by Jill Dodd
Soon I’m known as “the girl who dresses weird,” but I really don’t care because I’m having a ball with my creativity. Eventually, the kids get used to it, which is good because I’m not going to stop.
I want to bring Kelly to the Homecoming dance since I’m not ready to date boys. I relish the idea of dressing up like a guy in a tuxedo and top hat. We go to the dance dressed as a couple—me in a suit, bow tie, and top hat, and Kelly in a black dress. The teachers think we’re lesbians and forbid us to enter, so we sneak in long enough to have pictures taken. After the photos, three teachers corner us yelling, “You can’t come to the dance without a date!” So I say, “She’s my date.” Our friends gather around, angrily arguing with them. When the teachers threaten to call the police, Kelly and I leave so our friends don’t get arrested. Rumors spread that I’m a lesbian, but I really don’t give a shit.
The worst part is that after this goes down, my parents forbid me to see my best friend. I’m gutted. I miss her so badly, I cry every night. Once in a while, after my parents are asleep, I sneak out and meet her around the corner to talk, but our relationship is never the same. She can’t understand why my parents don’t like her and neither can I. Shame colors my emotions. I am powerless to change anything. She is the best, most honest person I had ever known. My longing for her never leaves.
Even with this major loss, I grow in new ways and discover new things. Kissing boys is one, and live rock concerts are another. Because LA is the music capital of the world, every important band comes to town, and I go to as many concerts as possible. Untamed, live rock music sets my soul free, while the outfits worn by David Bowie and Freddie Mercury inspire my imagination and give me permission to be my unique, wildly creative self.
By sixteen, my main goal in life is to move out of the house, so I have two jobs. I teach kids to swim in backyard pools all over Los Angeles County, and I am a salesgirl at a boutique called Nobby’s.
At seventeen, I’m about to graduate high school. I want to go to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM), but my parents think it is too expensive and that I won’t stick with a career in fashion design, so they won’t pay for it. Instead, I attend Cerritos community college.
At college, it isn’t long before I spot a tall, handsome man in a plaid flannel shirt getting coffee at the campus café. I have a mini heart attack when he asks if he can sit with me. My first serious boyfriend, Jack, is a brilliant machinist, whose lips taste sweet and salty at the same time. He charms the fear of sex right out of me, and I hand him my virginity on a silver platter in the back of his truck at a drive-in movie and naïvely become pregnant right away. I had never gotten a talk about sex or birth control from my mom and was clueless.
I can’t tell my parents and have no one to turn to. Jack withdraws. I’m sure he is scared, but I feel totally abandoned. I go to the abortion clinic by USC and lie alone on the cold, stainless steel table, filled with self-hatred and shame. Without painkillers, the doctor pries open my uterus and vacuums it out. I am forever changed. No longer innocent. I’m guilty.
Jack and I continue our relationship using birth control. Yet, he gradually becomes jealous and possessive. He thinks my clothes show too much skin and doesn’t want me going to the beach or nightclubs with any of my guy friends. I hate being told what to do, but when I pull away, he holds on tighter—literally. One time he starts jealously yelling at me in his souped-up fast car and begins driving so fast I can’t even jump out at a stop sign. When he finally stops the car, he has his muscular hand gripped on my arm so tight I can’t move. His controlling behavior pushes me away for a while, but when he comes back crying, I bounce right back into his bed, not really understanding the difference between abuse and love, and furthering my confusion around my own desires and sexuality.
Boating, Marine Stadium, Long Beach, 1978
LA MODEL
1977, Los Angeles Garment District
Nobby’s closes, so I waitress at a local deli and work as a box girl at the supermarket. But I yearn for the fashion business. While scanning the want ads in the Los Angeles Times, I find one looking for a fit model at a swimwear company. I have no idea what a fit model is, but I go check it out anyway.
High Tide Swimwear is on Broadway in the Los Angeles garment district—a haze of smog, freeway interchanges, and skyscrapers. Homeless people with shopping carts filled with their belongings line the garbage-littered streets. The drab buildings are covered in gang tag graffiti.
