Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (15 page)

I overheard the pity-ridden compliments. “It’s such a shame,” people would say. “She was so pretty. She could have modeled.” Just months before
the accident, when my mom was in the midst of a very eighties series of self-help seminars designed to release one’s inner child, I joined her for one of these sessions. That’s where we met a photographer, who asked my mother if he could take some pictures of me. Reluctantly, she agreed. A week later, she held the light reflector for him under the Santa Monica Pier. The photos were beautiful; even the brooding, angst-filled teenage me could see that. “Maybe I could be a model,” I said to my mother. “Sure,” she said, clearly disapproving. “Perhaps next summer, when school is over, you can show them to someone.” A year after the accident, we stumbled on those photos in a drawer. Now that I had a caterpillar of scarred skin crawling down my arm, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that any agency would be interested in such damaged goods. My mother, I felt, was secretly relieved.

It angered me that people saw me as ruined. I hated the scar. It carried the weight of tragedy. Yet even then I also knew my scar was a symbol of my survival. The surgery that put it there had saved my arm. After a year of physical therapy, I was once again able to stir pasta, dance, throw a football, and, in countless other ways, be a normal American teenager.

Later, in college, I would learn how to cover the scar with pancake makeup and powder. The director of a campus play I was in worried that my scar would be distracting, so someone in the theater department offered to help. Night after night, she covered the scar with stage makeup. Onstage, I was liberated. I felt like another person: not just a character but another me, one who didn’t have a scar. By the end of the run, I had learned to put the makeup on myself.

After I revealed my secret to Josette, there was an interminable silence. I’m sure she registered my terror-stricken face. She glanced at my scar and then asked in English, “Have you seen a doctor about getting that removed?” Before I could answer, she waved away her own question with
a dismissive “
Bien, bien.”
This was a first: someone, and a modeling agent at that, who didn’t care about my scar.

Santiago brought me to Spanish
Elle.
They admitted me, looked him over with a who-the-hell-are-you glare, and told him he could go. He waited for me outside. I was led into a room filled with many closets’ worth of clothes hanging on garment racks. Editors snapped Polaroids of models, pinning the photos to a giant corkboard. The photos captured the models from the neck down only. There were no faces. We were fitting models, one step above clothes hangers. It was cold outside, but the clothes on the racks were sleeveless. The shoot was for a summer story.

To the girls, who were from all over the world, the editors communicated in polite but abrupt English. “Here,” one said to me. “Put this on.” I took off my sweater and peeled off my leggings and socks. I was conscious of my scar but even more embarrassed by my expired pedicure and my unshaven legs, stubbly and covered with ash, chalky against my brown skin. (Come on, who actually shaves their legs in the winter?) If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve at least stopped at a drugstore for some moisturizer. I stood there, shivering and mortified, as these arbiters of beauty got a close-up of a regular girl.

Next to me another fitting model stood, awaiting her instructions. She was lithe and smooth with long, shiny blonde hair. She looked like she had just stepped out of a Breck Girls ad, her eyelashes curled, just a hint of makeup on her fair skin. She smiled when she saw me, a sunny, empty smile that revealed perfect white teeth.

Among themselves, the editors spoke Spanish, which at this point I couldn’t speak a lick of. I had no clue what they thought of me. They smiled only after they’d dressed me, to admire their own handiwork. After a few hours of dressing, standing around, and undressing, the Breck Girl and I were dismissed. They told her to come back the next day. They thanked me for my time. At first, I shrugged off the rejection. This had all been too
good to be true. I wasn’t model material anyway. I had a pretty face, but I figured my skin color and scar put me altogether out of the running.

Still, part of me yearned to experience the glamour of modeling. But since it seemed impossible, I decided right then, full of delicious self-righteousness, to focus on higher things, like my education.
I don’t want to risk lowering my GPA for some modeling job anyway,
I told myself
.
I wanted to graduate with honors. But the rejection stung. It would have been better if I had never entered the offices of
Elle,
never gotten a glimpse of the world I was now being shut out of. To my mother and grandparents, education was the most important goal for a young woman. But my response was self-protective, too. It’s easy to scoff at a club that won’t have you as a member.

