Christy Turlington is getting a master's degree at Columbia and making a documentary on the risks of maternity in developing countries. Joan Juliet Buck meets the super role model.
Photographed by Alex Majoli.
Christy Turlington, described as the most beautiful thing that ever lived, an angelic being, a freak of nature, turned 40 last January. A careful reading of her face in photographs reveals the rare geometry of a diamond shape made up of clean facets. The sharply defined cheekbones slant down to a pointed chin; the full lips are two distinct planes set at a 140° angle; the huge eyes are lozenges tilted up toward narrow temples. When she was younger, to her horror, her nose sometimes looked as if it had been corrected; today you can see that it, too, is made up of the kinds of planes and facets that no doctor could hope to copy. Her enormous smile and brown eyes are Latina, from her Salvadoran mother. The height is from her Anglo father, the regal posture from yoga. Curious, idealistic, and practical, gifted with a sharp intellect and an exhaustive memory, she also has an appetite for hard work, routine, and discipline. She's evolved from a working emblem of perfection to the less glamorous role of improving the fate of mothers in the developing world.
She started modeling at fourteen and quickly became the twentieth-century embodiment of luminous grace. With Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista she formed a triumvirate of supermodels that defined the Lacroix-Versace-Avedon days of hyper colors, monster jewelry, huge poufy skirts. Christy was the good one. "That's a way I got attention. All I had to do as a model was be sweet and kind and a team player and hang up my clothes and I got accolades—how easy is that?"
She wasn't interested in what was easy. Early on, she became a dedicated convert to yoga. At 25 Turlington retired from modeling to go to New York University on a quest for structure and meaning. "You get somewhere, you learn one little thing, and you realize there's so much more." She set out to study art history but found herself looking at so many religious images that she thought she'd head for the source and transferred to comparative religion, to read Thomas Merton and Nietzsche, and study Islam, Judaism, and the East. "Going to the root of the commonalities between Abrahamic religions and Eastern philosophies, I saw the way they all evolved and how we are all connected. It was an awakening for me on so many levels." She likes focusing on the fundamentals—birth and death. "I am fascinated by those transitions that are so important and that we completely numb ourselves to."
In the apartment where she lives with her husband, the actor-director Ed Burns, and their two children, Grace and Finn, there is an early Madonna and Child on the bedroom wall and, on the terrace, a long plastic slide for the kids. The tipping point in Turlington's search for meaningful work came with the birth of her daughter, five years ago. It was a natural childbirth, with a complication easily dealt with in New York but one that, she found out, would have been fatal in many developing countries.
Turlington learned that more than half a million women die in childbirth every year, a figure that has changed little in 20 years, despite the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. "I also learned that 90 percent of those deaths are preventable." She asked the humanitarian organization CARE how she could help. "I didn't want to be an ambassador; I wanted to go deeper. They said, 'If you're interested in maternal health, we'll educate you.' " In 2005, CARE took her to El Salvador when she was six months pregnant with Finn. Afterward she could not forget the sight of pregnant women walking for miles in the heat to get access to clean water.
Right now she is studying for a master's degree in public health at Columbia University, working in a world of issues and acronyms. She's also making a film following mothers and the people who treat them in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Guatemala. Which is why, in May, she and her crew were in El Triunfo, a hot, dusty village for displaced indigenous people in Guatemala, filming as an obstetrician named Linda Valencia, eight months pregnant herself, attended to some 400 women in native dress and velvet turbans. Valencia took Pap smears by candlelight and fixed them on slides with hairspray.
The documentary No Woman, No Cry is scheduled to come out next year, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals. Her friend Dallas Brennan Rexer is producing, and Turlington is financing it herself. "I can talk about things that people in the field are afraid to bring up because their funding is tied to administrations and policy."
