Soon after my dad died, we moved to D. Nieuwenhuis straat 22. Thank God my Opa and Oma lived within walking distance, so we saw them often. My Opa was a retired lieutenant from the army and he was super strict, and Oma was the most proper woman I’ve ever met. Her home, which was her sanctuary, was spotless at all times. She took great pride in her vases of beautiful fresh flowers and potted azaleas in the windowsills. We didn’t have a lot of money, a big house, or fancy things, but we had what was most important: love, commitment, and togetherness as a family. Every Sunday night, we had dinner and enjoyed debates as we sat around the table. We played Monopoly and card games for real coins that we collected in old jelly jars with our names on them. Opa always said he played competitively so he could use his winnings to pay for that week’s cigarettes and bread. After dinner, the adults drank coffee and Leo and I nibbled on homemade cookies and hot chocolate milk. Then the girls would do the dishes while the boys watched soccer games on our black-and-white TV. At around eight o’clock, my mom would serve cognac to Opa and coffee liqueur to Oma along with cocktail snacks of Dutch cheese, sausage, and crackers with her legendary tuna or chicken-curry salad.
When I started riding ponies at the age of five, at my aunt Lany’s barn, my great love for animals, especially horses, was born. The summer after my father’s death, my mother sent me to a three-week pony camp in North Holland. There, I met my first soul mate and spirit animal: a pony who came off a train from Russia where his front legs had been tightly shackled. His scars were symbols to me that the hardships we experience in life can heal with love and tender care. The pony’s name was Bruno and my nickname was Gigi, so I romantically blended our names to create “Gino.” For those three weeks, Gino and I were inseparable. He became my best friend. I spent all day long riding, grooming, and loving him. I even snuck out of my bunk bed to sleep with him in his stall at night. With just a few days left of camp, my time with Gino was coming to an end. Leaving him behind was unthinkable, so I called my mother from the pay phone and had a huge meltdown.
“Please, please let me bring Gino home,” I begged. I wasn’t sure what she would say because we lived a very modest life, but she made me a promise.
“Let me think about it,” she said. At least she didn’t say no! Something in my gut told me that my mother would make it possible. When she came to pick me up from camp, I waited anxiously for her answer.
“Yes, you can bring Gino home, but he’s one hundred percent your responsibility and you must do everything to care for him,” she said. My heart skipped a beat. I’d never felt that happy. Clearly, my mother realized that Gino was a crucial healing tool to help me overcome the loss of my father. She found a milk farm near our house where boarding was cheap. Every day, no matter if it was raining, snowing, or hailing, I rode my bike to the farm before and after school to clean stalls and feed, ride, and brush Gino. I worked hard in school so that the hours would pass quickly and I could return to him. The owners of the farm, Mr. and Mrs. Van Wijngaarden, treated me just like a daughter. I worked alongside their sons, who taught me to milk cows, deliver baby calves, and harvest the straw and hay that would feed our animals through the cold winter. I had blisters on my hands from the hard, physical labor, but I thrived in my role as a working farm girl. It made me feel complete. Once a week, I rode my horse on the dark country road to take lessons at the Papendrechtse Riding Club. My mom drove behind me in her car, shining its headlights on the road ahead of me so I could see where I was going.
Unlike many girls my age, I was not into boys. The only thing that got my heart racing was horses. I didn’t care about fashionable clothes; I longed for riding gear and the ability to one day buy my own show horse. I knew that I wanted more in life and rode every day with the goal of becoming an Olympic equestrian in dressage and a professional rider. I had been dreaming about a new saddle and bridle so I told my mother this one day when I was twelve years old.
