Jane Fonda’s current boyfriend, Richard Perry, introduced me to Benny in 1988. At the time I was traveling back and forth from New York to Los Angeles and considering a full-time move to the West Coast (the sunshine and palm trees were calling my name). Richard and I had been hanging out together for weeks, and when he left town for a while, he often asked Benny to keep me company. Before I knew it, Benny and I really began to connect, though Richard was none too pleased about it when he returned.
Benny and I quickly became an item for a number of reasons, but one of the major ones was the way his creative mind worked. I loved to watch him do his thing in the studio, particularly since he’d learned so much under the watchful eye of the master Berry Gordy. Under Gordy, Benny wrote and produced for Motown acts such as Teena Marie, Rick James, Billy Preston, and the Temptations. It couldn’t get any better.
Benny’s positive energy was so addictive and brought out the best in me. I was still trying to climb my way out of the hole I’d found myself in since my divorce and everything else that had happened. He encouraged me to formulate my own ideas for television. I had an early blueprint for America’s Next Top Model and shared it with Benny. I even registered the idea with the Writers Guild, but I let it lapse, so I can’t blame anyone else but myself for losing it. (Benny would later manage Tyra Banks, who had a major hit with the idea.)
Benny got me going in other ways as well. Our personal chemistry was off the charts—we couldn’t keep our hands off each other in private or public, and he was the best kisser I’d ever known, and that is saying a lot.
At Dan Tana’s, our favorite swanky old-school restaurant in Los Angeles, we would just sit in a red booth and kiss while other guests ate dinner. Soon, I was an overnight regular at Benny’s gorgeous home, and together we threw the most talked-about parties. Since this was right in the middle of Fresh Prince being taped, Anansa would fly out to Los Angeles to watch the tapings with her friends and have a ball playing with all the new electronic gadgets Benny would buy for her. He loved giving me the finest in clothes and jewels from all around the world, too—he was quite the man. It wasn’t long before Benny and I were head over heels, spending all our free time with each other, and there was talk of us moving in together and maybe marriage down the line.
One weekend in 1988, I decided to spend a few weeks living with Benny just to get a feel of how it would be. The first night after I moved in, Benny didn’t even come home. He’d never done that before in all the nights we’d spent together. I was livid! For some reason, Benny spending all night out opened my eyes to the harsh reality that the two of us just didn’t mesh on a basic level.
Soon, there began to be too many other unanswered questions about our relationship, and I was becoming more frustrated by all of it. Unfortunately, I’ve always been a sucker for a sad face and a good sob story. Benny begged me not to leave or break it off, so we tried again. I guess I didn’t want to let go of him either—I wanted a love that was solid and didn’t fall apart like too many of my other relationships.
In fact, I wanted a happy ending so much that we traveled as far as the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California, to get married just a few months later. But my good sense kicked in and I backed out the night before because I knew it wouldn’t and couldn’t last. I already had two marriages that had failed, and I didn’t need a third.
In the end, I realized we both loved high drama. That was good for a movie, but not for a marriage. Benny begged me to change my mind again on our ride back to Los Angeles, but I knew I’d had enough heartache over the years to walk away this time before the real pain set in. That said, I needed quite a bit of therapy to aid me in getting over Benny.
I saw Benny again just a few years ago, and he tried to rekindle our romance by using that same charm he’d used the first time we fell in love. He wanted to fly me to a Jennifer Lopez concert in Paris right then and there on his private plane (Benny manages her), and I’ll admit I was very tempted to throw caution to the wind and join him. But a voice in my head kept whispering, Be smarter this time and protect your heart. Too much time had gone by to go back down memory lane with Benny. When some doors close, they should remain that way.
CHAPTER 18
Victory Is Mine!
Finally, the custody battle for my daughter, which had nearly taken all of my strength, was over.
The truth coming out in court about all the lies Danny had told didn’t overturn the custody ruling, but it did allow Anansa to come to live with me full-time when and if she wanted. I was sure my daughter would want to at some point. My name had been cleared, and Danny’s tales about me had been exposed for what they were: hateful lies. It wasn’t everything that I wanted, but it was as good as I was going to get for the moment.
Now I had one last major battle to wage, and it was the epic battle of battles because it was the battle with myself. After years of self-loathing and self-destruction, I needed to get better physically so that I could truly enjoy my life, but to do that I needed to confront and accept that something was wrong inside.
For years, I had been walking around in a semiconscious daze, thinking both my physical and mental health were fine, when in fact they weren’t. I could manage sobriety long enough to put on a good front for the days I saw Anansa while she was living with Danny, but now I needed to be completely healthy for the day that Anansa came to live with me.
With my beloved James sadly gone from my life, God saw fit to send me another guru in the form of Quintin Yearby. Quintin, the young boyfriend of the designer Fernando Sánchez, made it his personal mission to get me back on the runway and into the modeling game.
The business had done a complete 360 since I had left the building. New people, new places, and an array of new faces had come aboard to claim their spot as new muses of famous designers, and to star in the pages of the glossy fashion magazines.
