As I type this blog entry with snow and sleet accumulating outside my window, I am happy to report that my friend, Spanish model Nastasia Urbano (below), is staying with a friend for the time being. In the meantime, the GoFundMe page set up to help her get out of her homelessness plight has raised €4,260 (US$4,815.61), the ultimate goal being €6,000 (now US$6,872, based on an exchange rate of US$1.13 to the euro). That's 71 percent of funds needed raised in just eight days based on contributions from 180 people.
But numbers don't tell the whole story - in fact, they don't tell a story at all. The massive outpouring of support for this lovely woman is a remarkable display of love, affection, and fondness toward her, and it only shows how Nastasia, though she retired from modeling to return to Spain and become a mom in the early nineties, has remained in the hearts of those who are her friends, her fans, or both. She is still one of the sweetest women to work in the modeling profession, a quality she was able to project in her career, like in this adorable cover photo from the July 1984 edition of Redbook (one of the last Redbook covers to feature a professional model before that magazine switched to putting movie and TV stars on its cover).
Nastasia has been so touched by the love and support she's received that she has made two videos thanking everyone who has contributed to her GoFundMe page - one in Spanish, the other in English. Here is the English-language version.
And I want to thank her for letting me be a part of her life, just as she's been a part of mine. :-)
The six thousand euros we hope to raise will allow Nastasia to rent a small apartment for a few months while she gets her lief back together and makes plans to return to modeling at a time when models her age - 57 - are in great demand. I'll let you all here know when the six-thousand-euro goal has been reached.
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.
Here's an update on my friend Nastasia Urbano, the top eighties model who ended up homeless on the streets of her hometown of Barcelona. She is staying at a friend's house there. I am so happy to know that she is all right.
But she still needs help. A mutual friend has started a GoFundMe page to raise at least €6,000 - about $6,858 - to help her get back on her feet. So now anyone who wants to help her can.
If you look at the left-hand photo on Nastasia as she appears today, you still see the beauty in her face, beauty that still captivates many a viewer. But you also see the humanity, the experience, and the character of this amazing woman. Just remember that the right-hand photo is not so much a picture of Nastasia as it is an image she projected to sell the Yves Saint Laurent brand. The real Nastasia Urbano is not an image. She's a woman of flesh and blood, and one who needs any help she can get.
I'm hoping anyone who reads this, knowing Nastasia's story, will feel moved enough to contribute to this GoFundMe effort. And when she is back on her feet, I know she'll be a stronger, more durable person as a result. :-)
I am back today with another El Periódico article from Mauricio Bernal about my dear friend Nastasia Urbano, the 1980s top model from Spain. Apparently, friends of hers who have known her far longer than I have are reaching out to help Nastasia, and efforts to get her out of harm's way and relieve her of her plight are accelerating. I am heartened greatly by this news.
As with my previous post on the subject, I present this article translated from the original Spanish, with the inevitable corrections and cleanup work necessary for a foreign-language text translated automatically by computer software. It is Mauricio Bernal's article and his alone; I take no credit for it. The picture of Nastasia was taken by photographer Elisenda Pons. Thanks to my fellow journalists in Barcelona for everything they do.
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A group of former co-workers of Nastasia Urbano has decided to organize to help the ex-model who, in the 1980s, was part of the elite world of modeling, and who now, in poverty, has to sleep in the streets of Barcelona. Overwhelmed by the story of Urbano's fall from grace published by El Periódico, Ruth Schuler, Liz Beltrán, Patricia Soler Beltrán and photographer Robert Suárez are getting in touch with other professionals from the business who knew the model at that time that she began her career - to let her know that she is not alone and, in the end, to reach out to her.
"It has left me in shock. I believe that all of us never expected this, to say the least of it," says Schuler, Urbano's partner in the Group Model Management agency. "We were at the princess level, but she, she was at the goddess level," she recalls, "I remember her as an introverted person, very beautiful and very generous with others." Then, in the '80s, Urbano did her first modeling work. Almost immediately, global stardom awaited her - first in Milan, and later in New York, where she worked with famous models such as Linda Evangelista and world-famous photographers such as Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton.
