Woman of a Certain Agelessness
Cheryl Tiegs is wearing her favorite color--blue.
“It’s always been a good color for me,” she says, true to her words, looking fresh and natural, every bit the prototypical California girl that has made her a quintessential supermodel. Here, in her spacious Bel-Air home, decorated in a Balinese motif with natural woods and warm browns, Tiegs is a chic image of So Cal cool in a blue V-neck sweater and jeans, her blue eyes sparkling and blond hair framing that world-famous face born in Alhambra 53 years ago.
Blue also is the color for baby boys, in this case her 5-month-old fraternal twins, Jaden and Theo. Tiegs and her husband of 2 1/2 years, yoga guru Rod Stryker, enlisted a surrogate mother after the couple spent more than a year trying to conceive on their own.
Tiegs, at an age when most mothers are tending an empty nest, dotes on the twins and manages mom demands from her 9-year-old son, Zack, from her previous marriage to writer-producer Tony Peck, son of Gregory Peck. The roles of mother, wife and businesswoman--she’s busily hawking her wigs for Revlon, designing a sportswear line and involved in other ventures--suit her just fine, thank you.
Now she also can add icon to the accomplishments of her model life. On Wednesday night, Tiegs, in Harry Winston jewels and a Nicole Miller metallic corset top and evening skirt, accepted the first MAC Fashion Icon Award from the cosmetic company at a gala event that also honored Miller.
As Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” played, Tiegs walked onstage to accept the award, and with all the charm of a fashion star, thanked the crowd of about 750 people gathered at the California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s fund-raiser at the Regent Beverly Wilshire.
“As a young girl, I used to see Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy fly across the pages in magazines,” she told the crowd, explaining that she’d go into her bedroom and pretend to be a model. Her fantasy, of course, later became “a dream come true. I have been in the business for many, many years. I love this profession because it’s a business full of dreamers and people who inspire others.”
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Days earlier, at her home, Tiegs talked about the award that the MAC--Makeup, Art and Cosmetics--company plans to present annually. She’s sitting in a room she calls “the Great Room” under its high cathedral-like ceiling. “That’s where Rod and I got married,” says Tiegs, pointing to the middle of the room, where four floor-to-ceiling steel beams form a perfect square. Her office is in a cozy corner. African art books fill bookcases. On a coffee table in front of her are six massive scrapbooks, their pages filled with keepsakes and photos from grade school to magazine covers.
At 17, Tiegs made the cover of Glamour. Time magazine proclaimed her the All-American model at 31, an age when most models near the end of their careers. In 1996, she appeared for the fourth time in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. Tiegs and her babies are splashed on the cover of this month’s More magazine.
Not one to have plastic surgery, Tiegs doesn’t hide her few wrinkles. She looks fabulously fit and effortlessly youthful, which begs the question: Does being recognized as an icon make her feel, well, older?
Tiegs fires back: “Nothing makes me feel older. Only I know all of the years of insecurity and the hard work that have gone into what I’ve done. I’ve been in the business for so, so long. And to be honored for that is really amazing to me.”
She says her goal at the start of her career “was to go as far as I could and to do as much as I could. Did I want to wake up every single morning and go to work? No. But I was always grateful every single day. I was being paid a lot of money to do something that I enjoyed doing.
“It’s a huge word--icon. When I got the phone call about the honor, I thought, ‘Oh well, yes. I’m thrilled. Thank you very much,’ ” she says. “I hung up the phone and then it started to sink in . . . I’m just honored that they know I’m alive,” Tiegs says, laughing, her hands cupped on her creamy-smooth cheeks.
John Demsey, MAC president, is very much aware that Tiegs is among the living. “I had her poster up in my room when I was in college,” says Demsey on his cell phone from New York. “When you think back to the women of the 1970s and ‘80s who established a look, an attitude, a presence, Cheryl was omnipresent. She broke the ground before anyone else did for that healthy-looking California girl. That’s what makes her an icon.”
Appreciative of the recognition, Tiegs simply says, “I’m an Alhambra girl. I was a pompom girl for the Alhambra Moors.” She led the songs at football games. She played the violin to please her parents and participated in several all-city orchestras composed of the best student musicians. “But I hated it. The day that I finished high school I put that violin away and never touched it again.”
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She pretty much knew even as a young girl that one day she’d be a model, even though she never owned more than three dresses at a time. “We lived from paycheck to paycheck. My father was a mortician and my mother worked in a flower shop.”
“I remember in high school how I really loved to see the pages of Vogue magazine and thinking, ‘I can do that.’ And then I went and did it, which is amazing to me. Fashion and modeling have been wonderful to me. I hear about these girls who complain about modeling or the fashion business and my jaw drops.”
Tiegs says her big modeling break happened as a high school senior, when she posed in a swimsuit ad for Cole of California, a manufacturer of bathing suits. The ad appeared in Seventeen magazine.
“The people at Glamour saw that ad and they said, ‘We want to book that girl,’ ” she says. “So sight unseen they booked me on a trip to St. Thomas along with Ali MacGraw.” And Tiegs landed her first Glamour cover.
“That was my big, big break with national magazines.” There would be other covers, and inside spreads in Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and People. It was the Time cover that catapulted her to celebrity status. “In those years, you have to remember models were unknown. People didn’t know their names like they do today. They just saw my face year after year after year and they didn’t know anything about me. Now they could read about the face. It definitely changed my life.
“Not to sound like Joe DiMaggio, but at that time I broke a record for modeling fees when I asked for $2,500 a day. People were, ‘Oh my God, can she get it? Will she get it?’ No other girl had done that,” she recalls, adding that talking about the past isn’t something she does very often because “first of all, I’m very much a person who lives in the moment.”
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These days, that includes double diaper changes and feedings for her babies, which she manages with live-in help and visits from relatives.
“Having the babies seems to fit into my lifestyle right now,” she says. “I married someone 10 years younger than I am who wanted a family. So it came down to a question of, why not do it? You have to remember that I traveled the world and lived out of a suitcase in my 20s, 30s and even in my early 40s, and didn’t have children.”
Tiegs says she’s determined to juggle motherhood with her many business ventures, including more modeling. She realizes that the business has changed--models have more perks, money and pressure to be rail-thin and update their image. “I didn”t allow people to change my image. It’s not as if I was one person in real life and then another person on the pages of the magazines.”
She holds no grudge with modeling’s preoccupation with youth. “I don’t think we can take away the beauty of youth. It’s great to look at. But I also think people are beginning to appreciate beauty of all ages, and there are certainly models for that. I think especially with the baby boomers, they want to see somebody they can relate to.”
The last time she did Sports Illustrated, “I was 40-something,” she says. “But you know, I think I could do SI today. They should use me.”
There are no boundaries for women today, she says. “I remember years ago women of a certain age had to wear a longer skirt or when they reached 40 they had to cut their hair short, above their shoulders. Today there are no rules. Women are making their own rules. At least, I know I am.”
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