The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Model Beverly Johnson on still fighting the good fight at 67.
She was the first black model to make the cover of US Vogue and helped bring sexual predator Bill Cosby to justice. Now, aged 67, Beverly Johnson tells Bethan Holt about continuing her fight with a campaign to tackle racism in fashion
The headline of one article about ’70s supermodel Beverly Johnson reads: ‘Without Beverly Johnson, there would be no Iman, Naomi Campbell or Tyra Banks. Seriously.’ Although relatively unknown in the UK, she has long been hailed a trailblazer across the pond: the first black model to appear on the cover of US Vogue, in 1974, and a heroine of the civil rights movement following that debut. She has starred on over 500 magazine covers, battled eating disorders, partied with the Rolling Stones, starred in the movie Ashanti with Michael Caine, been declared a ‘supermodel legend’ by Oprah, created a business empire to rival Goop and made the decision to share her Me Too story in the battle to bring Bill Cosby to justice.
This summer, the 67-year-old was hoping to begin taking things a little easier. After eight years together, her boyfriend, investment banker Brian Maillian, had proposed (using his mother’s wedding ring) and she was beginning to settle into the idea of enjoying time with him and her daughter Anansa (from her second marriage, to music producer Danny Sims), 41, and her four young grandchildren.
Then the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis happened. Thanks to her boundary-breaking fashion achievement, Johnson was a woman who activists and journalists alike were looking to. ‘People had been calling me asking if I had anything to say, and I’m thinking, actually, no,’ Johnson tells me when I call her at her home in Palm Springs, which looks just like one of those glossy houses from Netflix’s Selling Sunset ,complete with sparkling turquoise pool and plush cream interiors.
It was when a statement to Vogue staff by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, was leaked that she decided she had to act, instead of being ‘glued to the TV watching this like everybody else’. In the memo, Wintour admitted that the magazine had failed to ‘elevate and give space’ to black creatives and had made ‘mistakes’ in ‘publishing images or stories that have been ‘hurtful or intolerant’. It’s a hurt that Johnson has felt personally, both at the hands of Wintour (who reportedly snubbed her at a party to celebrate Vogue’s centenary) and more widely during her career, which began during her university summer holidays in 1968. Indeed, she recently recalled how the pool of a five-star hotel was drained after she’d swum in it during a shoot. ‘Twenty years later, one of the models told me it was because of me,’ she told People magazine.
‘I didn’t just want to list off the complaints because we’d be here for days and days,’ she says of deciding what to do next. Instead, Maillian told her about the Rooney Rule in American football, whereby two ethnic minority candidates must be interviewed for every senior role in the sport – the policy helped to prompt a significant jump in the number of non-white coaches after it was introduced in the early 2000s and has since been adopted by the FA in England.
‘He said, either you call it the Beverly Johnson Rule or maybe they might call it the Condé Nast Rule or the Vogue Rule, it’s up to you. You claim it or you don’t,’ says Johnson with her gravelly glamorous drawl. ‘And I decided to claim it.’
In an article for The Washington Post, Johnson discussed her modelling experiences (‘My race limited me to significantly lower compensation than my white peers… I was reprimanded for requesting black photographers, make-up artists and hairstylists for photo shoots’) and proposed her rule: at least two black professionals should be interviewed for meaningful positions within Condé Nast, from executives to editorial positions. She also invited other companies in the fashion, beauty and media industries to take up this rule. Her suggestion was covered by outlets around the world, she spoke about it on NBC News and Good Morning America and took part in an online discus
‘I wanted to rise to the occasion because I realised what it meant to so many black people’
sion with Tina Knowles-lawson (mother of Beyoncé) about tackling racism. Far from easing into a quiet life, Beverly Johnson is back and more passionate than ever.
Johnson was born and brought up in Buffalo, New York; her mother was a nurse and her father a steelworker. She was, she says, quite cosseted from the worst of the race troubles. ‘I didn’t grow up in the South, and there was talk of race, and Martin Luther King, and hoses and whatever… but we were up north, we lived in an integrated neighbourhood,’ she says.