"We are gathering more people, many people are signing up to help. The first thing is to talk to her, know how she is and what she needs. Every one of them is collecting information to see how we can help her, Schuler says. "We have to help her in a sensible way; opening an account in her name may not be a solution. We have thought about going to the homeless program at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, helping her in the process, of course, but above all, letting her know that she is not she is alone, and that there are people who appreciate her and who remember her from that time. You have to make that help concrete, but a lot of people are signing up."
The 1980s were Urbano's golden age. In New York she worked with the Ford modeling agency and did advertisements for brands such as Revlon, Yves Saint Laurent and Virginia Slims, among many others. She made a lot of money, but she lost it because of an unhappy marriage. From her beginnings in Barcelona, Schuler recalls that at the headquarters of the agency, "in a tower on Muntaner Street that no longer exists," they spent a lot of time together, "because it was like a second home" for models. "We were eating there, we spent the day there. Sometimes we went together to the castings. Then of course, we'd follow each other's work. 'Have you seen David Lynch's commercial?' I remember we were talking about that."
It is not the only show of solidarity that has awakened memories of Urbano. Hernando Herrera, a former model who now works at HH International Modeling in Barcelona, believes that a person with Urbano's experience still has much to contribute in the world of modeling. "She could do many things - not only work as a model, but also give lectures, host talks on fashion, and do countless activities," Herrera says, "and I am willing to retrain her and talk with photographers and agencies so that she can return to work." Esteve Llanes, who works for Foto K, a Barcelona store specializing in photography and video equipment that organizes workshops in which models often participate, has also offered his help. "We do workshops with models and I think that somehow she could share her experience with these women who start," Llanes says.
Beyond the world of modeling, Urbano has generated sympathy among people who have lived similar stories. Rosa Montané, a friend of Urbano in the town of Torroella de Montgrí just northeast of Barcelona, says she knows what the ex-model is going through. "Everything she talked about in your article, I lived through. I was an advertising producer and I was ruined at a difficult age, like she was, at 55 years old. I lost everything and the world turned its back on me; it took me almost seven years to get back up again. I know how it is that society will blame you by saying that if you end up in such a situation, that's because of something you must have done. Now I have a non-buoyant situation, but it's stabilized, and have a place where I have some room. She's welcome if she wants to come. "
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The one thing that makes me feel worse than knowing that Nastasia is homeless is that there is little if anything that I can do about it. But she clearly has a lot of friends in Spain who want to help her. And I'll let you in on a little secret; as a fashion and modeling outsider who's befriended many models of the eighties through social media as a result of me preserving their work on my beautiful-women picture blog, I can assure you that Nastasia has many more friends in America and elsewhere who want to help her. Dozens of us have expressed a desire to do whatever we can to come to Nastaais's aid. For now, all I can do is relay translations of these articles coming out of Spain to arouse more awareness of her plight. Until and unless she makes it back to New York and needs help from those of us in the Tri-State area, this is all I can do.
Nastasia, if you're reading this . . .. If you ever make it back to New York, I hope I'm one of the first people at the airport to greet you. And when I see you, I'm going to give you the biggest hug and the smoochiest kiss I can give you for a welcome. Not because I want to fulfill a fantasy of being with the woman in the Yves Saint Laurent Opium ads - because that woman is a fantasy herself, a fictitious image. Rather, it's because I love you as a friend because of who you really are - a sweet, generous and caring woman who's always been very dear to me and who I know would help me if the situation were reversed. I don't care about the fantasy goddess in those old ads. I care about you.
Hold strong, my dear . . . you have friends who love you and want to see you back on your own two feet.
