Walking with the Muses

by Pat Cleveland

  From that moment on, Frankie was my friend. He’d invite me over to his apartment, and we’d take his two huge Afghan dogs for a walk. Dressed in beige cashmere pants, a beige sweater, and a beige fur coat, Frankie was flamboyant. Because he was so tall and slim, the outfit made him look like one of his blond Afghans. He also liked expensive cars (one of many reasons his nickname was “Hollywood”), and he’d take me for drives in his champagne-colored Rolls-Royce and his small silver Porsche for two, where we’d listen to his taped show while we rode. And it was thrilling when he’d send me—me!—cryptic messages on-air for everyone in the tristate area to hear. “I’m almost finished,” he’d croon. “I’ll be seeing you soon, so wait for me.” That was pretty heady stuff for a high school student.

  As handsome as Frankie was, I never felt romantically attracted to him, even after my ardor for Ray cooled off. And though Frankie cultivated a public image as a ladies’ man, he was always a gentleman around me, never once making a sexual overture during the year that I knew him. Thinking about him now, I feel nothing but affection. He was like the big brother I never had.

  chapter 8

  SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE

  Teaching myself how to move the fabric of my homemade dress, age fourteen.

  Courtesy of Adelaide Passen.

  My first brush with high fashion occurred on an ordinary school day. I was leaving school with Frances, wearing one of my own creations—a wool black-and-white houndstooth dress with matching leggings, spats (my mom’s idea), and a poplin raincoat. The crosstown bus drivers were on strike, so the two of us headed for the subway. We were clutching our books to our chests and walking fast to catch the train when Frances, who had an adorable Spanish accent, whispered that a lady was following us. I looked over my shoulder, and there she was—pretty, stylishly dressed, and young (though older than we were).

  “Run!” Frances said, and as we did, the lady began to run, too. “Aren’t you afraid?” Frances asked, panting. “She’s probably a dyke.”

  “What’s a dyke?” I said. “She doesn’t look scary.” I stopped dead in my tracks, creating a minor pileup behind me, and swiftly turned to meet my doom. The lady stuck out her hand and, in a ritzy-sounding English accent, poured on a bucket of compliments about how great my clothes were. “Where do you get them?” she asked.

  I told her that my mother and I had sewn them. The lady handed me her business card. In that moment, everything in that stinking, claustrophobic subway station receded. The letters on the card popped out for me to read: V-O-G-U-E. It was my mom’s favorite fashion magazine. “Thank you for stopping,” the lady said. “I’ve been running after you since Forty-Second Street and thought I’d lost you. I’d love to write up something about these clothes of yours.”

  Then, while Frances stood beside me, acting as if I were talking to an alien, I gave the lady my name, address, and phone number. Frances poked me in the ribs and shot me an Are you crazy? look.

  “I’ll send you the piece when it’s published,” the lady said. Then off she dashed, pastel-colored and pretty, into the heavy, dull crowd of straphangers and commuters, who, next to her, looked like robots dressed in monotones of gray and brown.

  I was in the clouds, and I could have floated away entirely, but Frances brought me back down to earth. “She’ll probably rob you,” she said. “Now hurry up or we’ll miss the train!”

  Being noticed by Vogue seemed to come out of the blue, but this unsought gift was a turning point for me. My mom decided to make the most of it. One sunny fall day, I was sitting at her sketching table, looking at a teen magazine with the ubiquitous, wholesome face of Colleen Corby on the cover. My mom nodded at it and said, “You look just as good as she does.”

  “Me?” I said. Was she nuts? People usually compared me to a giraffe, not a cover girl.

  “I’m going to send your pictures to magazines and see if they need models,” she said.

  Mom decided that I needed professional photos, so she asked her old friend Carl Van Vechten to take them. He was out of town and suggested his friend Adelaide Passen, who had a studio in the building that housed Carnegie Hall. She coached me a little and told me she liked the way I moved and loved my profile. At fourteen, I was thrilled by her words.

  A few weeks later, we got the contact sheets, cut out the pictures we liked, and put them in envelopes addressed to editors at Look, Seventeen, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Ebony, and Jet. I nearly forgot to mail those envelopes because I stuck them in the bottom of my book bag.

