The Face That Changed It All

by Beverly Johnson

  Our guide, who was also a journalist, took us on a boat ride down the Amazon to meet the snake trainer. As we were riding through a waterfall, I put my hand out to feel the running stream, but when the guide noticed what I was doing, he immediately told me to stop before a piranha reached out and bit my hand off. What a doll! I was slowly falling in love with our guide, who had the sexiest accent and was clearly very concerned for my well-being. He was also quite good-looking, smart, and resourceful—heck, he had two jobs, and I’d just gotten divorced from a man who didn’t like the idea of holding even one.

  My fear of posing with a snake was actually doubled once we reached the snake owner’s straw hut and I saw the twenty-foot python in the flesh. I wanted no part of him. The Vogue editors, though, began spinning the tale of how if I didn’t do the shoot with the snake, the poor snake owner and his family wouldn’t be able to eat because the money they made from that one photo shoot would support the entire family for the year.

  Who knows if that was actually true or just a damn good lie used to get me to do what they wanted me to do. Whatever it was, the guilt kicked in. The family did look pretty destitute, and I didn’t want to be the one responsible for them not having enough food for the rest of the year.

  The next day we took another boat ride to the area where the shoot was to take place. By this point I was officially in love with our guide, and he was in love with me from what I could tell. On the way to the shoot, we stopped to pick up the snake, and that’s when we found out that the snake owner we’d met the day before wouldn’t be joining us because he was in the hospital—he’d been bitten by a snake! Although not by the same snake we were using that day, apparently.

  “You must be kidding!” I screamed. “I’m not doing this!”

  What made it worse was that the handler’s nine-year-old son would be handling the snake, but as they told me this, they also reminded me of the family-won’t-eat situation, and to get them all to shut up I had to give in once again.

  At the shoot, the nine-year-old kid placed the twenty-foot python around me as I lay at a forty-five-degree angle on a tree, as still as possible. As the snake slithered slowly around me, I could hear the crew oohing and aahing about how amazing the photos looked, so I gritted my teeth and kept posing for the camera. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a few large spiders appeared out of nowhere to join the snake, and I was done. I told the kid to get that damn snake off me. The shoot was over—nothing else would be crawling on me that day.

  We shot a variety of photo layouts during the six weeks in Brazil, but I also managed to fit in samba classes every day. I fell in love with samba, a distinctive kind of music with African roots that really took off at the beginning of the twentieth century in Rio de Janeiro. The music was strongly influenced by the immigrant population from the Brazilian state of Bahia, and it later inspired the dance that shares its name. Learning it brought me a great deal of joy.

  I always enjoyed tasting the local cuisine of every country I visited during my career, too. Brazil’s national dish is feijoada, a tasty stew that differs throughout the country, but where I was it comprised beans, fresh pork or beef, cabbage, kale, potatoes, okra, carrots, and pumpkin in one large yummy meal. Feijoada had been served to Brazilian slaves, because it contained the unwanted parts of the pig (such as the feet, nose, ears) and cheap black beans. This made me think of African-American slaves who were fed from the leftovers of whatever was served in the main house on the plantation.

  At the six-week mark, when the crew was ready to pack their bags for departure, I decided I wouldn’t follow. I was in love with João, the guide/journalist, and wanted to stay in Brazil longer to enjoy my newfound freedom, the rain forest, and him. I also wanted to keep dancing the samba! All was well until two weeks later when João was on the verge of being arrested for his antigovernment stance in a recent editorial piece he’d written for the local paper. His arrest would surely lead to my arrest, and that wasn’t part of the plan. Time to move on, it seemed.

  I called Eileen Ford and told her the love affair was over and that I was ready to come home. Eileen had some news that would cheer me up: another assignment. I would be heading to Greece for Glamour magazine, which she knew would be right up my alley. I longed to travel to Greece and see where Jackie Kennedy had once lived.