Yet despite the certain-to-come embarrassments and rebuffs, something inside me had changed when Josette shrugged off my scar. Maybe it wasn’t the deal-breaker I’d imagined it was. And though I hadn’t been asked back to
Elle,
I did get a check two weeks later for twenty thousand
pesetas
(roughly two hundred dollars in 1992, if memory serves). In two hours, I had made enough to cover two weeks’ worth of living expenses. Where I came from, you couldn’t make that kind of money without a graduate degree and board exams. I thought about the degree I’d have in a few months—major in theater arts, minor in American literature. That piece of paper would have cost my family close to a hundred thousand dollars, more if you counted how much we would pay in interest after I settled my massive loans. All that money and I couldn’t envision what I’d be qualified for, other than temp work. So when the agency, despite my embarrassing first outing, decided to take me on, I was thrilled. Between classes, I’d go on casting calls and get the occasional job, thanks to the surprisingly supportive Josette. I was competing for jobs that paid a thousand dollars a day. All I had to do was stand there and suck in my stomach. All of a sudden, I wanted very badly to be a model.

I sheepishly told my professors about my gig, and to my happy sur
prise, they encouraged my foray into Spanish professional life. They pointed out that being among Spaniards and having to interact in Spanish was great for my education. I enjoyed this new justification, so I left out the part about most of the other models being Swedish or German, most of the editors speaking impeccable English, and hardly any of them saying a word to me the whole time.

For a while, I girded myself for the inevitable disappointment I imagined lurking around the next corner with an “I’m smarter than this anyway” shtick. That evaporated with my first big gig during Cibeles Madrid Fashion Week. No high-minded snobbery about being too smart for modeling could negate the fact I couldn’t even grasp simple directions. Sometimes I’ll leave acquaintances with the impression that I became an international sensation right away, because the truth makes me wince.

At rehearsal, although I felt strange and shy parading around, scar or no scar, I was confident about the task at hand—the task being, well, walking. I was a sharp girl. I considered myself well read and articulate. Sure, these were the days before models just had to walk in a straight line. And sure, the instructions were given in rapid-fire Spanish. But following the simple choreography—synchronized entrances and exits, a few turns and crosses—should’ve been a cinch. And yet for some reason, when all the other girls walked right, I walked left. When they walked left, I walked right. After an hour or two of my screwing up, the choreographer said I could leave
.
Phew,
I’m done rehearsing,
I thought. I needed to recoup. I’d come back the next day and show them how it was done. Nope, I soon found out. I could leave, as in leave and not come back.

When the semester ended, I left Madrid, returned to Worcester to walk for graduation, then moved back home to L.A. with boxes and boxes of stuff but no game plan. After my glamorous European stint, I was back
living inside the peach-colored confines of my old bedroom, sleeping on my mattress-and-box-spring-on-the-floor bed beside a bookcase filled with
Sophie’s Choice,
The Outsiders,
and
The Satanic Verses,
with its original red-bordered dust jacket.

I knew little about the modeling industry in the U.S., though I had seen a woman featured on the local news whenever there was a segment on models, which in L.A. was quite a lot. Her name was Nina Blanchard. I scribbled that down, then called 411 for the number. When I reached the receptionist for the Nina Blanchard Agency, she informed me they held regular open calls. I told my mom. “That’s great, Paddy,” she said, ever my booster. “If you want to go, you should go.”

The forty miles from my mother’s house in La Puente to Nina’s Beverly Hills office felt more like four thousand as I drove from my lower-middle-class suburb into mansion land. Clutching my slim portfolio and wearing a hideous dress with big white daisies, I walked right into the office and waited. After a young and smiling Frenchman named Philippe saw my photos, I met with Nina herself. This time I’d come prepared for my audition. I wore short sleeves to avoid the awkwardness of having to bring up the scar myself. And of course I shaved my legs.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Nina was the epitome of the iconic old-school Beverly Hills agent—the raspy voice, the Estée Lauder look, the commanding air. I always imagine her wearing a Chanel blazer with a big brooch. Nina, who passed away in 2010, was the Eileen Ford of the West Coast, the woman who made Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley, who launched the California blonde look. She was an institution.

