“After a year in Paris I met Eileen Ford. She saw me at Dorian’s in Paris when she came for the collections. She said, ‘Oh, you would be great for the States because you are tall and blond, and that’s what we like. You should come over to New York.’
“But then, when I got here, Eileen was really completely rotten. She said she had never seen me. She didn’t know me! In Paris she’d said it was good I was a blonde. Here, she said, I should be dark, and she sent me to the most expensive hairdresser. All the money I brought over with me was gone—into hair! Then she said, ‘Never take a taxi because you will make no money here, so just walk and you’ll lose weight because you’re too fat.’ I was never fat. She sent me to a lawyer to do my working visa. After I went there three times, he said, ‘Listen, it’s too sad to see you always coming here. I must tell you that Eileen said, “Don’t make a visa for her.”’ But she didn’t want him to tell me! She was such a bitch. Every Friday she said to the booking girls, ‘Throw her out.’ And they always said, ‘Oh, come on, let her have a nice weekend at least.’ It went on like that for a while.
“Finally I went back to Europe in 1964 and made a little more training in Italy. And there, I said to myself, You have to think of something, because I now knew exactly how it should not be done. You shouldn’t just go to a photographer and show your book. Hundreds of girls do that. You have to do something so they will not forget you, so they will say, ‘That girl was really something different.’ I had no doubts about myself. I knew I had something which was interesting and I wanted to work with that. So I said, ‘OK, now we have to find a way to make sure that others see it too.’
“So I thought, I’m also going to be a whole new person. And I’m going to have fun. I’m just going to invent a new person; I’m going to be Veruschka. Veruschka was a nickname I had when I was a child. It means ‘little Vera.’ And as I was always too tall, I thought it would be nice to say that I’m little Vera. And it was also nice to have a Russian name because I came from the East.
“I decided this person has to be all in black. At that time everybody wasn’t wearing black. So I bought myself a cheap copy of a Givenchy coat—very narrow and just a little bit flared on the bottom, quite short, just covering the knee—a black velvet hat, and very soft black suede boots, which at that time people didn’t have. You could really walk like an animal in them. I thought I had to have this very beautiful walk. When I come in, it should be really very animallike.
“So when I came back, I went right away to see Barbara Stone. I said to her, ‘You must tell all the photographers about this girl coming from the East, somewhere near Russia. Never be too clear from where exactly. She wants to travel to the States, and she wants to meet you because she likes your photographs. She’s very interested in photography. She’s really quite extraordinary. You should see her.’ So of course they always said yes, because they were interested in another kind of girl.
“I would arrive and say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ And they would say, ‘Can we see some pictures?’ And I said, ‘Pictures? I don’t take my pictures around with me. For what? I know how I look. I want to know what you do.’ And then of course they got interested. I remember Penn saying, ‘Would you mind going over to Vogue?’ He made the call.
“My first trip to Vogue was very funny. I had seen Vreeland at Bazaar already, and she had made remarks. ‘Oh, you have wonderful legs,’ or, ‘Your bone structure is wonderful,’ or something. But then at Vogue she said, ‘Who is that girl? Put her name right on the wall. Veruschka,’ she said, ‘Veruschka, you’re going to hear from me.’
“Vreeland was after me all the time. So I called her and I said, ‘Listen, I would love to do a story about jewelry on the beach.’ And she said, ‘Take everything and go,’ and she would publish the whole thing. I could call up and say, ‘I would love to do this or that,’ and she said, ‘Wonderful!’ or often, ‘Maybe not,’ but anyway you could talk. We were then becoming teams. Like with Giorgio [Sant’Angelo, a stylist who later became a designer]. We were together a lot and did many trips together. Working together and going on trips together, that was the fun we had. We started to work in the studio just on our own, overnight. We invented things, just working with fabrics, and a lot of pictures were done like that. And that was only possible with Vreeland.
