Banking on Tyra
Tyra Banks says her fashion runway days are behind her. So what's next for this business-minded supermodel? Empire-building, of course.
Story by Mark Seal
Can someone be both sexy and smart, both beautiful and brainy, both a model and a mogul?
That's the question quickly answered - as if it were ever doubted - over a Los Angeles lunch with Tyra Banks and her mother/manager, Carolyn London, a two-woman freight train presently rolling across America. Having conquered first supermodeling and now television, they walk into the restaurant like ordinary people - which is one of the few things Banks has difficulty doing. Wearing jeans and a lingerie top, rust-red hair blazing like a brush fire, Banks, 30, has stopped traffic from Wilshire to Westwood boulevards. On one side of the restaurant, a table of grown men in business suits are reduced to gap-mouthed gawkers; on the other side, staring through the plate-glass window from the street, a gaggle of schoolgirls smudge the window with anxiously pointing fingers.
"I'm a chain girl," Banks says of Palomino, the restaurant that she has chosen for our lunch, as she and her mother scan the menu. "You can find something on the menu for everybody."
Her choice in restaurants is indicative of her career path: Tyra Banks offers something for everybody, from the gawkers at the adjoining table to the gaggle fogging up the glass, none of whom she seems to notice. No, Banks has tunnel vision, and she is, as always, on a mission. She has a story to tell! A story of hard work and big dreams, the story of a gamble that paid off, big-time.
And it begins in Milan, with a pizza she shared with her mother.
For that, you have to go back, before she became the creator and chief-judge star of her hit UPN reality show, America's Next Top Model, in which women compete on camera in full catfight for major modeling deals. You have to go back before she became the first African-American model to be featured on the covers of publications including Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue (twice), the Victoria's Secret catalog, and GQ, before she began starring in movies and appearing regularly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, before she co-starred in a Pepsi Super Bowl halftime commercial with Cindy Crawford.
You have to go all the way back to when she was 13 and just another gangly L.A. girl uncertain about her future. She was born and raised in Inglewood, where her father was a computer analyst and her mother worked as a photographer. Her parents divorced when she was 6; by the time Banks turned 13, she was already scraping the sky at 5'10" and 98 pounds. After a brief stint in public school, she transferred to the all-girls Immaculate Heart High, where, she says, she arrived "lonely and scared" but eventually found both strength and salvation. "They taught me all about women in power and being strong and not falling into stereotypes," she says.
On the first day of ninth grade, she says, "I was sitting on a bench by myself, very skinny, very awkward, and 13 years old." That's when the girl who would change her life appeared beside her. "A beautiful girl with curly blond hair, biracial, very tall. Even though she had on a uniform, she looked like a star."
Banks pantomimes a celestial spirit, swirling up and touching down, right next to her on that park bench. The girl sat down beside her and predicted the future. "You look like a model," she said, to which Banks replied, "What?!" She'd recently lost 20 pounds and grown three inches in one agonizing three-month period. Because she was so tall and rail-skinny, Banks says people always asked her if she was a basketball player, track runner, or ballerina, but model? Never.
"She said, 'I'm going to be a supermodel, and we should be friends, because we could rule the world together,' " Banks remembers. Her new friend taught her the essentials of modeling and, when she felt ready, Banks convinced her mother to take her first photographs.
Carolyn London, a clearly efficient woman with a sheaf of packed schedules poking out from her purse, looks up from typing endless messages into her Blackberry.
"In the beginning, I didn't take it seriously and discouraged her for months," says London. "But she was very persistent and asked me to take some photographs. At the time, I was a professional photographer, a medical photographer."
"Taking pictures of what?" I ask.
"Autopsies, surgeries, anatomical dissections, photo microscopy," she says.
She took Banks' photographs, but with one iron-clad condition. "I told her I would only allow her to do the modeling if it did not interfere with her schoolwork," London remembers. "She could only model after school or on weekends, and before she entered that world I insisted she study and research the modeling industry."
"I had heard about all the modeling schools and scams," Banks says.
But they wouldn't get their teeth into Tyra. She checked out each and every agency with the Better Business Bureau and other sources. Finally, narrowing her search down to six reputable modeling agencies, she went to six open calls. "And all six agencies said no to me," Banks remembers. "They said they already had too many black girls, that I was too ethnic or not ethnic-looking enough."
If the modeling agents didn't want her, college administrators did, and she says she was accepted to numerous universities. But Banks was insistent on becoming a model. She'd done some work for Macy's - "not the catalog, but the Sunday newspaper. That was the cover of Vogue for me."
When her modeling friend and mentor dropped out of school and flew off to Paris, she begged Banks to join her, but Banks stayed in school. Just after she graduated, however, she was on a plane to Paris, alone at 17. She'd finally landed an agent, L.A. Models. But while her friend would soon return home, Banks found her future in Paris. Her schedule was full, "for months and months," she says of her first trip to Paris. There, she became so immersed in the catty, backbiting, intensely competitive world of runway modeling that she never even realized it when, soon after her arrival, she had, almost miraculously, become a star.
