Entertainment
Campbell: Model, Citizen
‘It’s Not Charismatic,’ Designer Says, ‘It’s More Powerful Than That’
By GUY TREBAY
New York Times
NEW YORK--“I have a past,” Naomi Campbell said one day last week.
“I’m not proud of my past, some of the circumstances I was in. I’ve said that a hundred times. But I admit to my past. I own it. I don’t deny it. Denial is a very bad thing.”
Some people receive a gold watch after 25 years on the job, but Naomi Campbell has already received all the bling a girl needs for one lifetime.
“I get gifts all the time,” she said in August in The Hague at the war crimes tribunal of the former Liberian dictator Charles G. Taylor.
“Sometimes in the middle of the night,” she added, “without knowing who they are from.”
It was the middle of one night 13 years ago that lackeys for Mr. Taylor, apparently, dropped off two or three “dirty-looking stones” to Miss Campbell.
Whether that gift of diamonds was sufficient evidence to link Mr. Taylor to charges of financing a murderous regime using conflict diamonds seemed briefly beside the point back then.
Anyway, it was narratively less compelling for one brief moment than the spectacle of a statuesque beauty wearing the sort of chaste ivory cardigan and tight sheath favored by bad girls in noir films, and an amulet to ward off the evil eye, taking the stand at The Hague and coolly hijacking an international news cycle otherwise caught up in two wars, a looming double-dip recession and biblical floods in Pakistan.
“Did you see her on the stand?” asked Bethann Hardison, the model agent, and a Vogue Italia editor, who has known Miss Campbell since the model was a baby-fat newcomer of 14.
“When they dragged her into court, she looked like the brown Lana Turner. It looked to me like The Hague needed promo.
“You bring Naomi in, you get that sensationalism. It’s very simple. The girl moves news.”
Like it or not--like Miss Campbell or not--there is an element of truth in Miss Hardison’s observations.
Unlike any other fashion model who comes to mind and also unlike most movie folks or politicians, Miss Campbell seems to possess the ineffable magnetism that, in the Hollywood era, might have been termed star power.
“It’s the same magic Elizabeth Taylor had and that Marilyn had,” said the designer Anna Sui. “You can’t help but be captivated by her. It’s not charisma. It’s more powerful than that.”
Miss Campbell’s appeal is bewitching, Miss Sui said, because she seems to “embody what a glamorous person is supposed to be, someone who knows everyone, who gets the loudest applause when she walks through a door.”
It is sentiment that Oprah Winfrey seemed to second when she remarked to Miss Campbell in a recent interview that “you’re projecting the image and the image is also who you are.”
Yet, asked to explain what it is about herself that makes not just her notorious antics and misdeeds, but also her everyday doings so fascinating that tabloids gin up headlines--as happened two weeks ago, from minutiae like her longstanding habit of carrying Pickapeppa hot sauce in her handbag wherever she goes--Miss Campbell demurred.
“Fame is not a good word for me,” she said. “I’ve always said, when you say I’m a role model, I don’t know what to be.
“I can tell you this much. For the people who are truly close to me that magic spell don’t work.
“Those are the people who tell me the truth and I need to hear that truth because it’s dangerous for me if I don’t.”
She is not an icon, she said; unless, of course, she is.
Miss Campbell is “an icon rather than a model,” the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana said this week in an e-mail response to a reporter’s query.
The two were explaining what motivated them to produce a series of limited-edition T-shirts celebrating Miss Campbell’s unlikely milestone, 25 years in a business that usually spits out spent talent after a couple of years.
The resulting $200 T-shirts go on sale at the Dolce & Gabbana boutique on Madison Avenue during Fashion’s Night Out and feature images of Miss Campbell shot by some of the biggest names in photography.
Among them are Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Klein, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel and the late Herb Ritts, who once pointed out to this reporter that the singular quality Miss Campbell brings to the profession is that “she really gives it her all.”
It certainly seems that way in the images Dolce & Gabbana selected, many of which highlight assets Miss Campbell has always considered her best: her legs and her behind. The shirts will be sold during a multi-city tour Miss Campbell plans to make with the designers from London to Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, and part of the proceeds from sales will benefit her charity, Fashion for Relief.
“People are always telling me I need to do more charity work,” said Miss Campbell, who, it is often forgotten, was a primary force behind successful benefits to raise belief funds after Hurricane Katrina and again after the devastating earthquake in Haiti last January.
“They say, ‘Oh, Angelina Jolie is doing it, she’s doing this and that,’ and, you know, great! God bless Angelina Jolie, doing all of this where people can see it,” Miss Campbell said.
“The charity work I do is not for people to see. It’s for me.”
Could this possibly be the same tabloid Naomi, the tempestuous sexpot with cocaine issues, anger-management issues, and a man-killer reputation in her past?
Is this the woman who once chucked cellphones at assistants, was fired by an agency on the ground that “no money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed,” and who was called by a Vanity Fair columnist the “biggest brat in the modeling business?”
Is this the diva whose pouting insolence flared briefly even at The Hague?
Giving testimony at the Taylor trial was an “inconvenience” to her, Miss Campbell said on the witness stand, later noting to the prosecutor that she could barely remember the diamonds in question, because, “I find, when I’m used to seeing diamonds, I’m used to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box.”
Is it possible, though, that approaching a professional quarter-century mark and middle age--her 40th birthday in May was celebrated at a lavish party organized by her billionaire boyfriend, Vladislav Doronin, in Cannes--have mellowed Miss Campbell?
“I used to fight everything,” she said. “I used to be, like, ‘Why am I in a restaurant and that person is staring at me?’ I used to put on a pair of glasses and a hat and then wonder, ‘How do they know it’s me?’
“That’s my irrationality.”
Now, she added: “I’m a recovering person in progress. Every rehabilitation program I’ve been in says the same thing: Getting past the denial is half the battle.
“Take responsibility for your actions. No matter who you are, a banker or a model or an aesthetician, if you don’t do that, you’ll find yourself living in an insanity world.”
