Perfect Is Boring

by Tyra Banks

  “The minute this biz doesn’t feel good anymore, you get up and walk away,” I told Tyra. “You can quit, and I will not be disappointed. You are not stuck here; you have a brain, and a brilliant, creative one at that. So the minute you feel like you have to suffer to keep your paycheck coming in, you have my blessing. You can leave. And you should leave.”

  Tyra: And she meant every word she said.

  At the start of my modeling career, I could eat whatever I wanted. My food intake was crazy. I could eat a whole large pizza with two dozen buffalo wings if I wanted to (and often did), and if I ordered a burger, you had better bet I ordered it with cheese, extra bacon, with a side of onion rings dipped in ketchup and mayo, topped off with a superthick vanilla milkshake followed by a pint of coffee Häagen-Dazs for dessert. I was eating anything and everything. I had a fast metabolism and some serious youth on my side.

  My Paris modeling agency had given me a planner to keep track of all my go-sees and appointments, so of course I used it to write down the addresses to all the design houses . . . and all the McDonald’s and Häagen-Dazs locations in town. In between photo shoots or fashion shows, I’d chill for hours in those hard plastic ice-cream parlor seats, drinking coffee milkshakes because it tasted like home. It was my happy place among all those early-morning call times, French accents, and photo shoots that went late into the night.

  I wasn’t the only one, either—my #squad in Paris were models who hung out at McDonald’s. Yeah, the cool clique. (Taylor Swift, you didn’t know I had the first squad, huh? The Mickey D’s Mannequins!) My best friend was a Canadian model named Jen who could match me calorie for calorie. We could have put a high school water polo or football team to shame with how we could throw down on some nuggets. And forget fancy food like foie gras and escargot—we were in France, child, so we wanted French fries! And lots of ’em.

  But in addition to girls like me and Jen, who were food obsessed, not food repressed, there were plenty of models who had eating disorders. I remember one popular blond model who would brag to her boyfriend about how she’d eaten only an apple that day. While she seemed proud of her authoritarian calorie regime and talked about it as if it were a sign of her willpower and discipline, there were others who kept it well hidden. It had never occurred to me to throw up after a meal, so it took me a while to catch on to the fact that a lot of the I’m-so-stuffed-I’ll-be-right-back girls weren’t running to the bathroom ’cause they had tiny bladders.

  It wasn’t until later in my career that I realized how much these girls had suffered. My girls. My buddies in the biz. Ones I really cared about. They started to speak out about how they had struggled with eating disorders at the height of their careers. A throwaway comment from a well-meaning agent trying to protect his model’s career—“You need to lose a few pounds before this season”—would prompt a crash diet that would spiral into a full-on medical and psychological disease. It was a prison, and they couldn’t escape. No matter how beautiful, unique, or rich they were, they were still starving for success. Just writing this tugs at my heart. I wish I had known they were suffering back in the day. I would have tried to do something. What? I don’t know. But something.

  Anything.

  Carolyn: At one fashion show, I chatted with a supermodel who was six feet tall and thin as a wet string. She was slurping black coffee and sucking on a cigarette like it was her life source. After telling me she was hungry as she turned down the other half of my sandwich, she confessed to me that she lived on Marlboro Lights and caffeine to keep her weight down. “If I had one wish in the world,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke like she was a Weber grill, “it would be to not be hungry anymore.”

  “What?” I was sure I hadn’t heard her right. What about world peace, or curing cancer?

  “I. Am. So. Hungry. All. The. Time,” she repeated.

  “Then why don’t you eat?” I was two seconds away from stuffing my tuna sandwich into her purple-pouted mouth.

  “Because I want to keep my job, Mom.”

  Yeah, she called me Mom. A lot of the girls did.

  She might have been the one who didn’t eat that day, but I was the one who felt faint. I had to go sit down. “I will never let that happen to my daughter,” I thought. “I will drag Tyra out of here by her hair if she ever starts to think like that. And I won’t go for the weave tracks. Oh, no. I’ll grab deep down into those tracks to the cornrows near the scalp so she can’t slip away.”

  Tyra: I lived in two body worlds at the beginning of my career. One was full of beautiful white girls who would be like, “OMG, you are so skinny I could die! I am so jealous!” The other was my beautiful African American community of friends and family, who were always trying to feed me macaroni and cheese and collard greens with extra ham hocks to fatten me up. “Fix TyTy a plate!” they’d yell when I walked in the door. “Shoot, fix her two plates! She needs to gain some weight!”

  So when I did finally start to gain weight, I didn’t really care. All the black people were clapping their hands and nodding their heads like my body was coming along nicely and I’d finally started listening to what they’d been telling me since I was twelve. I’d walk into the family barbecue on the Fourth of July and be hit with a chorus of “Ooh girl, turn around. You lookin’ mighty fine now!”

  The modeling world, on the other hand, felt differently. Like, 180 degrees differently.

  They weren’t happy.

  In fact, they were pissed.

  Carolyn: The first few pounds she gained weren’t that big a deal. Tyra’d get up in the morning, tug a little harder to get her jeans on, then laugh about it before she sucked in, zipped ’em up, and went to work.