One morning, the pressure of nonstop runway modeling finally got the best of her. She called her mother, crying. "Send me a ticket, I'm coming home!" Banks remembers. "I said, 'I have a brain! I got accepted to so many schools! I don't need this.' "
Her mother flew to Paris, but she wouldn't let her daughter quit modeling. "She had accomplished so much at such a young age," London recalls. "She was 17 years old and in her first season she booked 25 fashion shows. The press was following her all over the place. Everyone wanted to know who this new girl was. Her agency called and told me that my daughter had taken Paris by storm. The agency actually flew me to Paris to talk about, 'How can we deal with this? We want her to keep a level head.' She had no idea that she was making fashion history. She thought everybody was booked that way."
London became her daughter's manager, as well as her rock, her support system. But after a few seasons, something worse than backstage catfights cursed Banks: excess poundage. Nothing drastic, probably not more than a few pounds, but enough for the Italian seamstresses to carp the dreaded words, Grosso, grosso, fat, fat.
"I said, 'Mom, I think I need to eat a little differently and work out a little more," Banks says. But her mother knew there was more in store for her daughter than calorie-counting seamstresses and runways on which women never speak. "I thought it was more important for her to have a healthy mind," London says. So, one evening, London grabbed Banks by the hand, took her to a mom-and-pop pizzeria, and told her to eat more.
London said to Banks, "Let's go celebrate and move on with a different mind-set."
She bought her daughter a pizza. Not some stingy slice, but a whole felonious pie. Bite by bite, that pizza became Banks' liberation from the world of rail-thin waifs for designers to hang their new collections upon, girls who are all strut and no speech, the silent beauties who never get the chance to show the world their brains. "We ate it and laughed the whole time," Banks says. "Because it was so against the fashion world and what they wanted me to look like. We felt we were just … what do you call it when kids break the rules?"
"Rebelling," says London.
When the pizza was gone, Banks was reborn, although neither she nor her mother knew for sure what, if anything, would come next.
At a French fashion show, though, they saw a vision of the future.
"I saw Cindy Crawford backstage," Banks says. It was Crawford in her House of Style days, the multifaceted supermodel whose fingers were in so many lucrative pies they called her Cindy. Inc. To Banks, Crawford was the
Supermodel Who Spoke, a businesswoman. "She just seemed so in control of everything," Banks says. "She had a microphone in her hand, she had a group of people who were working for her, she had a vision. I looked at her and thought, 'I don't want to be a model waiting by the phone and wondering what my next job is going to be.' I know this business has a revolving door. I have never been one to wait and have my career and destiny in control of other people. When I saw Cindy, I said, 'Mama, I want to do that. I want to be like her!' "
Banks and her mother gazed upon Crawford like pilgrims on some new shore. "She was curvy, not stick-thin,
a model that really connected to America," remembers Banks. "She was the girl next door. I was like, 'You know, I'm a black woman, but I feel like I can accomplish what she has accomplished.' I came back home and did not worry about gaining weight. I told my agency to call Victoria's Secret, then I started working for Victoria's Secret. I told my agency to call Sports Illustrated, and started working
for Sports Illustrated. I was very proactive with my career. I was not waiting for the phone to ring. I was telling them who to call."
It was a major move forward, but Banks was still just a silent image frozen on a page; a beauty, yes, but what about her brain? She began stepping out of magazine covers and into increasingly larger arenas, writing her first book, Tyra's Beauty: Inside and Out, and launching T-Zone, her annual empowerment camp to build self-esteem in young girls (now in its fifth year).
Oprah Winfrey helped push Banks' career into yet another dimension when she offered her a recurring guest spot on The Oprah Winfrey Show, doing segments on topics such as teenage heartbreak, sibling rivalry, and how to make cheap clothing look good. Prognosticators in the press began wagering that perhaps Banks would take over from Winfrey one day, a proposition that Banks does not discount. "I look up to Oprah as my role model," she says. "But I'm not trying to be Oprah. I know I started my career with cleavage. But I plan on retiring that one day and having an empire, hopefully similar to hers. One that's built on my business sense, built on my brain."
To build an empire, it helps to have your own television show. Enter America's Next Top Model, a reality show dreamed up by Banks: 12 girls living together and competing on the runway, vying for agents, and dealing with photographers, all for a lucrative modeling deal and all with the cameras rolling. It is the highest-rated show on UPN, with ratings that rival competitors on ABC and NBC. "Top Model may just be TV's perfect reality show," raved Newsweek. "It's as deliciously cutthroat as Survivor … . Like The Apprentice, Model does a great job of showing viewers the inner working of an industry. The show can even out-nasty American Idol."
Our lunch is the day after the season's finale, and everybody's talking about the winner - but the biggest winner on the show is Banks, who now also has two feature films, a Top Model spinoff, and a one-hour television drama in development. "And none of this involves me on camera," she says. "That's the important part: me as producer or executive producer." Runway modeling is over for her, she says. What's next? Well, after six years of secret recording studio sessions, she's releasing her first album later this year. The video for the album's first single, titled "Shake Your Body," received 155,000 hits in a week when it debuted as a free download on the Top Model website.
So, yes, Tyra's still shaking her body - but that's nothing compared to what she's doing with her brain.