was: I don’t want to hear this. I felt as if I was outside the scene, which looked small and distant, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. But I said, “So who does?”
And he answered. “Her name is Ellen. She’s my secretary. She’s quite a bit younger than I am.”
My father was never supposed to leave, no matter what his behavior to my mother, no matter how she might have failed him. They were, after all, the best jitterbuggers in Memphis. For years I asked my mother, “Why did you and Dad stay together if you were incompatible?” and she always answered, “It was a perfect relationship. We were so in love.” I remember reading somewhere that the urge to defend your failures can be so strong that you invent another world to inhabit, a cocoon of denial in your own head and in the public eye. My mother had invested in a kind of fantasy goodness about my father, and it wasn’t until years later, when I’d confided the worst heartache of my life, that she acknowledged her futile convictions about her husband and the societal pressure to stay married. You get to know the bad mask of a person, she would say, and you stay, hoping there is a good person underneath who really loves you and will never leave.
My father always said he left Memphis with nothing but the shirt on his back. In truth, he drove away in a white Ford LTD, with a nice severance package, having failed to usurp control of Shobe, Inc., from Da-Dee. He married Ellen, then divorced her, then remarried her, and along the way they had a daughter, Mary Catherine. They were living in St. Louis and he had stopped paying my mother alimony. I begged her not to have his wages garnisheed, which got him fired because of the corporate policy at the company where he worked. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with his liver, and the doctor said he’d be dead within the year, a censure that seemed to impress him. He stopped drinking, and when he rented a vacation cabin in Ponca, Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks, I went to see him. The opposite of in vino verita s is that liquor can camouflage the true person, and in sobriety my father turned out to be lively, kind, intelligent, unpretentious, fun. But mostly he was alive.
JOHN BRUNO LIKED SKINNY MODELS, BUT HE FED ME A little too well. He belonged to the oldest gourmet society in the world, called La Chaine de Rotisseurs, and wanted to eat in a different restaurant every night. The meals were glorious--silken smoked salmon with fat capers at The Colony, foie gras and duck a l’orange at Quo Vadis--but disastrous for my figure. The paradox of modeling was that I represented the cynosure of female beauty, selling an illusion of perfection, and the tacit promise of an ad or commercial with my likeness was that those products and services would make other women look like me, but in my private life, even I couldn’t look like that me. The moment the Model of the Year contest was over, I started gaining weight, back up to my prestarvation pounds. On weekends I went running around the Central Park reservoir with John, but he couldn’t join me on the days he worked, and I felt unsafe going alone.
Every week I’d pass thinner, younger, prettier girls on go-sees, and John made disparaging comments about my ample hips and thighs, even as he was ordering a Grand Marnier soufflé from one of his gourmand buddies. Twice I stuck my finger down my throat after a meal but fortunately found the experience too repulsive to make it a habit. The average model of my height weighed no more than 108 pounds (110 was considered fat), and I weighed 150. Nothing ever fit. I didn’t fit. On a photo shoot for Vogue, the editor had to cut the dreses up the back and affix the butterflied pieces to my skin with Scotch tape.
Sometimes when we were shooting on the streets of New York, the magazine would rent a big black limousine, the driver would look the other way, and that would be the changing room. I’d jump out, do the
And he answered. “Her name is Ellen. She’s my secretary. She’s quite a bit younger than I am.”
My father was never supposed to leave, no matter what his behavior to my mother, no matter how she might have failed him. They were, after all, the best jitterbuggers in Memphis. For years I asked my mother, “Why did you and Dad stay together if you were incompatible?” and she always answered, “It was a perfect relationship. We were so in love.” I remember reading somewhere that the urge to defend your failures can be so strong that you invent another world to inhabit, a cocoon of denial in your own head and in the public eye. My mother had invested in a kind of fantasy goodness about my father, and it wasn’t until years later, when I’d confided the worst heartache of my life, that she acknowledged her futile convictions about her husband and the societal pressure to stay married. You get to know the bad mask of a person, she would say, and you stay, hoping there is a good person underneath who really loves you and will never leave.
My father always said he left Memphis with nothing but the shirt on his back. In truth, he drove away in a white Ford LTD, with a nice severance package, having failed to usurp control of Shobe, Inc., from Da-Dee. He married Ellen, then divorced her, then remarried her, and along the way they had a daughter, Mary Catherine. They were living in St. Louis and he had stopped paying my mother alimony. I begged her not to have his wages garnisheed, which got him fired because of the corporate policy at the company where he worked. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with his liver, and the doctor said he’d be dead within the year, a censure that seemed to impress him. He stopped drinking, and when he rented a vacation cabin in Ponca, Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks, I went to see him. The opposite of in vino verita s is that liquor can camouflage the true person, and in sobriety my father turned out to be lively, kind, intelligent, unpretentious, fun. But mostly he was alive.
JOHN BRUNO LIKED SKINNY MODELS, BUT HE FED ME A little too well. He belonged to the oldest gourmet society in the world, called La Chaine de Rotisseurs, and wanted to eat in a different restaurant every night. The meals were glorious--silken smoked salmon with fat capers at The Colony, foie gras and duck a l’orange at Quo Vadis--but disastrous for my figure. The paradox of modeling was that I represented the cynosure of female beauty, selling an illusion of perfection, and the tacit promise of an ad or commercial with my likeness was that those products and services would make other women look like me, but in my private life, even I couldn’t look like that me. The moment the Model of the Year contest was over, I started gaining weight, back up to my prestarvation pounds. On weekends I went running around the Central Park reservoir with John, but he couldn’t join me on the days he worked, and I felt unsafe going alone.
Every week I’d pass thinner, younger, prettier girls on go-sees, and John made disparaging comments about my ample hips and thighs, even as he was ordering a Grand Marnier soufflé from one of his gourmand buddies. Twice I stuck my finger down my throat after a meal but fortunately found the experience too repulsive to make it a habit. The average model of my height weighed no more than 108 pounds (110 was considered fat), and I weighed 150. Nothing ever fit. I didn’t fit. On a photo shoot for Vogue, the editor had to cut the dreses up the back and affix the butterflied pieces to my skin with Scotch tape.
Sometimes when we were shooting on the streets of New York, the magazine would rent a big black limousine, the driver would look the other way, and that would be the changing room. I’d jump out, do the
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