The reigning face was Iman’s, and I was already very familiar with her. In my absence, she had become the proverbial toast of Madison Avenue in both print and runway modeling. Iman had gone through what I heard was a very difficult divorce from Spence Haywood, too, and her marriage had been filled with many of the same things I’d faced with Danny. But she hadn’t allowed it to slow her down. Now I was ready to do the same.
I so wanted back into the modeling game. Fashion and modeling had been my only way of life, and my newfound friend Quintin was determined to see me reclaim my rightful place at the top of the modeling world. He called me constantly, asking me to appear as a runway model in a show for his boyfriend Fernando’s first couture collection. At first I declined his invitations because I wasn’t interested in doing a runway show—it didn’t matter who the designer was. I had more than enough money from my settlement to just sit back and ponder long and very hard the when, the where, and the how of the way I wanted to reemerge on the world modeling stage.
But the more I chatted with Quintin (because he wouldn’t stop calling), the more I found myself softening my attitude, until gradually it shifted to when my return should be, not if. Quintin was now filling the shoes my dear James once wore. There was a time when I thought no one could ever replace my James, but I loved Quintin’s spirit and vibe.
Quintin was no carbon copy of James, though. Quintin had much more spice in his personality, whereas my beloved James was more refined, more dignified. There was only one James—he had class and style like I’d never seen before. Forty years on, I can still say I’ve never met anyone like James Farabee. How I still miss him.
Eventually, Quintin convinced me that my career had been on hold long enough and that his darling boyfriend’s couture showing was just the right venue to begin my return to the forefront of fashion.
Fernando Sánchez had become a designer with a lot of buzz around town. His designs introduced dressmaking techniques to silky slips and caftans so they could easily transcend their functional limitations. He had trained at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in Paris (one of his clas
smates had been Yves Saint Laurent). Laurent went on to introduce the modern concept of “ready” that revolutionized the way women dressed in their everyday lives. Sánchez caused his own revolution by changing the way women dressed in their sleep. (Saint Laurent would later hire Sánchez to design lingerie for his company.)
With my return to the runway in the works, I tried not to become overly obsessed with my appearance for my first big show since my self-imposed exile. It had been about three or four years since I’d done a runway, and I was sure I looked pretty good—I always looked pretty good—but was I model/runway fabulous? I just didn’t know.
One lesson I was forced to learn while living with Johnny was how to become less concerned with my appearance. As a model, you live and die by your own reflection. Our faces and bodies are our bread and butter, so we rarely pass a mirror without pausing to gaze into it. Johnny had once told me that, yes, I was beautiful, and, yes, my beauty had value on Madison Avenue, but in the real world, beauty meant only so much and only lasted so long. He added that men ultimately only wanted one thing from a woman, and in the end would take it from any woman, no matter how beautiful.
In essence, Johnny was saying my beauty really wasn’t so special after all. According to him, my looks only gave me a slight advantage over women working nine to five. After that, my tendency to look in the mirror every time I could pretty much ended. I found myself focusing on more pressing issues, and I had more than enough of those to keep me busy. It felt so good—no, it felt great not to have to be consumed with the superficial 24-7.
Beauty is indeed its own beast, and its own burden, when you have no reprieve from it. But now I had decided to get back into the thick of things, so a few superficial thoughts here and there were to be expected.
Fernando Sánchez’s show was held in late August, just before the more well-known designers debuted their collections for the seasons. Though Fernando wasn’t a top designer, he was definitely one to watch, so all the fashion press flocked to his studio that late summer day to see his first couture collection. My appearance in the show was top secret, which helped my preshow jitters just a bit.
Backstage getting ready, I could feel the steely stares of the other models and hear the whispers, “Where has she been?” No one said anything to me personally, because that would have required too much empathy. That said, one makeup artist did dare to ask how I was holding up as she applied my foundation. I could tell she was really asking about my life generally, and I desperately wanted to answer in the calmest, most straightforward way possible to show everyone how strong I was and would always be. Instead, as I began to speak, tears streamed down my cheeks, and the team of makeup artists immediately had to turn on fans to stop my entire made-up face from sliding off. Needless to say, that was the last makeup artist to ask me a question before a show.
Fernando decided I would open the show in his gorgeous orange, one-shoulder taffeta design. I closed my eyes, said a quick prayer as the curtains parted, and proceeded to walk purposefully down the long catwalk. I could hear a few gasps as I did my strut, which threw me off a bit because I wasn’t sure whether they were the audience’s reaction to seeing me or the clothes. In any other world, a woman standing five-foot-nine and weighing barely a hundred pounds would produce a reaction of pure shock and horror, but in the world of fashion I was the picture of health and the ideal of beauty.
By the time I reached the end of the stage, I was sure the reaction from the crowd was two thumbs up and a gold star. It was confirmed the next day when the press reviews of the show, the clothes, and of me, all sang our praises to the highest heavens. I was on the top of the fashion world again, and it felt so good! With one short walk down the catwalk in Fernando’s show, I had reclaimed my rightful place.
