Walking with the Muses

by Pat Cleveland

  So there I sat on my pink suitcase, alone by the taxi stand. There was a telephone booth, but I had no German coins to use in it. There was no music in my head, no joy, just dead, cold fear surrounding me in those dark hours before dawn. I missed home. What I would have given to be cuddled up on the couch with Mom at that moment, watching an old movie on television.

  I have never been so happy to see the sun rise; its fiery presence was like a long-lost friend with a heart brimming with love. It took a long time before even one taxi showed up. When a Mercedes finally pulled over, I simply thrust Christa’s telegram at the driver, with the address of the studio printed on it. I was so zonked at that point, I could barely read and didn’t trust myself to pronounce the words right.

  The studio was in a small factory outside town. I arrived in time for breakfast and was greeted by a woman dressed in a dark green vest, a flowered peasant skirt hitting midcalf, and white stockings (yes, long white opaque tights in summer). I’d already noticed from the cab window that this was how most of the women on the streets of Potsdam dressed. The woman paid for my taxi, then gave me a tour, first through rooms where women were knitting by hand or on knitting machines, and then into the studio, where I was welcomed in both English and German and immediately offered cheeses and meats from a lavish buffet. I ate and ate all day long, even between shots.

  The photo shoot, which was for the factory’s catalog, went well into the evening, with me struggling not to show my exhaustion. I drank coffee but no beer, which everyone else, even the stylists, guzzled as if it were soda pop. (Beer for the Germans is a lot like wine for the French.) Everything was extremely efficient, and at the end of the workday, I was handed an envelope full of deutsche marks. I felt deeply gratified. As the taxi drove me to the train station to catch the train to Berlin, followed by the night train to Paris, all I could think about was the little bed of my own that I’d have in the sleeping car. My desire for that bed was so intense, it was almost like a sexual fantasy.

  That night on the train, a gorgeous, delectable-looking young man delivered a dinner menu to my cabin. I ordered my meal, trying not to stare. I mean, this guy was handsomeness personified, a tall, slim drink of deliciousness. He returned minutes later with my dinner. When I was done eating, I was disappointed to see that someone else came to take my dishes away. But then he came back into the cabin to prepare the berth and turn down the covers. He kept his eyes on me as he fixed the bed, and I must have given him some signal, because in the middle of the night, he came back.

  I woke up right away. I grabbed him, and he grabbed me, the wheels of the train gliding smoothly on the rails beneath us. I let go of the bag of pistachios that I’d fallen asleep gripping, and within seconds we were both naked. From that point on, my hormones were in charge. Every so often, as we lusted away, a small part of my brain would step back and ask, Is this acceptable behavior? But I was too distracted to pay attention.

  After my German-Italian lover (I did find out that much about him, along with his name, Roy G. Biv) left my cabin to return to duty, I looked in the mirror and thought, You are someone who just had sex with a total stranger. Later, as I lounged in my seat, cracking pistachios all the way to Paris, I actually laughed out loud, savoring my secret and my new recreational sport—men!

  chapter 37

  ENGLAND SWINGS

  Me with the fabulous designer Zandra Rhodes in the Vogue studios, London, 1971.

  Courtesy of Clive Arrowsmith.

  As Wilhelmina had predicted, Europe was more accepting of me than America was; relocating there was a good career move for me. Somehow the Europeans seemed less hung up on race and on labels, and they appeared to have moved away from the lily-white, blond, blue-eyed ideal of beauty that retained a tight grip on the imaginations of magazine editors and art directors in the States. In Europe, my color just wasn’t an issue. Or if it was, I didn’t notice because I was too busy: The year 1971 was shaping up to be my most successful yet as a model, as I appeared in top magazines in both Europe and America and walked the runway for all the collections on both continents (as well as in Japan for Kenzo). For the first time I felt my career was on solid ground, and as my experience widened, I gained confidence that I’m sure made me more appealing to clients. It was kind of like playing an instrument: The more you practice, the better you get, and the more people want to hear your music.

