by Tyra Banks
Tyra: I step up to the microphone. Visions of Vanessa’s sash and tiara dance in my head. I part my lips. This boundary-busting black beauty queen fills my spirit.
I open my mouth wide.
And . . .
Carolyn: . . . nothing comes out.
Come on, baby. You got this.
Tyra: No, I don’t.
I can’t remember a single word of the speech I have been practicing in my mirror for the last six weeks. My mind is blank.
I am black.
I am proud.
I am riddled with stage fright.
Carolyn: She looks like a bullfrog. Her mouth is open and her tongue is coming out, but there are no words. Just bleh . . . bleh . . . bleh . . .
And the more she does that, the bigger her eyes get. Her shoulders start to hunch. She starts to look side to side.
Tyra: “Vanessss . . . aaaaaa . . . America . . . Missss . . .”
Tears start rolling down my cheeks as it dawns on me that this is really happening.
I can see Mama, who has the speech memorized herself from hearing me practice so damn much, and she’s trying to mouth the words to me.
Carolyn: Oh, Lord. This is really happening.
Tyra: Kenya starts to snicker.
I can’t take it anymore. I feel like Taylor Swift probably felt during the “Imma let you finish, but” moment: I want to be in a closet, under a rock, hiding in a Dumpster. Anywhere but up on the stage. So I run. I am a blur as I tear off that stage. The lunch lady is the first adult I see, and I run right into her arms. She gives me a big hug, and I’m boo-hooing into her shoulder. “It’s all right, baby,” she says, patting me on the back. “It’s all right. There’s always next year.”
There’s always next year?
Something about those words piss me off.
The tears dry up and my blood runs cold. I’ve worked so hard for this! My speech is really good! I’m not about to wait a whole ’nother gosh-darned year to do it!
Next year? Vanessa won this year!
I yank myself from the lunch lady’s embrace, right when Kenya has finished his MLK speech, and head right back out on that stage, running just as fast as I can. I push Kenya out of the way, grab the mic like I’m Kanye about to drop the best verse of all time, and proceed to proclaim my love and adoration for Ms. Williams.
Carolyn: Wait a second.
Yes, she’s back. But what’s coming out of her mouth is not the speech she practiced ad nauseam. What she is saying is ad-libbed, off the cuff, improvised.
Raw.
Real.
It is better than she ever recited it; you can hear a pin drop in the auditorium. The whole crowd is in shock. She ran off that stage like a little lamb and came back out like a lioness. She grabbed that audience by the throat and didn’t let ’em go, and when she’s finished, I stand up screaming. “That’s my baby! That’s my daughter!”
Tyra: A standing ovation.
Wow.
I feel like someone just put a sash on my shoulder and a crown on my head. They’re cheering my name. Mama is dabbing her eyes. Even Kenya is hooting and clapping.
That moment felt like royal magic. My experience at that assembly lodged something in my head. Being onstage? Making a statement? Not following lines? Oh yeah, I kinda liked it. I could get used to this entertaining people biz-ness. I was being celebrated for being authentic and for not giving up. And that felt damn good. But then . . .
A few summers later, something happened. And my body, well, it gave up on me.
In those three months, I grew three inches and lost thirty pounds, and I didn’t look like anybody’s beauty queen. I looked like a newborn giraffe still not sure what to do with its long-ass legs.
I’d grown so fast that my body couldn’t catch up. My hips would pop in and out of their sockets as I walked. It hurt so badly I’d start to limp, trying to contort my limbs and walk in any weird way I could so as not to feel pain with every step. I had naturally dark circles under my eyes, but now they made me look like I had some type of illness, and I had these rabbit teeth that looked so big not even my forehead balanced them out.
Kenya was homies with this boy named Lorenzo, who I had a mad crush on. I was obsessed with him and would start blushing even when I spotted him all the way at the other end of the hall. Not only was Lorenzo as fine as a junior high boy could be, but his intense eyes pierced through my soul, even though we, ummm . . . never made eye contact. In my mind we were meant to be, and I badgered Kenya on the daily about Lorenzo. So finally, Kenya asked him.
