Recipients of a genetic lottery―the “It Girls” of the runways―define the fashion industry. In the 1960s, Twiggy’s skeletal frame launched the woman-waif; in the 1970s, gap-toothed Lauren Hutton illustrated imperfect perfection; in the 1990s, Gisele Bündchen’s athletic build ended the era of heroin chic. But predating these ladies of the catwalk was one who defied the litmus test of beauty and proved it need not come with an expiration date.
The title of Anita Loo’s book, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, can serve as a metaphor for the history of the Western world. British missionaries camouflaged imperialism under the guise of “the white man’s burden”; Nazi ideology apotheosized the Aryan ideal; Barbie glorified the blonde bombshell. Given this entrenched mindset, it is not surprising that the goddesses of the silver screen sported golden locks: Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe. Because of this cookie-cutter yardstick of aesthetics, those with darker pigment often harbored self-doubt, as was the case with a girl from the Far East who considered herself the proverbial ugly duckling.
Noelie (so called because of her arrival on Christmas Day, 1929) Dasouza Machado was born in Shanghai, the daughter of a Chinese mother (who passed away when she was three) and Frederico, a Portuguese father, a gold trader. She grew up in the city’s tony enclave and spoke French in school, Portuguese at home, and Chinese with the servants. The Machados were pillars of their community, and the money fueling their wealth came courtesy of a boat-captain grandfather who shipped cotton and―considering their vast wealth―opium as well. Growing up with two brothers and a stepbrother, she never considered herself attractive. White, Western women―Irene Dunne, Vivien Leigh, Rita Hayworth, and Noelie’s idol, Ava Gardner―beckoned from posters in Shanghai. She later recalled, “We (nonwhites) had no images. We had nothing that told us we were nice-looking, nothing. So, I didn’t think of myself as good-looking at all.” At age six, Noelie barely survived a combination of typhoid and meningitis, and endured a stay in quarantine, where she lay in a state of delirium. When Japanese bombs fell on her hospital, amidst the ensuing chaos, rescue crews mistook her for a corpse. Her father found her on a lorry, surrounded by the dead. The Japanese confiscated Frederico’s business, as well as his palatial home, forcing him to move into a cramped apartment with his family and various relatives. When Noelie was sixteen, the Machados fled the newly Mao-controlled country; Frederico felt his mixed-heritage children would not mesh well with the new regime. As he put it, “We are neither fish nor fowl.” They sailed to Buenos Aires where, because of her slanted eyes, the neighborhood children teased her with the name Chinita (little China girl.) Chinita was also what Buenos Aires’s Lotharios called her as the teen made her way to the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. After graduation, she became a Pan American air hostess and lived with her brother in Lima, Peru.
“I’m coming to get you.” These five words uttered over the telephone redirected the course of Noelie’s life. The magnetic voice belonged to Luis Miguel Dominguin, the most famous bull-fighter in the world. Noelie reminisced, “I was swept away. Of course, he swept away ten million women, also.” Luis was a fabled matador and Picasso pal, the kind of man other men wanted to be, and their wives wanted to be with. Their relationship exposed her to the world of the bullfight, one worthy of a Hemingway novel. Indeed, Hemingway chronicled Dominguin’s fierce rivalry with his brother-in-law in a Life magazine series, later published as The Dangerous Summer. Luis was immediately smitten by the teenager with the Oriental look, and three days later, they were living together. Their unwedded bliss scandalized Noelie’s proper Roman Catholic family, including her oppressive stepmother, and it took fifteen years for her father to again speak to his only daughter. The fallout from their affair―Machado later said it was as if she had run away with Mick Jagger―forced them to escape the eye of the storm. The couple fled South America and embarked on city-hopping of the world’s most glittering capitals. Luis’ star status brought them into the orbit of celebrity parties where they fraternized with Errol Flynn (“a punk”), Pablo Picasso (“charming, flirtatious, old”), Charles Revson, owner of Revlon (“charming”), and Francois Truffaut. Their two-year tryst ended at a soiree in Madrid when Dominguin waved his “red flag” at Ava Gardner, then the wife of Frank Sinatra. Machado recalled, “Can you imagine the most beautiful woman in the world coming in and going after your guy? I had no chance.” Devastated at the breakup and estranged from her parents, Machado made her way to Paris, never dreaming it would lead to her road less travelled.
The exquisite, exotic DNA that had forced the Machados to escape China proved a siren call to the head honchos of the top fashion houses, who were intrigued with Noelie’s sky-high cheekbones, frame made for designer clothes, and luxuriant black hair. She was soon the highest paid freelance runway model in Europe, and became for future generations the non-white beauty icon she had never had for herself. Noelie sashayed down the runways, a Madame Butterfly in Balenciaga. Along the way, she decided her very Catholic name did little to enhance her unusual looks and her burgeoning career on the haute circuit. In a nod to her country of birth and the racial slur of her youth, she adopted the moniker China (pronounced Cheena.) Paris led not only to fame but also to Martin La Salle, the son of a diplomat and political science student at the Sorbonne. She recalled, “He was extraordinarily handsome, a mixture of Henry Fonda and Montgomery Clift―simply gorgeous.” Despite his looks, for a year during their courtship, she left him for the Oscar-winning actor William Holden. La Salle and China married soon after their reconciliation, and the couple had two daughters, Blanche and Emmanuelle. Divorce arrived in 1965 when China had an affair with her husband’s friend, a New York-based writer for Paris Match.
