Nastasia Urbano Speaks

Spanish model Nastasia Urbano is alive and well and beginning to show all of the signs of a comeback - not so much for her career (although that is likely to come), but for herself.  She opened up to the Spanish daily newspaper El País to talk about her battle with homelessness in an article titled "The Model Who Lives On the Street Discusses Her Descent Into Hell."

Despite having recently cut her long brown hair short, as seen above, she still exhibits poise and beauty, and she still looks flawless at 57 years of age.  But in the English translation of Alfonso Congostrina's interview piece with Nastasia, posted below, she bared her soul and made her pain clear.  Her frankness is, I hope, her first step to recovery.  (An interview video is included, but you have to know Spanish to understand what she is saying; there are no English subtitles.)  As always, I take no credit for this story; I just cleaned up an automatic translation of it.

And while I remember that Nastasia was usually credited for her modeling work by her first name alone, I had no idea that her original Christian name was Consuelo.

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Everyone calls her Nastasia. She herself invented the name, in the early eighties, when a modeling agency forced her to rename herself. Consuelo Urbano "was a name without a hook."  As Nastasia, she managed to be fashionable, lending her image to ads for perfumes and fashion brands. She earned checks with six zeroes. She rocked the world and rubbed shoulders with the stars of cinema, music and fashion in New York. She retired shortly before the phenomenon of the top models turned her successors into stars. Decades later, she that does not respond to the name of Consuelo. Today she is 57 years old and has been living on the street for three months, in Barcelona.

Nastasia signed contracts of one million dollars to work only twenty days. It was the '80s. Today everything she has is reduced to her dog Jack and the clothes she wears, "the jacket my friend Toni has left me," she explains, referring to the person whose house she has stayed at during these days. "Three months ago I slept for the first time in an ATM booth. I walked for a whole day without being able to think clearly. A scream of despair bounced in my head. A cry of help, of help . . . " she recalls in a slow conversation while she fixes her eyes, between green and gray, on the interlocutor. Urbano's history was reported last week in El Periódico de Cataluña.  Since then, she's seen some light, but she is still waiting for the script she needs to turn her life around before she turns 60. She knows that the camera wants her - "it's something that you have to be born with it," she says - although she detests her current appearance. This Wednesday (February 6) she told her story to El País.

The film of Nastasia's life begins in September 1961, when she was born in Switzerland. There she lived with her parents, Spanish immigrants, and her two brothers. Their summers were spent in the municipality of L'Ampolla, in Tarragona. "I had a boyfriend and one day he took a picture of me on the beach. He showed it to someone and it ended up in the hands of a modeling agency," she recalls. Consuelo, as still called herself then, left her job at a department store, flew to Barcelona and, after renaming herself artistically, began to work. "Everything was fast. First Barcelona, ​​then Milan, Paris . . .." She earned a lot of money and entered a circle where beauty was everything. And she was very beautiful. It was then when he met Fabrizio Ferri, a photographer who launched her worldwide.

At little more than 20 years of age, she found Europe too small for her. The young woman crossed the pond and settled in New York. There, the Ford modeling agency took her on and led her to the covers of the most important publications. "I appeared in Vogue, New Woman. I was the image of brands like Yves Saint Laurent and Opium," she recalls. She made a lot of money. She abused cocaine and alcohol at a time when excesses seized the stars.

She partied with fellow model Jerry Hall, with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and others. She was "one of the girls" who liked to go out with Jack Nicholson. She danced at a party in the company of Melanie Griffith, was the girlfriend of actor David Keith and met Andy Warhol and David Lynch. She fell in love with a man 22 years older than she, who separated her from the world she adored: "He was very possessive and he annulled me as a person."

Overnight, she forgot about drugs and alcohol, but she continued to work without worrying about how much money was in her bank account. Every summer she returned to Barcelona and, at 31, on one of the trips, she fell in love with the man who would become her husband. She left everything in New York behind, she left her boyfriend and in 1992 went home to Barcelona . . . by then a different city, spruced up for that year's Summer Olympics. "That year I changed my country, I got married and I got pregnant with my daughter," recalls Nastasia.

She was married for seven years and invested all her fortune, "blindly," in her husband's failed projects. She had two children. "From the year 2000, I started working on a temporary basis, I took care of people, children . . . but what I earned was never enough. A French bank contacted me and informed me that I had an account that I did not even remember. I lived there for awhile, then I took care of my father . . . but I have never recovered. They have evicted me three times. The last time was three months ago," she recalls.

She claims to have a good relationship with her children, but she does not want to cause more discomfort for them. "They have their problems and a mother can not be a burden to their children." Her friends have started a campaign on the GoFundMe portal to help the former model to get money and, for the first time in a long time, she is excited: "I only ask for a future with tranquility and in which I can live and not survive, as I have until now." Many things have happened, but today, Nastasia, dressed in gray and black and extremely thin, still knows how to pose.

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Nastasia, of course, is a dear friend of mine, and I hope her climb of out the worst depth imaginable - being without a place to rest your head - continues.  The fact that she is excited about the future indicates that all is not lost for her. Don't give up, Nastasia.