“You’ll need money for that,” she said. So I got my first job, working in my favorite Chinese restaurant in town. There, on Saturdays and Sundays, I washed the endless stacks of dirty dishes and buckets of used silverware. Luckily, I had plenty of training in cleaning thanks to the super-neat homes that my mom and Oma both kept. I made one bucket with just knives, another with forks, and a third with spoons, and organized the dishes by size. After hours and hours of washing, I rode my bike home. I was exhausted and smelled like a fried noodle, but I also had a great sense of accomplishment and independence. My hair and clothes were so greasy that my mom made me get undressed before I even entered our home and sent me straight to the shower. Otherwise, the aroma of fried food would linger throughout the whole house.
I finally saved enough money to purchase that brand-new saddle and felt like I had died and gone to heaven. At this point, I was winning a lot of riding competitions. We were poor, and my horse wasn’t fancy like those I competed against, but I was definitely the most driven girl there. I was also serious about gymnastics and actually got to the junior Olympic tryouts. Around the time I turned thirteen, I started feeling severely fatigued and had trouble falling asleep at night no matter how tired I was. My mother thought that I was just doing too much, but then she realized that this was more than a case of spreading myself too thin. She took me to the doctor, who diagnosed me with a severe case of the Epstein-Barr virus and put me on bed rest for six weeks. I had to take a break from riding and gymnastics, which was devastating to me. A few months later, I had an appendicitis and was hospitalized. Looking back now, I truly believe that this virus was probably the culprit of my health journey.
“You can’t be the best at riding and gymnastics at the same time,” my mother said one day. “Pick one.” Although I was passionate about both sports, I chose the barn over the balance beam. I needed money to help support my love of horses and riding, so at fourteen years old, I got a part-time job selling cheese and sandwich meats at the local grocery store, HEMA. I was quickly promoted to cashier. Although it was hectic to juggle school, riding, barn work, and my job, that monthly check made it all worth it. I was so motivated that nothing was ever too much, and my energy was endless.
“Can you come to Amsterdam with me in a few weeks?” my girlfriend Dorothy, a hairstylist, asked one day when I was sixteen years old. “I need a model for a hair show I’m doing.”
“Uh … I’m not really into the hair and makeup thing,” I said, hesitating.
“Please?”
“Let me think about it.”
“I can’t find anyone else with long enough hair for the braids that I’m doing,” she said when she called me a week later to ask again. “Can you come?” I still wasn’t sure, but I wanted to help a friend, so I agreed to go. The show was a week later on a freezing-cold and snowy winter’s day. When we got there, a woman who worked for the top Dutch designer Frans Molenaar approached me.
“One of our models is sick with the flu and canceled. Can you take her place and walk in Frans’s show?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said, even though I had never worn a stitch of makeup or a pair of high heels. In fact, I hadn’t done anything that feminine or seen anything as fancy as the clothes I wore in the fashion show. I was straight from the barn to the catwalk with no idea what to do, so I just looked at the other models and imitated the way they walked and held themselves. I’m still not sure if I was a natural or just a convincing copycat, but after the show, I was approached by Pieter van der Schaft, owner of Intermodels who was also a scout for Eileen Ford. He asked me to do a test photo shoot a few days later. When those pictures were sent to various clients and advertising agencies, I immediately got offers to shoot at different locations all over Europe.
“Give it a shot and try it for a little while and then we’ll see,” my mother said when we discussed these opportunities, even though she knew nothing about the modeling industry. She promised to take care of my horse while I was gone and I knew she would.
I was signed by Eileen Ford in New York who got
me a working visa to come to America and before I knew it I was immersed in fashion and traveling the world. I was on runways all over Europe and traveled to an array of exotic locations for modeling jobs, making more money than I had ever dreamed of. My income helped me support my family and it sure beat my jobs at the Chinese restaurant and grocery store. Amazingly, when I was only a teenager, I fulfilled the promise to my seven-year-old self to provide for my family. Of course, this opportunity to become financially independent was a dream come true, but in the blink of an eye, it was also the end of my teenage years. Although I never returned to live in Holland, which I love so much, I took every piece of the moral and emotional foundation that my mother gave me and used it while traveling the world for work. I was extremely disciplined, focused, and motivated. Nothing was going to stop me from succeeding in this industry and I wanted to make my momma proud.