“Yo, so what you think of Tyra?”
“Ugh, she’s a skinny, ugly-ass monster.”
Monster?
What?
I was crushed. Beyond heartbroken. I could deal with Lorenzo not wanting to be my boyfriend, but him thinking I was an ugly-ass monster? Get out the dustpan, ’cause that pounded me into powder on the floor.
Forget bein’ onstage, playin’ to the crowd, performing, or anything that involved other people.
The ugly-ass monster just wanted to hide.
The only good thing that came out of this time in my life was that I got all A’s, because when the other kids would spill out after lunch to flirt and hang with their friends, I’d haul my still-hurtin’ hips to the library and pretend that no one could see me if I just sat there with my face in a book.
My only C was in PE. Yeah, I was awkward and uncoordinated, but that subpar grade landed on my record because I didn’t want to get undressed and expose my emaciated-looking body to my classmates (who barely knew my name) in the locker room. When I showed my report card to my dad, he skipped right past all those A’s. His eyes narrowed and he handed it back to me. “What’s up with that C?”
Well hell, there was no way I was gonna tell him that it was because I didn’t want to get naked in front of girls who had started to grow breasts and hips when all I had was knees and elbows, so I just ran straight to my room and boo-hooed into my pillow.
The painful years, when my crush Lorenzo called me a “skinny, ugly-ass monster.”
Yeah, there was a whole lot of boo-hooing in those years.
Carolyn: Yeah, Tyra became skin and bones in one summer.
At first, I didn’t think anything of it and figured her width would soon catch up with her height.
Except it didn’t. I kept waiting, and so did she. While most of her friends were struggling to lose weight, Tyra was struggling to keep it on.
Our friends and family started to notice how skinny she was. “I don’t know, Carolyn. Does she have an eating disorder?” they’d ask. “Is she anorexic?”
Every time we sat down to breakfast, lunch, dinner, she ate everything on her plate (and on her ice cream cone), but I still dragged her to doctor after doctor, trying to find out if there was anything medically or psychologically wrong.
Tyra: I was about the same height I am now but about sixty-five pounds lighter (that’s, like, the size of a five-year-old child subtracted from my frame). Mama was so worried about me being too skinny (no thanks to my teachers, who kept calling her: “Carolyn, something is wrong with your girl.”) that twice a week after school, I’d have to go to some doctor or another to get poked and prodded with needles. I felt like a science experiment, like something you’d see on a late-night TV movie called Giraffe Girl, where I’d stomp through the city and send everyone screaming and running away.
(What’s crazy is that the same building that used to house the clinic where I’d have to go twice a week for tests is now part of an entertainment complex that is home to the America’s Next Top Model headquarters. It took me a few weeks of walking through my office door to stop worrying that someone was going to come chasing after me with a needle.)
My brother and I were archrivals and he bullied the heck outta me at home (I still blame him for my elementary schoo
l mean streak—the whole I-must-be-a-bully-to-get-my-power-back thing), but for some reason, when it came to my weight, he rallied around me. It was like nobody was going to pick on his sister but him!
After school, I’d come home and he’d help me make shakes that we thought would help me gain weight. It wasn’t anything as sophisticated as the protein powders of today, just whatever we could find in the kitchen that we thought might be fattening. Honey, sugar, bananas, peanut butter, cream cheese, Nestlé Quik, and ice cream would all go in the blender. Sometimes it was so sweet it felt like it might melt my teeth, but I’d suck it down like my life depended on it.
The shakes didn’t work, but bless my brother: He tried.
Ma was my other biggest supporter, but she broke my heart one day when Kenya came to the door after school.
“Is Ty home?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Let me see if her skinny butt is here!”
It was a throwaway comment that she probably hadn’t thought twice about, but boy oh boy, it crushed my soul. She was my defender, my number one fan, and now she was making fun of me, too? I ran to my room and slammed the door so hard that they probably heard it in San Diego. That was when she realized just how much I was affected by my skeletal frame.
