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- Oct 17, 2012
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‘Being on the cover of Vogue at 15 meant nothing to me,’ confesses Carmen Dell’Orefice. She doesn’t mean to sound ungrateful; it was more that she was baffled by it all.
‘I never really understood what it was they were looking at, what they saw in me,’ she shrugs. Whatever it was, she’s still very much in possession of it; Carmen has been modelling – albeit with a few brief attempts at retirement – for almost 70 years now.
At 13, she was spotted by the wife of a photographer, getting off a bus in her native New York City; the following year, she sat for Salvador Dalí – who gave her a painting in addition to the $7 she officially earned for modelling for him – before going on to work with the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century, including Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Richard Avedon.
And at an age when many of her contemporaries are long forgotten or sadly deceased, she is still fronting campaigns for luxury brands such as Rolex and walking the runway for Gaultier, Galliano and Mugler.
‘I’ve had more covers in the past 15 years than I had in all the years before that’
On a scorchingly hot summer’s day, we meet in the suitably elegant surroundings of the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s genteel Upper East Side, where the dining room is populated by ladies who lunch (and, it would seem, see the plastic surgeon with some frequency, too), and where Carmen is a regular. While in photographs she projects a haughty imperiousness, in person she is warm, charming and thoughtful, with passionately held opinions on politics and economics (‘I can’t talk about fashion,’ she says dismissively over the cobb salad and lemon sorbet).
She’s still incredibly striking: tall and slim, with her trademark silver hair tied back in a neat, low bun, high, smooth cheekbones and tight, firm skin – not a sagging inch of neck or jawline.
She openly admits to having enhanced her god-given bone structure with regular silicone injections for decades, and undergone a fearsome-sounding ‘medical dermabrasion’ almost 50 years ago to banish wrinkles and sun damage, but that is all she is willing to discuss until she writes her memoirs.
She refuses to be frail; in spite of a painful double-knee-replacement operation just three months ago, she wore high heels a few days after we meet, for her 82nd birthday.
But more than her looks and her impressively lengthy and illustrious career, it’s Carmen’s personal life that should surely have Hollywood scriptwriters salivating.
The only child of an Italian immigrant father and Hungarian mother, Carmen modelled initially only to help support both her impoverished parents, who lived apart but never divorced. She herself has been married three times: first, at 21, to Bill Miles, after five years of dating and three illegal abortions.
The couple eventually had a daughter, her only child, Laura, but Bill was unfaithful, so they divorced. At 28, she married the photographer Richard Heimann, but he left her soon after because he decided he wasn’t ready for marriage or bringing up another man’s child.
Her third marriage to Richard Kaplan, an architect, who she met in early 1963 and married later that year, fizzled out after 11 years.
‘You don’t have to like me, but I’m not going to please someone for the sake of their approval’
Outside matrimony, her lovers have been many, varied and not all entirely single, from the photographer Norman Parkinson to the US talk show host David Susskind and the multimillionaire Norman F Levy.
The latter introduced her to Bernie Madoff, who defrauded Carmen to the tune of several million dollars in his infamous Ponzi scheme.
‘Sure I might feel more secure with my little fortune at my disposal in my old age, but the loss of it doesn’t change who I am as I never changed my lifestyle,’ she reasons. ‘How many beds can I sleep in in one night? How many roofs over my head do I need? I don’t need that much.
Carmen in 1947 - this was her first Vogue cover
‘I do want to live every day though, rather than fear the inevitable.’ Certainly, nobody could ever accuse Carmen of a life half-lived…
My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had grown too tall, and had no muscle tone left. I tried a ballet class and couldn’t even do a plié without falling over. It was my first death.
I have an iMac and an iPad, but I can’t do texting – I have arthritis. Technology should serve us, rather than us serving it. If you think you don’t need something, you probably don’t.
I didn’t marry to have children. I married to have a relationship and I was blessed with one child. I was an only child, too – my mother was smarter than most women today; she just had
me. I nurtured my own daughter’s ambitions the best way I knew how [she was 22 when she had Laura, who is now 60]. Laura always knew that she was a wanted child; she got all of me and she still has me.
My mother taught me how to sew, how to upholster, how to cook, how to wallpaper, how to count the pennies. Our rent was $30 a month, and we’d often be a few dollars short, so at the end of the month, we would sometimes have to pawn the sewing machine, which was a tragedy.
As a model, I didn’t have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn’t full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn’t a cover-girl type. I’ve had more covers in the past 15 years than I had in all the years before that.
'I have an iMac and an iPad, but I can't do texting'
There’s no way I would have got to see so much of the world, with my humble background, without modelling. We were penniless and hungry for most of my youth. I washed the sheets in the bathtub in my bedroom and hung them out of the window on the clothes line, which in winter was difficult as the sheets would freeze and get stuck to the line.
These young models are taught to walk a certain way – it’s all about sex. There is a lack of refinement, there is no romance. Everything is a vulgar description of life – it is so sad.
It took me half my life to find satisfaction. I have been there for a while now, though I can’t pinpoint it exactly. And satisfied is the word. Happiness is a quiet indulgence I do on my own.
I never married unless I was in love. I am an incurable romantic. These days, everyone wants a formula, and a list – they want this, they want that, yadda yadda yadda. People today have their list of demands, and they miss connections, they miss empathy. Life is chemistry.
I was 16 when I fell in love with my first husband. He was 26 and had a young son from
a previous marriage. He was also in love with someone else, an older woman. I had little
self-esteem. Just because those men put me on the cover of Vogue, I didn’t have the insight about my own needs and desires to help my partners treat me the way I wanted to be treated. But we all tried. We just didn’t know how to stay together.
Dieting, or watching your figure, is not that complicated. You just have to have self-discipline, and understand what you have been given genetically. I always wanted to be smaller than I am; I’m a typical woman in that sense.
Left; Carmen in a fashion show on an aeroplane, 1955, right; and one of her early modelling cards
It took me half my life to understand who I was. How could I be true to anything when I didn’t know myself? I am able to be truer and truer with myself the older I get, but I am still a work in progress. You don’t have to like me, but I’m not going to please someone for the sake of their approval.
If a man has a relatively good experience with his mother growing up then, in some way, his subconscious will pick a partner who will do for him what his mother did. I am not talking about making their dinner, but emotional support. I love all men, because I have a need to mother them.
I always have a male friend, if I can find one who is suitable. If it doesn’t suit you to have one, that’s fine, but I always do.
My mother was very hands-on; so were the nuns at my school. If I didn’t learn my catechisms, I’d get physically punished by them.
Did I regret my abortions? Frankly, no. I got over Catholicism and guilt when I was eight. I made my
Holy Communion, but by the time I made my Confirmation, I had resolved that it was a crock. Women need to wake up. If the US rescinds Roe v Wade [the landmark 1973 decision by the US Supreme Court that effectively made abortion legal], women don’t realise what it will mean for the rest of their lives. And what it will cost the government, to deal with all those unwanted children dumped on society.
I live alone and enjoy doing most domestic things myself. I like living simply and cooking occasionally for small groups of friends.
I had double-knee-replacement surgery recently, and the doctor let me bring my video biographer – who is making a film about my life – into the operating room. He also came to the
dentist with me, and to see my dermatologist of 45 years, who does my silicone. I want to show the world what it is to be a so-called natural beauty.
I broke my nose on a diving board when I was a kid, and my first husband said: ‘I know the best doctor in the world and, for your 18th birthday, I’m going to give you a nose job.’ He didn’t like my nose. I’ve never told anyone that before.