  But if I was thriving professionally, I sometimes felt a bit out of control personally. A typical week might find me in Milan on Monday, back in Paris on Tuesday, and off to London on Thursday for five days. My body—and mind—felt the strain. My old back injury flared up, and my feet ached incessantly. If there was an airborne virus, I’d catch it. (It turns out that sixteen-hour days and a diet of croissants and croques monsieurs tossed back with champagne aren’t the best ways to build up resistance.) I’d vacillate between feeling adventurous and up for anything and exhausted, sick, and ready to collapse. And more than a little homesick. On balance, though, the ups certainly outweighed the downs, and I knew how lucky I was.

  My first trip from France requiring air travel was to London, where I was introduced, in roughly this order, to: (1) a whole new batch of delightful accents (including Cockney, in a monologue from my Heathrow taxi driver that had me in stitches); (2) left-side-of-the-road driving (which had me clutching the car handle with white knuckles); (3) British Vogue’s legendary Grace Coddington (a flame-haired, Pre-Raphaelite beauty who was a consummate professional); (4) the great photographer Norman Parkinson (who’d just finished photographing Princess Anne and scared me when he said, “You are very odd-looking, not at all the kind of model I am used to photographing,” since the phrasing was so similar to that of the snobby Patrick Lichfield, whose elevator was the scene of my near rape—but unlike Lichfield, Norman was joking); (5) the brilliant hairdresser Didier Malige of Jean Louis David in Paris (“Not to be confused with Jacques-Louis David, the history painter,” he said endearingly before offering to do my hair); (6) my lovely, maternal English agent, Eileen Green (who is hands-down one of the nicest people I’ve ever met); and (7) compliments of Eileen, a proper cup of English tea and scones with clotted cream and jam (which—need I even say it?—I fell in love with on first bite). And that was just in my first four hours in the country!

  I learned so much from that Vogue shoot with Grace Coddington and Norman Parkinson, and I had so much fun doing it (Parkinson could have been Bartholomew Cubbins from the Kingdom of Didd because he put on a different crazy hat for every shot), that I developed a permanent soft spot for London and the United Kingdom as a whole. I met some of my favorite people and had some of my most unforgettable adventures on British soil.

  On my second trip, I stayed at Eileen’s house in London. I had gotten back very late at night after finishing a shoot in a remote London pub with David Bailey, the hottest photographer in England, if not the world. The next day Eileen woke me with a tray laden with toast, marmalade, a hard-boiled egg, and a pretty flower in a vase—and some exciting news. “Guess what, my dear?” she said. “You have a job for a very important show, and the designer is Mr. Yves Saint Laurent. But you must get over there as soon as you have breakfast. It’s close to eleven. I let you sleep in.”

  Meeting Yves Saint Laurent was a dream come true, and my heart began to race at the very possibility. He was a hero of mine, not only because I loved his designs but also because he was one of the first French couturiers to use black models on the runway. I cursed myself for leaving my Saint Laurent dress—the one I’d bought on Madison Avenue the day Halston hired me—back in Paris. My Stephen Burrows wrap dress was a good second choice. I threw it on, and in no time, I was bumping along on the wrong side of the street in a big English taxi, headed to the London Planetarium for a charity fashion show.

  I felt as though I’d entered the bottom of a fish bowl when I looked up at the building’s dome, with the entire universe displayed on it via a twenty-foot-tall projector that stood in the center of th
e room. Wrapped around the projector was a narrow catwalk. I had never seen such a peculiar space for a show: proof to me of how eccentric (if charmingly so) the English could be.

  During the rehearsal, I could hardly concentrate on walking that perilous platform, which was seven feet above the floor, because I was so distracted by the intricate dance of stars, planets, and constellations on the ceiling. There was a choreographer backstage, and lots of English models, hairdressers, and dressers. It was nothing like a Seventh Avenue show or, for that matter, anything I’d ever done. With thirty different outfits to change into, which wasn’t unusual back then, I felt like a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star, the star being Yves Saint Laurent, who was sitting somewhere in the audience, hidden among the hundreds of other stars held together by their adoration of fashion. I had seen him once in Paris, on the day his collection was being shown. He had driven himself right up to the door of the building in a black Volkswagen Beetle, jumped out without locking the doors, and quickly gone inside. Imagine—no Rolls, no entourage (boy, those were the days)! He had looked like a sexy bookworm, quite handsome, with a luscious mane of hair that turned golden in the sunlight, oddly geeky and shy-seeming, with those oversize black glasses.

