real glamour – and more Kim Alexis – I had to go through more surreptitious means. I would occasionally peak in the women’s magazines my mother regularly brought home and look at the models inside. Cosmopolitan was a favorite of my mother’s, and sometimes she’d have Glamour or Redbook on hand. I’d look when no one was around to spare myself the embarrassment; it would have looked bad to be seen looking at Glamour or get caught red-handed with Redbook. If I’d been caught with Playboy like other guys, at least I would have been considered normal. It was in Cosmopolitan, though, that I discovered women like Anne Bezamat, a gorgeous Frenchwoman who wore her curled chestnut brown hair in a loose bouffant with a few locks hanging down. She had eyes like melting icicles – frosty with a touch of warmth. I was able to finish a romantic poem I’d started writing by looking at her picture. Thank you, Anne Bezamat.

The biannual fashion editions of the New York Times Magazine were a safer option, as I could look through them along with the rest of the Sunday paper. But not much safer. I still couldn't let Mom see me poring through these inserts, and she never suspected my interest in them. Once she took a New York Times Magazine fashion edition to see it herself, while I was reading another section. "You don’t want this," she said.

In fact, the Fashions of the Times, as it was called, provided my sweetest memories of my ongoing discovery of the opposite sex. It featured the most elite of the top models, the brightest stars from the most prestigious agencies. I would look through the pages excitedly, sighing with delight as I gazed through the photos. I must have fallen eternally in love at least a dozen times . . ..

There was Dianne deWitt. Her face was flawless enough to inspire mannequins sculpted in her likeness. She still had a warm, friendly smile, accentuated by her magnificently styled golden blond hair.

Sheila Johnson, one of the top black models of the day, always looked soft and alluring with her almond eyes and her silky brown complexion. She was quite the turn-on in a copper-colored sweater top with a plunging V-neck.

Rosemary McGrotha . . . was she Donna Karan’s muse or Anne Klein’s muse? Right, why should I care? With her steely blue eyes, her sharply pointed nose and her full, curvaceous figure, she looked like a real woman. She was a real woman. She was known for her love of good food and a lack of interest in dieting.

Clotilde, Ralph Lauren’s spokesmodel, had the loveliest hair: a long, flowing chestnut brown mane framing her gently contoured face . . .. Oh my God! She could make tweed or knits look sexy.

So these women were a fantasy. So what? In high school, the girls either picked on me, were taken, or both. Being with lovely fashion models in my fantasies helped get me through adolescence. I emerged from that period more mature in my tastes; I went from comic books to classic novels and from light pop to classic rock. Alas, I was not more experienced in how to deal with real women. I've never regretted my obsession with the high-profile fashion models of my adolescence. They soothed my teenage restlessness when no one or nothing else did.

(Other models I was attracted to in the early eighties included but were not limited to Nancy Donahue and Pat Cleveland, both of whom, of course, I have met.  Since I wrote this essay, I have since learned that the model in the newspaper ad I began this essay with a description of was German model Margrit Ramme. :-) )