“So I was working very well as Veruschka. People liked me. Then I started seeing [photographer Franco] Rubartelli. I met him in Rome. He was married to a beautiful blond Swiss girl. We were a little bit the same type, only she had much more beautiful hair. He’d done his first pictures for American Vogue with her, black and white with a wide angle from down below, and she was doing all kinds of strange movements. And I noticed that and I liked that, and when I met him in Rome, we did some pictures like that, and then we became very friendly. Vogue had wanted to finish his contract; but then they saw the pictures we did, and they renewed his contract.
“Vogue wanted me to work with other photographers then. So I went on the famous trip to Japan with Avedon. It was [Vogue fashion editor] Polly Mellen’s first trip when she started there. But I’d really wanted to work with somebody who wanted to work with me all the time. So I was working a lot with Rubartelli, which Dick didn’t like very much, because Rubartelli was very jealous and always called me up, even in the studio. So that was a problem—this couple thing.
“That was just before Blow-Up. Blow-Up made me very famous. Antonioni had seen me in London, working with [photographer] David Montgomery. I admired Antonioni as a director very much. He came one night when I was doing some pictures, and he stayed, quietly, for a very long time and then said good-bye and left. Then, when I came back from Japan, there was this phone call from Antonioni saying, ‘I would like to have you for my film.’ I was very happy. But everybody else—especially Rubartelli—was very upset. He said, ‘No, don’t do it, don’t do it.’ But I was strong. I said, ‘I’ll do it.’
“When I did Blow-Up, I remember smoking pot. That was a big thing. At that time it wasn’t so normal to smoke. And after the film it became the big thing. Everybody smoked.
“After Blow-Up I was not so strong with Rubartelli anymore. I got a lot of offers, and I refused them because Franco was just so jealous about it. I was very inexperienced. I’d never lived with a man before Rubartelli, and I thought, OK, men are like that. They are just so jealous. I thought it was awful, but I took it for a while. But then I couldn’t anymore, and I said, ‘No, it’s impossible.’
“We were together five years, until the beginning of the seventies. I was already separated with him, but we did, in the time of separation, a film together called Stop Veruschka. I was very upset because I didn’t want my name on the title, because everybody would think it was my story. But he did it anyhow. He put all his own money in, and it was kind of a disaster. The film came out, it wasn’t a success, and he had so much debts that I think he had to leave Rome. He went to Venezuela, and he became a producer there, but I never heard of him anymore.
“The first stone face I did was on the terrace in Rome where I stayed with Franco. I was alone, I was depressed, and I said to myself, ‘What’s to become of me? I’ve become so many things already. I’ve done so many different women.’ I had already painted myself as animals and plants. Now, I thought, I would like to disappear into something and become like a stone. And I saw the beautiful structure of the stone of the terrace. And so I went back, got the colors, and with a mirror imitated all this on my face. And Rubartelli came, and he saw this and he photographed it. Then I did it in a much better way for the film Stop Veruschka. I had a rubber scalp put on and stones around me, and I was lying on the stones and the camera went over stones, over stones, stones and stones—and then one stone opened its eyes and looked at you.
“Then I disappeared, too, in about 1971. My last pictures never came out. Dick Avedon decided to do the whole Paris collection only with me. So we went to Paris with Ara Gallant, who was doing the hair, and Serge Lutens, a very good makeup man. F
or hours he did this powdery makeup, and then Ara did my hair very white in front and very long. We didn’t like the look. We wanted to change it. We would have maybe done something else—worked with wigs or whatever. We were experimenting. But then Alex Liberman and Grace Mirabella [who had just replaced Diana Vreeland as editor of Vogue] looked at the pictures, and they were very unhappy, too. They didn’t like this look. Grace Mirabella liked a certain look, the hair always to the shoulder and very fresh and very bourgeois. And she wanted me to be that. I felt that they wanted to change my personality into something more salable. She said, ‘People have to identify with you.’ I said, ‘No. You have to take another girl for that.’ So they actually did ask another girl. And I never did any modeling again for a long time.
“Of course I was a model, but I didn’t see myself as typical. Maybe I’m a frustrated actress. I did it more like a big theater play. With accessories and clothes, you invent; you become a person who is very sexy or very Garbo or whatever. I never liked to be one thing. It was very natural for me to do it that way. Otherwise I couldn’t have been in that business so long, just putting on clothes, being detached from it, making money, and going home.