Spanish fashion model Nastasia Urbano is one of the models I befriended on Facebook, and I have been in touch with her before, both on social media and by telephone. I'd lost contact with her recently, and I had no idea what happened to her until someone who follows my beautiful-women picture blog found one of my posts devoted to Nastasia and left me a link to an article from the Barcelona daily El Periódico. It turns out she is homeless, sleeping in different places throughout the city.
I am devastated. Nastasia has been one of my dearest and sweetest friends in the modeling profession, despite the fact that I have never met her in person, and so many people who know her better than I do love her. She is a warm, caring, generous person, and even at 57 years of age she retains the earthy sensuality that made her a star in the modeling world back in the 1980s. A combination of factors has left her homeless, but the biggest cause is a former husband who left her higher and drier than she could have imagined.
The following is a translation of the original El Periódico story by reporter Mauricio Bernal. I automatically translated it with Google, and as it was a literal translation that did not recognize the differences between Spanish and English, I reworked it, changed a few words, and cleaned it up a bit. The photos and the video below are from the Internet version of the original story. I take no credit for this article; this is still Mauricio Bernal's reporting, and I want to make that point clear. I post it here because I care deeply about Nastasia, I love her as a friend, and I want as many people to read this - because she needs help. I wish her the best, because she deserves much better than what she has, or doesn't have, now, and I wish I could do more than just relaying this story to make people aware of her situation.
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One day, when she went to a local official in Barcelona ask for help, Nastasia Urbano was told that she had to register first, and when she explained that she was sleeping in an ATM booth, he answered that there was no problem, that she could register there. If the official who tended to her then would have had the curiosity to search for her name on the Internet - aesthetic reasons could have persuaded him - he would have discovered that a certain form of apocalypse existed for this woman . . . a personal one, which consists of falling from the highest peak to the lowest depth. He would have found covers of magazines and advertising campaigns of major brands, and in all of them he would have found an exceptionally beautiful model, and yes - very similar to the woman from the ATM booth.
New York, 1981. Nastasia Urbano has just arrived in the city. She is 20 years old and has the feeling that the world is at her feet. The world of fashion, at least. She'd done her earliest modeling work in Barcelona, and then, with photographer Fabrizio Ferri, in Milan, where she had been cover of Vogue and other major magazines. "I traveled all over Europe for work, I was called from London to take catalog photos, then I went to Paris. I was doing very well, I was very much appreciated, so I went to New York, because in the world of modeling, once you've done Europe, you go to New York to try." The city of skyscrapers received her with open arms, and quickly the new arrival made a name for herself. Well recommended, she signed with the greatest of New York modeling agencies - Ford. "I did all the magazines, everybody loved it, and I was very chameleonic. People did not get tired of me," she says. "There are models that are very beautiful, but they only have one image. I never had that problem."
Urbano reviews her story in a café in the Plaza de Espanya. She is 57 years old. She bathed in abundance and now she is in ruins. Sometimes she sleeps in the street and sometimes in the house of a friend who opens the doors for a few days. From time to time, she gets some money doing some precarious work. She suffers from depression and has to take medication. Looking back sometimes means remembering the times of splendor, and sometimes the beginning of the fall. "Every year I came to Barcelona to visit my parents, and one of those times I met my ex-husband. That was the end of it; he left me with the clothes. The only good thing about that relationship was my children, but the rest was horrible. I paid with my money, the second day I met him. He wanted me to buy him a BMW, and I, like a fool, wrote the check. I was in love. If you don't trust the person you're in love with, who do you trust? But he didn't love me."
New York, the 1980s. There are several moments suitable to measure the kind of life that Urbano led in that decade. For example, the brands for which she was the image in their advertising. The list is long and impregnated with glamour: Yves Saint Laurent, Opium, Virginia Slims, Revlon. "I did the Revlon campaign, all the 'top models' of that time did that campaign, and I did it too. I worked with Helmut Newton for Opium, and later I was hired for Yves Saint Laurent, for which David Lynch did a commercial for. He had been commissioned as much for the cinematography as for the photography. When you sat with him, as I remember, he would sit on a sofa in front of you and stare at you without saying anything. But not out of ego. Because he's not like that, he's a sweet man." The Internet archives have preserved those images of the past, the chameleonic beauty frozen in the time when New York surrendered at her feet, as here, for example, where she is photographed (second from left) for the Revlon "Unforgettable Women" campaign with, from left, Michele Brooks, Linda Evangelista, and Sandra Zatezelo.
