He had changed his name again, this time to Diamond Stone Red Rose, and he was now living in a commune on the west side of Manhattan with a friend from MIT, house-sitting for a group of people who spent their summers on Martha’s Vineyard. The friend was a brilliant mathematician and violinist who also played tabla, a kind of Indian drum. The two of them would play for me for hours on end. When the friend had to go back to Boston, he invited us to visit. He gave us two plane tickets and a locked suitcase. So the next day Kenneth/Matthew/Diamond Stone Red Rose, a huge flute, a locked suitcase, and I boarded a flight to Boston’s Logan Airport. We went straight from the airport to Cambridge, where his friend had an apartment near the MIT campus.
That night we went to a party, and everyone drank tons of beer. It was a wild college scene, and when we got back to the apartment, his friend opened the suitcase. It was filled to the brim with dozens of plastic bags of marijuana. I actually jumped back when I saw it, aghast that Matthew and I had been tricked into transporting this stuff. I realized that I needed to start being more careful about the people I associated with.
The next day we flew back to New York City, which was hot and stifling. When I got home, my mom wasn’t there, so I went into my room to relax and read Commentaries on Living by Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the books of spiritual teachings that Matthew had turned me on to. I was still thinking about Matthew and how much I loved him when Sonny barged into my room without knocking. He’d grown more volatile than usual over the past few months, and I’d stayed out of his way as much as possible. He was territorial and always insisted on being the boss, so my budding career and Matthew’s presence infuriated him. Matthew was much stronger and more virile than Sonny, and my stepfather was obviously intimidated by him.
Sonny stood over my bed and told me he wouldn’t allow Matthew in our apartment again. I protested and he smacked me across the face. Then he said, “You want to have sex? I’ll show you how to have sex.” He hit me again and held me down with all his might and proceeded to rape me. It was unspeakably horrible. Though he’d made suggestive and sexually threatening remarks before, I’d never thought he’d attack me and force himself on me. I can’t write more about it except to say that I started to scream at the top of my lungs. The gods must have been listening, because by some miracle Matthew came by to say hello, saw that my bedroom door was ajar, and took a running leap and landed on top of my stepfather. Punching and pulling him off me, he yelled, “You leave her alone, old man!”
Sonny left the room, and I thought, Thank heaven, we won. But no sooner had I caught my breath than Sonny roared back into my room with his pistol. He pointed it at Matthew and told him to get out of the house and never come back or he’d kill him. I had never seen Sonny look so angry or so insane, and Matthew was understandably scared. He backed off, said he’d return, and then he ran.
My stepfather locked me in my room and said through the door, “If you say one word to your mother, I’ll kill your friend.”
My shirt was ripped half off, my arm was bloody, and my jeans were torn. But all I could think about was escaping. Jumping out the window was impossible because we lived on the twelfth floor. I considered climbing out the window and up the side of the building to the next floor, but that was too dangerous. Then I heard the front door slam and lock, and I knew he was gone.
Somehow I broke the doorknob off my bedroom door, and without a second thought, I was out of the apartment and up on the roof of my building, hiding, looking out over the city, wondering what to do. It was one of those summer Sundays when it seemed that everyone in New York was out of town. I looked down onto the street, and when I was certain my stepfather wasn’t coming back, I ran down fourteen flights of stairs, past people who turned and stared, and across Central Park to the West Side, where I knew Matthew would keep me safe.
When I got to the commune, I was greeted by two lesbian lovers. They calmed me down and gave me tea. It was July 20, 1969, and I’ll never forget sitting with them in front of the television watching Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon. Despite the heat, I was shivering and scared: I’d just run away from home. I hadn’t traveled as far as Neil Armstrong, but I felt as if I had. All I could think was: My poor mother—she’ll be so worried.
Matthew got back later that night with his friend from Boston, and we watched the moon landing over and over again. He comforted me but was afraid and didn’t know what to do. I stayed at the commune for three days without going out.
