Ugly Truths Behind Some Model Images

WASHINGTON — On the cover of January’s Mademoiselle, model Niki Taylor sports a knowing look, big teeth and straight blond hair blowing away from her perfect face. In a tied-up sweater over a white shirt, she looks like a confident, thirtysomething career woman.

On the cover of this month’s Cosmo, she’s doing the ‘50s Love-Goddess thing: Hair flowing out of a tousled topknot, ample cleavage riding high, Bardot-style, in a tight dress next to the caption, “Why Can’t a Woman Make Love Like a Man?”

My high school-senior baby-sitter, Jamilah, was perusing the magazines when I asked how old she thought the cover girl was.

“Thirty--at least,” she said.

Niki Taylor is 17. Just like Jamilah.

Niki, bless her, is, “just trying to be regular,” according to Cosmo--which means as normal as any teen-ager who makes several thousand smackers a day can be. According to Cosmo and Seventeen--she’s on its cover too--Niki likes Coke, chewing gum and scuba diving, is insisting on finishing high school in her Miami hometown and even wore a dress her mom made to homecoming.

Great. My gripe is with the folks--mostly women--who put her on the covers.

Not that it isn’t old, old hat for New York modeling agencies to take a fresh-faced girl and to apply paint, powder and a push-up bra, ending up with someone who’s the image of the jet-set sophisticate who knows her way around a bottle of Dom Perignon.

So why don’t they pick on someone old enough to order a drink? Or at least to vote?

Did I mention that Niki shares the Seventeen cover with her sister, Krissy, with whom she has modeled in runway shows in Milan? Model Krissy, who Seventeen says favors Pepsi and “short, tight and sexy” clothes, is 14.

There are thousands of drop-dead women of the advanced ages of, say, 19 and beyond whose faces and bodies haven’t caved in to the point where they can’t hold their own with a Nikon. Why can’t magazines limit themselves to them?

Because they’re hooked on newness. And because magazines, like other sources of pop thrill, are heavy into illusion. If the latest girl with great bones happens to be 15, great--she may be good for an extra few years. If she can be made to look like Marla Maples’s big sister, why not? She can still be a nice girl.

As a fashion writer eight years ago, I met many models--and never ceased to be amazed at how these paragons of beauty were worse than most women in worrying about their weight, age and whether anyone would take them seriously.

I learned something else: Mostly, modeling stinks.

You wouldn’t think so, the way certain media carry on about the comings and goings of whoever owns the “happening” face. According to them, the lives of current favorites Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell are filled with glamour and money, fun and satisfaction--just like those of the superstar models who preceded them.

Cash and glamour, certainly. Fun and satisfaction? Listen to the ugly truth told to Elizabeth Sporkin, of People magazine, by former hot faces--we’re talking 2,000 magazine covers between them--Beverly Johnson, Carol Alt and Kim Alexis. Now in their 30s, they’re ancient enough to tell a truth all those early-’80s party-hearty-at-Studio 54 snapshots never hinted.

“One night . . . I was eating only a head of lettuce for dinner,” recalls Alexis, whose “diets” made her lose her period for two years. “Kelly (Emberg, also a model) walked in and said, ‘You’re eating a whole head of lettuce?’ ”

At one point, recalls Alt, “I was drinking eight cups of coffee a day and ate salad for dinner. . . . On my first modeling job, I fainted.”

“I ate nothing. I mean nothing,” says Johnson, whose battles with anorexia and bulimia led her to Overeaters Anonymous and a thyroid problem. “From the moment I started modeling at 17 . . . I thought that the next 16-year-old girl . . . would be better than me.”

OK, so they abused their bodies to lose weight--just like millions of women brainwashed, ironically, by photos of smiling-but-suffering mannequins. There’s more:

“I remember feeling so . . . depressed. . . . I had no personal life. I was always flying someplace--weekends, holidays, vacations.”

Still, they got paid--fabulously. But saying that abusing your body and psyche is OK for a fat paycheck sounds dangerously close to defending prostitution.

One more thing: Johnson cites how “unfair” it is that “one of these days my (teen-age) daughter will be in Vogue magazine, she will weigh 105 pounds and pose in a dress that a 35-year-old woman then will want to buy.”

Just like Niki in Mademoiselle. But what burns me most is that the covers and fashion pages of the same magazines that run helpful, well-researched articles about women’s eating disorders, that burble about the importance of self-esteem and loving ourselves “just as we are” are among the worst perpetrators of this nonsense.

All of which adds to the obscenity of a grown woman journalist--most major fashion mags now have female editors in chief--using a 17-year-old girl to peddle an image ill-suited to a healthy teen-ager. An image that impressionable girls are certain to see and learn all the wrong lessons from.

But hey, Niki is normal. Happy. I hope so.

However, 10 or 12 years from now, I won’t be surprised if she’s airing some ugly truths of her own. Because you can’t always believe what you read.

But so often, we do. We do.