Lauren: the legend
The original supermodel, Lauren Hutton, 73, is still killing it. So what has 50 years in front of the camera taught her about love, her looks and the power of reinvention?
Lauren Hutton arrives at our shoot early and, boy, is she fierce. She won’t wear this and she won’t wear that. The stylist looks alarmed, the make-up artist is anxious and the photographer, who has flown himself 3,000 miles from New York to London just for the privilege of shooting her, is slogging it out to win her approval. Her first words to me don’t bode well either: ‘And what do you do?’
By the time the shoot ends, nine hours later, we’re all in love with her. We’re astounded by her energy, her work ethic and we’re hanging off her every word. Such is the allure of this endlessly inspiring 73-year-old supermodel.
‘I usually come in mean because I’m frightened, I just don’t know what I’ll be up against,’ confesses Hutton two days later when I’m invited to interview her at her friend’s house in Chelsea. ‘It’s hard because I come from a time when everyone was an artist at the top of their game. These days, I could end up on a shoot with 30 people, all staring at me and all talking and sometimes the photographer just leaves you to go look at his television set [digital monitor]. I can’t imagine that happening to the masters I worked with, it would’ve been the end of the world. And I don’t like to work with hair and make-up because they don’t seem
to know very much. Well, who can blame ’em? They’ve never had a senior wrinkle in their lives and, suddenly, they’re looking at me and I’ve got wrinkles through my eyebrows and everywhere else, you know, it’s a Minotaur’s maze. I don’t want to have to hurt their feelings, but I end up saying, “Hands off. Let me do this. We’re going into a labyrinth and I know it,” and I just hurt their feelings and they get sniffy.’
She is curled up on the sofa next to me, dressed in chinos and a bright green jumper from J Crew, not a scrap of make-up, hair loosely pinned back, flashing her trademark gap-tooth smile. She is astoundingly beautiful – wrinkles and all – but still, I can’t help wondering what kind of self-assurance it must take to continue to put herself in front of the camera (her latest campaign was for Calvin Klein, for which she posed in underwear) to be scrutinised like that in this youth-obsessed world – a world where 21-year-old models have nose jobs and cheek lifts – and to have never surrendered to even the most subtle surgery of any kind. ‘Are you kidding? A million times it’s occurred to me,’ she snaps back. ‘I’ve smoked and I’ve been on the equator six months of the year for most of my adult life, and that’s a tough sun. I’m a mass of polka dots and I really don’t like ’em,’ she says, lifting her sleeves,’ but that’s just the way it is. I’m not gonna go take ’em all off!’ So why does she still throw herself into modelling? ‘I keep telling myself it’s very important because it gives courage, especially to girls, it gives them some place to grow to. When I tell them my age, they get taller right in front of me, their eyes get bigger, they just get filled with spirit.’
Mary Laurence Hutton was born in 1943, in Charleston, South Carolina. She never really knew her father, Laurence – a writer and artist; her mother, Minnie, divorced him soon after the war and relocated. He died early, at 36, before his daughter had the opportunity to get to know him. ‘Never meeting my father was the most painful thing in my life,’ she has said, adding today, ‘but I was very lucky because he sent me letters from the day I was born.’ When her mother remarried, she left ‘proper and very prissy’ Charleston to live ‘in a swamp’ in Florida. She says it was a relief after the confines of Charleston, where stockings and a hat were required to go to the local grocers’, she was now tackling 6ft eastern diamondback rattlesnakes and alligators in the backyard. ‘It was great, my
‘I keep modelling because it gives courage to girls. When I tell them my age, they get taller, their eyes get bigger, they get filled with spirit’
stepfather taught me how to take care of myself in the woods and I was gone, outside, every time I could be… until my mother started having babies and I started taking care of them.’ She had three half-sisters to look after. ‘It certainly taught me to love, in a way I had not really known – my mother was very young when she had me – so it gave me a lot to care for and be responsible, and love like that.’ But helping to raise a family meant school took a back seat; she was 11 when she learned to read.
I wonder when she first got a sense of her beauty, and the power of it? ‘Not until I turned 18. Eight guys asked me out to the school dance and I said yes to all of them. I didn’t know you were supposed to choose one. Three huffed off and the others, we all became friends. That’s when I started realising that this was a potent, powerful and usable commodity!’
That summer, in 1961, she left for New York City to work as a bunny girl in the Playboy Club. ‘It was pretty fascinating. I remember seeing a lady walk in in a full-length sable with tennis shoes and thinking, wow! It was all vaguely scandalous for a Southern middle-class girl, wearing a bunny costume – at least adults thought so – and in those days, men, you just had to find ways to wriggle around them, duck’n’dive.’ Her pay cheque was $700 a week – ‘not too shabby for an 18-year-old girl’. After her three-month-stint there, she returned to school. ‘My mother had been to college, my father and stepfather, so it just didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t go too. Except I was having to pay for it.’ She landed in New Orleans
and went to Newcomb College, the ‘rather fancy’ women’s college of Tulane University, by day – and by night worked as a waitress on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. ‘It was fantastically interesting at the Al Hirt Club – the Mick Jagger of his day – we had Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce and all the jazz greats.’
