The All-American Model

For those who simply want to look at the pictures, the words that follow may be thought of not as bits of language but as bits of Styrofoam, packed around the images they accompany to keep them from breaking. The pictures are precious, though they could not be called rare. The sweet creature they show is the new Top Model, who is among the most extensively photographed, and certainly is one of the most expensively photographed, women on earth.

Top Models are not elected or anointed, but every couple of years the ball of flaming gas that is the U.S. communications industry indicates that a new One is at hand. By assuming office she becomes the nation’s muse, our new moon. In earlier manifestations, the Top Model was Lisa Fonssagrives, Suzy Parker, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton. Now, lambent in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, ineffable on a talk show, utterly right at the right disco, a splendid beacon in the mind of every wistful teen-age buyer of eye enlarger and cheekbone sharpener, a poster pinned across Farrah’s, a secret smile on the face of a dozing commuter, her name is Cheryl Tiegs.

Hear this: “The new bold beauty is round, she is not scrawny. She’s sexy, earthy. She has fire and excitement in her eyes. Her body looks healthy, and strong enough so you could wrestle and roll with her.” So says Francesco Scavullo, a Manhattan-based fashion photographer. He is right; the great-blue-heron look of the early ’60s has been consigned to outer darkness. Hollow chests have been replaced by noticeable and often visible breasts, and haughtiness by a sometimes even more disconcerting look of warmth and directness. Artificiality is out and naturalism is in: wind machines to fling hair about in a suitably natural manner have become as important as print dryers in the studios of the fashion world’s fashionable photographers.

Scavullo’s description of the new naturalism fits several tall, smashing models—Rene Russo, Lisa Taylor and Patti Hansen, a freckle-faced 21-year-old from Staten Island, whom he photographed nude for a 24-page story coming in the April Vogue. It certainly fits Lauren Hutton, whose gap-toothed, T-shirt-and-nothing beauty in the late ’60s made the earlier exoticism seem airless and unexciting. But Hutton is spending more time with her film career now—she has made eight movies—and there is no doubt that Cheryl Tiegs, who is taller, blonder and more gracefully lush than seems either possible or fair, is the most striking embodiment of the natural style that Hutton started.

There are no short, stubby brunettes in California—it is an EPA regulation—so Tiegs’ kind of beauty is called, in the shorthand of the business, the California look. It is not simply a matter of height and blondeness and blue eyes. Her cheekbones are set wide under a tanned breadth of untroubled forehead, and the result, by some trick of geometry, is a face whose expressions are astonishingly warm and open. Her great length of shank and neck give a powerful impression of health and muscular strength, and there is a sense of physical well-being conferring a benison on her. Some other beauties suggest the inviting possibilities of evil. Tiegs’ clear and uncomplicated healthiness suggests that there is no such thing.

Two poses in a recent issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED (both by Walter looss, who also took the full-page photo of Tiegs that appears on page 51) show why she is a rarity. One has the model facing the camera in a wet, white fishnet suit that is, of course, transparent. Her full breasts show clearly. Most women would look like a sack of potatoes in this suit, and most models would look like a half-empty sack of potatoes. Tiegs’ body is awesome, and her face is so fine and strong and unembarrassed that questions of taste do not arise.

The other picture is more interesting. It shows Tiegs sitting in a small wooden boat, wearing a modest, white one-piece bathing suit. She regards the camera gravely, with a look of total self-absorption. Her body and face are womanly, but her expression is that of a three-year-old girl playing intently at the beach. She sees the photographer, but from a place far inside herself. She seems profoundly calm. A viewer wonders: What does she find there? What is so fascinating?

How to get a reputation as a dumb blonde: appear on a local New York talk show whose host asks, “How tall are you?” and “How much do you weigh?” Tiegs does her best with the material. “Five-ten,” she says, her face alive and warm, the sparkle in her eyes working at perhaps 55% of max; “One-twenty.” She ballooned up to 155 lbs., she says, just after she and her husband Stan Dragoti, a well-established TV commercial maker, were married, and she dropped out of modeling. Then she stopped eating fattening foods —”Sorry,” she says, “but that’s the secret”—and the blub dropped away.

