Pat Cleveland: the model who partied with Warhol, lived with Lagerfeld – and took on Vogue
In the late 60s, Pat Cleveland was one of the most popular models in New York, working with the best-known photographers: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Hiro. Yet she could not get on the cover of Vogue. The photographers “were all very upset”, she says, “because they’d shoot covers of me and sometimes the editors said: ‘Wow! This is the cover!’ Then they’d replace me with a caucasian girl. I just got fed up.”
She made a vow. “Why am I going to waste my time” in the US, she wondered, “when they don’t care about people of colour?” In 1971, she moved to France, promising not to return to the US until a black model was on the cover of US Vogue.
Paris was a promised land. She slept on the floor of one of Karl Lagerfeld’s apartments with fellow models Corey Tippin and Donna Jordan and the Vogue illustrators Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. She remembers the young (ish) Lagerfeld fondly: “He was like a muscle man at the time. He had this gym in his house, all mirrors and low black lighting and calla lilies.” The illustrators would sketch the models until midnight, when everyone got dressed up and went out to the nightclubs – Le Palace and Nuage.
In 1973, American and French designers were asked to compete in a legendary fashion show, the Battle of Versailles, held at the historic palace. French designers including Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy competed against Halston, Bill Blass and Anne Klein. The Americans showed their designs on a group of models that included 11 African Americans – which was unprecedented at the time – and unexpectedly emerged triumphant. “Black was popular,” says Cleveland. The mood among the models was comradely. “There were no catfights. It was like: ‘Hey, let’s get it!’ We had our routines – every time we went out, we thought we were the Folies-Bergère.”
The following year, the black model Beverly Johnson appeared on the cover of US Vogue. Cleveland was as good as her word. She returned to New York and began spending her nights at Studio 54.
In the 60s and 70s, she says, you had a choice. “It was like: are you gonna hang out with the hippies, who are all lying around in beanbag chairs with torn jeans and fuzzy hair? Or are you gonna comb your hair and go out at night and have mimosas and steak au poivre and dance with the Supremes?”
Mick Jagger was “one of the gang”. They dated, but rock star boyfriends were no big deal: “There was nobody else around. It’s not like you could go out shopping in a regular grocery store. You always had to shop at the specialty shop.”
One summer in Florida, Muhammad Ali proposed to her. “He was just a big, fluffy, teddy bear guy; shy and southern with nice, soft hair. He had this convertible Cadillac with two bodyguards sat in the front and he’d take me out driving. He’d always say stuff like: ‘OK, watch this!’ then drive to a poor area where all the people would recognise him, like: ‘Muhammad! Muhammad!’ He’d stand up and say: ‘Yeah, it’s me! You put your money on me and I’ll win for you.’” He would say this in a rhythm, like “hip-hop rhyming”, she says. “I think he started that.”
Ultimately, however, she and Ali were not simpatico. “One morning, he saw me in my bikini, jumped at me with a towel, wrapped it around me and says: ‘Well, if you’re gonna be my wife, you cannot wear that.’ I thought ‘Oooh, this is too strange for me!’”
Andy Warhol was also a friend and she was a regular for afternoon tea at Salvador Dalí’s. “I’d be sitting there posing like a little dog and he would never do a drawing. He’d just walk around the table looking at me.” Surely being a muse got tedious? “Oh no! I’m not the muse; they were my muses. I was watching and studying them.”
Cleveland had been painting since childhood and was educated at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan (alumni include Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and her lifelong friend Lopez). Most of the people she met were too busy looking at her to realise she was looking right back.
As a child in 50s Harlem, she had learned to stand apart. “I didn’t see anybody that looked like me, or was like me.” She was a girl of mixed heritage, growing up in an area that was diverse, but in some ways still segregated. “Sometimes I’d be in the Irish bar, or with my Jewish friend, then my Puerto Rican girlfriend would teach me Spanish, then on the corner, in the black neighbourhood, they’d be singing:‘Doowah, doo-wah …’”
Her father, a jazz saxophonist called Johnny Johnston, returned to his native Sweden shortly after Cleveland’s birth, leaving her to be raised by her mother and aunt. Her aunt was one of the black bohemians who had travelled to Europe years before, seeking freedom from prejudice, as her niece would years later. “My auntie worked in the opera house in Paris, making clothes and doing her dancing, and when she came to live with us she brought all these things. Everywhere you went was a creative mess of fabrics and paint and drums.” Dancers who worked with the renowned choreographer Katherine Dunham would come over to practise in Cleveland’s living room. “So there were always men, half-dressed, doing