Razor wire–topped fencing surrounds my destination and bars cover the windows. I park my red Datsun 240Z sports car on the street in front of the grimy fortress and buzz the intercom at the steel-cage door.
I meet with a red-haired woman named Alleen, who has a thick Texas accent. She’s around thirty-five and looks so cool in her tight jeans, high-heeled boots, and long red-fox-fur coat. For some reason, a round faceted crystal from a chandelier is hanging from the buttonhole of her denim shirt. She piques my curiosity.
Her design studio is a bright white room with gray industrial carpet. Rolling racks are jammed with swimsuits, and design sketches are pushpinned to the walls. Colorful marking pens litter her white desk—plus a Styrofoam plate of barbecued ribs, beans, and corn on the cob, and a Coke.
She takes a two-piece off the rack. “Here, darling, try this on, dressing room’s in there.” She points to a small closet. I put the bikini on and come out. “Oh, you’re just a little Lambchop!” (She still calls me this today.) She takes her measuring tape and pulls it up between my legs and over my left shoulder to get a torso measurement. Then she measures the distance between my nipples, plus the more normal bust, waist, and hip numbers.
“You’re perfect! I can’t believe it! Do you have any idea how many girls I’ve measured in the past month? This is terrific, I’ll call you later today.” When she calls later to offer me the job, I negotiate her up from $3.75 to $4.25 per hour.
My job as a fit model is to wear swimsuits while Alleen, or the patternmaker, pins, slices, and writes on them to perfect the design or fit. Alleen works with a lit cigarette hanging on her lip. Her hands tremble as she focuses and talks to the swimsuit. “Come on, you motherfucker,” she says, pulling the fabric together, slicing and pinning it.
“Alright, that looks better. Turn around, Lambchop, lemme see the back.” Between fittings I wear a hot-pink robe around the office so I’m always ready to change.
When I’m not trying on suits, I cut samples. I hoist massive five-foot-long rolls of fabric on top of my cutting table and arrange pattern pieces efficiently. I use heavy iron weights to keep the pattern pieces from moving. Then I draw around them with a black marker or white tailor’s chalk, remove the weights, pin the layers together, and cut them out.
I gather all the trims with the cut pieces and put it all in a plastic Baggie with a Xerox copy of the spec sheet. Now it’s time to cut the spaghetti used for neck and back ties. This is a major pain in the ass. The 7/8" by 60" perfectly parallel strips of Lycra are the bane of my existence, because the Lycra runs from my scissors as I cut. My right hand is full of calluses and blisters, but I don’t care because I love my job, and I love my mentor, Alleen.
Working at High Tide, I get to see how diverse and inclusive the fashion industry is. Everybody’s welcome, whether you’re gay, transgender, straight, or from any country on earth. It’s just not an issue.
I’m eighteen during my second year at High Tide. We’re shooting our ad campaign and my job is to organize and fit suits on twelve models. I’d never been in a real Hollywood photographer’s studio, so I’m secretly checking it all out. I’m just a designer’s fitting model, not a real photographic model. All of a sudden, I hear rumbling on the set below when Ron Harris, the photographer, fires a model on the spot for being short, then yells up to me in the makeup loft, “Hey, why aren’t you in a suit?”
That’s how it all started. I shoot the campaign, then ask the president of High Tide to pay me the same amount
as the other models and walk away with $800 for a day’s work. It’s a lot more than $4.25 an hour. If I did this for a living, I think, maybe I can pay for fashion design school at FIDM myself. I have already quit Cerritos College because I am learning so much more working in the garment industry than at school.
I decide to get an agent and meet with four top Hollywood agencies. Three of them want me. I choose the one that I assume does the most photography work. High Tide lets me clock in and out when I have go-sees or bookings, so I still work both jobs and teach swimming on weekends.
My new modeling agency is in Hollywood. Stained dark carpet and fake wood paneling are the design features of the small office. Miriam, the agency head, sits at her desk, her back to the window overlooking the Sunset Strip. Papers and cigarette ash cover her desk. Eight-by-ten, black-and-white model photos are stapled all over the walls. She has dark hair, a strong nose, thick black eyeliner, and a deep, raspy voice.