  I bid João a fond good-bye and hopped on a plane to Greece. But on the trip, my stomach started doing cartwheels and my head was hurting as well. Once I landed in Greece, I began to feel worse, so I headed to my room in the hotel and got into bed. I alerted the Glamour staff that I was sick, and when the editors saw my condition, they arranged for a doctor to visit. I knew something was very wrong when they all began to converge outside instead of inside my room to discuss my health. The first diagnosis was cholera, but that was quickly ruled out as they determined it had to be some type of parasite that I picked up while in Brazil. After I developed a high fever and began to lose weight, they decided it was best to fly me back to New York on a private plane so that the doctors there could determine what treatment would be most effective.

  I’ll never forget being wheeled off that plane on a stretcher that sunny day at a small airfield just outside New York. Waiting for me were the two most important women in my life: my mother and Eileen Ford. My mother started crying the moment she saw me because I’d lost so much weight from the constant vomiting and severe diarrhea. She couldn’t believe how small I was; Eileen Ford, on the other hand, was just glad I had made it back alive. Fortunately, the doctors in New York didn’t take long to figure out which parasite I had, and I was back on my feet in a matter of weeks.

  No one was happier to see me up and out than my beloved guru James, who thought it was high time to put my good name to use and expand my empire beyond modeling. He was now unofficially in charge of advising me about how to make the most of every ounce of my growing star status, power, and fame in the fashion game. Though he was technically my hair and skin specialist, as with many women, my hairstylist was so much more.

  James had a host of plans for me that included developing a slew of beauty products we would launch together. Over the years, James had concocted his own impressive array of the most wonderful hair shampoos and conditioners made from nothing more than natural fruits and vegetables that he grew in his own home garden. He then mixed the fruits and vegetables with essential vitamins and nutrients that nourished all hair types back to their original healthy state.

  With James’s endless ideas for branding my image—a business idea still in its infancy at the time—he felt it was crucial that I meet with Eileen Ford to press the issue of my face becoming a cover of Vogue magazine in the very near future. I ran in the same circles with all those girls whose faces regularly appeared on Vogue covers, and I had already appeared on a number of Glamour magazine covers, not to mention numerous spreads inside Vogue. James believed that Eileen would agree that I had done enough modeling jobs to have my face on the cover of a major upscale fashion magazine, no question. The color of my skin should have no bearing at all on the decision. But I worried that the perm James applied to Eileen Ford’s naturally curly/kinky hair had given him a false impression about how her brain worked.

  For a start, just a few months earlier I’d had a run-in with Ms. Eileen about fair and equal pay for models on fashion shoots, and the fight hadn’t been very pleasant.

  One day on a catalogue shoot, I had casually asked some of the models what they were being paid for that particular job. Some of the girls didn’t like discussing money, but others were quite happy to share. When I learned how much less I was earning than some of my counterparts, I couldn’t believe it. Some were getting paid almost twice as much as I was, and in some instances for less work than I was putting in.

  This simply wasn’t fair or acceptable. I decided not to bring race into it, though I easily could have. Right was right, and I could fight it on those merits alone.

  Eileen was the first person I called
when I returned home from the shoot. She already knew about the pay differences because she’d negotiated my contracts, and I told her that I wanted this unfair practice fixed. She said she would make some calls about it, and in a matter of weeks, the pay matter was resolved and I was getting paid the same amount as other models. As word spread about what had happened, several other black models also asked for equal pay on catalogue shoots, and their requests were granted as well. That ol’ saying “You won’t know until you ask” is so true.

  It didn’t occur to me at that time, but I was making a major impact on the unfair practices of an industry that generated millions of dollars each year. In a small way, I was fulfilling my childhood dream of pushing for justice!

  This victory made me even more determined to talk with Eileen about getting that cover of Vogue. It had been a dream of mine since I first moved to New York, and my hope was that Eileen’s cunning, savvy, and brilliant business mind would join me in trying to figure out a way of turning my dream into reality.