Turlington is passionate about the endless complexities of public health. "Now I'm 40 and getting this degree, I might be on the cusp of the career that I always wanted. Maternal deaths mean there are very serious things going on under the radar about women's status. There is aid for children, but without mothers, what are their chances of survival? International health-care reform is moving toward the American model, but it's broken. The United States ranks forty-first in maternal health. I think one of the reasons we're doing more Cesarean sections here is because that means more people in the delivery room, and the hospital can charge you for four days instead of two. It's all for profit and not about taking care of people."
Deborah Gordis, the director of the Mothers Matter program at CARE, who encouraged Turlington to go to Columbia, impressed by the "extraordinarily poised, very intellectually gifted young woman," asks, "How can someone who's been modeling since she was fourteen be such a mensch?"
Christy Turlington, five foot ten in jeans and flowered Steven Alan smock, hair pulled back and without makeup, sits down in my kitchen for lunch on a hot April day after a class at Columbia ("Advanced Topics in Reproductive Health") and before picking up Grace at school. She ate everything I put in front of her and downed a beer. Her yoga aura and her beauty had made me fear a New Age saint. She eats meat, likes the sun, drinks wine and beer, and calls pale vegetarians "veals." Though she exercises, between graduate school, the documentary, and her family, right now she's too overwhelmed for yoga.
She terminated her partnership with Puma for her line of yoga clothes, Nuala, in 2007, and with her natural beauty line, Sundari, in 2003. "There ended up being a lot of pressure for me to be the face of Sundari. As soon as I started selling it that way, I felt I was modeling for someone, and then it didn't feel pure to me, so I got turned off.
"I miss yoga, but yoga is much more than the physical postures. I believe what I am doing now is the most important yoga, which is service. Service is a fundamental part of being human. It's a potential that needs to be cultivated. People are always so concerned with what they might lose.…"
"But what you get back is so much more.…" I offer.
"Actually," says Turlington, "when people spin it that giving is the best drug—'It feels so good; just do it for that feeling'—it takes away from the beauty of it."
Christy Turlington, born in Danville, California, on January 2, 1969, was raised Catholic and describes herself as a progressive Catholic today. Her mother's father left El Salvador in the forties for political reasons, and María Elizabeth became Liz in Los Angeles. In the sixties she was a glamorous Pan Am flight attendant who married a divorced pilot, Dwain Turlington, moved to the Bay Area, and quickly had three daughters, Kelly, Christine, and Erin. The girls went to El Salvador to Liz's family in the summers, but they were never taught Spanish.
When Dwain was transferred to train pilots in Florida in 1979, the girls found themselves in another world: "In Danville, everyone was pretty much the same," says Turlington. "This was another nice suburban area, near Boca Raton, but a brutal police beating created outrage; there were race riots and curfews. The Mariel refugees were coming in from Cuba every day; there was a huge Hispanic community of Cubans, Colombians, Nicaraguans, and people from El Salvador, where the war was going on. My mom was very vague about it all. It made us wonder where we belonged—what was our culture? I was ten, and I thought, Ooh, maybe it's not so cool to be Spanish.…"
She was horseback riding at fourteen with her sister Kelly when a photographer asked to take their pictures.
He ordered them to "look bitchy."
She had barely seen a fashion magazine. "What does he mean, and why should we?" she wondered.
Soon she was modeling for now-defunct department stores and the Girl Scout catalog. "I had always been independent; I wanted to have my own stash if I got into trouble. My mom was a more traditional homemaker: I could tell my dad had some power over her, and I didn't want that."
After her father had a heart attack, the family moved back to Danville. "It was like going back to a village. My dad was unable to fly and was miserable; we were all miserable." Christy, when not modeling, took up with a bunch of skate punks and hung out in Berkeley doing drugs. At one point all three sisters ran away together and lived on the streets of San Francisco for weeks. "We are lucky to be alive. It was fun, though, and I never felt unsafe. Modeling saved me." The small tattoo of a rose that she got at the time has now been erased.