At nineteen, I signed a three-month modeling contract in Tokyo and got to experience the amazing Japanese culture. It was an inspiring time and I loved working long days. I exercised as much as I could to stay in top shape. One day, I pulled a muscle in my back, so my agent, Himari, took me to her acupuncturist. I was fascinated because it helped immediately so I had treatments every day after work for a couple of weeks until my pain was completely gone. From Japan, I went back to New York, where I was based, and booked my first Cosmopolitan magazine cover with Francesco Scavullo, the well-known fashion photographer. I felt extremely exhausted the day of the shoot, but I blamed it on jet lag and the different lifestyle I’d experienced in Tokyo. During hair and makeup, I felt very strange and faint, but pushed through.
“Are you okay?” one of the Cosmopolitan editors asked me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Your eyes are kind of yellow. I think you need to go to a doctor,” she told me. Someone on set called Eileen Ford to get me an appointment with a doctor immediately. Dr. White did an array of blood tests and sent me home to rest. Two days later, I returned and when the nurse interrogated me about any potential drug use, I was not only confused but offended.
“You tested positive for hepatitis B,” she explained. “Which is a liver infection that you can get from a blood transfusion or dirty needles.”
“I must have gotten it from acupuncture needles, because I’ve never used drugs,” I said. Today, acupuncturists use only disposable needles, but back then they would simply sterilize the needles by cooking them in a huge pot of boiling water and reuse them. I had already learned I had a weak liver because out in the modeling world, when I tried to go out at night to party with the other girls and drink, I couldn’t keep up. The same thing happened in high school on a class trip to the Heineken factory, when I got violently ill from the beer tasting at the end of the tour.
The hepatitis B diagnosis was scary. I was only nineteen years old and in an English-speaking country where I had no family or support system at all besides my agency. We canceled all my upcoming modeling bookings and I flew back to Holland to be with my mom and get a second opinion from my hometown doctor. Unfortunately, he confirmed this frightening diagnosis. But after a month of my momma’s TLC and Dutch cooking, I made a good enough recovery to get back in action. I was extremely driven and well aware my lucky draw wasn’t going to last forever. Momentum was incredibly important, as was being in the right place at the right time, and being sick in Papendrecht wasn’t any good for my business. So I got back on the road and back to work.
Over the next fifteen years, my life was very hectic and busy. I lived like a gypsy, constantly on airplanes, flying all over the world without much time off. I was a workhorse who always kept going no matter how I felt. Coming from humble beginnings was my greatest gift because the motivation and hunger to be successful was ingrained in me. I lived in Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Sydney, Cape Town, Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. Being able to experience all these different cultures so early on in my life gives me great respect and admiration for the diversity in the world. Besides feeling extremely grateful for the blessing of this life, I earned an incredible amount of money and successfully invested it. The financial independence felt powerful and gave me a lot of self-confidence. I was proud of how far I had come and how much I had accomplished since I was that little girl on the farm.
One day during a photo shoot in Marbella, Spain, a woman from the hotel’s front desk came to find me on the set.
“Your brother called with an emergency. He needs to talk to you immediately,” she said. I rushed back to the hotel as quickly as possible and called Leo from the lobby.
“Mamma has breast cancer and needs a double mastectomy,” he said. My world felt like it had collapsed. OMG. Not my momma! Cancer? Is she going to die?
I raced to my room, packed my luggage, and jumped into a cab to the airport, where I waited six hours to get on a flight to Amsterdam. I stayed in Holland while my mother, who was forty-six years old, recovered from surgery. This motivated me to become extremely health conscious and live a very clean life. I was tired and started to feel extremely lonely having lived out of a suitcase for over a decade. Never in one place long enough to connect with people or build meaningful relationships. I started to long for a family, my own family, and a place to call home.
Chapter One
YOU ARE NOT WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU. YOU ARE WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO BECOME FROM THAT EXPERIENCE.