  Sadly, Eileen did not share my dream. She told me point-blank that Vogue would not put my face on the cover. As odd as it may sound, at the time I didn’t look deeper into her denial or the meaning behind her steadfast refusal to get me the cover. All I knew was that Eileen was done with the conversation and had made it clear that I needed to be done with the idea as well.

  But I couldn’t give up that easily on something I wanted so badly. My goal was always to become, if not the top model, one of the top models in the world. I couldn’t do that without having a Vogue cover. Getting the Vogue cover was how you reached the pinnacle of the business back then; now, it’s actresses who hope they’ll get the cover, but its power is still the same.

  If Eileen wouldn’t assist me in getting what I wanted, I knew someone who would.

  Her name was Wilhelmina (Willy) Cooper, and Eileen knew the Dutch-born beauty even better than I did. At one time, she had been the Ford Agency’s most profitable supermodel; she had epitomized the classic, aristocratic look of the fifties and sixties with her swan-like neck, doe eyes, and delicate cheekbones.

  Standing at five-foot-eleven, Wilhelmina was often hailed as one of the few high-fashion models in those days built like a real woman, with measurements 38-24-36. In her heyday she appeared on the cover of American Vogue a staggering twenty-eight times.

  In 1967, Wilhelmina, along with her husband Bruce Cooper, a former executive producer of The Tonight Show, pulled off the ultimate coup. They formed the Wilhelmina Models agency, which offered the first real bona-fide threat to Eileen’s several-decade hold over the modeling game and Madison Avenue. Eileen was furious at what she perceived to be Wilhelmina’s betrayal, and to any model that dared leave the Ford Agency to sign with Wilhelmina Eileen sent a Bible with passages referring to Judas underlined in bold red Magic Marker.

  Blame it on those girls from my Buffalo neighborhood who tried to jump me on a weekly basis, but I had little fear of Eileen’s wrath. Her refusal to help me get the Vogue cover meant I had no other choice, so I reached out to Wilhelmina. Willy had assisted Naomi Sims in her early days when no one would consider taking a chance on a dark brown girl appearing between the covers of nonblack magazines. She encouraged Naomi constantly and put her on the path to the major triumphs of her career, which included the covers of two nonfashion magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal and Life.

  I remember meeting the lanky former model as she sat at her oversized wooden desk eating a slice of pizza with her feet propped up and a burning cigarette in a nearby ashtray. Cigarette smoking would be the primary cause of her death just a few years later at the very young age of forty, but that day I told her my dream of a Vogue cover and her face lit up.

  This meant parting ways with Eileen, but I would do it with as much class as possible. Eileen was the most powerful agent in the business and making an enemy out of her wasn’t a very smart move. Most of the other girls who left Eileen would slither away to join another agency without giving notice, believing they were somehow wrong to act in their own best interests. But my brain didn’t work like that. This was my career, so I had no fear in discussing my move face-to-face with her. There was no need for underhanded or backdoor moves on my part. I would thank her profusely for all her support and hard work on my behalf. She deserved my thanks and my honesty, and I wanted to make sure I could return if this new arrangement didn’t bring the results I expected.

  I was surprised at how gracious she was. Despite our disagreements over the years, I really think Eileen appreciated my honesty and gratitude, and she said she would welcome me back if I did indeed decide to return.

  With Wilhelmina now running the show, I continued receiving bookings for editorial shoots in all the top magazines. In fact, my workload actually increased, because people were so shocked Eileen didn’t send her “death squad” after me. There was plenty of talk around town about my defection from the Ford Agency to Wilhelmina’s company, but I had become accustomed to the constant chatter about what I was doing and why. The media coverage of celebrities in 1974 wasn’t as huge an issue as it is now.