  We got some polite rejections, and time passed. Summer turned to fall and then winter, and I’d all but forgotten the attempt to break into modeling. Then, one late spring day when I got home from school, my mom waved a letter at me as if it were a winning lottery ticket. She pushed it into my hand before I even had a chance to shut the door.

  Dear Mrs. Cleveland,

  Thank you for bringing your beautiful daughter to our attention. The Johnsons would love to meet you for our upcoming issues of Ebony. They will be in New York in June. Would you please call us at the Waldorf Astoria on June 15?

  “June fifteenth! That only gives us a week to get ready,” Mom said.

  Ebony, along with its weekly companion, Jet (the first magazine aimed specifically at black people), was owned and published by a visionary couple from Chicago, John H. and Eunice W. Johnson. Mom and I were ecstatic that I might be featured in its pages. When we called the Waldorf Astoria, we were put through to Mrs. Johnson’s secretary, who told us that she was looking for models for an upcoming fashion show and would like to meet me.

  On the appointed day, Mom had me wear a demure white cotton dress with ruffles around the sleeve and collar. Under my dress, I wore the world’s most uncomfortable garter belt to hold up my seamed white stockings. The finishing touches were a white straw hat, three-inch-high white patent-leather shoes with a strap across the arch that closed with a pearl button, and wrist-length white gloves. I looked ready for my first communion.

  My hair was pulled straight back in a long ponytail. (Frances had taught me how to iron my hair straight, like all the Puerto Rican girls did.) I also wore black eyeliner, which I practiced putting on while looking in the mirror on top of the fridge. I hated makeup and the sticky way it felt. But Mom said if I didn’t wear it, no one would notice me and I’d die an old maid. That scared me into using it.

  We were too dressed up for the subway, so Mom splurged on a taxi. We walked into the Waldorf Astoria—which I knew only as the hotel of presidents and diplomats—and I saw huge glittering chandeliers suspended from the high, high ceiling. As we walked through, people sitting in the lobby—all of them white—glanced over. I blushed, feeling admired because we were so nicely dressed. It occurs to me now that perhaps those people thought we didn’t belong there. And maybe we looked poor, or like hillbillies, in our homemade clothes.

  The man at the desk told us that Mrs. Johnson was in the Presidential Suite. Mom and I clearly looked lost. The man took pity on us and said politely, “That would be on the top floor. Take those elevators to your left.”

  We got to the elevators, and the doors were opened by an operator wearing a uniform and white gloves. At last, another colored person. “Ladies,” he said as he bowed his head slightly and gestured for us to enter.

  My mom and I looked at each other with wide eyes. On the ride to the top floor, I noticed the elevator man eyeing me in the mirror. I felt like the virgin sacrifice, dressed in all white, climbing to the top of the mountain to meet Kong, like in the black-and-white jungle movie I’d watched on television.

  “Wow,” I said to Mom as we got out and started the long trek down the hall to the double doors of the Presidential Suite. “My knees are shaking.”

  “So are mine,” she said.

  I looked at her in desperation. I wanted to do anything on earth but walk through those doors. But before I could turn and run for my life, they opened, and out came two stunning, light-chocolate-colored girls. Next to t
hem, fully and beautifully blossomed, I felt like a first-grader.

  “They’re nice-looking, but you’re better,” Mom whispered to me.

  We stepped into the room. No wonder it was the Presidential Suite: It looked like a wing of the White House (or what I imagined a wing at the White House would look like). Sunlight flooded the place and huge bouquets of flowers, arranged in expensive-looking Chinese vases, were on every surface. There were several pretty ladies sitting around. Models, perhaps? A door at the side of the room opened, and a well-dressed young woman walked straight toward us, extending her hand. “Hello, my name is Sandra,” she said. “Let me guess—you’re Mrs. Cleveland and her daughter, Patricia.” She turned to me. “Mrs. Johnson is eager to meet you.”

  I froze, unable to utter a word. Mom spoke for me. “Yes, we’re so happy to be here.”