Fast-forward to 1993, when I’m in Aspen, Colorado, for a photo shoot. I meet Mohamed Hadid on the gondola going up Ajax Mountain. We start talking. He is kind and very handsome. Soon we fall in love, get engaged, marry, and settle in Los Angeles. With his first wife, Mary, Mohamed has two girls, Marielle and Alana, who live in McLean, Virginia. On April 23, 1995, we welcome the first of our three angels, Jelena Noura Hadid (Gigi). Just a year and a half later, on October 9, 1996, Isabella Khair Hadid (Bella) is born. Then my son, Anwar Mohamed Gerard Hadid, arrives on June 22, 1999. I stop modeling after giving birth to Bella because traveling with two babies is not doable so I start working with Mohamed, who is a real estate developer and extremely smart, creative, and a genius in design. After losing most of his fortune in the early nineties’ real estate crash, he is determined to turn things around. Like me, Mohamed came from very humble beginnings and was raised by a strong and loving mom, Khair Hadid. I have no doubt he will make it back on top. I have always had a passion for design and he teaches me about things like antiquing and wholesale furnishings. We are a great team; he creates the big picture and I am the detail person who follows right behind to put on the final touches. I enjoy working on his projects and designing interiors. I also love being a mother of three and am immersed in my life as a mommy and wife. It’s a dream come true. I’ve finally found a place where I belong, my own special family in beautiful America.
Sadly, our marriage is short-lived, and in 2000 Mohamed and I separate. He’s a good human being and provider for his children and always has been an amazing son to his mother. But unfortunately for me, he’s not a faithful husband. It’s a sad experience and hard for me to accept. It’s also a big blow to my ego. I thought I was a pretty good catch: financially independent, on the covers of magazines, and absolutely loving my home life and roles as wife and mother. It takes a long time for me to truly understand that the breakdown of our marriage has nothing to do with who I am, but nevertheless it feels like a failure, even though there is nothing I could have done differently. Growing up without a father, this is the last thing I want for my children but I adapt.
As soon as Gigi finishes her pre-K year, the kids and I are off to Casa Amore, in Punta Mita, Mexico, a beautiful place that Mohamed and I built together and I decorated in authentic Mexican style. It’s a colorful and happy home that I created with the vision of a lifetime with Mohamed and our family, but life isn’t always what you think it will be. So I keep telling myself to pull up the bootstraps, a saying from my riding days that I’ve used throughout my life, meaning that I’ve got to push through and move forward, no matter the circumstance
s, and deal with the cards life has dealt me. After all, I have three beautiful babies, I am healthy, and I have a whole life ahead of me. The kids and I spend a quiet summer with my mom, my brother, his wife, Liseth, and their two daughters, Joann and Lizzy, barefoot on the beach, building sand castles, catching crabs, bodysurfing, watching birds, going on jungle rides in the pickup truck, and discovering all kinds of amazingness right in our backyard connected to Mother Nature. The kids learn about lizards, armadillos, and snakes. Sometimes we sleep on the beach to watch momma turtles lay their eggs. I take long walks to think and process. Leo, Liseth, and I enjoy margaritas at the local beach bar while we pick up the fresh catch of the day. Life is beautiful and meaningful in this magical little town. I loved the people from the minute I arrived for the first time, just two years earlier.
While detoxing from my Beverly Hills life on my daily long sunset walks, I start to slowly digest my experience and find clarity. I realize that I don’t want to go back there. Even though I always loved the palm trees and sunshine, I never really felt at home in Beverly Hills, and it is not an environment where I want to raise my children. But where am I going? That question consumes me the whole summer. I’m so grateful to have my mom and family here from Holland. They are so rational and always put things in perspective for me. It turns out to be the most difficult summer of my life so far, but I make it a magical one for my children. They have no idea what is really going on and don’t need to know anything that is happening between their father and me. I tell them he is very busy working. They don’t have a clue that this is the beginning of our new life.
Believe Me Page 2
