‘Retire? Not as long as I can still do it ...’
’70s model Pat Cleveland tells Emily Cronin why she still has a lust for life
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-1960s and ’70s. “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, lightand 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 decadeslong hiatus and felt a sense of muscle memory at the heft of a paintbrush in her hand. Several of her abstract paintings and collages appear in an exhibition, 75 Works on Paper in London.
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 pen and ink sketches by the late illustrator Antonio Lopez 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 the New York City neighbourhood of Harlem to a white Swedish jazz saxophonist father and African-American 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 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 ’20s!” she hoots.
“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.”