  But the weight kept coming, and her curves filled out like a Renaissance muse.

  Soon, the modeling agency started droppin’ hints about her weight, and a hint from the agency isn’t much of a hint. It’s more like an order. “She needs to lose weight,” they said.

  She tried.

  Sorta.

  Maybe she’d have a salad for lunch, but then she’d get a piece of cheesecake to celebrate that she’d only had a salad. I thought she looked good. She thought she looked good. But you did not see curvy curves on the runway. At least not the kind Tyra started to grow.

  Then her agent in the USA took us to lunch to tell us something. Tyra was excited because lunches with agents always consisted of good news. A major campaign booked. A product endorsement contract. Career-growing goodness.

  Tyra: I will never forget that man and the look on his face. As I sat there trying to guess what huge job I’d booked, he had another conversation in mind. Basically, I was an old Toyota Corolla that had too many miles on it and was losing its resale value. “You’ve had your moment,” he said, shaking his head. “There are only about two or three girls who can become icons every ten years, and you couldn’t possibly do that. But guess what. You can be a catalog girl now.”

  The words fell out of his mouth so fast and so fluently that I knew this was a speech that he’d pulled out of his files for just such an occasion. This was the “You is over, bitch” lunch. I could tell he’d delivered it dozens of times before, to girls who’d had a successful season or two or three who no one wanted to book for big jobs anymore. I didn’t dare say anything, but inside I thought, “That’s not me.” There was something deep down inside, some sorta spark, that knew I wasn’t just one of those here today, gone tomorrow models. This wasn’t about just a couple of years of modeling for me. I put college aside for this damn business. This modeling thing was something bigger. Not just a career, but a destiny.

  My life’s calling.

  Right then and there, I knew there were bigger things ahead for me. Things that were bigger than even my own modeling career. I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they were going to be major.

  I sat there, silent, nodding like I understood and agreed with everything he sai
d, but wishing that I had gone ahead and ordered cheesecake.

  Not to eat it. To smash it in his damn face.

  (Drake, you know what I mean, right, boo?)

  Carolyn: After that man told Tyra not to let the door hit her big ol’ butt on her way out, he had the nerve to offer me a job.

  Tyra: Now I saw Mama scanning the table for something to smash in his face.

  Apparently, since I was now an overweight outcast, they wanted her to take over and manage one of their supermodels. She was heroin-addicted and beyond a hot mess, but she was skinny and blond, so he said she still had a future.

  Carolyn: No thank you, honey. No thank you.

  I did not have the time, interest, or energy to mother some model who was throwing her potentially stratospheric future away by shooting it up her veins. I had my own baby to care for, who had just been disrespected big-time to her face. “You’re a has-been, Tyra, but Mama, we’ve got someone else who you can get your hands on to make into a major star.”

  What the—?!

  When Devin went off to college, I transformed his old room into a command center for managing Tyra’s career.

  Even after all of this nonsense—yes, Tyra cried (and cried and cried)—we did not panic. She was still getting work. It wasn’t as much work, but she was walkin’ some runways and posin’ in some magazines. She still had somewhat of a career.

  Then when we were in Milan for fashion week, her Italian agency called me.

  “Do you have pen?” the agent asked in his strong accent. “I want you write down what I saying.”

  I grabbed a nearby envelope and started jotting down every name that he listed, eight of the top fashion houses in Italy.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “All designer no want to work with Tyra no more.”

  “OK. Why?

  “Perché she too big,” he said. “Mama, she need lose weight. Her career will be finish if she do not.”

  Tyra: Oh, Lordy . . . that Milan Fashion Week. I remember it like it was the day before yesterday. And he told her the list was growing. There were eight designers who didn’t want to hire me this season. Last season, it had been four. I had been the It Girl, but now I was about to be the Out Girl, and I’d never rise anywhere near supermodel status. I bet you’ve been in a situation like this at some point in your life. Maybe you were the metaphorical It Girl at your job or in your relationship, then all of a sudden you ain’t getting that promotion or the love of your life says they want to take a break. Now, no matter how solid you thought your self-esteem was, it’s really looking more like Swiss cheese (one of those big, mouse-baiting cartoon chunks, all full of holes). We all know that we shouldn’t care too much what other people think of us, and that we shouldn’t rely on external validation, but damn. In these moments, that’s hard. You’d have to be stone cold to weather these kinds of blows and not let them affect you. And you’re getting to know me more and more with each page turn of this book, so as you now know—I was not stone cold.

  Mama showed me the list in our tiny hotel room in Milan, as I was sitting on the bed. These were some of my favorite clients, people who had snapped me up when I first got to Europe, but now they were turning their noses up like I stank like French bleu cheese, and they didn’t want anything to do with me. I knew that the list was only going to grow as my body grew.

  I saw my whole career flash before my eyes. What the hell was I going to do now? I pictured myself selling Jacuzzis (“Just look at those jets. Have you ever seen such powerful jets on a tub?”) or spritzing perfume on unsuspecting shoppers at the mall.

  I burst into tears.

  I wanted to keep modeling. I was kinda desperate. I’d lose weight. I’d try anything.