  Sandra urged us to take a seat and to help ourselves to some tea. When Mom and I saw the tea tray with its real silver pot, delicately painted teacups, fruit, marmalade, and coffee cake, we wanted to dig in. In fact, it was all I could do to resist stuffing the food in my purse to take home. Mom said, “Better not eat anything—you might spill.”

  And thus did I learn my first lesson in suffering for beauty: Never mess up your fancy clothes with crumbs or stains. So I sat, prim and proper, my back straight, legs crossed at the ankles, and hands folded in my lap. Madame Metcalf had taught me well—or maybe I’d just seen one too many Pollyanna movies, in which the girls walked around with books on their heads to develop good posture. I always imitated them, and in that moment I knew all my book-on-the-head practice had paid off.

  Sandra came back and said, “Mrs. Johnson will see you now.” We walked into the next room, and a woman with a warm smile and kind dark eyes stood up from what I was sure was an inlaid Louis XIV desk just like one I’d seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (though hindsight and common sense tell me it was a high-end reproduction). Mrs. Johnson shook our hands. Then she sat back down and said in a lilting Southern accent, “Sandra, ask Miss Cleveland to walk for us.”

  So Miss Cleveland did just that. And my life as a professional model began.

  chapter 9

  LOVE WALKED IN

  The cover of the 1966 Ebony Fashion Fair program. The photo was taken on my sixteenth birthday.

  Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Eight days later, on June 23, 1966 (my sixteenth birthday), Mom and I reported for duty at Ebony’s photo studios.

  “Hello, ladies!” said Sandra, greeting us at the door. “Follow me.” She picked up our bags and led us through a narrow arched doorway to the dressing room. There were clothes everywhere, hanging on wheeled metal racks. One side of the cramped space was a full wall of mirrors, and the other was a wall-long makeup table, with many small mirrors framed by bright lightbulbs. It was what I’d always imagined the backstage of a circus would look like.

  “We’re working with our male model at the moment,” Sandra said, putting down our heavy bags. “So make yourselves comfortable. Mrs. Johnson would like to see you before we shoot, so I’ll be back shortly.”

  Sandra left the area, which wasn’t really a room but more of a partitioned-off space separated from the photo area by a row of those overstuffed clothing racks. Mom and I just looked at each other in silence, too dumbfounded to speak. “We made it!” Mom said finally. “We’re here!” Quick as a flash, she unzipped one of the big black bags and winked at me. “I thought I’d bring a few tricks from the old days,” she said. It was a reference to all those nights when she and Aunt Helen used to get dressed up to go out on the town.

  She unpacked several exotic twisted braided hairpieces that she’d made herself (she called these her “masterpieces”); a can of hairspray; foam-rubber bra pads, complete with the shape of the nipple; and her entire makeup kit, because even though her skin was much darker than mine, I didn’t have any makeup of my own. For a brief moment, I felt like a show horse about to get saddled up.

  I unzipped the other black bag and unpacked a satin corset with tiny whalebones to keep the shape; a brassiere that would need the foam pads because it was too big for me; two ruffled tulle petticoats; and a lady’s half-slip, to wear under a dress so you couldn’t see through it. Oh yes, we also had natural-colored stockings, long evening gloves in white satin, and Styrofoam wig forms holding a few constructed hairpieces that Mom had stayed up all night creating.

  She did my hair while I did my makeup. We were humming away, busy as bumblebees working hard to turn our efforts into honey, which, as Mom liked to say, “Rhymes with money.”

  “More eyeliner,” she said. I followed her command. The more I put on, the older I looked. Within moments, I’d been transformed into a grown-up.

  Sandra popped in. “Mrs. Johnson has arrived,” she said. “Our photographer wants to start now with you and our male model. It’s for a men’s hair product.” She went to the clothes rack and selected a pale pink evening dress. “Here, put this on.” She held the dress up to herself and looked in the standing mirror. “It’s Givenchy. Let’s see how it fits.”

  The dress was so exquisite, I almost wept: The fabric and the workmanship were on a whole different level from our homemade clothes. I couldn’t even see the stitching, and there were no safety pins holding pieces together, a technique I often used because I couldn’t bear sewing for hours before I could wear an outfit. But I just stood there, like a deer in the headlights, holding the dress.