In the café in the Plaza de Espanya, Urbano explains that she has just cut his hair. "I'm extreme, either I have very long hair or I cut it to the ground," she says. Three decades after her conquest of New York, the young woman who lent her beauty to the great brands in fashion and cosmetics is recognizable by her eyes, by the curve of her mouth, by her poise and by her elegance. These are things that she has not lost. "I want to live, not survive," she says. "I'm tired of surviving and asking for money, the people around me move away, they all leave, and I'm not surprised, I've already been evicted three times. If I had to pay for the flat I could not eat, or I could not pay for the electricity, or I could not pay for the water and I'd have to go down to the fountain to get it. I have worked cleaning houses, taking care of children. Now I'm at the house of a friend, Toni, who is an angel. But I can't settle there, it's always for awhile. In a few days, when I leave that house, I wonder where I'm going, I'll be with my cart and my four things and wherever I'm going to sleep."
There is another eloquent yardstick to measure the luminosity of that New York past: acquaintances, friendships, names . . . the people with whom Nastasia Urbano, the "top model" on the crest of a wave, rubbed shoulders. "I was a very young and very curious person, eager to enjoy myself. I met many actors and actresses. I dined one day with Jack Nicholson, another day with Andy Warhol, or with Roman Polanski, or with Harrison Ford, with Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, with Simon and Garfunkel, and I was about to go to Madonna's wedding with Sean Penn because David Keith from An Officer and a Gentleman was invited, and I was going out with him at that time, but that day we woke with such a hangover that we could not even get up. I had everything, I lived like a queen." Urbano says she had problems with drugs and alcohol, but she does not regret anything she did then. "I had to live life to the fullest. "
Urbano made money, a lot of money. "I think I was the first girl who signed a multi-million dollar contract to advertise clothes, they gave me a million dollars a year for 20 days of work, and for three or four years. When they paid that kind of money at that time you only earned it when you modeled beauty products." A friendly banker convinced her to deposit part of the profits in a Swiss bank. Although from Barcelona parents, Urbano had been born in Switzerland. "At the bank, they told me that with the interest I could live the rest of my life, and to think I'd done so well. . . and because of this man, my ex-husband, now I'm here. All of this happened . . . I've signed documents, but I don't remember having signed anything. Money has never been my goal in life, and when I've had it, I've been generous. And now I'm like this."
At the end, in the café in the Plaza de Espanya, Urbano starts crying. She says she can't do it anymore, and that she wants to get out of the hole not so much for her as for her children. "I want my children to see me well, I want to recover as a person to be at their level. I want them to be proud of me, I want them to live their life without worries, not to suffer more for me, but they have a father who is nothing and a mother who lives on the street. My daughter has anxiety attacks because of me. They are adults and they have their lives and they do what they can for me, but I try not to disturb them. I want them to see me with a home, working and paying for my things. I want my grandchildren to come to my home for lunch, and I want to be able to make them some cookies. I'm good at making cookies. I'm going to have that? I don't know. I think not. I have lived well because I could live well, but I've adapted to what I need. I need a break."
Urbano misses New York. "I miss it day and night," she says. "New York is a city that makes you vibrate; you go out and you get goose bumps. Here," she concludes, referring to Barcelona, "I've been dying, that's the way it is. Here, my soul has been dying out."
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I hope she can come to America again, and as I live in the greater New York area, I'd be happy to help her in any way I can if and when she does. But until I am in a position to help Nastasia, all I can do is hope and pray for her. :-(
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