As a teen, Johnson was a competitive swimmer with aspirations to study law. ‘I wanted to be a Supreme Court lawyer,’ she remembers, with only the faintest glimmer of modelling as a possibility. ‘I remember seeing Twiggy on television one time and going, “Wow, she’s really skinny.”’
Modelling began as a summer job while she was reading criminal justice at Northwestern University in the early ’70s, but quickly turned into a full-time endeavour and Johnson became one of the biggest faces of the decade, despite what might seem like some quite crushing obstacles. The legendary model agent Eileen Ford declared Johnson ‘too fat’ the first time she met her, and Kodak didn’t make film that went dark enough to represent her shade of skin (never mind the photographers, hairdressers and make-up artists flummoxed by her non-white features).
But she admits that she was a little naive about the impact of being the first black woman on the cover of America’s biggest fashion magazine (African-american model Donyale Luna fronted British Vogue in 1966). ‘Sometimes you just have those goals that you’re working towards and you don’t really know everything about it. It wasn’t like, “I want to be the first black woman on the cover.” I didn’t know about that. I wanted to be on the cover of Vogue because that’s every model’s dream.
‘When it came out and everyone was asking, “How does it feel to be the first black model?” I was like, “Oh, I am? Give me a little time to think about this.” I was a 21-year-old kid thinking,
“I need to get with my friends and party, and now this really heavy duty is on me.” It really took me a while.
‘When you were a kid, you would think things are going to be better. You have this kind of innocence but that [Vogue cover] was the moment my innocence was replaced with this more mature reality, of really what America is doing, or was doing. I wanted to rise to the occasion because I realised what it meant to so many black people. And I didn’t want to let them down, or myself down.’
Now, such ‘firsts’ are celebrated with huge social-media fanfare – such as when Beyoncé was photographed by Tyler Mitchell for US Vogue in 2018, the first photographer of colour to shoot the title’s cover – but that wasn’t the case for Johnson.
‘At first, the white models didn’t speak to me and then the black models didn’t speak to me,’ Johnson recalls, suggesting that competition was so fierce among women carving careers for themselves that it was difficult to celebrate one another’s successes, though she has said that model Lauren Hutton always stuck up for her. ‘I was being hit by arrows from everywhere.’
Even so, that cover was really the start of a string of adventures that she describes in her 2015 memoir, The Face that Changed it All. These included Elizabeth Taylor loaning her the famous 69ct Taylor-burton diamond ring during a dinner party hosted by the designer Halston, giving skincare advice to Michael Jackson and having an affair with Mike Tyson, which saw him so enthralled by her that he rushed from winning a fight in Las Vegas to see her in New York (she wrote that she had promised, ‘If you win, I’ll give you some’). She also had a relationship with Chris Noth, best known as Sex and the City’s Big, for five years in the early ’90s (‘Bev is actually hilarious,’ he once said of her) and was married to Sims from 1977 to 1979 (after an earlier marriage to estate agent Billy Potter from 1971 to 1974).
And yet there has been a darker side to the fame. In 2014, Johnson was one of the women who spoke out against Bill Cosby. In an article for Vanity Fair, she said that Cosby had once attempted to drug her at his home. ‘As I thought of going public with what follows, a voice in my head kept whispering, “Black men have enough enemies out there already, they certainly don’t need someone like you… fanning the flames,”’ she wrote. In the article she reveals she was asked by Cosby to audition for The Cosby Show , he charmed her and ‘reeled’ her in with a series of meals at his home with her daughter.
On another visit, he offered her a cappuccino from which she took a few sips. ‘I was a top model during the ’70s, a period when drugs flowed at parties and photo shoots like bottled water at a health spa,’ she wrote. ‘I’d had my fun and experimented with my fair share of mood enhancers. I knew by the second sip of the drink Cosby had given me that I’d been drugged – and drugged good… My head became woozy, my speech