  As I returned backstage to change, the dressers were buzzing about the fact that Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister, was supposedly in the audience. I’d had a special interest in Princess Margaret ever since I’d seen her royal wedding to Antony Armstrong-Jones (a commoner, my mother had explained) on television when I was a child. Now there were two people in the audience I desperately wanted to impress. I resolved to do my best show ever.

  In the end, Saint Laurent didn’t even come onstage, though I did get to see him from a distance when a spotlight lit him in the audience. Backstage, all the models had somewhere to rush off to. Disappointed at not meeting Monsieur Saint Laurent, I changed back into my beautiful Stephen dress and left by myself. Eileen had said she’d have a cab waiting for me at the end of the show, so I made my way to the Planetarium’s entrance, where the crowd was filing into the lobby and a small reception was taking place.

  There were so many people that I just went with the flow—it was shoulder to shoulder—and found myself in an exhibition of carnival mirrors. I stopped in my tracks and looked into the mirrors and started to have fun with them, bending this way and that, just playing while I waited for the crowd to thin out. It was full of the crème de la crème of London society, and I got a kick out of seeing the whole scene distorted behind me in the mirrors, like a kaleidoscope of reality. The stream of people was so thick that I had to stand closer to the mirrors, and at one point, I almost lost my balance. I felt my high heel step back on to something soft, like clothing. I looked down at the floor and saw that I was standing on the hem of a woman’s dress.

  “Oh, dear,” a voice said, and the entire crowd stopped moving. When I turned my head, I realized the person whose dress I’d stepped on was none other than Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret. She even had on her tiara. She smiled and toasted me with the drink in her hand. I was almost too stunned too respond, but then, as if on cue, we both turned to the carnival mirrors and started to laugh. I was so much taller than she was, but the mirrors’ distortions were an equalizer: They rendered us both with short legs, wide bodies, and little arms. Like children, we bent and weaved for a couple of moments, looking over our shoulders at our backsides, giggling.

  Then she extended her free hand, bedecked with jeweled rings, and took mine, and we stepped and shifted to the next mirror and repeated the routine. As we laughed out loud at ourselves for looking so silly, we were no longer a royal and a commoner, a princess and a pauper—just two innocent kids being free and having fun. Then someone in her royal retinue pulled her away, and she walked back onto the carpet and into her official role as British royalty.

  That encounter with Princess Margaret taught me that when it comes to joy, there are no class barriers.

  My next trip to England was to be photographed a second time by the enigmatic Guy Bourdin. Believe it or not, I was even colder on this shoot than I was on that first one with Donna. Way colder. The client was Max Factor, so I was really excited. I’m going to represent the makeup of the Hollywood stars! I told myself. Guy’s brilliant idea was to paint me blue and photograph me nude on a platform in the middle of the North Sea. Oh, and did I mention that this was in January? Not only was the paint itself itchy and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t cover myself between takes, because the paint would peel off. I was blue with cold underneath the blue paint; my goose pimples had goose pimples. Christine, the sweet assistant whom I’d worked with on other shoots, kept saying, “You poor darling, you poor darling.”

  The assistants were all standing knee-deep in the water, waiting for the master to show up. When he did finally, he stood on scaffolding as I was carried out into the sea—which was gusting with high waves—and placed on a tiny plank of wood on my belly, facedown. As I looked into the water just below me, I could hear Guy shouting out, “Stay straight,” so I stretched my arms and legs out as far as I could and balanced my weight on my abdominal muscles and held that position. I actually muttered to myself, “You are a seagull, and flying over this water is natural to you.” Without this pep talk, I’m not sure I would have made it through the whole ordeal.