There is an authentic friendliness to Tiegs, and it is a large part of the surprisingly personal contact that she manages to make with strangers who see her pictures. But there is also a professional friendliness, of the kind that good politicians develop. She gets first names right, listens thoughtfully to tedious questions. On this morning of the solid-mahogany talk show, she woke too late for breakfast, grabbed a few pieces of candy on the way out of her Sherry-Netherland suite, reached the TV studio on time, politely declined an offer to redo her hair and makeup, and was greeted by the off-putting Siegel with “Hi, hi, hi. And who are you?” She smiled as if he had offered her one perfect rose.

Now, on the way from the talk show to the studio where she will shoot Virginia Slims ads, there is a series of irritating mix-ups with taxis, ending with Tiegs standing in the snow at the wrong address. She is going to be late, and she hates that; it is unprofessional. But she reassures the embarrassed driver, and when she reaches Photographer Abe Seltzer’s studio on West 22nd Street, she is unruffled, full of hellos.

Cheryl Tiegs is, good Lord, 30 years old. She appears not to mind, perhaps because from a distance of four inches she looks 20. The employers who pay her the highest rate in modeling also appear not to mind (she has raised her rates for commercial modeling from $1,500 a day to $2,000, though she receives the standard $150 a day for high-fashion work). Model Cristina Ferrare, 28, on hand for the shoot (as photo sessions are called), thinks that there is much less panic about age these days in the fashion business. “Part of the change is feminism, probably,” she says, “and part is that everyone is exercising, keeping themselves together. But a lot of it is just Cheryl. She has that incredible face, and her body is the best in the business.”

The cluttered studio is crawling with bodies: several photographer’s assistants, a studio manager, a couple of art directors, two stylists, two hairdressers, gofers of both sexes, several admen in three-piece suits, the models, a makeup man, journalists. Everyone is gossiping, talking agency talk, watching the underbrush for poisonous serpents. The same Donna Summer tape has been wailing for three hours.

Strobe lights detonate at one end of the big room; Photographer Seltzer is working with Nancy Dutiel, a wan, lovely blonde who is new to the Slims ads. Tiegs, her hair piled and pinned with a flower, sits as Makeup Man Way Bandy, an old friend, dips his fingers into tiny pots of color and touches up her face. What he achieves is a stronger version of Cheryl: the wide eyes more enormous, cheekbones more prominent, the nose a more perfect narrow line. “The only thing you have to be careful with is her lips,” says Bandy. “They’re thin, and she doesn’t like a definite line or a lot of color.”

The stylist decrees a red chiffon evening dress, and Tiegs, with as much modesty as she can manage in a room full of people, slips it on. Wearing ballet slippers and carrying a pair of elegant red sandals, she pads across to where she will be photographed against a white paper drop. She grins at an onlooker. She can look a 6-ft. 2-in. man in the eye. The red flower in her hair looks like a pennant at the masthead of a racing sloop. Ellen Merlo has said that the one overriding reason for Tiegs’ appeal is that her sexiness is not forbidding to men or offensive to women. This seems logical; how could anyone take offense at a sailboat?

Now Suga, the tiny Japanese master hairdresser, approaches, and Tiegs bends her knees, lowering her head so that he can give it a last swipe with his brush. A small, wren-colored woman, a stylist, darts up, makes an odd little ducking gesture that may be obeisance, and slips a bracelet on the racing sloop’s left arm. Photographer Seltzer, a big, bald, hard-looking man, lies on his belly, chest soothed by a pillow, and begins to talk in the style parodied in Blow-Up: “Good, good, wonderful, great.”

