In preparation for the test shots, my mother had rolled my hair in rag curls the night before, and the lumpy twisted rags felt like steel rods between the pillow and my head and made it impossible to sleep. This method of curling the hair was really unpredictable because often one section refused to curl at all and so the “naturally curly, I can’t help it, I just woke up this way” look became the “I hate my straight, limp hair and so does my mother, who spent all night curling it in rags” look. On top of that, the rags had stray threads of cotton that would snag in my hair, and prying them out gave other sections an Afro-like frizz. I knew I had done the wrong thing by curling my hair the minute I walked in the door. The hairstylist grabbed my hairsprayed ringlets and proceeded to lecture me on how I should go to every job with clean, unstyled hair. As a twelve-year-old it never occurred to me I may have insulted him by doing my own hair. I was just avoiding what I thought would be an instant cancelation of the shoot if the photographer saw that I had just ordinary, limp, straight hair and, as a consequence, wasn’t worthy of his time. I felt like I’d bullshitted my way into making the modeling agency take me in the first place and that my hair was going to expose me for the fake I really was. Luckily, my hair and makeup were done before the photographer arrived, so my real identity, with my ugly hair and my red, blotchy skin, remained undiscovered.
The photographer was a sluggish, heavy-set man whose droopy eyes accidentally registered me as he was glancing around the studio looking for something of interest—like a light or an assistant. After several hours of ordering and eating lunch, tweaking lights, and touching up my makeup, I began the actual modeling part of the photo shoot tired and wilted, and spent several more hours in that sweltering hot studio shooting the three different looks. For $1,400 I got a close-up wearing a jean jacket and a beret, a ridiculous jumping-up-and-down photo on a mini trampoline wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a more grown-up look in a skintight black dress with a black plastic trash bag on my head scrunched into an abstract shape. The latter, I was told, was high-fashion, avant-garde.
Although the photos turned out to be something that I showed anyone who cared to look at them, the experience of taking them was horrible. No matter which pose I struck for him, he had a correction, each more embarrassing to me than the last. “Don’t jut your hip out like that, stand normally. Chin down, relax your mouth, open your eyes.” He yelled his orders at me all day, demanding that I change what I was doing, chipping away at my joy and confidence with each command. By the end of the shoot, I had stopped attempting to inject my personality into the pictures. Instead I was like a scared puppy that sees its master and automatically rolls over because it knows that’s the one thing it can do to avoid a beating. I left the shoot feeling tired, anxious, and insecure, but because my mother had paid for it and taken another day off work to act as my chauffeur/chaperone, I felt I couldn’t tell her the truth of how the photo shoot made me feel. So I lied and told her that I was excited about my new career.
On the way back to Geelong from the big city, we stopped at McDonald’s. I held her hand as we stood in the “order here” line among other twelve-year-olds and their mothers. I stuffed myself with cheeseburgers, French fries, and a vanilla milk shake. And for the first time since the start of my career as a model, I was happy. Stopping at McDonald’s became a ritual for my mother and me after a go-see or a modeling job. It was a midway point between the big city and the smaller bay city where I lived, and it became the midway point between the person I was and the person I was pretending to be. I sat down to eat as a child, but talked about my exciting day at work like an adult. For that one moment, I let it all go and my mother watched me without judgment or concern. I’d passed the test, and food was my reward. I’d pretended to be an adult, and going back to who I really was, a child excited to be at McDonald’s, was my prize for being such a good pretender.
The only problem was that I couldn’t stop rewarding myself. Returning to regular school life, I started to gain a little weight. I don’t know why exactly, but I just couldn’t stop eating. After my first photo shoot, eating seemed to be a huge comfort to me, and so every day after school, my friend Fiona and I would walk to the local supermarket to buy potato chips and candy. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, I knew I should be working out and trying to stay skinny for a potential modeling job that could happen at any moment, but eating just felt so good. My friend was a year older than me, and she told me that when I got to thirteen, my body would start changing, that I would hit puberty and get my period and get fat. Because she was older and knew more than I did, and because she had definitely gotten fatter since turning thirteen, I had no reason to doubt her, and so the inevitability of my weight gain made me think depriving myself of eating candy was futile. If it was going to happen anyway, I might as well make myself feel less anxious about it by soothing my nerves with a bag of potato chips. But I knew it was wrong. I knew my mother couldn’t see me doing it. She’d just lent me thousands of dollars to get my modeling portfolio with the proviso that I would model my way out of debt. No one would hire me in this condition. I weighed 120 pounds!
After four long weeks, I received a call from the Modeling World. My agency was hosting a runway show in Melbourne with a local designer so they both could show off their wares to the fashion industry. They asked me to walk in the show, which would take place in a nightclub, and the event was only five days away. I felt no excitement, just panic. I dreaded the fashion show and I hated myself for getting so fat. I was nervous about being on a catwalk in front of the fashion industry anyway, much less modeling clothes that might show them all the reasons not to hire me—my big hips, my bulky calves, my fat stomach. To be perfectly honest, after my experience with the test shots, I would’ve been happy if I’d never gotten hired to model. I had the glamorous pictures to prove that I was pretty, and a story to tell of what it was like to be a model while never having to admit how terribly insecure modeling made me feel. Proving that I could do it if I wanted to but not actually having to keep proving it over and over again would’ve been perfect. The only thing between me and this plan was my ego with its inflexible stance on failure. The embarrassment of failure was too much for me to bear. I’d already told everyone that I was a model, I’d convinced an agency that I had what it took to be a success, and, of course, I couldn’t disappoint my mother. The only thing standing in the way of devastating embarrassment and success and admiration was a Cadbury Caramello Bar. There was no other option but to starve myself for the five days and hope that I could at least lose the five additional pounds I’d gained in the last two weeks.
Not eating is pretty easy when you have a gun to your head. I just needed those five pounds off for the fashion show, and then after that I’d eat salads and I’d never again eat junk food. After this stupid, extreme diet, I was going to work out every day and never have to starve myself again to get ready for a job. It was all about being ready, being prepared. As I had discovered, 90 percent of my nerves and feelings of insecurity came from being underprepared—whether I hadn’t studied enough for a test or trained enough for ballet exam—most of my feelings of terror would go away when I felt I knew the answer to every conceivable question. Modeling would be no different. If the question was, “Will you look good in this tiny bathing suit at any angle?” then my answer would be, “Yes.” It was that simple.
My mother, a dieter from way back, approved of this quick-fix plan not only to get me ready for the show but also to shut me up. Unfortunately, when I was nervous, I’d cry a lot. I’d wail and howl and stomp around the house moaning about how stupid I was and how I was doomed for a life of failure and mediocrity. My plan to starve myself, although not the healthiest plan, was a one-time Band-Aid that was better than the wailing, and so she reluctantly taught me a couple of her dieting tricks. Mostly they consisted of caffeinated beverages without milk, Ryvita crackers with beets and steamed vegetables. Oil, butter, dressings—everything that made food taste good—were out. Dry was in. And so I embarked on my first diet, wanting desperately to succeed as a good dieter and to get this situation behind me.