No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (6 page)

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 33

ant and wonderful. Circled me two or three times. “Yes.

Hmmm. I think we can work with Janet.”

“Janice,”
I said.

She smiled at me, a tight and venomous smile. She

turned me around and indicated my reflection in the mirror.

She tried hard to look pensive, to convey that she was thinking about how she was going to transform me. And I looked at my reflection, too. My hard little body. Bone thin. Visibly undernourished. Those raisin breasts. My huge lips. It was obvious she thought I didn’t have it. And I hated her for it.

“Well, we have our work cut out for us, but I see a lot of potential here,” she said brightly.

You don’t know how right you are, bitch.

So, yes, I pursued the dream—as they say. Really threw myself into it. This is how you walk the John Powers Walk.

This is how you apply makeup the John Powers Way. This is how you smile—from the inside,
deep
inside, even if you have to fake it.

The other girls in my class were about the biggest

dullards I’d ever met in my life, but we all shared the same, immediate goal: to make it to the annual National John Robert Powers Modeling Contest, to be held later that year in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

“You’re going to win,” Pam Adams told me. She wasn’t at all interested in modeling—she wanted to be a writer—

but she thought I was beautiful, and she knew I saw the fashion business as my way out. “You’re perfect,” she said.

“Look at you. You’ve got long thin legs and beautiful stick-thin arms—you look like a plate of spaghetti. Plus you’ve got no tits. None of these girls have tits.” It was true.
Haute
couture
was made for girls who looked like young boys.

“And you know what the best part is?” Pam added. “Once

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

POSING AT THE JOHN ROBERT

POWERS SCHOOL OF

MODELING.

you make it, you can have

any man you want.” She

was right about that, too.

I loved her for believing

in me. I loved her friendship. I loved hanging out

at her place and stealing

prescription pills from her

mother’s medicine cabinet and getting high and

singing along to James

Taylor and talking about guys and

where we saw ourselves in ten years. I saw myself in Manhattan, of course. Walking past a billboard of myself: a hugely famous model. Pam had different aspirations. “I see myself on a sailboat in the Caribbean, bronzed gold by the sun, stoned out of my fucking head, getting laid.”

My mother had promised to buy me a ticket to New York when the time came for the contest, and for a few weeks she even remembered that fateful first morning at John Powers. “Someday you’ll look back and remember that I’m the one who launched your modeling career,” she said, smiling like a regular June Cleaver. But eventually the pills got the better of her, yet again, and she was gone, beyond my reach.

But not me. I was serious about modeling now. Now it wasn’t just the girls I looked at; I looked to see who took the pictures. Avedon. Horst P. Horst. Guy Bourdin. Helmut Newton. Bill King. Scavullo. Irving Penn. Sometimes they even had little blurbs about the photographers. I was fasci

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 35

nated. I couldn’t wait to meet Avedon. And I was sure he couldn’t wait to meet me. I told myself that he might show up at the modeling contest.

“I’m going to need that ticket to New York,” I told my mother one night.

She looked across the table at me as if she was trying to figure out who I was. “What?” she said. She always sounded like she was under water.

“That ticket to New York,” I repeated. “The contest is at the end of the month.”

“New York?” she repeated, the synapses misfiring. And then it hit her: “Of course. The ticket to New York!

Absolutely. Anything you want, dear.”

Later that week we drove to a travel agency on Las Olas Boulevard, and she paid cash for the ticket. “I thought you’d quit modeling,” she said as we left the agency. I was clutching the ticket as if it were a lifeline. “You never talk about it.” Of course I never talk about it, you bitch. You never
ask
.

“Could you drop me at the mall?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She didn’t pursue it. That was my mother. She was relieved. She really didn’t want to know.

She was just making conversation, trying to get through the day. Life for her was about distance; she was happiest when she was disengaged.

I spent the rest of the day at the mall, looking for a dress. I had seen this little silk number in
Vogue,
and I wanted something like it. I found an outfit at Burdine’s that was reasonably close. It had this little wraparound motif, with bold blotchy flowers, and it made me look a little Hispanic. I liked the effect. I knew I didn’t look like most of those wholesome all-American girls in the magazine ads, but I also knew that no amount of trying was going to turn a little Polish mutt into a blue-eyed blond. And I didn’t want to be a blue-eyed blond anyway. Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa.

36 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Okay. I’m a goddamn liar. If someone had asked me

then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have probably said: “A blue-eyed blond.” I had a vision of myself, on stage at the Waldorf in midcontest, telling the judges and the assembled guests: “When I grow up, I want to be Cheryl Tiegs.”

I knew I was going to love New York while we were still circling La Guardia. It was immense. Endless. A girl could get lost in New York. Lost so she’d never be found again.

I loved everything about it. I loved the noise in the terminal. The strange twanging voices. I loved the energy—the snap and crackle all around you even when you were standing still, with your mouth open, which I guess I was. I even loved waiting for my bags at the conveyor belt.