She warned me that I wasn’t in Europe anymore. My scar could be a serious obstacle. But she was willing to represent me. I couldn’t have been more astounded if she had sprouted gossamer wings and pulled out a magic wand. My journey had begun. Elated, I planned to return to the agency after a two-week trip to New York.

Before my meeting with Nina, I had done a little homework and made ambitious plans to weasel my way into all the big modeling agencies in New York. I would be in the capital of advertising and fashion, roaming Madison and Seventh Avenues, so why not storm the offices of Eileen Ford, John Casablancas, and Wilhelmina? Nina advised me not to. I wasn’t ready, she told me. I obeyed. In those days, you had a “mother” agency who groomed you and helped you build your modeling book of tear sheets from magazine editorials, and then that agency sent you to other markets they thought you could work in. They placed you at a sister agency and shared the commission.

When I returned from the East Coast, I set off on a Friday for a meeting at Nina’s agency, this time with proud mom in tow, to meet the rest of the team and receive my marching orders. Nina wasn’t there that day, but her head of fashion, Jack somebody, was.

He explained gingerly that my scar was not exactly a draw for editors and casting directors. “We have to think of our bottom line,” he said, as my elation faded and dejection replaced it. Eleven minutes into my big meeting, I was headed back to the San Gabriel Valley. My mom was livid. “That scar is not your fault,” she said, with tears in her eyes. But any anger I might have felt took a backseat to my sense that modeling in Spain had all been a fairy tale. I couldn’t blame a modeling agency for being superficial. That was their business. All I understood was that in Spain, I was a woman, beautiful and confident. Back home, I was a young girl again, uneasy with herself, scarred, and brown.

I wallowed all weekend; then on Monday, as soon as I knew her office was open, I called Nina and explained what had happened. She said that she would keep her word, as I had kept mine while in the Big Apple. Nina fought with Jack. She was the owner, after all, and she ultimately took me on.

I wasn’t expecting to be on the cover of
Vogue,
but I’m not sure I under
stood that the jobs I’d get would be commercials. My first job was a Folgers commercial, shot in L.A. but for the French market. I played one of several coffee groupies, wild for a caffeine-drinkin’ man. For most of the day I sat around and chatted with the other models. They regaled me with stories. One had just done a video with Prince. Another went on about modeling in Europe—not “second-tier Europe,” as she condescendingly referred to Madrid, but in Paris and Milan. How fabulous it all seemed! After three days of essentially lounging around, I left with a really cool pair of jeans from the shoot and $3,600—
cash.
I had never seen so much at once. I folded up the bills and crammed the wad into my front pocket. One girl looked at the bulge with an eyebrow raised. “Why don’t you put it in your purse?” she asked. “Because I want it close to me,” I said. I liked the feel of it against my thigh.

Nina was a motherly presence in my life. When jobs or castings ended late, she’d insist that I stay the night in the spare room at her lavish Mission Revival–style villa in the Hollywood hills. She didn’t want me driving home late. I’d never seen a house like hers. I ogled the Spanish tile, the turrets, and the spiral staircase. Her stunning lawn had no curry leaf or kumquat trees, like my mom’s, but I remember taking note of the St. Augustine grass. Peter had had a gardening business when he first arrived in the U.S. and St. Augustine grass, he always said, was the most resilient.

When I had both an early-morning and a late-afternoon call, Nina would let me hang around the office instead of having to trek home only to trek back later. On those days I’d bring lunch in a little Igloo cooler and eat in the conference room. In an office full of lingerie ads and tape measures, I must have made for a strange sight hunched over a Tupperware filled with one of my college staples: Top Ramen stir-fried with curried flank steak. I’ve always felt like a truck driver trapped in the wrong body. Today, I eat straight from pans with my fingers. I overturn blenders, the dregs of sauces sliding slowly into my mouth. Home alone, I get in bed, perch a pizza box on my lap, and go at it, wiping my mouth on my sleeve.