by Wendy Leigh
After spending the first three years of her life living with her grandmother, she returned home only to find that her mother was jealous of her grandmother, who quickly moved away. From that time on, Iman’s relationship with her mother was fraught. “I have had an adversarial relationship with my mother,” she has said, admitting, “She is powerful and I am, too, and we have locked horns like bulls all my life.”
However, in contrast, she adored her father, who became a diplomat, and who loved to read to her, just as David always has. “He reads to me all the time,” Iman has said of David, “When he reads, he plays all the characters and uses different voices for each one. When he reads to me, it’s like being a little girl again.”
In 1969, when Iman was fourteen and living in Saudi Arabia with her parents, the president of Somalia was assassinated, and Iman and her family fled on foot to Kenya.
Her parents sent her to boarding school, which she hated, and she swore to herself that if she ever had children, she would never subject them to a similar fate. She had been brought up as a Muslim and, when she was very young, had been taken to Mecca. When she grew older, although she no longer prayed, she fasted at Ramadan.
After serving in the Somalian military for two years, she studied political science at the University of Nairobi, spoke five languages, and in between classes waitressed and worked as a translator. When distinguished writer-photographer Peter Beard approached her in the streets of Nairobi in 1975 and asked her if she had ever been photographed, she was outraged.
“I thought, Oh God, here goes another white man who thinks we’ve never seen a camera,” she said. On the other hand, as Beard remembered, “Iman was dead anxious to get out of Africa.”
No matter how much she wanted to leave Africa, though, she still drove a hard bargain and would only allow Beard to photograph her if he paid $8,000 for her college tuition—which he did. In Manhattan, he took her to Wilhelmina, one of the top modeling agencies of the day, famous for representing Lauren Hutton and Anjelica Huston, and then called a press conference to introduce her to the fashion establishment. With an eye to media coverage and building Iman’s mythology, Beard claimed that he had met her in the bush, giving enough detail for Newsweek to take the ball, run with it, and elaborate by describing her as “a Somali tribeswoman,” and for other publications to go further and describe her as a “nomad.”
Eugenia Sheppard, distinguished fashion columnist for the New York Post, heralded Iman’s arrival in America, writing on July 22, 1975, “New York will soon be bowled over by the arrival of a fashion model from Nairobi who will appear wearing an elephant-fetish jacket and a dozen or so gold band necklaces. She is five foot ten and a half, one foot of which, from her photographs, seems to be a miraculous neck.”
Headlines described her as a “Cattle Girl,” and the subtext was that here was a noble savage and that hers was a latter-day Cinderella story. “It was all a fabrication,” Iman admitted afterward. “But I am definitely not the victim of it: I was an accomplice. I knew exactly what was going on.”
All in all, just like David at the start of his career, at the start of hers, Iman was unafraid to spin a good story in order to use the media to promote her. And in Peter Beard she had found a masterly accomplice. “Okay, so we did set up the legend, but it got completely out of hand. The press ended up calling her a goat herder, which was a complete insult. We said she was herding cattle: there’s a big difference,” he said.
In Manhattan, she was immediately photographed by Arthur Elgort for Vogue, but as she had never seen the magazine in her life, she was completely unaware as to the significance of the shoot. Moreover, she had never worn makeup or even a pair of high heels before. “Suddenly I was wearing both and standing alone in front of a camera and a barrage of people,” she remembered. “I was like a deer caught in the lights of a car. Afterwards, when I looked at the pictures it didn’t look like me. I saw no trace of the Iman I was.”
“She wasn’t very good in her first show,” Betty Ann Grund, then fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, remembered. “But she learned very quickly. She had an elegance and was like a gazelle.”
When Iman’s parents discovered that she was in Manhattan and that she was modeling, they were far from delighted. In particular, her father, who had dreamed of her becoming a politician, was deeply disappointed. And from then on, both parents “spent years asking me when I was going to get a proper job,” Iman said.
