Transcript
CAROL ALT:
I'm Carol Alt. And today, we are in lovely downtown New York City. I grew up actually in College Point. I was totally not interested in fashion as a child. I was a tomboy. I was more interested in passing the football and getting on the hockey team. My mother was a showroom model. Even though she was a model herself, she no way could prepare me. I was actually in the Army, Army ROTC. I was going to Hofstra to study law, and I was working in a little steakhouse. This photographer walked in and said, "Oh, you know, you should be a model." And so many people had said that to me simply because I was 5-foot, 10. I walked into Elite, and John Casablanca said, a handshake deal is good enough for me. That was 1979 or '80.
Okay. This was my first cover. The first go-see I went on, they said to me, you look okay in European makeup, but what do you look like in American makeup? What's the difference? Does that look like European makeup? (LAUGH) Whatever. At the time that I was coming up as a high fashion model, the agency called me and said, you are overexposed. They're gonna get tired of you. You would never hear those words today. They said, well, if you'd like, we can maybe call Calvin [Klein] and Ralph [Lauren] and ask them if you could do some runway work for them. So, I did runway.
The first time I sat down in some guy's chair to have my hair and makeup done, he said, "So what are you gonna do after this?" I'm like, what do you mean after this? I (STAMMERS) I just started this, sir. I haven't even been working a year yet. And then the next time I sat down and somebody said, what are you gonna do after this? I started going, holy cow. Yeah, I was worried about my career ending, I said I want to do these posters. And I did five different shots. And they became top-selling posters. And from then on, it's been, if you're a supermodel, you have a poster.
And then from there, I was doing, I started to do movies, Anna Karenina, Sweet Charity, My First 40 Years. And from then on, they wrote movies for me. So I incorporated it early on in my business. Sometimes it was very difficult to do. My career was what it was because I was creative and eccentric and a maverick in a time when people weren't. Everything that I do I'm trying to communicate with the world around me.
Hi. My name is Carol Alt, and you've been watching Modelinia.
