I didn't realize the cultural and historical significance of this cover until it hit the newsstands in August 1974. In Buffalo, where I grew up, I had trained as a competitive swimmer. In New York, I was a model with an athlete's mind-set. I had had other covers in the United States and abroad, but getting the cover of Vogue was the gold medal—I wanted to be number one. To be honest, I assumed Naomi Sims and Helen Williams had already been on the cover, so this was not a lofty or noble pursuit to break a barrier or create history, but simply a personal ambition. When Eileen Ford, my first agent, told me I'd never get it, I thought it was because I wasn't her top model, not because I was black. I left Ford and signed with Wilhelmina because she said she could get me the cover.
When the issue came out and all the media requests flooded in, including one from The New York Times Magazine, I had my awakening. I'd always been very lucky with my career. The only prejudice I was aware of was that the leading black magazines, Ebony and Essence, wouldn't put me on their covers at first, because I wasn't ethnic-looking enough. Now interviewers were asking me about prejudice, and I began to think about what my mother's and grandmother's generations had gone through—the cultural biases about beauty and style that wouldn't have made this possible for them. It made me angry. But it also inspired me and does to this day. I was lucky to have been part of something that gave generations of African-American women a sense of belonging that we did not have until then. With this privilege came responsibility. I've tried being a role model by focusing on health initiatives for women, especially African-American women, over the years.
The early seventies were an extraordinary time. We'd had the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, Watergate, Woodstock.... Some Vogue subscribers might have complained, but it didn't matter because the issue sold out so fast. The magazine was changing, too; it wasn't so much about the grand fashion fantasy it had been in the sixties as it was about the girl next door makes good.
I remember the shoot like it was yesterday. The fall clothes were beautiful, but it was so hot out, and these dogs were there as well. They were so bad, and the photographer, Francesco Scavullo, was afraid of them. In those days, before celebrity covers, models never knew if they had the cover until the magazine was published. You could get bumped. We did a cover try in the studio. Scavullo always said I had not been properly photographed until I met him. A lot of the photographers back then didn't have experience photographing women of color, but Scavullo and his team—the makeup artist Way Bandy and the hairdresser Suga—got me: my skin color, the texture, the tone, how to light me. I was paid the editorial day rate back then, around $100.
Just three years before, I was studying law at Northeastern University in Boston and working as a swimming instructor when one summer I lost my job. Some classmates suggested I stay with them in New York and try modeling. A woman at a dress shop in Buffalo had once written the name of a friend in Manhattan on a piece of paper, saying if I ever wanted to get into modeling, call her friend. I'd kept it. The friend was Korby Pleasant, the manager of the Jax boutique on Fifty-seventh Street. When you see photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on Capri wearing those great slim pants and T-shirts? They were from Jax. Korby got me an interview at Glamour. Against my father's wishes, I came to the city with my mother, my little white gloves, and my hair in a topknot, and met with the editors. Then Alexander Liberman—Condé Nast Publications' Editorial Director—appeared, calling all the shots, and by the end of the day I had my first assignment, with the photographer Frank Horvat on Fire Island during the summer of 1970. I'll never forget it. I was the only model, and I was so nervous. As the ferry got closer to Fire Island, I saw all these people dancing, and then closer, I saw they were all men dancing together. When we docked, they swept me up and I was dancing....
I left Boston and transferred to Brooklyn College, taking classes at night, although I never graduated—a regret. I worked by day at Jax selling clothes to people like Mrs. Onassis, who was the sweetest lady, and if I had a go-see, Korby would not just let me go, she'd dress me. So many people helped me, like the hairdresser James Farabee, who introduced me to Greta Garbo. I studied her poses, learned about opera and the theater. When I was sent to Irving Penn to model a hat, I had a sense of what I wanted to do. Soon I was consumed with modeling, but I still found time to go out to places like Le Jardin disco. I had married in 1971, so I always had a stabilizing base.
One morning Wilhelmina telephoned me. "Beverly, you got it!"
"Got what?"
"The Vogue cover! You're on the newsstand!"
I put my clothes on as fast as I could and ran blocks to the nearest kiosk, at Forty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. There it was, and it was gorgeous—by which I mean it represented me in a way I wanted to be seen: natural, not too trendy, friendly. I couldn't believe it! People were lining up to buy their morning paper, and I got in line. When I got to the cashier with the magazine in my hand, I realized I had left my money at home.
"This is me, this is me!" I exclaimed.
The cashier gave me a New York look. "Pay up, sweetheart."
I promised I'd return with the money.
"Honey," he said, "if that was really you, you'd be able to afford the magazine."
I had to put it back.
I used to have a copy next to my bed. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, turn the lights on, and look to see if me on the cover was true or not. When I found that it was, I turned off the lights and could go back to sleep.—AS TOLD TO WILLIAM NORWICH