At first, though, she had great difficulty in adjusting to America. As she told photographer Scavullo, she had been offered American food but was scared to eat it owing to the artificial flavoring, and consequently quickly dropped seven pounds. And however much she tried to enjoy New York, she found the city and the business so hardscrabble that she sometimes felt as if her neck would break from all the tension. She was still accustomed to a more peaceful life in Africa, and the noise of the city invariably woke her at around five every morning.
From the first, she had hated modeling. “I’ve been trying to quit since the day I started,” she said. “In the beginning, I thought that modeling was only a job for people who didn’t have any other way to go. I had a lot to me, you know. In my schooling, in my mentality, I think I had quite a lot. But the job proved to me otherwise.”
But despite her disdain for modeling, or perhaps because of it, she was showered with praise for her performance on the catwalk. Karl Lagerfeld called her “one of the greatest models in the world.” Saint Laurent dubbed her “flawless,” and Scavullo termed her “a great beauty.” Bill Blass said, “I used her from the start. The truth is, she’s a great actress. She’s always still Iman, but her ability to transfer her attitude from one house to another is incredible. She used her body like an instrument, and I’m not talking about her sensuality.” By wordlessly conveying emotion, or lack of it, Iman was, in her own way, somewhat of a talented mime, just like David.
Summing up the secret of her appeal, she said, in a quote that could have come straight from David, “You have to give people fantasies. You have to create illusions all the time.”
In the midst of all the adulation of Iman, the projection of her as a black Cinderella who had become queen of the catwalk, a Somalian named Hassan Gedi, who was then working at the Kenya Hilton, came forward claiming that he had married her, that she was his wife and had lived with him in Kenya for the past two and a half years, and that he still loved her. With no alternative other than to admit the truth, Iman said, “I was married—not an arranged marriage—it was my choice. My parents were totally against it and within months I found that I had made a huge mistake.”
Like David, it transpired that Iman possessed the facility never to be truly tarnished by scandal, to emerge with her aura of innocence and her image intact, and the sudden revelation that she was married did not damage her reputation one iota. By now, she was a superstar in the world of modeling and, unlike most models, even did her own makeup and styling.
Betty Ann Grund remembered, “She is wonderful, warm, and very intelligent. She was quite different looking from other black models.” Bill Blass would sum up the essence of her modeling success: “She’s the High Priestess—we call her that [Iman means “priest” in Arabic]. Of course she’s dramatic, but behind the slightly grand attitude she’s very professional. Never lets you down. And whatever happens, if there’s a problem, she’ll handle it: make them laugh, keep them in awe, whatever is needed to cover a disaster. But beyond the fact that she’s famous, Iman is the perfect model, she gives expression to the clothes.”
In 1978, she met basketball great Spencer Haywood, who played for the Knicks, then for the Lakers, on a blind lunch date in Manhattan. Afterward, she and two of her friends went back to Spencer’s apartment, where Iman was impressed by his African art collection and his knowledge of African culture and history. For his part, Spencer said, “I was completely fascinated to be talking to this incredibly lovely and innocent woman who was from the very part of the world that so int
rigued me, the homeland I wanted to know everything about. I wanted to listen to Iman and look at her forever.”
After that, their romance skyrocketed, as hand in hand they took strolls in Central Park together and went jogging. She happily watched him play basketball at Madison Square Garden. And when, five months after their relationship began, Iman got pregnant, naturally Spencer immediately married her, partly because of the baby, and partly because she didn’t have a green card—a strange coincidence, given that David had married Angie so that she would get British residency. And then there is the fact that Spencer’s last name is Haywood—the same as David’s father’s unusual middle name and the middle name that David also gave his son.
On July 5, 1978, Iman gave birth to Zulekha, her daughter with Spencer. Soon after, the famously difficult and demanding producer Otto Preminger discovered her and cast her in The Human Factor. Afterward she reported, “If filming hadn’t ended when it did one of us would have killed the other. We had terrible differences.” In contrast, Preminger’s production manager, Val Robins, insisted that the director “was very gentle with Iman . . . he worked with her and tried to get it out of her.”