On the third night, Matthew’s friend (who, to judge from that suitcase full of weed, knew his way around the drug scene) brought home some LSD. He told us it would expand our minds, so we all took some. At first everything was beautiful and full of light, but the next minute, I felt terrible, as if I were being chased by demons. It went on like that, back and forth, light and dark, all night long. Morning came and we left the commune to join up with friends at the fountain in the middle of Central Park. I was now wearing Matthew’s clothes, and we were like one. We danced in the grass barefoot and walked uptown to a theater that was playing the Beatles’ animated film, Yellow Submarine. The colors saturated my mind, and I ran out of the theater barefoot, onto the cement of New York City, singing, “All you need is love.” We returned to the park, where we watched the sun set and then rise again. Time moved ever so fast.
All the flower power seeped into my head, and the world became one colorful, psychedelic love-in. We walked downtown toward the towering glass skyscrapers where people dressed in suits, and we danced among them in our love beads, fringes, dirty ripped bell-bottoms, and flowered T-shirts. We sat on the steps of the subway at Fiftieth Street and Sixth Avenue and watched the people moving like robots, going up and down.
By the time we’d been on the streets for at least three days, I started to wake up. I saw what it would be like to live as a street person and realized it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to have alien voices speak through me. I didn’t want to do drugs that took me to dark places, and I didn’t want to sit on the ground and watch a parade of heels click by. There are few things as dehumanizing as watching people walk by and refuse to meet your eyes.
The next day we all started to make our way back uptown via Madison Avenue, and that was where my journey ended. Without warning, a police car drove up beside us, and out jumped two Blue Meanies, just like in the Beatles film. They pushed Matthew up against the wall of the building and handcuffed him. They took me aside and told me they were taking me home. I’d been missing for two weeks, and my mom had called the police, even though I’d phoned her to tell her I was okay (but refused to say where I was). The cops made Matthew get into one car and me into another; he was driven away, and I was taken home. There was nothing I could do.
We pulled up to the door of our building, and any relief I had upon seeing my mother evaporated when I saw Sonny standing beside her, smiling as though he’d done nothing.
There was no word from Matthew. I hoped he wasn’t in jail. Or maybe he was too afraid to come around; my stepfather was not someone whose threats you took lightly. I was used to Matthew’s mysterious absences; still, every day without him broke my heart a little more. I did know one thing for sure: I never wanted to live on the streets with no money. I was done with drugs and scrounging for food and all of that. And when you know what you don’t want, you choose what you want.
For me, that was fashion, and I rededicated myself to my career. I started to dress up again, making myself look as good as I could with the raw material (and makeup kit) that I had.
chapter 21
SHATTERED
During a dark and tumultuous period in my life, I often struggled not to show emotion when I posed for portfolio photographs.
Courtesy of Sean Kernan.
Despite my constant efforts, I wasn’t getting any paid modeling jobs. And now that I was no longer a student, that was a problem, both for me and for Ford. The agency told me that if I didn’t make more money, they’d be forced to drop me
. Shortly after that conversation, they booked me for my first catalog job. They probably thought I’d balk—catalogs were for people who couldn’t get high-fashion editorial work—but as far as I was concerned, nothing was beneath a working professional. (Remember, this was long before the era of the so-called supermodel.)
The job was in downtown Manhattan near Houston Street, and the shoot was in the factory where the clothes were made. When I arrived promptly at eight in the morning, some of the models were already on the set. I soon learned that this kind of work was an art in itself. You had to hold your hand in a certain way to accentuate—or fake—the cut of the garment. The lighting flattered the clothing, not the model. And the stillness allowed me to practice rooting myself like a tree, just as Mrs. Vreeland had counseled.