  “Mommy, OK . . . um, OK,” I cried. “I’m gonna skip meals, and I won’t eat that much. I can get a trainer, and I’ll work out in the morning and at night. I’ll count calories so I know exactly how much I’m taking in. Then I’ll hit the sidewalk in Paris, NYC, and Milan and run five miles before bedtime every night.”

  Mama put her arms up to come in for a hug. Or so I thought. Instead, she grabbed my shoulders and shook me like salad dressing. “Stop it!” she shouted, her face so close to mine that I could feel her breath on my false eyelashes. “This is nothing to cry about, Miss Tyra I-worked-like-hell-to-get-here Banks.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know what we’re gonna do?”

  “What?” I sniffled.

  “We’re gonna go eat pizza.”

  Then she ripped that list into confetti and threw it in the air.

  Carolyn: Once that pizza was on the table, steaming hot with all those little pools of mozzarella cheese and shreds of fragrant fresh basil, that was when I started challenging Tyra.

  What can you do if you want to stay in this industry?

  Where do you see this kind of body, bodies like yours?

  Instead of changing it, what can you do to use what you have?

  If the straight line is no longer the option, what happens if you turn? Pivot. When you look to the right and the left, what do you see?

  Now, let me tell you, I did not want Tyra to fall into the trap of thinking she had to live up to some silly idea of the “perfect” body. I’d seen that my whole life: women stretchin’, sweatin’, and starvin’ themselves to get into a shape that their body ain’t never supposed to be in in the first place.

  Tyra was almost a supermodel, and if she was “too fat,” what message did that send to the rest of us normal-ass women? Those of us who aren’t six feet tall? Who have curves in all the “wrong” places? I was so damn sick of hearing that women’s bodies should be this, that, or the other, but never loved and embraced for what they are. I want women to feel like their bodies and booties are beautiful. I couldn’t preach it to the world, but I could start with my daughter.

  Tyra: When she said “pizza,” my first thought was “crazy.” Then she started walking. Actually, it was more like marching. I followed like I was in bootcamp, and we found ourselves at our favorite pizzeria (it was actually a focacceria on Corso Magenta; I can almost taste that divine cheese now, as I write this). As soon as I smelled the smoke drifting out from that wood-fired oven, I started to calm down.

  We sat at our usual table, in the corner by the window, where we could watch all the people coming in, the families and couples just getting off work. Mama took out a pen and handed it to me. As soon as we ordered, she gestured at the tabletop, which was covered in white butcher paper.

  “Now,” she said, “you are going to write down every client in this industry that likes ass.”

  “Ass?”

  “Yes, that likes your ass.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, still thinking she was crazy.

  “Who likes ass?” she demanded.

  “Um, Victoria’s Secret?”

  “Write it down!”

  “Sports Illustrated?”

  “Write it down!”

  I was starting to catch on.

  “Middle America!” I wrote it down.

  “Who has an ass?” she asked.

  “Cindy Crawford!”

  “Write it down!”

  “Claudia Schiffer!”

  I wrote it down.

  By the time we’d finished our pizza, I had a whole list of commercial clients who booked the bold and bootyful, and a list of models who had curves and were working and at the top of their game, past and present. I sat back and looked at the list, now mottled with grease stains and dots of tomato sauce, and I slowly started to smile.

  My career didn’t have to be over.

  It just had to be different.

  Mama had always called the fashion elite “those bosses in black,” because while I worked with many wonderful, warm, and nurturing modeling agents, designers, magazine editors, and other powers
that be (who I am still friends with today), there were just as many who lived up to the stereotypes: They never cracked a smile, gave out a hug, or wore anything that resembled a color. Those were the power people Mama didn’t want getting to me.

  Now Mama sat back and crossed her arms. She was smiling, too. “I will be damned if my baby starves for these BIBs.”

  I ripped the paper off that pizza table and took it back to our hotel.

  Carolyn: I sent a fax to the agency, and they called me back almost as soon as it went through.

  “Carolyn, what the heck is the list?”

  “Those are her new clients.”

  “Tyra is a high-fashion model,” they said. “She walks for Armani and Chanel. None of these clients you faxed are high fashion.”

  “Well, she ain’t high fashion anymore,” I said. “She ain’t starvin’. She’s changing.”

  “That is not the path for a black girl,” they said. “It doesn’t exist.”

  To be honest, that made me so mad I can’t remember exactly what I said next.

  But I’m sure it wasn’t very nice.

  Tyra: As angry as I was with the USA agent who had told me I was over, there was a grain of truth to it. True, it was my booty that got me booted from the world of high fashion earlier than I would have liked, but said booting was inevitable. I worked in a cold industry that was unapologetic in how it embraced the new and next and put the old out to pasture (in my case at the ripe old age of twenty-two).

  At first, I was depressed to have to say sayonara to couture, but the more resistant the agency was, the more convinced I became that a girl-next-door path was my path, that modeling for the masses was what I was supposed to be doing. “You just need to lose some weight and you could be the next Iman. The next Linda,” they pleaded. “You are not a curvy girl, really. Just lose the weight. And it’s too soon for you to go commercial. You will never work in high fashion again.”