Was it there that she was discovered as a model, I wonder? ‘I wasn’t discovered as a model,’ she raps back, ‘I discovered myself!’ In fact, when she arrived back in New York in the mid ’60s with $200 in her pocket, she answered an ad in the New York Times to be a house model at Christian Dior, which meant modelling the clothes for store buyers and New York’s wealthiest customers. There, she soon realised that the meagre $50 a week wouldn’t help with her life-long passion to travel the world. She heard that editorial models made more money, so she took herself around to all the agencies, shrewdly leaving the best till last. By the time she sat in front of the indomitable Eileen Ford of the Ford Agency, she had a portfolio. ‘And you know what she said? “Thank you, good bye.” But I was persistent and I saw a photo of her son at graduation and I name-dropped Newcomb College and her head snapped back. “You went to Sophie Newcomb?” she asked, and I said, “Yes m’am,” and she said, “Sit down.”’
That’s when she became Lauren Hutton. And soon after, the first go-to, all-american supermodel, working with the photographic greats – Richard Avedon, Irving Penn – and gracing hundreds of magazine covers and ad campaigns. The girl who was told to hide the gap in her teeth with mortician’s wax not only went on to make it her trademark, but in 1973 seized a contract with the beauty giant Revlon worth $250,000 a year (equivalent to $1,378,299 in 2017), then the largest ever contract in modelling history. ‘I really went into modelling for the money and to flex pussy power – that was a great
thing, I certainly learned a lot about that.’
Talking of pussy power, she must have been one hell of a man-magnet – all that beauty, vivacity, ready-and-up-for-anything – I wonder how she navigated her pursuers? ‘I was in love,’ she says simply, ‘and you’re just not interested in anybody else when your heart is taken.’ All she says of her late partner Robert Williamson, who died in 1997 and with whom she spent 27 years, is that ‘he had coke bottles for glasses, he was super-smart, an athlete scholar and he saved my life over and over… it sort of went bad at the end [Williamson is said to have squandered some $13 million of her money] but it doesn’t matter, it was worth every single second and penny, I’d do it all again in a minute.’
So there weren’t any adventures with her leading men? Naturally, Hollywood came calling and she starred in a clutch of movies, most notably the seminal 1980 film American Gigolo with Richard Gere, of whom she says: ‘Stars are always stars for a reason, it’s not an accident, it’s because they’re particularly bright in a lot of ways.’ Then she reels off a hilarious story about hunting down real-life gigolos with Gere in clubs in LA. ‘But we sure didn’t find any! Well, only gigolos for other guys.’ Eventually, the films dried up; she was 40 by this point. ‘That age was really the death for women... At 30 I was just starting to feel my oats, just starting to look good because I’d grown some brains and by 47 I realised I’d become invisible and women my age and above were supposed to hide ourselves.’
So, from her loft on the Bowery, she called every magazine editor she knew – and those she didn’t – and before long she was modelling more than she’d ever done and taking more risks. Indeed, the first time she posed nude, she was 61. Would she ever do it again? ‘No, I drew the line at 70,’ she laughs, adding with a sparkle, ‘I mean, I don’t know, it would take an awfully good photographer.’
Along the way, she got to travel – the kind of travel that involves living with Pygmies and Kung Bushmen and sleeping on the floor of dirt huts in Uganda. And what did she learn from her travels? ‘I learned that women are governors; they work hardest of all and have brains that think long-term to protect their children.’ Hutton has 14 godchildren but never had any of her own. ‘I always assumed I’d have children, but I’ve always known how much time they take to do a good job. My mother wasn’t grown up enough to understand that – a young girl in a world war, life changing everywhere – and I understand that, but I also know the toll it takes on a child. And don’t forget I wanted to see the world, and you can’t just drag ’em around with you.’ Her next adventure? She’s off to dive with great white sharks.
But that’s Lauren Hutton all over – fearless, intrepid, powerfully strong, go-getting and at times as complicated, vulnerable and insecure as the rest of us. What smacks you between the eyes is her openness and honesty – she reveals it all and, by god, it’s more than refreshing, it’s positively contagious. Young supermodel wannabes with your manufactured responses, your fear of originality and your Botox, take note! And as for any advice on embracing your age, she says this: ‘One of the reasons I lasted in modelling for so many years was because every time I came back from one of these great trips, I had a new face. I mean it. Whatever you live through, changes you, it goes inside and it makes you think differently and you wear it on your face. That’s why it’s so important for us to get out of our grooves. Whatever groove it is, get out there and find another.’
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I went into modelling to flex pussy power – I certainly learned a lot about that