The furor over the model who broke the mold reached Oleg Cassini, who brought her to New York for his 1958 show. When Cassini contacted a group of Southern buyers to inquire why they had not placed any orders for the dresses Ms. Machado had worn, their succinct response was, “Oh, she’s black.” Nevertheless, her American debut led to the door of the grande dame of fashion, Diana Vreeland, who championed Machado’s unusual aesthetic. The night they met, Vreeland threw Machado into a show at the Waldorf Astoria, which Noelie opened atop a twenty-foot ladder in bat-winged Balenciaga hot pink pajamas. Harper’s Bazaar’s crown prince photographer, Richard Avedon, watched with admiration as she descended, and booked her on the spot. He pronounced China his muse, referring to her as “Golden Bones,” and dubbed her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Avedon photographed her in various locales, such as on an ice floe in Canada, wrapped in snow leopard, shots that garnered global attention. The erotic and ethnic-faced model presented an image that Hearst’s white-bread readers could not put their manicured fingers on, much less identify with. A furor arose when Avedon wanted his pictures of Ms. Machado in the pages of the February issue; however, the publisher refused: “Listen, we can’t publish these pictures. The girl is not white.” As his contract with Harper’s Bazaar was up for renewal, he threatened to leave if his work with China was not included. Such was Avedon’s clout that the editors concurred. Machado, in addition to serving as the magazine’s first nude, was the first non-Caucasian woman to grace the cover of an American magazine. Through becoming the Jackie Robinson of fashion, China set the stage for a representation of beauty considerably more inclusive than the blonde-haired, blue-eyed standard of the 1960s, and paved the way for Beverly Johnson, Iman, and Naomi Campbell.
In 1962, China segued from her role in front of the camera to one behind it when she became the fashion director of Harper’s Bazaar, thus opening up another professional pathway, this time for women. Some of her famed subjects, Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, aided in her endeavor by lifelong friend Avedon. A decade later, she branched out to produce fashion shows for television, design costumes for films, and launch a namesake line of wraps. She also helped introduce Lear’s, a magazine aimed at “the woman who wasn’t born yesterday”―heady accomplishments for a single mother. In her free time, she spent evenings partying with Andy Warhol at Studio 54 and hung out with celebrities such as Jack Nicholson.
Even in China’s eighties, maturity never looked so good. She did not kick off her designer heels and rest after a storied life―one that took her from China to Latin America to Europe to the States―and retire in her golden years. And golden they were. Firm in her refusal to live off the fruits of a man, Machado made a comfortable living from her varied enterprises and savvy real estate investments that allowed her to purchase a white waterfront property on the spectacular Long Island Sound, in the exclusive enclave of the Hamptons. She shared her multi-million-dollar home with her second husband, Ricardo Rosa, and their dog Cha Cha, a French bulldog with a penchant for chewing on telephone cords. But the chic eccentric Asian-themed ’50s house was no Sunset Boulevard. Machado, forever in constant motion, painted the living room murals shortly after the death of Avedon as a way of mitigating her grief. Until her eighth decade, China was the hostess of an annual June party to celebrate the blooming of her roses. An accomplished chef, she cooked everything for her 110 guests using Macao recipes, compliments of her father, a mixture of the cuisines of China, Portugal, and India. Never one to rest on her laurels, in addition to an autobiography, I Was Always Running After the Laughter, China worked on a cookbook about the cuisine of her childhood, and globe-trotted to exotic locales such as India.
Machado returned to her old stomping ground despite her protestations of, “I’m a senior citizen, for God’s sake!” when she signed a modeling contract at the age of eighty. Thus, the woman who broke the color barrier shattered the age one as well. She appeared in a twenty-page spread in W magazine, and it brought in such an avalanche of offers that she described it as “complete madness.” At age eighty-two, she was featured in advertising for the New York store, Barney’s, and landed a spot in Cole Haan’s “Born in 1928” campaign, to celebrate the brand’s and her own eighty-fifth birthday, alongside other octogenarians such as Maya Angelou. Ivan Bart, the president of IMG Models, said, “China was instrumental in teaching younger models with her advice, “Own yourself, own your own beauty.’” Her life showed them how.
In 2011, a reporter went to the Machado home for a lunch date, and China provided the directions: “Drive straight to the end of the road. We’re on the beach. You can come right in. I am an ordinary person.” However, after the interview―where his subject was decked out in head-to-toe faded denim Levis―was proof positive that ordinary was the last word to describe an extraordinary woman.