Apparently, I need all kinds of things done. She sends me to a pediatric cosmetic dentist to have a look at my Tetracycline-stained teeth. The dentist recommends capping them, which means filing my teeth down to a point and putting fake ones on. I can’t do it. My teeth have a band of gray, but they are strong and healthy. I feel like I’d be selling out if I had them capped. He bleaches them instead, which in the seventies is terribly painful and doesn’t work very well.
Next, a plastic surgeon removes the mole from my chin. He said it could turn cancerous, so I go ahead with it. They want to remove the mole on my cheek too, but I refuse.
Then Miriam sends me to a hairstylist in Beverly Hills named Carlo. I don’t know what is in the champagne, but I am so relaxed that night in his salon that I allow him to cut all my hair off into a very short boy cut.
I have no idea that Miriam is the former director of a sexy girls’ agency affiliated with a porno magazine. So, naturally, my first interview is with Frederick’s of Hollywood. He sells sleazy lingerie. I know this because my parents get the catalog. Miriam comes with me to meet Frederick, who tells me to put on a tiny, see-through, leopard-print thing with black lace trim. I have to change in the closet right next to Frederick’s desk, which has shutters for doors that I’m sure he’s looking through.
I feel so insanely anxious and uncomfortable with the sleazy outfit and the closet, but I force myself to do it anyway. I come out timidly, basically nude, while Fredrick and Miriam study me up and down and ask me to turn around. I feel like a slut and am panicking internally. Together they agree that though my body is perfect for lingerie, at only eighteen I have too much of a baby face for his product. Thank God.
Miriam books me for cheesy jobs, like car and trucker conventions, where I have to wear a red-white-and-blue, skintight, zip-front polyester jumpsuit. She sends me to hotel and motel rooms all over Hollywood, where clients from out of town hold sketchy interviews.
Sometimes these are not interviews for real jobs. They’re just men looking for sex. I go to a house in Bel Air, where a man welcomes me into his lion’s den of a home, and, for whatever reason, he has 8×10-inch glossies of girls all over the wall behind his desk, which smells like high-priced hooking to me. My dad has told me of the dozens of times he saved girls like these from overdosing on drugs or on suicide calls—information that stays with me and probably saves me from a bad path in my near future. The man is about forty, with a dark tan, shaggy hair, and chest hair creeping out the top of his shirt. There is no actual product to sell. On second thought, I am the product he wants to sell. He wants to see me in a bikini.
Miriam sends me to a high-rise right on Hollywood and Franklin, where a man, after approving of my body in a bikini, tells me I’ll be accompanying him to Las Vegas as his escort. I notice that the man in the photos behind the desk does not match the man in front of me. I try to flee but he has locked me in. I plead desperately for him to unlock the door, he finally relents and I run to the parking garage for my car, telling the security guard about the incident. He couldn’t give a shit about my ordeal. I speed out in my car with my heart pounding.
Miriam thinks it would be a good idea for me to go on The Dating Game—the seventies game show. Lots of actors use it as a publicity tool. I do it with no intention of looking for a date. My goal is to pick the guy with the least perverted answers. My boyfriend, Jack, who I am trying to break up with at the time, tells me that if I do it our relationship is over—another reason I go on the show.
On an interview for a department store catalog, I meet with a very rare, female photographer. Looking around her studio walls I see fashion shoots, but also sexy shoots. While she looks through my book, she says, “You know, I also shoot for Oui [the porno magazine] and I’d love to use you.” I basically have a silent heart attack and get out of there as fast as I politely can, picturing my dad’s gross porno walls at home.
Later, Oui magazine calls Miriam offering $25,000 to use a swimsuit shot right out of my portfolio for their cover. I panic. I want the money, but my insides are churning. I don’t want the reputation of being in pornography magazines! How can I get better jobs for wholesome all-American brands if I let them use my picture? On top of that, the whole thing repulses me because of dealing with my dad’s sick porno obsession my whole life. I strongly refuse their offer.
Soon after, I land a national commercial for Sprite and work along a group of other young, fresh-faced athletic actors. I notice that one girl has a look very similar to mine.
