NEW YORK CITY
1967–1985
I’ve tried to imagine how all alone B. must have felt as a young black model in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s. She’s told me the stories, but I can’t quite grasp them. No black faces on mainstream fashion magazine covers. None inside those magazines, either. Not on the editorial pages, not in the ads. What would possess a seventeen-year-old black woman to come to New York—on her own—and go up against the entire white fashion world with nothing more than good looks and a smile? It takes courage, I’ll tell you that. B. is the bravest person I know.
All too often, in those go-see days, B. would drop off her book—her big black book of modeling photographs—either at an agency or one of the fashion magazines. The receptionist wouldn’t even try to hide her surprise. Back it would come, possibly opened, more likely not, with no word of encouragement from the unseen art directors beyond the reception area. Jerry and Eileen Ford simply didn’t accept black models; other agencies took the same line, just not as blatantly.
B. did have one ally—a life-changing ally at that. Wilhelmina Cooper was a Dutch supermodel who with her husband had started her own agency—one with a unique approach. Wilhelmina had seen how easily models could be exploited, by unscrupulous men and employers alike. She wanted to keep her models safe. Instead of just getting them jobs, she managed their lives like a mother hen. Rene Russo was one of her future stars. So were Patti Hansen, Pam Dawber, and Connie Sellecca. Soon enough, they were not just B.’s fellow models, but her friends.
B. wasn’t just invited in with open arms, though. Wilhelmina called her back three times, intrigued but wary. Finally she told B. to get new pictures done. B. met with a photographer the agency recommended, only to have him propose sleeping with her in return for printing pictures from the shoot. When this happened with another photographer, too, B. went back to Wilhelmina. “What should I do?” B. asked. “Can you help?” Wilhelmina took a drag from her extra-long cigarette with its holder and gave her a look that said, Clever you. B. wasn’t trying to be clever. She was desperate. Wilhelmina was her last chance, and those sleazy photographers were keeping her from it. Wilhelmina must have heard that desperation in B.’s voice, because at Wilhelmina’s direction, the agency set B. up with a hassle-free photographer, hair, and makeup—all at no cost. The moral to that story, B. would say years later in speeches: if you don’t tell someone what you need, they can’t help you.
Most of Wilhelmina’s stable lived, on her orders, at the Webster Hall hotel for women on Thirty-Fourth Street: no men allowed above the first floor. B. took up residence there, too. To her girls, Wilhelmina was more than a role model. She was their surrogate mother. She wanted them to feel they were part of her family; often, they did photo shoots up at Wilhelmina’s big house in Connecticut, and hung out there for hours afterward, drinking and talking.
In her own way, Wilhelmina did what she could to break the race barrier in modeling. One day she escorted B. and another of her models to meet Dino De Laurentiis. The famous director was conducting screen tests for his remake of King Kong. When he saw B., he was stunned. Did Wilhelmina imagine a black girl up there on the spire of the Empire State Building, doing battle with King Kong? I remember asking B., “Why did you go? Why even bother?” “Well,” she said with that radiant smile, “you never know!” The other girl Wilhelmina brought that day did get the part: Jessica Lange.
At Wilhelmina’s urging, B. began to take acting and singing lessons. She worked up a nightclub act, and landed a gig at the old Playboy Club across from the Plaza Hotel. She sang at another place called the Bushes, on the Upper West Side. At one point she was in a reggae band as a backup singer with Debbie Harry, before Debbie became Blondie. Another time she was in a trio with two Freds—one of them future R&B king Freddie Jackson. Sadly, the night that Wilhelmina was to come catch B.’s act with Freddie, she had a stroke. B. kept looking at the door, waiting for her to come in, until they got the news. Ever after that, Wilhelmina’s advice motivated B. “Do everything you want to do,” she told B. more than once. “Don’t let anyone stop you.”
B. was—and is—a terrific singer. But modeling was her forte. She became the first black woman on the cover of Mademoiselle. She did cover after cover of Essence—no one before B. had had five Essence covers; they sold better on the newsstands than any other face. She did covers of Ebony, too. She could do young; she could do sophisticated. The only thing she couldn’t do was white.
Magazine covers made her a star; commercials made her money. B. did more than one hundred television and radio campaigns. She sold Crest toothpaste with Lena Horne; she sold Colgate, too. She was the face of Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits, and Betty Crocker corn bread and corn muffin mix. She pitched Noxzema, USAir, Equal, Burger King, and many others. For all that success, though, B. never felt she had it made. Often as not, casting directors would find her too black. Others would say she didn’t talk black enough. She had to fight for every job.
As she made more of her own money, B. rented an apartment and started decorating it with care. At the end of a modeling session she would ask the photographer if she could keep a prop or two: a fish tank, maybe, or a standing lamp. Usually the answer was yes. Finally, B. felt ready to invite some of the models over for dinner. The first dinner she gave was all ladies—gorgeous ladies—who oohed and aahed at all the hand-me-down objets. They wanted to know which photography shoot each one had come from. All were still struggling to make ends meet, as B. was, and they marveled at how resourceful she was. They saw, too, how naturally all those objets worked together. This girl from rural Pennsylvania had style! And cooked like a dream. None of the others ever entertained. Nearly every model B. knew ate almost nothing and never cooked, not even for themselves.
Why B. felt a need to host and cook dinners, she couldn’t quite say. Her mother’s cooking, and those summer evenings of hungry, happy relatives and friends—that was part of it, for sure. Then, too, B. liked people. I mean she really liked people, virtually everyone she met. She just embraced new people with a pleasure they felt right away. I think, too, that the magazines she was appearing in now made a strong impression on her. There was glamour in entertaining. That was what those magazines conveyed. It was like entering another world. This was the world where B. wanted to live.
Often, after a downtown shoot, B. would come up to the East Side and have dinner alone in an elegant restaurant, just to experience, if only briefly, the dream of an affluent life. More than once, the waiters treated her rudely: they assumed she was a high-class hooker awaiting her john. Since modeling shoots were almost always during the daytime, she eventually got evening work as a restaurant hostess. She wanted to learn the restaurant business, for the inevitable time when she grew too old to model. One of her stops on that trail was a restaurant called America, on Eighteenth Street, a vast, high-ceilinged coliseum of a place, popular for serving huge portions of pasta in big white bowls. There B. worked her way up from evening hostess to manager.
Tragically, Wilhelmina died of lung cancer in 1980, at the age of forty. But B. was a big enough model now to survive that loss. She had changed her name from Barbara to B., and had all the shoots she could handle: the flip side of being a black fashion model was that once you made it, everyone knew you. She also had money, enough to consider opening a restaurant of her own.