“When I traveled with Giorgio [Sant’Angelo], we would even cut up clothes if we didn’t like them. The designers were all happy because the pictures looked great. Now all this changed completely. You always had to see the dress. This whole thing didn’t work at all with my way of working. I had always refused commercial work. They wanted to do Veruschka Vodka, but they would have been very upset later, seeing me painted like walls. For me, no million dollars is worth giving up my freedom of expression. I called Diana Vreeland about that contract. I already had decided to say no, but I wanted her advice. She said, ‘Veruschka, be very, very, very difficult and then say no.’ I loved that.
“I went to Germany from 1971 until about 1976. The outside world was not anymore interested in what I wanted to do as a model, so I was clearly saying, ‘OK, that’s it. Now I do other things.’ It was very natural to go into other things. I started working on body painting with Holger Trülzsch. I had a house, and I stayed there with Holger, and we did the body painting, which made me disappear. I was working against my model career. Then we started doing the dress paintings. It was a parody on modeling. I would paint myself as a man. I did this thing in Playboy [in 1973] where I was painted like vulgar gangster men.
“When Holger and I found the rag warehouse in Italy [where they did a stunning series of photographs in 1988], we didn’t think that it had to do with clothes. We just saw it as a visually interesting place, but it happened to have thousands and thousands of old dresses all piled up, which were related to my life. I don’t want to make it such a psychological thing, but there’s always a link with my background, my history. The warehouse looks very beautiful in our pictures, but if you really look close, thinking of the camps, where they tied up clothes, too, it is actually quite scary. So this is beauty with a monster sitting, hiding behind it. That’s serious.”
$75 AN HOUR
“I longed to grow up to be the best butcher in the world,” Gertrude Behmenburg said about herself in 1943. Instead the four-year-old grew up to be Wilhelmina, America’s greatest model of the 1960s. She might have been happier—and lived longer—had she kept to her original dream.
When she died of cancer in March 1980, Wilhelmina was remembered as a great success—the last star of the couture era in modeling, the top moneymaking face of her time. She’d appeared on 255 magazine covers, including a record 28 covers of American Vogue. And in her second career as co-owner and president of Wilhelmina Models, she’d won one last magazine cover four months before she died; her photo illustrated an article about the rancorous competition that had made modeling, Fortune said, “more lucrative than at any time in its history.”
In her ten years of posing and a baker’s dozen more years as an agency head, Wilhelmina saw her trade change from a polite cottage industry filled with ladylike creatures who looked as if they never went to the bathroom to a $50-million-a-year business seething with enmity and greed and—apparently, at least—running on a current of money, drugs, and promiscuous sex.
Wilhelmina changed, too. She started out a willful beauty, master of herself and her course in life. But she ended up a secret victim, known as the head of the world’s second-largest model agency; a caring mother to models who could always come to her for advice; and a pacesetter who promoted blacks in the face of her industry’s indifference and racism—not as the battered wife of an abusive alcoholic; a mother who couldn’t protect her own children; a picture of superficial perfection whose daughter believes she chose to kill herself with cigarettes instead of facing, and fixing, her horribly imperfect life.
Wilhelmina was born in May 1939 in Culemborg, Holland, the daughter of a German butcher and a Dutch seamstress. Growing up in Oldenburg, Germany, she dreamed of a career as a nurse, a teacher, or an international spy. But on V-E Day she and her four-year-old brother were skipping down the street to get their day’s allotment of food rations when a group of drunken Canadian soldiers passed by, shooting their pistols in wild celebration. One of their bullets killed Wilhelmina’s brother. She determined that day somehow to make up the loss to her grieving mother, Klasina.
“She lived her life for other people,” says her daughter, Melissa. “The only thing she ever did for herself was become a model.”
In 1954 Wilhelm Behmenburg moved his family to a one-and-a-half-room apartment on Chicago’s North Side, where he’d opened another butcher shop. Daughter Gertrude entered high school not knowing a word of English, but she picked it up quickly from television, a part-time job in a five-and-ten-cent store, and the fashion magazines that “became my favorite reading material,” she said. “I even went to secondhand stores to buy all the old issues…. I read them cover to cover, devouring every word and every picture of my new idols, the beautiful models who reached so glamorously from the pages—out to me.”