  “What’s wrong?” Sandra asked.

  I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t want to get undressed out in the open.

  Sandra caught on instantly. “You can go behind the screen if you like,” she offered. I said a silent prayer of gratitude. Intensely shy, I couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing than disrobing in front of a stranger—or even my mom. Little did I know what I’d be in for as a professional model. Undressing in the open is part of the job description.

  I ducked behind the screen and pretended I was in the scene from Gypsy where Natalie Wood changes behind a screen like that one, throwing her fancy feather costumes over the top. “You okay in there?” Mom asked after a few minutes had passed.

  “I’m okay,” I said. But I wasn’t. The dress was huge on me, and I was afraid to come out, because I thought once Sandra saw how badly it fit, she’d send me home.

  “Let’s see how you look,” Sandra said.

  I took a deep breath and ventured out one bare toe at a time. I felt like a little girl playing dress-up in her mommy’s gown, eyeliner or no eyeliner. Sandra sized me up and shook her head. Mom looked worried. Sandra left the room and came back carrying a box of industrial-size metal clips. “We’ll need lots of these, so hold still,” she said. “I’ll make this dress fit.” She clipped the fabric so tightly that I could hardly breathe. “There, it fits perfectly. No one will know what’s going on in back—just don’t turn sideways.”

  Sandra stepped aside, and I got a look in the mirror. There were so many clips running down the back of the dress that it looked like a dinosaur’s vertebrae. When Sandra draped a robe over my shoulders, I looked like a hunchback. But when I looked straight into the mirror, I had an epiphany: Sometimes it’s what you see up front that counts.

  “Ladies,” Sandra said, “we have created a wonderful look. Let’s go shoot it.”

  Bright natural daylight was pouring into the studio. The photographer, Sleet, was a tall, light-skinned black man of around forty, wearing glasses and a bow tie that looked like a pinwheel about to start spinning in the breeze. Sandra introduced us, and Sleet asked me to go stand on the no-seam paper. “Is our male model ready?” he sang out.

  I heard the smoky voice of a young man coming toward the set, but I couldn’t see him yet. “I’m not a model. I’m just doing you guys a favor.”

  “I know, man,” Sleet replied.

  “Don’t insult me by calling me a model,” joked the tall young man, who was now striding toward me like
a panther. As he came closer, I discovered the most poetically beautiful human being I had ever beheld. (I later found out that his mix of ethnicities was a lot like my mom’s: Native American, black, and Irish.) Around twenty, he had dark wavy hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and skin the color of deep, glowing caramel. My ideal man—until that moment a thirty-foot-by-seventy-foot Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass—went out the window and was instantly replaced by this guy.

  His hazel eyes, flecked with green, bored into me. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he said with a slight bow. He gestured toward the stool. “May I?”

  I nodded, knowing it was futile even to attempt speech. He sat down just in front of me. I could see Mrs. Johnson whisper something into Sleet’s ear.

  “Miss Cleveland, I hear it’s your birthday,” Sleet said. “Happy birthday!”

  I croaked out a thank-you.

  Then the guy stood up, took my hand in his, and said, “May I be the first to give you a birthday kiss?” He leaned forward, and his lips brushed the top of my hand.

  After an endless moment, Sleet’s voice broke the spell. “Okay, Kenneth, that’s enough. We’ve got pictures to take. She’ll be on the tour with you, right?” he asked, looking at me. I didn’t know what to say, but Mrs. Johnson and Mom chimed in together, “Yes!”

  Kenneth looked into my eyes again, and I felt something profound move in my sixteen-year-old soul.

  “This will be a kind of birthday portrait, so let’s get started before it’s your next birthday.” Sleet stood behind his camera, mounted on a tripod. “If you’d both look this way for a moment. Now, Miss Cleveland, touch Kenneth’s shoulder.”

  I put out my hand and felt his strong body beneath his shirt. Sleet took the picture. I saw Sandra whisper something in his ear. I still had my hand on Kenneth’s shoulder. I wanted to keep it there forever.