  While Wilhelmina was busy singing my cover-worthy praises to editors and photographers around Manhattan, I had other high-profile champions on my side, too. At one photo shoot with supermodel and part-time rebel Lauren Hutton (a lady well known for speaking her mind at all times), she bluntly told the entire editorial team that it should be me and not her getting prepped and primed for the Vogue cover that month. She was the great Lauren Hutton, so she knew she could say what she wanted without fear of reprisal. And she was more aware than I that Vogue was hesitant to put black faces on its cover.

  Lauren also knew that her words would travel verbatim to every fashion editorial staff in Midtown. Not many top models in her position would have done what she did at the time. Lauren Hutton still remains a hero to me because she took a stand.

  But while the Laurens of the modeling world would have major cover shoots set up for them well in advance, that wasn’t how my career-defining moment played out in 1974.

  On the day my Vogue cover shot was taken, I actually was on a photo shoot for the inside of Vogue. There was nothing out of the ordinary to suggest this shoot would be any different from any of the other editorial spreads I’d done. My beloved Francesco Scavullo was the photographer, and we were working in the location he loved the most, his Midtown home/studio. I adored his gorgeous and well-lit space as much as he did, and shooting there meant I would also get to see his adorable live-in love and assistant Sean Byrnes.

  But what I appreciated most of all about that day was the fact that my face would be in the hands of a true master. Aside from his photography, he had also painted an award-winning portrait of singer Janis Joplin in 1969 just a few months before she died. He was hired to create shots for the movie posters for A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and was commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov to photograph the dancers of the American Ballet Theatre.

  Frances Stein, the fashion director at Vogue, was there, too, and she wasn’t too shabby, either. The former fashion director at Glamour, and now second-in-command under the icon of all fashion icons, Diana Vreeland, Frances had chosen a tantalizing periwinkle-blue sweater as one of the outfits for me to wear, and it was truly a divine match next to my skin. We girls loved to call Frances “Frankenstein” behind her back.

  (I had met Diana Vreeland, the grand dame of all things fashion, on just one occasion, while I was at a New York party, and I was wearing a one-of-a-kind red evening gown. Diana took one look at me and proclaimed as loudly as she could, “Darling, you should always wear red!” A legend in the fashion world and a huge personal hero of mine, Vreeland began her publishing career in 1936 as a columnist for Harper’s Bazaar. My favorite story about Vreeland is that in 1955 she moved into an apartment that was decorated exclusively in red.)

  At the shoot, Frances added a scarf to accent the neck of the blue sweater, and let me tell you no one could f
ool around with an accessory the way ol’ Frankenstein could. She must have twisted and knotted the scarf thirty times and switched the brooch from side to side about twenty times. Patience is a must when you’re a model, and Frances just about wore mine out that day with all her fiddling and fussing.

  Frances and Francesco chatted back and forth, as though I weren’t there, about how much they loved that vibrant burst of color on me. I was rarely photographed in colors so bold and wondered why someone hadn’t thought of it before. The day was turning out to be something very special.

  Also on hand to beautify me every step of the way were Way Bandy and Suga, who made up what I like to call the “crème de la crème” of stylists back in the day. Way was a Picasso of makeup, spending hours just applying my foundation with a Q-tip for a finish so seamless and natural even I couldn’t tell where the makeup began and where it ended. Then there was Suga, a Japanese hairstylist who was right up there next to James as the best one in this country.

  How I adored those two men with all my heart. They were such perfectionists in their craft. I would watch in awe as they performed their beauty magic: curling, stippling, and brushing. Just being in their presence and picking up tidbits from their chatter made me feel as though I could teach a master class at Parsons School of Design. (Sadly, AIDS would claim the lives of both of those beautiful men just a few years later. It broke my heart.)

  What I remember so vividly about that day was that from the moment I opened my eyes, it had had a magical feel. I wouldn’t understand how magical and life-altering it was until a few months later, when Wilhelmina dialed my apartment early one morning.

  “Beverly, you’re on the cover!”

  “Of what?” I replied without thinking.