When she modeled in Europe at fifteen, her mother went with her. In Rome Christy bought porcelain dolls. "I'd be taking my body makeup off and soaking in a tub and trying to read a book I had for school, while Mom went out with the photographers. I remember being happy I had a mom who was cool to hang out with. It made me feel safe. One of the reasons I've been lucky in the business is that I had normalcy, I had family, I stayed in school—all of the things I didn't want at the time."
By sixteen, Christy was working almost exclusively for American Vogue. "I skipped that self-critical place that's dangerous for any teenager. I kind of figured, If Vogue thinks I look OK, I probably look OK. Working with Arthur Elgort, Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, I felt pretty confident in my day-to-day life."
In 1987 she moved to New York. "Right away I didn't like the identity of being a full-time model. The cliché of it! The clubs!" Calvin Klein immediately put her under exclusive contract for his perfume Eternity. "I didn't really have any good friends at that time, and I didn't use my sisters as the friends they could have been. I think there was a bit of jealousy. I was probably a little condescending to them at times; I was sort of the parental one. My income surpassed my dad's in my first year of modeling—and my dad made a good living. That puts you in a different place in your family, and the power dynamic shifts. I kind of liked the power in a weird way, but I was confused by it."
She had an older boyfriend for six years, and then spent six more with the actor Jason Patric. She met Ed Burns nine years ago in the Hamptons, at a concert. "There was something about Eddie that was completely good and healthy. He's such an optimist, a relaxed person who doesn't get stressed out. When things don't go the way I plan them, I get more abrupt, not the friendly, open me that the rest of the world sees. He's certainly seen all of my selves.… It's better to be known than loved. I mean known inside, deeply known. When somebody knows you, they know—it's not ephemeral, it's not a state or a stage." They broke up, came back together, and married in San Francisco in 2003. The family circle grows tighter as it expands: Her sister Kelly is now married to Ed's brother, Brian.
I met Turlington in the West Village one morning before a shoot with Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for Roberto Coin in an empty loft. Modeling is the only thing she calls work: "It's the only thing that pays me; everything else is school or volunteerism." She's always lived downtown, and it's clear she relishes the identities of wife, mother, student, local. She crossed the street to greet the painter Alex Katz.
Claudia Schiffer, I said, has a helicopter hangar full of clothes; what about Turlington? "I keep some clothes," she said. "When I had my town house on Eleventh Street, I had a basement made of cedar. I like it and I don't—you smell like a gerbil." She used to give her clothes to her sisters but stopped when they gave Azzedine Alaïas to consignment shops. "I think I got all that through my system; it was plenty for me. I didn't need to own everything. I'll buy a few things a year but not the trendiest, because I will never wear it beyond that one time; I can't justify that—honestly, I'd rather feed people."
In the makeup trailer on a side street, Oribe, an old friend, got to work on her hair and into the easy gossip of grooming. Turlington's hair was brushed back, scraped, blown; Oribe was full of stories: "Remember the Timex shoot?" "You as Brigitte Bardot?" "Penn, ah, Penn!" "The early retouchers!" "Arthur!" "Avedon!" Turlington held her face up for Lisa Butcher to dab on creams and powders. The multiple planes of her face were gently tinted, the eyes exaggerated, the olive cheeks buffed pink.
"Christy is a different kind of beauty," says Oribe. "There hasn't been another one like her, and she's smarter than a whip—there are so many gorgeous women that are not smart or witty and kind. She was this superclassy thing that was bigger than life, and a virgin."
"I think what you see," said Lisa Butcher, "is the physical manifestation of the niceness in her. Normally people that beautiful somehow look frightening, but with her there's something tender, so she feels very safe, and you feel safe."
Turlington sat on the bed in an evening gown, the twenty-first-century embodiment of luminous grace. "Now she's a beautiful, beautiful woman," said Butcher. "Adult women are much more fashionable at the moment."
On the CARE Web site, there is a photograph of a young Somali woman who looks like Turlington: wide-set almond eyes, straight nose, a well-defined mouth pursed in an echo of the slight frown. I showed it to her.
"Oh," she said, "my face is a dime a dozen in many parts of the world."
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