Carolyn: My previous job as a medical photographer had been at an orthopedic (muscles and bones) hospital, so I finally took Tyra to see one of the top doctors there to get a second opinion. The doctor ran some tests, and turns out, once again, they were negative. One doctor suggested she might have Marfan syndrome (what some people call giant’s disease) because she had long arms and a long neck and had grown so quickly. But no.
“Do you have any photos of you and her father when you were her age?” he asked. I dug through our photo drawer and found pics of myself as a teenager when I was curvy enough that my mother made me wear a girdle and torpedo bra to keep everything from moving all around when I giggled. I then requested some pics from her dad. The doctor looked at the photos and immediately shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter, Carolyn,” he said. “Look at her dad in this photo. This severe thinness is just in her genes. I guarantee you that as soon as she hits puberty, everything else will catch up.”
Giraffe Boy saved the day!
My papa with his siblings. Need I indicate which one he is? His daddy long-legs are screaming the answer!
I was sitting on the sofa one day with my best friend, Jackie, a year or so later, when Tyra came home from school and walked through the living room into the kitchen.
Jackie raised her eyebrows. “What are those peaks on Tyra’s chest?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, Jackie,” I whispered back. “They just appeared overnight.”
Jackie craned her neck around the corner to see Tyra bending over, riffling through the fridge for some barbecue sauce. “Wow! And look at that growing booty!” We fell over ourselves laughing—quietly, of course, so Tyra couldn’t hear us—and a little part of me relaxed inside. Everything the doctor had said would happen was happening. I didn’t have to worry anymore, because Mother Nature had taken over! More important, Tyra didn’t have to worry either.
Tyra: And then, something crazy happened. Something crazy on the first day of school in the ninth grade. By this time, I’d gained maybe ten pounds, so I was starting to fill in a little bit, but I was still brace-face from all the metal in my mouth and had the self-esteem of Sadness from Pixar’s Inside Out.
I’m sitting on a bench, scuffing my shoes on the ground, and this girl appears in front of me. She’s backlit and her crown of flaxen curls is glowing like a halo. Plus, she somehow looks good in her freakin’ school uniform! Mine hangs like a laundry bag around my knees, but hers is short and cute and shows off her strong, long, toned legs.
And I think she’s talking to me, but I can’t understand a darned word that she is saying.
“Arumaah?”
Huh?
I do that movie thing where I check to see if there is anyone standing behind me, but there isn’t; the bench is against a wall. She’s clearly talking to me, and she’s getting impatient that I’m not answering.
“Arumaaahda? Arumaaahda?”
Finally, it dawns on me that she and her laid-back California tongue are asking me, “Are you a model?”
I just snicker. A model? Puh-lease. . . . That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I’m an ugly-ass monster, not a model.
But it seemed like that girl, Miss Angel Locks, had a thing for monsters because she took me under her wing.
She’d turn the hallway into a runway and we’d practice perfecting our walks between the lockers. She took me to her favorite thrift store, where I bought a five-dollar dress that looked like couture—I wore it to the school Christmas dance when most everyone else was rocking Contempo Casuals and Jessica McClintock.
She even convinced me to forgo the hair-sprayed bangs, long-hair trend that everyone else was rocking and wear a pixie wig instead (and now, hardly a season goes by on Top Model when I’m not giving some girl a pixie cut. Oh, the tears!). I wasn’t a professional model—posing for Polaroid cameras at lunchtime didn’t count—but Angel Locks made me feel like I had an itty-bitty tad of potential.
When Angel Locks found out that Mama was a photographer (it didn’t matter that she was a medical photographer who usually shot anatomical dissections and deformities), she didn’t miss a beat and asked my mom to take some pictures of her for her modeling portfolio.
Well, Mama didn’t miss a beat either. . . .
In tenth grade, my friend convinced me to rock a pixie and wear this fly $7 vintage dress to the school Christmas dance.
Carolyn: I’d done some low-end lookbook fashion photography before, and hell, as much as I liked my day job, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life shooting infections and broken bones! Seeping wounds don’t really have a good side, ya know?
So I figured this was win-win: Tyra’s friend could get some photos for her portfolio, and I’d use ’em in mine, too. And Ty could tag along.
