Sante D’Orazio/CORBIS Outline
|
Walk on the Wild Side
By Martha Sherrill, November-December 2003
For Lauren Hutton big risks make life worth living. Just don’t mess with her sharks
|
She's a voice before she's a face. And that voice likes talking, yelling, shouting—and going on about Charles Darwin, Pygmies, whale sharks, and the technology of orgasm. Actually, almost anything is possible with Lauren Hutton. Anything. She turns out to be a rampant, rambling, hilarious troublemaker. (Did we know that already?) And at this precise moment, she's blasting outrageous remarks like cannonballs into her hollow new office space in New York's Soho district.
"Testosterone!" she's shouting, with a certain amount of exasperation—and perilously close to top volume.
"Testosterone!!"
Sitting at her disheveled desk—from which she runs her new makeup line for older women—Hutton looks pretty uncollected herself. She's wearing a hip-hugging yellow skirt, Adidas running shoes, and a powder blue cardigan that's unbuttoned enough to reveal a rumpled silk camisole beneath. Her hair is messy. Her nails haven't seen a manicure in weeks, and she is deeply tan. To top everything off, the world's most enduringly beautiful model is working out a theory about why women need to take over the world and keep "the boys" from blowing everything up.
"I'm not against bombing," she demurs, while stirring Equal into a glass of iced tea with a pair of scissors. She flashes a wicked—and quite famous—smile. "In fact, I can give them a list of places to go next. Like Taiwan."
She's not talking about geopolitics—she's talking about sharks. Hutton is given to diatribes in her husky Southern drawl—this one is about how the craze for shark fin soup in Taiwan and other East Asian countries is depleting the world's population of hammerheads and whale sharks, among other species. But for sanity's sake, let's stay focused on the main preoccupation of her morning: the biological purpose of men.
"They're doing what they were meant to do—patrolling the borders, protecting the house," she says. "Men have vision. They build bridges. We'd still be sitting at the edge of the river without them. But two thousand years of second-class citizenship is enough! Enough!"
You're never in one place for long when you are talking to Lauren Hutton. You're in a tiny prop plane, flying over the Kalahari Desert. You're walking the souk in Tangier, diving in Belize (where she got that tan), dogsledding in the farthest reaches of Sweden. For the last four decades, Hutton has spent six months of each year on the road, seeking out places where nobody else goes. "After two months of modeling, my smile would die. I'd become an automaton," she says. Then she'd run off to play, as she puts it, "and when I came back, I had something to put into that black box again."
"Two months on, two months off," she says. "That's how I've lived for years."
She has hung out with nine different hunter-and-gatherer tribes. ("Everything important that I've learned about life, I've learned from them.") She's been trekking in Micronesia, motorcycling in Russia. A lifelong natural-history junkie—as a girl growing up in Tampa, Florida, she loved flowers and kept bugs as pets, according to her aunt, Coralie Feurtado—Hutton has become an amateur expert on sharks, often taking month-long trips to dive with them. "I really don't like diving without sharks," she says. "I mean, if you're diving and there aren't sharks, it's just kindergarten."
Cocos Island in the Pacific Ocean is one of her favorite hideouts, where she swims alongside schools of hammerhead sharks. Getting there requires a flight to Costa Rica and then a 37-hour boat ride. "A very rough trip," Hutton says. "But I'm lucky. I never get seasick." She has traveled to Asia and South America almost too many times to count and has been diving all over Micronesia and Melanesia and Mexico. About six years ago, she started a list of things she wanted to do before she died. She has already done most of them, with one exception: diving uncaged with a great white shark.
"The great thing about dangerous situations is that you are so alive," she says, swiveling around in her office chair, her hands gesturing in space. "I can remember every day of all my hunter-gatherer trips—every single day—better than I can remember what happened on any day last week. You're learning. You're totally aware and you're fantastically young. You're five again. Everything is brand new. Simply traveling does that—as long as you find places without lots of tourists—and those places are harder and harder to find."
Whenever she's in New York—which is more than she'd like these days—Hutton is stopped on the street, in stores, elevators, clubs, in the Noho Star coffee shop, where she eats breakfast. Sometimes people want autographs or to pass along a few words of praise, but usually Hutton is stopped by women looking for beauty tips. Hutton, who rarely exercises, never uses sunscreen, takes estrogen, smokes hand-rolled filterless cigarettes, and turns 60 this month, appears improbably alive and vibrant. "What's your secret?" women ask. "What are you doing? What are you taking?"
"Hey!" she usually answers. "Do what makes you feel good!"
Nowadays, she's likely to squeeze in a reference to her new makeup line. It's called Lauren Hutton's Good Stuff (available on www.laurenhutton.com, in Sephora stores, and on Home Shopping Network). After years of flacking for other people's products—she's a former spokesperson for Revlon, Hush Puppies, J. Crew, and Premarin—she's finally manufacturing and merchandising something of her own.
"God, I know," she laughs, "who needs more makeup? But on the other hand, who knows more about it than I do?"
Hutton moved to New York City at 21, after a turbulent childhood in Tampa, hoping to become a painter. After wandering into Christian Dior, looking to make some easy money as a model, she found herself in demand—even though the hairpieces and heavy eye shadow of the times didn't really suit her. Stylists asked Hutton to wear a temporary cap over the gap in her front teeth. "It was around 1963," she says, "and all the makeup was done by guys who'd Annette Funicello-ize you."
Her fresh, unpretentious spirit caught the attention of Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue. Before long, the cap came off, her makeup was toned down, and her hair wasn't ratted. By the mid-'60s, she had come to embody the natural, wholesome, almost makeup-less look of an era—one that has endured along with her.
She also shattered stereotypes of the haughty, empty-headed fashion ideal. "Lauren wouldn't know the word prima donna," says Gabriella Forte, a longtime fashion executive and now the U.S. president of trendy clothing designer Dolce & Gabbana, who met Hutton in the late 1970s and remains close to her. "She's natural and never hides," says Forte. "I mean, how many ravishing beauties in this culture would want to advertise for menopause?"
|