In 1956 she accompanied a friend to a modeling school for an interview. The friend was too short. Gertrude, on the other hand, was tall enough and had the looks: widely spaced, hypnotic eyes and a full, sensuous mouth. “My head began to spin,” she recalled. Promising to repay him from her five-and-dime earnings, she borrowed the tuition from her father for an intensive modeling course. That May Sabie Models Unlimited presented her with a certificate stating she’d completed its professional modeling course “in creditable manner.”
Now Gertrude Behmenburg no longer existed. Gertrude just wouldn’t do, Behmenburg was too long and awkward to remember, and her middle name, Wilhelmina, was too foreign. In her place stood Winnie Hart, model. In 1957 “Winnie” began her career at beauty pageants. She was named Miss Lincoln-wood Army Reserve Training Center on Armed Forces Day in May. In July she was off to Long Beach, California, to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. She had small modeling jobs, too, and she took an after-school job as a designer-secretary-house model with Scintilla, a local lingerie company, to augment her earnings.
Wilhelmina photographed in Valentino couture
Wilhelmina, photographer unknown, courtesy Melissa Cooper
In 1958, just before she graduated from high school, Winnie joined the Models Bureau, the first agency in Chicago. “I damn near fell off my chair when she walked in,” recalls her booker, Jovanna Papadakis. The chestnut-haired beauty was already fighting the weight problems that plagued her throughout her career. Her Models Bureau composite gives her height as five feet nine inches, her weight as 132 pounds, and her measurements as 37-24-36. “A hundred thirty-two?” Papadakis laughs. “I’ve got news for you: We lied even then.” Winnie weighed 159. Nonetheless, the agent thought she resembled Suzy Parker and immediately called Victor Skrebneski, then, as now, the king of Chicago fashion photography.
Skrebneski, who’d started working for the Marshall Field & Company department store in 1948, had just lost his favorite model and girlfriend Mary van Nuys to the gree
ner pastures of New York (where she later met and married literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar). When Winnie arrived at his coach house studio, Skrebneski took her under his wing. He even taught her how to back-comb her hair. “We spent many hours on that,” he says.
In 1959 Winnie’s picture started appearing in Scintilla’s mail-order catalog, and sales boomed. Impressed, her boss sent her picture to the International Trade Show in Chicago, and she was named its Miss West Berlin. “I had to speak to the girls at the trade fair,” says Shirley Hamilton, then a booker at another Chicago agency, Patricia Stevens. She took Winnie downstairs to a coffee shop and told her to order whatever she wanted. “Enjoy it,” she said. “You’re not going to have anything like it until you lose thirty pounds.”
Hamilton asked her why she called herself Winnie, then declared, “From now on you will be Wilhelmina.” Within six months all her advisers believed she was ready to go to New York. Early in 1960 Hamilton called Eileen Ford and set up an appointment. Skrebneski accompanied her. Ford told her that she couldn’t be a model “with those hips” but that if she lost twenty pounds, she could go to Paris and try to start with Dorian Leigh. So Wilhelmina flew to Europe, “sort of saying to myself, as an excuse in case nothing happened, that I was visiting relatives,” she said. She ended up staying a year and working nearly every day. “I put her on a diet, and she lost a lot of weight, and everyone adored her,” Dorian remembers. “She said, ‘I want Eileen to eat crow.’”
Willie, as friends called her, soon got jobs in London and Germany (where her native language came in handy). She also took her first location trip, to Gardaja, Algeria, where she was to pose in the Sahara in clothes by the couturier Madame Grès. The resulting pictures earned Willie her very first cover, for L’Officiel magazine. In fall 1961 she returned to New York, moved into a small apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, and “took the city by storm,” says Papadakis. Wilhelmina appeared on twenty-nine more covers and was booked weeks, even months, in advance. She paid off the mortgage on her parents’ house, bought them a car, and made plans to send them to Europe.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 22