In her private life, conflict erupted between Iman and Spencer when it became clear that he was against her posing nude for Vogue and for Playboy, and escalated yet further when she had breast enlargement surgery in advance of her nude centerfold being shot. When Spencer was traded to the Lakers, he, Iman, and Zulekha moved to Los Angeles. He was still in love with her, but their marriage went into decline when he began taking drugs and then was arrested for beating Iman, a charge he still denies.
Finally, as he wrote in his memoirs during a ball in Paris, “Iman hooked up with Grace Jones. Some of the Frenchmen kissed Iman’s hand, as is their custom, but they went well beyond the hand. They put their tongues in Iman’s mouth and were grinding her. With me standing right there. The whole scene was too weird for me,” he said. “I was horrified. But Iman told me I was being ignorant. ‘These people are all gay and they are all my friends,’ she said. ‘This is how it is in Paris.’ What happened to that conservative African girl I met in New York all those years ago?” Spencer Haywood asked himself.
“ ‘It’s not a big deal,’ she told me. But it was a big deal. They were mocking me and her. Iman didn’t understand that. Then Iman and Grace Jones were dancing together, another strange scene, grinding each other with everyone else standing around watching them like they were the floor show,” he said.
However, Spencer was far from squeaky-clean himself. Almost as an aside, in the book, he lets slip that he fathered a child by another woman while still married to Iman. Ultimately, they divorced and a bitter custody battle between them ensued, at the end of which Iman won legal custody of Zulekha.
In 1983, Iman suffered a near-fatal accident when the taxi in which she was a passenger was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver who had run a light. She was instantly thrown forward. Her face went through the glass, and she broke her cheekbones, collarbone, and three ribs, and dislocated her shoulder. Her arm was in a sling. She fractured a bone in her ear, and afterward had five hours of reconstructive facial surgery but remembered nothing of the accident because, immediately afterward, she fainted.
But no matter how much pain she had suffered, and how deep her injuries, Iman soldiered on. She was now the first black model to front big advertising contracts, and to command fees of $30,000 a day or more. But although she was now at the peak of her modeling career, she still held fast to her ethics and refused to take jobs specifically for black models.
By now, she was living in a duplex with a boyfriend, stockbroker William Regan, and in 1989 she retired at the very top of the modeling profession. Along the way, she also helped other models to achieve their potential.
“She’s really like a mother figure to me, and she’s taught me so much. She taught me how to walk and how to take my jacket off in a show. She’s helpful to everybody. Not just black models, white models, too,” supermodel Naomi Campbell said.
As an actress, while she was breathtakingly beautiful, by the beginning of the 1990s, she had not met with great success on-screen. By then, though, she had found happiness in quite another arena: She had met David Bowie.
Iman has said, “What I love about David is that he’s a true gentleman, very old fashioned and English. He never lets me walk on the outside of the pavement, opens doors for me, and because we met on the fourteenth, he sends me flowers on the fourteenth of every month. He’s a scholar too—he reads a lot, writes, does sculpture and paints, so I’ve learned so much from him.”
Unlike David, she always had the example of her parents’ happy marriage to inspire her. “They’re still in love and always have been; they hold hands all the time. If it weren’t for them I’d have given up the whole idea of romance and love. Their marriage is unique,” she said.
Nowadays she says, “This is the happiest time of my life, because this is the first time that I am happy with my life exactly as it is. I’m totally at ease with him—totally myself. I don’t have the feeling that if I reveal something about myself, that something is going to happen to the relationship. I know that whatever he knows of me, he will always be with me.”
In return, David has said of her, “She is an excellent person and a wonderful mother and she has such a wonderful, well grounded sense of independence about the way things are, about her career, and what she wants to do. She has changed my life. I give far more over to her than before. So it takes a wedge out of what I would be throwing into my work. But it doesn’t seem to have caused me many problems.”