After several weeks of catalog bookings, I’d earned a good amount of money but little satisfaction. Finally, Ford told me that I was doing well enough that they were considering sending me to some top photographers. One was Patrick Lichfield—officially, Thomas Patrick John Anson, fifth Earl of Lichfield. He was Queen Elizabeth II’s first cousin once removed and a very “in” photographer, discovered by none other than Diana Vreeland. Dressed in high heels and perfectly coiffed, I arrived at the building—an old factory in the East Twenties—and entered a dark hallway, thick with the smell of urine and lit by a single dangling light bulb. I felt my way past doorways until I found a freight elevator with a retractable iron gate. I pushed the button and could hear the elevator squeaking and rumbling toward the ground floor; it seemed to take forever to crawl down the heavy cables. It arrived on the ground floor with a thud. I almost didn’t step in, but I’d come this far and didn’t want to be late. So I slid back the iron gate and got on.
The elevator was dark inside. I pulled a small chain, and a light came on. The car was like a small cage; when I pushed the button for the sixth floor, the gate closed, and a bump signified that the ascent had begun. Then the car stopped between floors. It started up again and jerked its way to the sixth floor and came to a halt. I opened the gate, found the office, and knocked on the door. Nothing. After a few more unanswered knocks, I pushed the door open and saw a man standing at a desk by a large window, speaking to a pretty blonde. The man—handsome and tall, with wavy blond hair—was wearing an open-at-the-collar white silk shirt that revealed his upper chest and a gold chain around his neck. He looked casually aristocratic.
I walked to the desk with my portfolio. The man stared at me and stepped aside, as if I had cooties.
“May I help you?” said the pretty blonde. She seemed to have no idea what I was doing there.
I introduced myself, and she said, “Who sent you?”
“Ford,” I said.
She looked at the man and said, “There must be some mistake.” The two of them laughed merrily, as if at some private joke.
The man said, “Are you sure your agency gave you the right address?”
“Yes,” I said, realizing from his accent that this man was Patrick Lichfield. I was briefly awestruck until he spoke again.
“Tell that agency not to be ridiculous,” he said. “This is not the type of girl I want to photograph.” He looked straight at me, turned on his heel, and left the room in a huff.
The elevator was still there when the girl handed back my portfolio. With tears welling up in my eyes, I thanked her, retreated, closed the iron gate behind me, and quickly pushed the down button. When the door closed, the tears came streaming down my face until my eyes were so flooded that I didn’t notice the elevator had skipped the ground floor and gone all the way to the basement, where it stopped abruptly and the light went out.
There I was, in the dark, in the basement, feeling devastated as well as dizzy from the ride and the dank, dirty smell of dust and mildew. The only source of light was a narrow shaft from a basement door leading outdoors. Pull yourself together, I thought, wiping away my tears and willing myself to calm down. The elevator gate closed and the machine started whirring on its own. Good, I thought, that’s good. I pushed the button for the ground floor, barely able to see the button, and waited to move. That was when I noticed a large man standing on the other side of the gate. He yanked it open and got in. I smiled and asked for his floor, but he didn’t answer. He just closed the gate behind him, and the elevator started to move.
The light went out again and the man spoke. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. I felt his hairy arm brush past me to reach the elevator buttons, and then I felt his big body move nearer. Please stop standing so close, I thought, my anxiety mounting. There’s space. Then he grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth. His dirty fingers touched my lips, smearing my lipstick. Then he rubbed his heavy body against me, pushing me against the elevator wall, where the metal bars poked into my back.
I reached for the buttons to make the elevator move, but he knocked my hand away. He stank horribly of urine and his clothes scratched against my face. He put his hand on my head and pushed it hard against his lower body. I tried to scream, but the sound was stifled by his pants, his private parts against my face. I tried to squirm away, but his grip was like a vise, and my head was throbbing. My knees hit the floor, and I could feel my stockings rip on the rough wood beneath me.
The elevator started up. He pushed another button, and the elevator stopped. I was being crushed in the corner of that cage. I tried to reach the emergency bell on the floorboard, but he grabbed my hand, forcing it into his pants. He didn’t say a word, just kept breathing hard. Then, somehow, the elevator rumbled up to the ground floor.
