Beauty and the Beach
Psst: Want to get away from it all?
Supermodel Cindy Crawford shares her secret to
traveling light, appreciating what you have, and
burying your toes in the sand.
Interview by Mark Seal
Photographed by Henrik Bulow
Cindy Crawford has a secret.
To staying young. To keeping fit. To stoking the fires, and fulfilling the dreams, of her family. She calls me late one afternoon, her voice surprisingly deep and melodious with Midwestern Everygirl roots. She’s phoning from her home in Malibu, California, but, in her mind, she’s already returned to the territory of her secret, a magical place to which she promises to transport me in the next hour.
“I’m always ready,” she says, when I ask how long it takes her to pack. “I’ve traveled so much, and have traveled with my kids quite a bit. For me, it’s not like a week of preparation.”
Our conversation is not about the Cindy Crawford of “Cindy, Inc.,” not the business/modeling/fashion/television Crawford, chief of Crawdaddy Productions, a hydra-headed corporation that capitalizes on Cindy Crawford as a product, image, and business. Not the Crawford of 600 magazine covers. Not the Crawford the world knows by face alone. Instead, we talk about travel; specifically, her favorite travel getaway. It’s a resort whose name alone is a superlative in itself, the One&Only Ocean Club on Paradise Island near Nassau in the Bahamas, where she has just spent a blissful week with her husband, national nightclub impresario Rande Gerber, and their two children, son Presley, 5, and daughter Kaia, 3.
Here is the story of someone who may have it all, but also realizes the importance of getting away from it.
Veteran travelers like Crawford know: It’s not just about changing your place; it’s about changing your perspective. Some find peace and a fresh outlook in the mountains; others find it in a city. For Crawford, it’s always been a beach. “I grew up in the Midwest, and maybe I don’t need to say more than that,” she says. “I just relax in the sun. I love swimming in a warm ocean.”
She arrived on her first beach from another world: DeKalb, Illinois, where she was born Cynthia Ann Crawford, the second of three girls and one boy to an electrician father and hospital-lab-worker mom. At 16, she was discovered by a newspaper photographer. After that, modeling became her summer job, but school remained her focus. She became valedictorian of DeKalb High School and got a chemical engineering scholarship to Northwestern University. But, after one semester, her body triumphed over the books, catapulting Crawford toward camera, catwalk, and celebrity.
She didn’t even see an ocean until she was in the eighth grade, when she accompanied her family to Florida, and got the first glimpse of her future, the backdrop where supermodels the world over typically gain fame: a beach. “My grandparents had a place near Vero Beach called Barefoot Bay,” she says. Then came modeling, which took her to practically every beach on earth.
Her favorites? “Parrot Cay [the 1,000-acre island in the Turks and Caicos], in terms of just the beach, is probably the most beautiful beach I’ve ever been on,” she says. “Also, Carreras in Mexico. In the Caribbean, St. Barts, I’ve probably been there 20 times on a shoot and every time I love it.”
She found her all-time favorite beach, fittingly, on business. She had gone to Nassau with the late, great photographer Herb Ritts to shoot pages for the Pirelli Tire Calendar, the famed glossy international datebook featuring the world’s most beautiful (and, frequently, bare-chested) women. “We took a boat to a tiny, uninhabited Gilligan’s Island and we shot on that,” she remembers.
They spent just two nights in the area, staying at the Ocean Club, then a relatively small resort created by A&P grocery store heir Huntington Hartford, Jr. But something about the place stayed with her.
After her divorce from Richard Gere, she reunited with longtime friend, former Ford model-turned-entrepreneur Rande Gerber. When he popped the question in 1998, they began looking for the perfect wedding location, fast. Crawford immediately flashed back to that incredible beach in the Bahamas.
“We decided to get married in six weeks,” she says. “We didn’t want the press to find out. We knew we wanted a small hotel and to be able to take over the whole place. The Ocean Club had everything right: access to New York, which is where most of our family and friends were coming from. I had about 50 rooms at the time, so we could take over the whole hotel. It just worked. Since then, it’s worked even better, because they have added a whole new wing and a kid’s pool.”
She adds, “I would do the same wedding today, if I could. We got married on the beach, in the sand.” The bride wore a white Galliano slip dress; the groom a white shirt and Armani pants. Both were barefoot on the beach.
Now, she’s a wife and mother, and trips to the beach are a family tradition.
Before getting into the specifics of why she loves the Bahamas so much, I ask her about her travel strategies. Crawford laughs. “Let’s see, this time was I was really smart because I worked in Mexico City the day before we were all flying, so I flew by myself and my husband flew with the kids,” she says. “So that’s a good strategy.”
Having just finished an ad campaign and fashion show for a Mexico City department store, Crawford strolled through the Mexico City International Airport, a roller bag trailing behind her.