What Tiegs does now is a fast, intricate dance. She turns quickly, swirling the skirt of her red dress. She is very good. At the height of the swirl, and an instant before Seltzer’s strobe lights flash, she smiles in a way that seems marvelously natural, although the smile’s wattage is far greater than anything likely to be encountered in the real world. For perhaps 20 minutes, the pattern of turn, swirl, smile is repeated without letup, but with subtle variations. In these 20 minutes, Seltzer fires off four or five rolls of 36-exposure Kodachrome, perhaps 180 frames of film.

Though smoking is the point of it all, Tiegs does not smoke. She holds her long, skinny cigarette unlit in her long, graceful fingers. In the finished ad, the cigarette will be lit for her, politely, by the retoucher. As she walks off the set to be dressed in her next costume, she drops the Slims to the floor. By the end of the day, Tiegs, Nancy and Cristina will have, in such fashion, gone through more than a pack.

It is not age that will stop Cheryl Tiegs’ modeling career; it is aeronautics. She is about to float free. Her face and her body have been recognizable for years, and now her name is known to the kids who rush to get autographs and the distraught high school boys who write earnest letters (“You are by far the most beautiful looking and shaped woman …”) begging for an old sock, a hairbrush, a nude picture. Soon it will be known to the steady and the reasonable, the people who keep their credit cards paid up and have their children’s teeth straightened.

Tiegs is about to waft off into celebrity, that peculiar state of matter that is like fame, only without responsibility. Celebrities do not have to do anything. Celebrity is held to be interesting in itself, and this interest in turn sustains the celebrity. Consider the recent photo of Tiegs boogying at a Manhattan disco, Studio 54, with Tennis Player Vitas Gerulaitis. The two barely know each other. As Tiegs explains, “It was publicity.” If Cheryl is straining at the mooring ropes, part of the reason is that she and her husband have been working hard to produce the necessary volume of superheated publicity. An odd result is that the makers of Virginia Slims and other products that Tiegs sells, like Black Velvet Canadian whisky and Cover Girl Cosmetics, are now selling Cheryl Tiegs.

Not everyone buys her. One elder of the beauty biz finds the California look distinctly boring. “There have, always been superstars,” says Diana Vreeland, who worked as an editor of Bazaar and then Vogue for four decades. She cites Veruschka, one of her own discoveries, from the ’60s, “an artist who did the most extraordinary things with herself.” The ’60s, Vreeland feels, were more interesting. She considers the naturalism of the present period cloying. “There’s too much blowing in the wind. At one time, it was fashionable to be made up and it was not fashionable to have your clothes always falling off you and your hair falling down.”

Vreeland reflects, then says, “A model becomes what today is. And what today is is the inner force of fashion.” A pause. “I think there is a certain monotony about the girls of today. It must be planned that way.”

Vreeland now finds herself above the battle, and just now the modeling business finds itself involved in an entertaining squabble. It began last summer when Johnny Casablancas, a fast-moving Frenchman who owns the largest model agency in Paris, set up shop in New York, where there are an estimated 800 models at work. Eileen Ford and Wilhelmina, heads of the two largest New York agencies, say that he had assured them that he would not invade. But invade he did, and he also hired Ford’s financial controller and two of her top booking agents. Ford retaliated with a $7.5 million lawsuit against Casablancas for breach of fiduciary trust. Nevertheless, he now has 19 of Ford’s models under contract and 16 of Wilhelmina’s, for which she too is suing him. Protests Casablancas: “I did not snatch bodies. They are thinking people.”

Eileen Ford, still the most successful model agent by far, is either motherly or tyrannical, depending on the viewpoint. Tiegs, who is Ford’s client on the East Coast, has no complaints and probably should have none, considering that her income, largely earned through Ford, has been estimated at $300,000 a year. But Ford is not universally popular says a fashion photographer with satisfaction: “Now she’s up against a businessman who’s taking her best talent.”