  The waves kept moving, the metal pole holding the plank kept swaying from side to side, and I kept peeking to see whether Guy was shooting or if I had been left there to die. Every muscle in my body was screaming for help when I saw the assistants and crew bundle up onshore in their coats and blankets. Please, God, let him get the shot, please hurry up, please, please, please, I begged as the cold entered my lungs—a heavy, damp feeling. I was there, naked, in the dead of winter, for a good half hour before I was released and back on dry land.

  Two days later, I was in bed with pneumonia at the Portobello Hotel, as sick as I can ever remember being.

  chapter 38

  I’M A BELIEVER

  For one of my first modeling jobs in England, I got to hang out with Teddy Boys at the Swan Club in London, 1971.

  Courtesy of David Bailey.

  Despite enduring that epic bout of pneumonia, I have fond memories of the Portobello, a boutique hotel in Notting Hill that was a favorite of the music and fashion crowd back in the seventies. I had memorable encounters there with more cool people than I can recount, but two in particular stand out.

  The first was Mick Jagger, whom I met when I was at my sickest. I got a call from a London friend who told me there had been a Mick sighting at the Portobello and that if I didn’t go down to the dining room immediately to meet him, he would come over and drag me down there himself.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m in bed. I think I’m going to die.”

  “You can die later. You have to meet Mick. Do it for me. Promise.”

  I staggered out of bed and looked in the bathroom mirror. The face staring back resembled the survivor of a shipwreck. I gulped down two of the antibiotics the doctor had prescribed (he’d made a house call to my hotel room) and felt so dizzy that I dropped my glass of water. The phone rang again.

  “Are you dressed?” asked my friend.

  “Not yet, I—”

  “Go. Now. Before he leaves. Or else I won’t speak to you again.” And he hung up.

  I went to the closet, pulled on a colorful dress, and left my room for the first time in two days. The front-desk clerks looked startled to see me, since the meal trays they’d been leaving at my door had gone untouched. I smiled at them wanly and walked down the short stairway to the dining room. And then I saw him sitting alone at a table by the bar.

  The room was spinning, and I had just decided to turn around when Mick looked up at me with big bright eyes and smiled. He was the cutest thing on two legs, with so much hair that he looked like a fourteen-year-old. He gave me a nod and I nodded back. What did that mean? Then he did it again, which said to m
e, Why don’t you come over? So I did.

  “Hello!” he said in the unplaceable British accent that his critics like to call “mockney.”

  “Good morning,” I replied in American.

  “I’m waiting for breakfast,” he said. “They’re slow.”

  I couldn’t concentrate, and the room seemed to be spinning, so I sat down next to him on the bench to regroup. It was a tiny space, so we were sitting very close. We looked at each other.

  “I’m Pat,” I said.

  “I’m Mick,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  Just then an exotic-looking, dark-haired girl walked over to us, gave me a dirty look, and sat down across from Mick. She looked like she wanted to take a bite out of me. Mick looked awkwardly at me, then at her, then at me. “This is Pat,” he said finally.

  “Really?” the dark-haired girl said, watchful, like a lion protecting her cub.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Nice to meet you both. Don’t let me disturb you.”

  I slid out over the leather bench and went back to my room, where I promptly fainted. When I woke up, the concierge was beside my bed with a doctor. I was in that hotel room for a week, with the doctor visiting daily, until my fever broke.

  It wasn’t until 1975, some three years later, that Mick and I finally had some fun together. He was between relationships: His first marriage, to the dark-haired girl I’d met that morning, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias, had ended (though they weren’t officially divorced), and he had not yet met his second wife, my good friend Jerry Hall (I’d gotten to know her in Paris through Antonio, who was crazy about her and thought—correctly—that she and I would hit it off).

  Mick and I reconnected in New York through the photographer Ara Gallant, a friend of both of ours. Mick was in town and wanted to go out with a nice girl and asked Ara if he knew anyone. Ara suggested me, and I thought, Why not? So it was arranged that I would meet Mick at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel at midnight.