Within days, Calvin, Ralph, and Halston were ringing my phone again like the good old days, personally asking me to be in their fall shows. I could not believe all the love I was receiving after what felt like years of isolation and defeat. It felt damn good to be wanted and needed by all the fashion kings once more, and I said yes to each and every one.
At the Calvin Klein show a few weeks later, the room was all abuzz with talk of which model would close the show. Opening or closing a designer’s show was a major honor, and Iman had been Calvin’s muse for the last few years. Once upon a time, that had been me, but things change.
That year—1988—at Calvin’s request I would be the one closing the show instead of Iman. I was the hot girl once again, so of course Calvin would use me to close the show. It was good for his business, and this was all about business. And I hoped that Iman would understand.
But I thought wrong. The Calvin Klein show that year would mark the first time in years I would be seeing my old friend, and I was so looking forward to saying hello to her and reconnecting after losing touch. This business about closing the show would mean nothing between two black women who walked through the fire a few times over the years. I couldn’t imagine Iman would give two damns about who closed or opened Calvin’s car door, much less a fashion show, after all we’d been through.
Sadly, when Ms. Iman arrived at the venue that day, she walked off the elevator, looked me dead in the face, and turned away as though she hadn’t seen me at all.
I was mortified, but figured that maybe she hadn’t seen me. Later, we were all getting dressed and I saw her again, and damn if she didn’t do the same exact thing.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I said out loud. “Homegirl is tripping.”
I was too angry to be hurt, and too angry to think straight. Before she could walk away the second time, though, I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into a side room.
What happened next I’m not completely proud of, but I did it so I’ll own up to it.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. “How dare you pass me like you don’t see me? Don’t you understand how crazy that makes us both look? Don’t you know people see you doing that to me? I’m not your enemy, and you are not my enemy.”
I obviously scared the hell out of Iman that day because she never passed me again without speaking. We even began hanging out again for a while, but that didn’t last long. She met David Bowie soon after, and the rest is history.
Unfortunately, my once-again booming modeling career couldn’t be the primary focus of my life as it had been once upon a time. I was a mother now, and trying to reenter the world of full-time motherhood was an adjustment. Anansa would need some time to wean herself from the wayward life she had been living with her father, and I wanted her to have that time and space. It would be a slow transition, and she needed to have the freedom to come to live with me whenever she wanted, when she was ready.
Though she had been forced to grow up fast, she was still a young child, and I knew she couldn’t fully appreciate how much of a pawn she had been in the game her father had been playing with me. This was a man who made deals to have his daughter married off to some African prince when she became a teenager. What father would do that to his only daughter in this modern era?
At one point after the custody case ended, Danny took Anansa on an extended trip to South Africa. Who knew if he would ever bring my child back to the United States and to me? According to the custody ruling, he wasn’t even allowed to take her so many miles away from the city of New York, and certainly not out of the country.
It turned out that Danny wanted to move to South Africa to open a massive recording studio and capitalize on the burgeoning music scene there. My guess is he was also running from his issues in the States. As luck would have it, I was invited to South Africa by a number of organizations, particularly the lavish Sun City resort and hotel. The resort paid for me and my new assistant to fly over for a couple of weeks, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect because I wanted my baby girl back home.
I hadn’t traveled to South Africa before because of apartheid. I had been asked to appear in a Dial soap ad in the late seventies for a whopping million d
ollars, but I refused to do anything until Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid had come to an end. I was also asked to pose for the cover of Town and Country magazine in South Africa, but my response was the same.
But now the situation was different for me, too. I had to travel to South Africa and check on my baby girl.
There was racial tension even on the flight to South Africa. The attitude from the crew and other passengers was unbelievable. At one point I was made to use the bathroom at the back of first class when the one in the front was closer. I was one of the few blacks on the flight; even my assistant was white. The stares and glares I received were completely unnerving—I couldn’t believe this was really the late eighties and this kind of idiocy still existed.
My time visiting the South had prepared me for this world. My Mother Dear taught me the best lesson on how to defer to white people when I visited my grandparents’ land in Florida. I was about nine years old and we were standing in line at the grocery store one day when suddenly a white woman cut in front of us. The up-from-the-north Yankee in me immediately said to the lady, “Excuse me, miss, we were in line first.”
My Mother Dear quickly silenced me by saying, “That’s OK,” to the lady. I didn’t understand at first—I was angry, upset, hurt, and embarrassed by what this woman had just done to us.
But what my Mother Dear knew well was that this woman was to be pitied in every way. Anybody who could so easily disrespect the basic rights of another human being had their own demons to face, and confronting her in that moment would do little good.
Stares and shoves and being forced to use a different bathroom were only a preview of the bad behavior I would experience once I landed in South Africa. I was on a black continent, and the disrespect and contempt I encountered was astounding.
The Face That Changed It All Page 21