Bitchiness seems to be a constant in the $25 million-a-year model biz, despite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that the financial rewards are rapidly increasing. Television has made a big difference; a top model will get $1,000 a day for shooting a commercial, and then twice that for each 13-week cycle the commercial runs, so that in a 21-month period she will make $15,000 for one day’s work. There are other changes too. Highly paid “image girls” like Tiegs, whose faces become associated with several specific products, have come into fashion. Margaux Hemingway and Lauren Hutton have restrictive but enormously profitable contracts. Margaux is reportedly receiving $1 million over five years to work exclusively for Faberge, while Hutton is getting $500,000 over two years from Revlon. Another agency owner, the Hungarian who calls himself Zoli, in mono-moniker fashion, sees daily fees escalating still further. Says he: “I doubt whether Hutton would step in front of a camera for less than $5,000 a day” when she finishes her Revlon contract. “Cheryl Tiegs is getting to that point too. People with faces that are well known are no longer advertising a product, they are endorsing it.”

Some souls must endure fate’s buffets, and others are favored guests at destiny’s sitdown dinners. Except for her fat period and a bit of mid-marriage bumpiness, Cheryl Tiegs’ life seems to have been uncommonly secure and successful from the beginning. The warmth and strength she now shows so easily to the camera is clearly to some degree a reflection of what she knew as a child in Alhambra, Calif. Theodore Tiegs, an undertaker, was a steady, thoughtful, attention-paying father, says Cheryl, and her mother, Phyllis, was a laughing, cuddling person. Phyllis worked in a flower shop when her two daughters were growing up, and Vernette, four years older than Cheryl, took care of her little sister. The Tiegs family went to Quaker meetings on Sundays. They were healthy and moderately affluent. The girls did well in school, and though Vernette was the more intellectual, Cheryl got good grades, played the violin skillfully enough to qualify for a city-wide youth orchestra, and read a lot. She was, appropriately, a pom-pom girl.

When she was 16, a talent agent came to her high school to speak about careers, and, he says now, “I saw this stunning young girl listening very attentively at the back of the room.”

Soon she was doing cover work for True Romance and Teen mag azines. That soon slides past the hard work of learning to be a model. “I would look at those photos of Jean Shrimpton flying across the pages of Vogue and I’d try to fly across my room,” Tiegs says.

She was seen in a memorable swimsuit ad for Cole of California in Seventeen. “There was gentleness that came through. Her face was almost Victorian,” recalls the stylist for the session, Marion Samerjan. “You just had to fall in love with her.” West Coast Talent Agent Nina Blanchard saw the photo and offered Cheryl a contract.

Cheryl was enrolled as an English major at Cal State, in Los Angeles, when Glamour magazine packed her off to the Virgin Islands with Ali MacGraw, then a star model, to shoot a cover. “She was so nice to me,” says Tiegs now. “I had brought all the wrong clothes.

She just pulled out all these gorgeous things from Paraphernalia, with the price tags still on them, and loaned them to me.”

At 19 Cheryl left college and took off for New York. With another blue-eyedCalifornia blonde, Kelly Harmon, daughter of former Michigan Football Hero Tom Harmon, she lived in an apartment above the Shoreham Hotel’s garbage chute. “Neither of us really fit into the New York scene very well,” says Harmon, who now models and studies acting in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that Cheryl was working hard, she never seemed happy there. “She was an outdoors nut like myself,” says Kelly, and in those days a suntan did not help. A California girl was tagged, she says. “You’d go to New York, and Eileen Ford would look you up and down and say, ‘My God, get rid of that blonde hair, make your skirt longer, and tone down.”

Tiegs was not yet a superstar in those early New York years, but Glamour’s editors discovered that the magazine sold better with her face on the cover, and they used her again and again. Early on she met Adman Stan Dragoti, then head art director for Wells, Rich, Greene and 15 years her senior. He had been married briefly and bitterly and was gun-shy. They lived together on and off for two years and parted, supposedly for good, three times. Finally he agreed to try marriage again.

That was in 1970. They went to Los Angeles, and for two years, weary of the tedium and pressures of modeling, Cheryl stayed at home, acted as Stan’s chauffeur, and lunched out a lot. She got fat. Then one day her scales registered 155. She reacted by stuffing herself with everything in the kitchen. Says Stan: “She started to go up the wall. She hid all the pain of the weight gain. It was bothering her more than she let on to anyone.” Finally she was galvanized by a magazine shot of a model in a bathing suit. Within a year she lost 35 lbs. and returned to modeling.

