‘Retire? Not as long as I can still do it…’
Pat Cleveland, the Seventies model, tells Emily Cronin why she still has a lust for life after all that partying
Pat Cleveland has a question for models today: Why walk down the runway when you could dance? “Oh, I love dancing. I’ve always felt that if you can move, then you should dance,” says Cleveland, the American fashion model who twirled, shimmied and shook her way down every fashion runway of note in the mid-sixties and Seventies. “The designer who made the clothes you’re wearing had to stay up at night thinking about how to make you look wonderful. Dancing and moving in that open space and walking toward that light [at the end of the runway], having a very spiritual, big moment where you just give yourself and all of your happiness to everyone around you – that’s beautiful.”
As she speaks, Cleveland is stretching and posing via a video call from her rural New Jersey home, in full view of the peacocks that prowl her backyard. At 67, she’s dancer-lithe, breathy and perpetually fascinated. And covered in paint. That’s because lately she’s spent most of her free time in her studio – a double-height, light- and plant-filled space – making art, accompanied by a paint-flecked dog and cat lounging on a pile of painter’s rags.
Her mother, Lady Bird Cleveland, was an artist, so she painted through her childhood. She took it up again in April after a decades-long hiatus and felt a sense of muscle memory at the heft of a paintbrush in her hand. “You grow up near an easel, you drink the watercolour paint, and then it’s in your DNA,” she says.
Several of her abstract paintings and collages appear in an exhibition,
75 Works on Paper, opening at London’s Beers gallery (beerslondon.com) on Friday.
She’s amassed quite the collection of work by other artists, too. Her studio walls are bedecked with gifts from friends, including a handful of energetic pen and ink sketches by the late illustrator Antonio Lopez (“he made everyone beautiful, just with one stroke”) and a smattering of Andy Warhols. One screen print of a dollar sign sits in an alcove outside her bedroom. “It was Christmas and we were all at Halston’s house. Halston had the habit of filling up a box with $100 bills and giving it to somebody for Christmas. Instead, Andy said, ‘You need money – here’s your present,’ and gave me this.”
Born in Harlem to a white Swedish jazz saxophonist father and Africanamerican artist mother, Cleveland was 14 when a Vogue editor spotted her waiting on a subway platform. She went on to attract the support and adulation of designers Stephen Burrows, Yves Saint Laurent, Zandra Rhodes and Halston, who dubbed her a “Halstonette”. Irving Penn, who she describes as “kind of an oddball – he would do Vogue all day but complain about it, saying he had to get out of the studio and photograph flowers” – photographed Cleveland with a gardenia behind her ear. She tells me she swam in the North Sea in winter for Guy Bourdin and posed on a parapet of the Chrysler Building for Thierry Mugler. And she was with Saint Laurent during a moment of inspiration. “He loved the girls in Pigalle. You know when he made that see-through top? We were in the car, riding along to eat some dinner, and he said, ‘Look at those girls. That’s my next collection’.”
She did it all, by the way, while dancing through a roster of the era’s eligible men (Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson included) at Studio 54 and Tenth Floor. Several decades later, she still looks in most of her pictures like the woman having the most fun at any party. Did it feel that way when she was in the thick of it? “Oh my god, it felt like the roaring Twenties!” she hoots. “There were so many changes – you felt like a butterfly that had a cocoon a million times instead of one. You just wrapped yourself up in it and went with the culture and danced your way through it and came out the other side.”
What made her heyday all the more remarkable was that it happened at all: when Cleveland was 16, career-making agent Eileen Ford sat her down and told her that there was “no work for coloured girls” and she would never make it. Cleveland’s subsequent move to Paris was partly politically motivated – she vowed not to return to New York until a black model featured on the cover of Vogue (Beverly Johnson did just that in August 1974). She’s now regarded as one of the first black supermodels. “Of course it’s still there,” she says of institutionalised racism, “but if people have a problem with people of colour, they have to get over it. It’s not good for business.”
Cleveland’s daughter Anna, 28, is a model too. In light of her own experiences “being chased around a studio by a photographer who wants to get a piece of the cookie,” Cleveland always accompanied Anna on go-sees and shoots when she was starting out. “My daughter never had those problems because I was with her,” she says.
Later today, she’ll head to Manhattan to see Anna and son Noel Van Ravenstein, 30, for a rare afternoon together before Anna flies to Mexico for a shoot (both are her children by Paul Van Ravenstein, but Anna uses the surname Cleveland professionally). “We’re all going to meet up in the city, eat cake and laugh.” It’s rare thanks to their busy schedules, Pat’s included: she has several paintings, an album (her single,
Tonight Josephine, about jazz-age dancer Josephine Baker, is on itunes now) and a poetry collection currently in the works.
“Some people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to give it up, I’m going to go retire.’ No! Why should you give up something you like to do when you can still do it? Until your last pinky doesn’t work, you should do something. Even if all you can do is make your little finger dance.” And then she does just that, humming a little do-be-do-be-do while it wiggles. “You have to use your senses to enjoy new things until it’s all over. Just keep blooming.”
‘She did it all while dancing through a roster of eligible men’