This was one of my favorite cameras—it was large format, but I could handle it like a 7mm. It was heavy as hell, but I got some pretty nice biceps from lifting it. I loved that camera and all its heavy accessories, and kept it even after I retired!
Tyra: One day after school, Angel Locks and I head to Ma’s glamorous photo studio—the one in the hospital used to shoot detached limbs—so that she can take pictures of us in our eighth-grade graduation gowns, since they were the most glamorous dresses we owned. Oh, the ceremonial couture attire!
Mom starts with Angel Locks, and she’s snapping away. They’re working it like Mama’s Annie Leibovitz and this shoot is going on the cover of Vanity Fair. “Beautiful! Gorgeous! Perfect! Yes, touch your hair like that, wonderful!”
Finally, Ma notices that I’m just standing there on the sidelines. “Come on, Tyra, let’s get some pictures of you two together. Jump on in.” I’m posing, Mom’s snapping, but “gorgeous” is not what’s coming out of her mouth. “Just relax a little, Ty,” she says. “No, sweetie, relax. Now, put your chin down. Not that much . . . Up a little! Uh . . . not like that.”
Ma is in her photo zone, in command of the set, making sure she’s getting the shot. But I can’t take it anymore. Finally, the misery dam breaks and all that frustration and pain (and jealousy) come flooding out. I run out of that medical studio crying down the hall, graduation dress flapping in my wake.
Carolyn: Yeah, I was in the zone. The wrong zone. I’d put my photographer hat on and tossed my mama one right out the window. Tyra was just standing there feeling like she’d just been awarded the Miss Awkward title and tripped on her way ’cross the stage to pick up her ill-fitting crown, and I didn’t even notice. Every time I shouted praise for her friend, it was like shouting an insult at Tyra. And any constructive feedback
on her posing probably felt like I was setting her up for a Comedy Central Roast. “Tyra Banks? Oh yeah, that fivehead be posing like a giraffe on Rollerblades. . . .”
Tyra: I lock myself in Mama’s office and call my buddy Marisa. “My mom is horrible,” I sob into the phone. “She’s making me feel like crap. She’s talking to Angel Locks like she’s some goddess or something and I’m nothing. Like I’m not good enough. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand her!” (My mom, not Angel Locks, to be clear.)
Carolyn: I could hear her yelling, “I hate her!” to God knows who, followed by screams that sounded like a velociraptor down the hall. Her friend was standing there looking confused and guilty. But I was the guilty one.
“Sorry, sweetie,” I said, putting away my camera. “This shoot is over.”
“I wonder if Häagen-Dazs is still open,” I thought, “because I am going to have to figure out some way to make up for this.”
Tyra: Angel Locks didn’t know what the hell she was blabbering on about that first day of the ninth grade—I was not model material. This had proved it. You know that saying “a face only a mother could love”? Well, what the hell did it say about your face when your own mama couldn’t capture a decent pic of it next to your stunning best friend?
Carolyn: After that, Tyra really didn’t want anybody taking her picture, not even if it was just a snapshot at a birthday party. A camera would come out and she’d just vanish, like she was a vampire and someone was about to open the blackout curtains. Whoosh, she was gone.
Then her braces came off, and she got used to having a few curves. Little by little, the gawk was replaced by grace.
I had started to get a little reputation with my fashion photography (that hospital studio started doubling as a fashion one more and more often), and I was doing shoots to help girls build up their portfolios. Sometimes Tyra would come with me as my assistant. I was makeup artist, hairdresser, photographer, film developer, and printmaker, and Tyra tagged along for the entire process, holding brushes and blow dryers, light meters and reflectors, and chilling with me in our laundry room that I’d transformed into a darkroom, complete with red lights and photo equipment balanced on top of the washer and dryer! When Tyra wasn’t paying attention, the models on the shoots would whisper, “Your daughter needs to be in front of the camera, not holding blush brushes.” You know, I looked at them like they were crazy. I knew Tyra had developed into a graceful, gazelle-like creature, but to me, she looked like a ballerina (must have been subliminal dancer dreams of mine), even though she’d begged me to pull her out of the one YMCA ballet class she took at age five.