David couldn’t bear to be parted from Iman for long, and, during the early years of their marriage, decided not to tour because, as he put it, “I think getting married and then running away for ten months would be an absolute disaster.”
Putting his rampant sexual past behind him, he revealed, “I have no temptations whatsoever. I have so been there and done that. I cannot tell you what I’ve done. You cannot show me anything new. None of it holds water for me anymore. There are no temptations—coffee, maybe.”
Both of them had left their pasts behind, and, as Iman said, they had “both lived a bit on the wild side, and we’re both, deep down, homebodies.”
He has said of Iman, “My wife has a strong sense of who she is. And that’s what I need in my life—someone who doesn’t have a fractured personality, very down to earth, not flippant. I no longer need attention. I wanted the adoration of the masses, the audience, because I was incapable of one-to-one communication. I used to feel nothing without my work.
“Now I no longer feel guilty if I’m not working. My idea of an experience is a yacht cruise with Iman. I want to be with her. She is my soul mate. I can’t believe that a relationship like this has been so smooth sailing. There really have been no difficulties. We don’t try to put up hurdles for each other.”
Traveling the world became their biggest joint pleasure. They spent their six-week honeymoon in Bali. And closer to David’s roots in the UK, together they explored Cornwall, and, in particular, the putative haunts of the mythical King Arthur and Camelot, his court. And, according to journalist, Billy Sloane, the night before David played Glasgow on his Earthling tour, he and Iman went for a walk around the west end of the city, studying all the architecture, “and then they went to the Botanic Gardens and bought an ice cream and just walked, with no security, no nothing.”
Since his marriage to Iman, David had become far more open and gregarious than he had ever been before, and in February 1992, despite the attendant publicity, he and Iman went to Elizabeth Taylor’s sixtieth birthday party at Disneyland. A few years later, they befriended Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, and when they were killed in Paris, Iman and David went into shock. “It’s such a loss,” Iman said. “The last time I saw her it was July on her birthday at the Tate Centenary. We laughed and joked. It still hasn’t sunk in.”
On a more positive note, in 1997, after Iman
and David met British prime minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, when they attended one of David’s concerts, Tony Blair enthused that Iman was “stunningly beautiful,” and she reciprocated with, “It was very sweet of him. I think he’s a very good looking man, too!”
Of David, she said, “There is that comfort of thinking that you have known this person all your life, but still the freshness. My heart flutters whenever he walks into the room.” One Christmas she made him slippers, getting up every morning at five to work on them and to embroider his initials on them before he got up at 6 A.M.
Before she and David married, Iman asked her family what they thought of him, whereupon her father announced that he would have preferred her to marry a Somali or a Muslim, or, at the very least, someone black. And her aunts and uncles even insisted that he convert to Islam. “Can you imagine David Bowie converting to Islam?” she said. But her parents were quickly captivated by David. “They love him, and what they love is that I love him,” Iman said.
The union of David and Iman had caught the imagination of the world, and together they made a dream couple. But, not content to rest on their romantic laurels, they both continued to pursue their separate career destinies. Always a businesswoman, just as David was always essentially a businessman, Iman said proudly, “I was always careful to save, to spend wisely, to build my business sensibly.”
Rather than focus on acting, in 1994, Iman launched her own cosmetic company and proved to be a consummate businesswoman. “From day one I wanted to create makeup for all women of color, not just black women. Grouped separately we are a minority, but if all women of color pull together we are a majority,” she said.
Offering specific shades of foundation formulated for African-American, Asian, Latina, and other women of varying ethnicities, Iman’s company was such a runaway success that in 2010 it was a $25 million business. Moreover, in 2007, Home Shopping Network invited Iman to create her own clothing line, which she later expanded with accessories, all with great success, winning her fans and customers among women of all ages.