He kicked me aside, opened the gate, and scuttled out of the elevator like a roach. I fell on the floor, bruised, cut, and trembling all over, but glad to be alive. I picked up my portfolio and made a mad dash for the street, nearly knocking over a delivery boy. I kept looking behind me to see if the wicked man was following me, but he was gone, having vanished into thin air.
I jumped into a line of people waiting to board a bus. As I rummaged in my purse for the fare, I noticed the other riders looking at my bloody knees. Even amid that crowd, I was afraid the horrible man was nearby. When I got home, I didn’t tell my mother what had happened. I didn’t want to scare her, even though I was sick to death of having the same thing happen again and again just because I was a girl. I didn’t have a dad to measure other men by, or an older brother or even an uncle who lived nearby, so for years I’d thought that maybe all men were good, like my only role models—Santa Claus or Jesus or Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. In other words, made-up men. I knew better now. There was my stepdad, the men in Mexico, this horrible pervert in the elevator. All over the world, men would hold you hostage and threaten you and force you down the drain into a dark world. I started to build a shell around myself that men couldn’t penetrate—not even Matthew, who had a pure soul but couldn’t be counted on to be there when I needed him. (It had been weeks since I’d heard from him, and I had no idea where he was.) Still, I tried to hold on to a tiny hope of something better. Surely there was a good man—a real, live man, not just a fictional one—out there for me somewhere.
I had no paid work for the next two weeks, which turned out to be a blessing, because it took that long for my knees to heal, even if my emotions didn’t.
But my streak of bad luck wasn’t over just yet. Back in my cycle of go-sees, I went to the studio of the photographer Hugh Bell. I’d met Hugh, who was known for his brilliant portraits of jazz musicians, back in the Fashion Fair days, and he’d always been a booster of mine. He took many wonderful photos of me and always told me not to give up, because I’d be a big star someday.
I dragged my suitcase full of clothes up to his large, light-filled studio near Union Square. While I got dressed and made up my eyes with lots of black pencil, Hugh constructed a set for me to pose in. When I saw what he’d done—he’d attached a hammock to beams suspended high in the ceiling—I thought, Hmmm, that doesn’t look too safe. Before I could say a word, Hugh said, “Don’t worry, I’d
never put you in harm’s way.” He helped me into the hammock and backed away to start shooting. I posed carefully as the hammock started to sway. He said, “Now throw your leg over the edge.”
“Like this?” I said.
“Yes, like that.”
I felt proud of how well I could take direction, and as Hugh looked through the camera, I thought, I’m a good model. And that was when it happened. The beam holding the hammock slipped loose. Bam! My back landed hard on the floor, and the heavy beam crashed on top of me. I heard Hugh shouting, a camera dropping, and feet pounding the floor. I couldn’t speak because I was crushed right down the middle, and I certainly couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe.
The beam was so heavy that Hugh couldn’t move it off me. He put his face next to mine to see if I was breathing, then went to the phone to call someone. I yelled, “I’m all right,” but it came out as a tiny whimper. He rushed over, relieved. In reality, I wasn’t all right at all, but I didn’t want to tell him. He gave me aspirins and eventually got me out from under the beam and onto his sofa so I could rest. All I kept thinking was: I’m a good model.
“Do you want me to call a hospital?” Hugh said.
“No, I just want to do the pictures,” I said, worried that I’d get in trouble with my agency.
He said we should probably stop for the day, which was a relief. I was in agony. He called a cab for me, and somehow I made it home and into bed. Several hours later, when my mom got home, I couldn’t move at all. The pain was so excruciating that I blacked out, and when I woke up, I was in the hospital in a strange slinglike contraption that stretched my arms in one direction and my legs in another. The doctors told my mom there was something dangerously wrong with my back. She also said the agency had called to find out why I hadn’t shown up for the other go-sees scheduled that day. When they found out what had happened, they suggested that I sue the photographer. Hugh was my friend; I never considered it.
Walking with the Muses Page 14