If this conjures up an image of some heavily camouflaged star trying to look inconspicuous, forget about it. “They recognize me anyway, so I’d rather look good,” she says.
She met up with her husband, kids, and nanny, along with Rande’s brother/business partner, Scott, and his wife and kids, in Miami, where they spent two days visiting Rande’s mother. Then, the two Gerber families flew off to the Bahamas.
“My kids don’t get to see their cousins that often, so … my sister-in-law and I decided, ‘Let’s go away,’” she says. “We just wanted the two guys to spend time together on vacation. [Initially] we thought about going as couples, but then we would only have gone for two or three days because no one wanted to leave their kids. So we did it over spring break when we could go for a week.”
When the clan arrived in Nassau, the resort’s staff was waiting to whisk them to the property, where they were greeted like family, which they practically are. “The bartender was the bartender at our wedding, and half the employees have been there since we got married there,” Crawford says. “For us, it’s like going home a little bit. You know people, you recognize places, you know the routine.”
Then came the sweetest part of the arrival: silence. For the first time in a long time, Crawford had no schedule and no jangling telephone. “I love the fact that my cellphone or Blackberry doesn’t work there,” she says. The beginning of vacation is not without decisions, however, important ones like selecting the right room, which, for her family, means one of the resort’s 4,000-square-foot villas — which, even for Crawford, were already booked solid. So she settled for one of the beachfront suites, with an adjoining room for the children. “We like to be on the ground level with the sliding glass door that opens out into a big yard,” she explains. “You don’t have to go down a long hallway or through a lobby to get to your room. I like to be barefoot.”
Before rushing barefoot to the sand, there is the matter of unpacking. Crawford falls into the camp of those who insist upon unpacking immediately. “For me, once everything is away and organized, that’s when I can start relaxing,” she says. She packs light for the islands: five of the approximately eight string bikinis in her wardrobe, each of which she will wear twice, for economy’s sake, on her 10-day vacation, along with just enough clothing to mostly avoid nocturnal repeats.
These days, being more mom than supermodel, she is ever alert to the needs of her children. What makes their family vacation destination special, she says, is the combination of One&Only Ocean Club and its sister property, Atlantis — side-by-side, yet vastly different. “The kids love, love, love the water slides at Atlantis,” Crawford says. “The best part of their vacation is at Atlantis. … So there’s grown-up fun and kid fun,” she says.
When Crawford’s ready to hit the pool, she slides into a bikini — “the kind that tie on the side with a triangle top” — and becomes Cindy the super-model, whether she intends to or not. “I wear my swimsuit with a coverup and bring in my basket a good book, extra sunscreen, and that’s about it.”
She’ll lounge on a beach chair and open her book, not some sudsy beach read, but the heavy lumber, this trip The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, “about India during the British occupation.”
Beach boys will swirl with trays in their hands. Crawford says Rande might have a beer as he fiddles with his iPod or reads a magazine. For her, a decision looms: Will she go for a workout in the spa with world-class trainer Larry Nairn, or engage in one of the “soft sand” train sessions on the beach? If so, she’ll forgo the beach drink. “I know if I have a drink in the day, there’s no way I’m going to the gym.” But if she’s wisely signed up for a massage only, in one of the Balinese-style treatment seraglios, then bring on the beach boys. “I’m on vacation, so I want a vacation drink,” she says. “I’ll have a Bahama Mama, which is basically a rum punch.”
After the first few days, having caught up on her sleep, her typically fierce, single-minded focus will slide into an easier island routine. Gone is the urge “to jump out of bed because there are a hundred things I should be doing, but just to kind of lounge in the morning. Even if I don’t go back to sleep, I feel like I could go back to sleep.”
Then, all too soon, it’s over and she’s packing everything and everybody up and the kids are asking in unison, When are we coming back? It’s always too short,” she says. “There’s always that weird feeling that even if you take a shower you’ll still have sand in your hair. It feels like the first time you’ve ever put regular clothes on. It definitely feels like the end of the vacation.”
In the end, a trip to the beach is not merely a vacation but a reflection of what Crawford’s become: someone who’s achieved a better life, which, for her, means not having to worry about anything, at least for a while. “I grew up not having a lot of money,” she says, attempting to define what the term “the good life” means to her. “I always define it like this: If my refrigerator breaks, that’s not a big hardship. I can go out and buy one without thinking about it. The way I grew up, it was like, ‘Oh, god, the refrigerator broke down! What are we going to do?’ Not to have that kind of day-to-day financial hardship is, for me, a big thing. That, to me, is luxurious: health and family and not having to worry.”
Of course, now she sees exhibitions of wealth that most mortals will never see. “No matter what level you’re at, there is always the next level of the good life,” she says. But none of that goes to Crawford’s head. All she needs is her family, a good book, and a beach. “Luxury is, at the time, being able to appreciate where you are,” she says.