I loved the crush of bodies when we got outside. I loved looking for a cab that was big enough for Dawn Doyle and the three other girls who had flown up with us. I loved the ride into the city. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. I loved my first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, all aglitter in the afternoon sun.

“Why are you crying?” one of the girls asked me.

I noticed a huge billboard just ahead. A blond, all-American girl, twenty feet tall, smiling down at me, clutching some blond all-American soap in her blond all-American hand. I hated her. She looked like every other whitewashed Wonder Bread girl on every billboard in every city in the country.

“Because I’m going to win,” I said.

We stayed at the Waldorf and I got lucky and ended up with a room of my own. I thought it was a sign, the beginning of great good things.

The next morning, after breakfast, a tour bus came for us. I piled aboard with dozens of other contestants. We N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 37

were driven through Greenwich Village and SoHo. We had lunch at some Italian place that was crowded with Japanese tourists. We took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. We went to a ballet. Toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visited the Whitney. Some of the girls were too cool for all this “culture,” but not me. I loved every minute of it. I was on sensory overload. I thought I was tripping.

Right then and there I decided that I was going to move to New York as soon as I could. I even thought about never going back to Florida, but I didn’t know how I’d swing it.

So I concentrated on the contest.

I was so fucking nervous, but so were the other girls.

We were just kids, after all. And we thought this was the Big Time. So we went through our paces, which involved mostly changing in and out of clothes and going out front and smiling and strutting our stuff for the crowd. “Next we have Susy Murgatroyd!” the MC would say, like he was announcing the Second Coming. Everyone would clap,

including the judges, and Susy Murgatroyd would do her thing and hurry back and another girl in another little number would go out and do her best to sell herself and the dress she rode in on.

When it was my turn, I was shaking like a rosebush in a hurricane. But when I got out there, something happened.

Those judges looked like a bunch of dirty old men. Telly Savalas was one of them. He had that Kojak grin going. I half-expected to see a lollipop in his mouth. What a schmuck! He looked like he was drooling.

So, yeah, I went out there and walked up and down the runway and just looked eminently fuckable. That was it.

Simple as that. And I was good at it, too. Knew how to work it. I could
hear
the judges getting hard. Even the one female judge was getting hard.

38 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Sure enough, I won the contest, but to this day I don’t know what the fuck I won.
Miss High Fashion Model?

Explain that! They gave me this cheap little trophy with what looked like a brass penis on top. The judges hovered round, congratulating me, trying to get me alone so they could talk me into dinner, followed perhaps by a pleasant round of fellatio. I smiled a lot. From deep
inside.
And the next thing I knew I was back on the plane to Florida.

My father would come home and rib me mercilessly. “Hey, Cheryl, how you doin’ today?” This was a reference to Cheryl Tiegs, the only model whose name he knew.

“Where’s your tits? Who stole your tits?” Or he’d say,

“How many judges did you have to blow to win that

Mickey Mouse contest?” God, I hated him.

I hadn’t been back a week when he came home one

afternoon with a black eye. He was in a

hellacious mood. He went and got the

phone book and looked through the

Yellow Pages and called some fly-bynight lawyer. I could hear him raving about how he was going to put that

“fucking nigger” in jail. Somewhere

not too far into the conversation, the

lawyer at the other end must have

hung up on him. Even an ambulance chaser knew better than to deal with a lunatic like Ray.

He walked into the kitchen,

steaming. I was setting the table.

WINNING
MISS HIGH

FASHION MODEL
.

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 39

I looked up at him. He was staring at me like he wanted to kill me. “What the hell are you looking at,
Cheryl
?”

“I never noticed what nice eyes you have,” I said, focusing on his shiner. I couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud. But I couldn’t help myself. His hatred was contagious.

He fucking pounced. The sonofabitch started hitting me and at the same time yanking at my pants like he was going to rape me. I was screaming at the top of my voice, fighting back for all I was worth. I kept swinging for his injured eye; I whacked him a couple of good ones, even knocked the bridge out of his mouth. But he kept coming. He was relentless.

“You perverted motherfucker,” I shouted, swinging

blindly. “I know why Alexis left home!” This really got to him. He grabbed my hair and pinned my arm behind my back and I thought for the life of me he was going to snap it at the elbow.

“You little tramp,” he wheezed. “No more Mr. Nice

Guy.”

He wanted to kill me, and I wanted to kill him. But just then my mother got home and joined the fray.

Ray threw her across the room, and her head slammed against the coffee table and cracked open. Everything went still for a moment. Panicked, my father went over to see if he could do anything. She slapped his hand away.

I ran into the kitchen and hurried back with a roll of paper towels, but the blood just seeped through. I grabbed a handful of linen napkins and helped her to the car. Ray looked genuinely scared, just the way he had out in the Everglades.

I drove Mom to the hospital where she worked, Hollywood Memorial. It was the closest hospital to our house.

She was holding a third linen napkin to her head, and it was already soaked with blood.

40 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

“How long has this been going on?” she asked me.