Beauty and the beast of aging
ELLE MACPHERSON SAYS SHE IS AT EASE with turning 50 — ‘I feel better now than I’ve ever felt’
Elle Macpherson is wearing high heels, so she’s even taller than nature intended. Her hair, too, is long and cascades down her almost-elfin face in blond strands. She is an impressive sight, but the most extraordinary thing about it, surely, is that she turned 50 in March.
One of the original supermodels to emerge from the ’80s, Macpherson The Body turned the most famous physique on the planet into a brand. Her lingerie range, Elle Macpherson Intimates, has sold around the globe. She has also hosted — and been executive producer for — reality fashion shows on both sides of the Atlantic.
Still, it can’t have been easy for one of the world’s most desired women to reach her 50s.
“I don’t think beauty’s reserved for youth,” she says. “I think women today want to look good, they don’t want to look young. They want to feel good, they don’t want to behave like a teenager necessarily. My ambition has been to navigate this phase of my life with grace and I feel like I’m doing that. I see my priorities changing. I realize that this is a period where you can either go with it or it can be quite difficult.”
She speaks earnestly, sometimes as if she is talking about someone else. Can you imagine, she asks, what it would be like for someone who has spent their life in the public eye to realize suddenly that they don’t look the same as when they were 20?
But Macpherson is, she says, at ease. “I feel better now than I’ve ever felt. I look at pictures of myself when I was younger and I think, ‘God, I was so gorgeous there, but I didn’t feel it.’ Or, ‘Wow, I look so much better now.’ I was such a dork, and I can see insecurity written all over my face, trying to be something I wasn’t — even though at the time, I thought I was cool.”
Born in Sydney, Macpherson had what she describes as an easy, simple childhood. She swam every morning at 5:30 a.m., played netball and lists debating as one of her “greatest” school achievements. She was house captain, had lots of friends and loved school. “I was a leader,” she confirms.
Her parents separated when she was 10 and she moved between her father and mother. He was a sound engineer who started a shop in his garage and expanded into a chain of stores; she was a nurse, among other things, and was remarried to a lawyer.
Macpherson can trace herself through her “three” parents. “My stepfather taught me commitment, discipline, respect for the world and for difference of opinion. He taught me the importance of education. The things I learned through school have supported me all my life: methodical preparation; making lists. If I put the work in, usually the byproduct is a great result.”
Her mother taught her flexibility. “She went to where her heart was. Do what you love, love what you do. And then my dad was really savvy and entrepreneurial, he thought outside the box. He was a bit of a rebel and a hard worker.”
After winning a place to study law at a Sydney university — which one she can’t remember — Macpherson deferred and went to model in America. She launched a career in fashion and was married to her first husband, a photographer, at 21. She adorned the muchcoveted cover of Sports Illustrated a record five times — hence The Body — and, in 1986, Time magazine put her on its cover. But Macpherson wanted more. “I thought, ‘Why am I doing a calendar for Sports Illustrated? Every- body seems to like the pictures, why don’t I just make my own?’ ” And so she did. In 1989, when a small New Zealand company approached her to help it break into the Australian market, she cut herself in on the deal and created what would become Elle Macpherson Intimates. Elle Macpherson at 50 is a very different woman to the supermodel in her 20s. “I have done it all. I’m a girl from the ’80s — what do you think?! I went to Studio 54 and I met Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol and Diana Ross, and I hung out in that scene. It was very hedonistic, and there was the rise of the supermodel and the rise of Wall St. and it was very potent and intoxifying and fast-paced and exciting. I was a part of that movement and really indulged and enjoyed. And I was there 100 per cent.” Drugs and booze? She laughs. “Not for the last 11 years.”
Today, Macpherson seems a devoted mother. She and her second husband, Arpad Busson, the multimillionaire father of her two sons, separated in 2005 after nine years of marriage, and last year, she married the billionaire Jeffrey Soffer.
Macpherson is promoting an “alkalizing” food supplement, she helped develop with a London nutritionist whom she met in her late 40s, when she wasn’t feeling her best. “I was getting jet-lagged, my skin was really dry, I was not feeling motivated and I couldn’t sleep at night. I started putting weight on around my waist, which was unusual for me.”
Her supplement is, she says with no hint of irony, a “sort of a gift to other people.”
The fashion industry has been kind to Macpherson, so I’m not surprised when she sings its praises.
But when I ask about skinny models, she surprises me.
“I think you’ve got better questions than that one.” Really? “Yeah.” Why?
“I think that’s just one of those passé criticisms that don’t have a lot of merit or meaning. Jockeys are very small. And? Football players are really big. And? You have specialized body types for particular jobs.”
I cannot resist asking whether this unusual 50-year-old has had any work done. “On my house?” she replies and laughs. “It’s not really my thing. Quite clearly. Look at this face, it’s very natural.”
I ask for her biggest quality and fault. There’s a long pause. “I can’t think of a witty answer and it needs one. I don’t want to be too earnest.”