When I explain my dilemma with Miriam’s sexy go-sees, she suggests I try her agency—Wilhelmina, who recently opened a West Coast branch. Wilhelmina Models in New York is representing some of the biggest names, from Patti Hansen and Gia Carangi to Shaun Casey and Julie Foster.
I want to work in New York someday, and since Wilhelmina has an office there I could easily go. I am dying to shoot with famous New York photographers alongside famous models hot at the time, like Kim Alexis, Carol Alt, Kelly Emberg, Esme Marshall, Beverly Johnson, Janice Dickinson, Iman, Christie Brinkley, Bitten Knudsen, Tara Shannon, and Brooke Shields.
I go the next day, and they sign me on the spot. The sleazy go-sees disappear, and I model only for legitimate fashion clients: California Apparel News, Women’s Wear Daily, swimwear companies, department store catalogs, newspaper ads, television commercials, and modeling on talk shows.
I even get invited to glamorous Hollywood parties. My favorite is held at Flipper’s, the roller-skating disco in West Hollywood. Patti Hansen is in our group, along with Robin Williams, who I believe is seeing my agent Molly. Mork & Mindy is a hit show at the time, and even Pam Dawber is signed with Wilhelmina. I admit I am startruck.
A few months later, Gerald Marie, the head of Wilhelmina’s sister agency, Paris Planning, comes to the US to scout models and he chooses me. My plan is to go to Paris, get editorial tear sheets from Vogue Paris, Elle France, and every other top magazine, dressed in Paris Couture, of course, then work in New York among my favorite models.
Well, that was the plan.
Wearing Kenzo for the book Fashion 2001 by Lucille Khornak, 1980
STAINED GLASS
March 1980, Paris
It has only been a few weeks since arriving in Paris. Many mornings I head straight to the agency, unless Pepper has already given me my list of go-sees or I am booked for a job. So far, the only jobs I’m getting are the ones I don’t want, but I need work and hope that even at a crappy job I can make good connections and move up the slippery steep model ladder.
As I walk into the agency, I feel an instant jolt of tension from the room. Something is seriously wrong. Instead of frenetic buzzing and shouting, it’s hushed silence. The mood is dismal. Pepper looks up from her desk, gesturing for me to come over. When I get close she whispers, “Willy has passed away.”
“What? How?” I can’t believe it. Wilhelmina was only forty and the powerhouse of the agency. How could she be dead?
“Lung cancer. I’ll call you later,” Pepper says quietly.
I wind down the stairs and go directly to Notre Dame. Magnificent stained glass shines bright in the vast, dim space. Priests’ prayers bounce off limestone walls, echoing through the church. I light a candle and kneel.
I think back to my only meeting with Willy and can’t get the image of her skeleton fingers and ashy skin out of my head. I didn’t know she was sick, but she certainly didn’t look well. I wonder how she feels about the fashion business now? Is she glad she spent so much of her life working in fashion? Was it worth the ride? I don’t know if God is real, or if he hears me, but I ask him to help me make it in Paris.
I stare at the flickering candles and the beautiful stained glass, thinking, There’s not a single person who really knows me here—not even Scarlett. I’m halfway around the world, so far away from everyone I know. Back home, everybody’s got their opinion of who I’m supposed to be, but here, no one has any idea who I am. I have absolutely zero peer pressure. If I change my personality, no one would even notice. A rush of freedom flows through me. I’m energized. My body feels light. My heart swells. I can be rude. I can be mean. Maybe I should sleep around or start smoking. I should definitely start cursing. The possibilities are endless.
I leave the church and on my way back to the hotel, I buy a pack of hand-rolled cigars. As I relax into the sagging hotel mattress, I light one, pondering my options with a wicked smile.
Scarlett and me at Hôtel Andrea, Paris, 1980
HÔTEL ANDREA TO LE BON HÔTEL
Scarlett and I are so excited to pick up our first paychecks at the agency, but when we open the envelopes we’re floored. They’re much smaller than we had expected. We go directly to the accounting lady downstairs to ask about it. We can barely understand the innocent-looking, petite, Parisian woman saying in broken English something to the effect of “Well, you owe us for the hotel and the plane ticket.”