An observer’s impression is that Tiegs keeps a lot to herself. Behind her openness there is a great reserve. And behind this reserve there is a private area that almost no one has been allowed to see. It is easy to speculate that it might involve some variety of reckless, wild release, simply because so much control seems to demand some kind of balancing. But the odds are that behind the control there is more control. Her husband, a tall, slim fellow who puts a lot of emotion into his conversation and his gestures and who is forever touching Cheryl on the arm or smooching her behind the ear, says: “She really is what you see. There is no worm in this apple.”

A year and a half ago, they bought a $450,000 Spanish mansion in Bel Air, on a hill overlooking Los Angeles and the sea. They do most of their business traveling together and, as if they had just been married, sit down to champagne and dinner of whatever cheese, fruit and nuts are in the fridge.

The new moon is full. Are there no shadows? A diligent reporter finds one and, oddly enough, it involves an awkward picture. Tiegs is passionate about tennis and is ranked fourth among women celebrities in the nation. Not long ago, Us magazine shot her on the court, and she says, moaning low, “They caught me up on my toes, my arm bent, everything wrong.” The nation’s muse is now sweating pools on the practice court.

When she came back to modeling in the early ’70s, after her unsuccessful experiment at being a stay-at-home wife, she had matured enough to graduate from Glamour, which aims at the 18-to-35 set, to Bazaar. Now, her timing still superb, Tiegs has the happy task of picking fruit from the overhanging branches. She has just signed a $65,000-to-$70,000 contract with Simon & Schuster to do a beauty book with a collaborator. There is talk of a weekly beauty-care spot on the Today show. She has discussed sportscasting. There is an easy $250,000 to be had by endorsing a Cheryl doll, she has been assured. She is not rushing to grab the money. “What if I want to be taken seriously as a television personality? You can’t have that if you have a Cheryl doll. There’s a Farrah doll, but there’s no Phyllis George doll.”

As Tiegs practices her ground strokes in Bel Air and considers which pile of money to pick up, others are calculating in Manhattan. The natural look, with its painted-on vitamins, its hair falling down and its clothes falling off, seems good for another year or two, but it will not last forever. Eileen Ford thinks that it will be replaced by a more delicate, refined, romantic illusion, and she wonders when she should start signing up delicate, fine-boned young women.

And where would that leave Cheryl Tiegs? Unconcerned. Her too radiant health could be subdued by the greens and purples in Way Bandy’s paint box. Bows and ruffles would be easy. The wind machine could be turned off. Suga could stand on his tiptoes and comb in romance. The bones, really, are quite fine. But Tiegs has had enough of the small, sealed-off world of the studios and high-fashion magazines. This fine-looking, tough-minded California lady has packed her makeup kit and her tennis racket, and taken a deep breath, and is ready to move on.

Pushpin War: Farah v. Cheryl

Since she first blossomed on a poster over a year ago, FarrahFawcett-Majors has become the most ubiquitous wallflower since BettyGrable was a base hit with World War II G.I.s. Grable and her fabledgams had a printing of 3 million; Farrah, teeth rampant on a field ofmane, found a home in 7 million dormitories, dens, bedrooms andbarracks. “She set standards for the industry,” rhapsodizes Ohio PosterMaker Ted Trikilis, whose Pro Arts company banked $1 million last year,thanks largely to Farrah’s alfresco appeal. Farrah, however, is aboutto have Spinksian competition. This week Trikilis unrolls his newestposter, a pink-bikinied Cheryl Tiegs. Farrah is an “incredibly sexygirl,” but Cheryl exudes that “healthful, fresh,mysterious-girl-next-door image,” he says. The, er, sales figures willbe interesting to watch: Can Farrah hang in there? Will Cheryl plasterher? The paper chase is on.