Paulina

When she was a 15-year-old kid in Paris, at an age at which most girls are still sleeping in kitten-print flannel pajamas, trying to make sense of trigonometry and dreaming of boys they'd never have the nerve to talk to, Paulina Porizkova was living in night clubs, dancing on tables and pouring drinks down the necks of strangers. Her tiny Latin Quarter apartment served as headquarters to a horde of fashion-industry kids who stumbled in at dawn, only to revive hours later for more raucous revelry. That, though, was years ago. This past spring, the world's hottest model—also the world's smartest, brashest and most controversial model and, arguably, the world's most beautiful woman—turned 22. The days when she is said to have worn her too drunk to fuck T-shirt are apparently history.

"I was a wild kid, but who wouldn't have been?" she says. "You're in Paris. You're 15 years old. All of a sudden, after having been rather ugly as a child, you discover that you're attractive to boys. You're earning tons of money—and there are no parents around. Who wouldn't go completely nuts? My old philosophy, which I formulated when I was about ten, was that I wanted to experience everything, good and bad, whatever it was, so that when I died, I could say, 'Boy, I've done it.' So I did do it. And I'm still doing it. Except...."

Here the voice trails off and turns vaguely serious. Yes, there have been some adjustments. There are more in the works. Paulina, for example, has recently abandoned her highly principled take-me-as-I-am impudence and has had her formerly crooked teeth bonded. For the first time, she has begun to appear on magazine covers with her mouth open. This exquisite and expensive mouth, moreover, is on the verge of turning a bit proper. "I do read my press, and when I see what I've been saying," she says, "sometimes I go, 'Uh-oh.' Here I am, trying to present myself as the intelligent model. In one line, I'm saying that I read Dostoievsky and Dickens for fun. Then, in the next line, I'm saying shit and fuck. My experience tells me that the people who read Dostoievsky usually don't say shit and fuck. So I'm not going to say them anymore."

Paulina is one of those bright-burning cosmic phenomena that occasionally blast into view in high-profile fields such as modeling. Yet she stands apart; she is one of those notorious exceptions who are at the same time huge successes and rebels (or at least not true believers). From that megabuck mouth have come shocking irreverence, disdain for the code of sentimental mush that those models who can speak speak, along with regular aggressive (text continued on page 128)Paulina(continued from page 66) sallies against the hand that feeds her: Modeling is stupid. (Alternately: "It sucks.") She hates the work. She's in it for the money. Beauty tips? Ask Christie Brinkley. There is, perhaps, something like a pissing contest going on here. The pictures featured here were photographed for Paulina's 1988 calendar, her first. Christie Brinkley has done three. Not, for the record, that Paulina has any ill to speak of her rival. "No, not at all. On the contrary. I'm saying she's very smart. You make a lot of money giving people tips on how to look."

Paulina not only doesn't dispense beauty tips, she doesn't listen to them. She considers exercise boring. She smokes. She drinks. Sometimes she falls asleep with her make-up on. "If you're a model, you tend to be about my age," she says, "and at my age, if you have one last late night, it doesn't really matter. Your eyes are red? You can always use Visine. When I'm at an age at which I no longer look so good, obviously I'll no longer be able to model." This is cold, indecent reality but not necessarily the way things ought to be. "Modeling would be a great business to get into when you're a 30-year-old woman—30 or over. By that time, you know where you're going. The trouble with modeling is that agencies keep grabbing girls who are 14, 15 and 16, and they screw them up, and five years later, they're wacko."

Paulina, of course, can say anything she damned well pleases and still get paid $5000 a day—minimum—for slipping her body into and out of clothes. She gets away with it for the simplest of reasons: Whatever she puts on in the way of clothes and whatever she has put out in the way of magazine covers—Glamour, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Self, Sports Illustrated—sells. Far from self-destructive, she seems to recognize that the market place can bear a whiff of titillation. Even today, she exercises only minimal self-censorship. She trusts in the good will of others, particularly journalists, not to misunderstand; and if they do, she doesn't really give a flying hoot. Another possible conclusion is that she is simply as exhibitionistic intellectually as a model has to be physically. In addition to a well-developed impulse to shock, she also has a well-developed impulse to please; and in her case, the two work nicely together, since the more she shocks, the more she pleases—if not everyone, then at least that sizable part of her audience with a taste for irreverence.

"You want something really shocking and outrageous to put in playboy?" she asks. "How about if the editors were outraged and shocked by the simple truth— that I'm a normal girl who happens to be a model."

Sure, Paulina.

•

Paulina Porizkova was born in 1965 in the Czech town of Prost&U+011B;jov, and she was three years old when Soviet armored vehicles rolled in from the east to put an end to liberalism. Her father, a sometime university student and occasional truck driver, periodically in trouble with the police authorities, and her mother, then a secretary, climbed onto a motorcycle and crossed to an Austrian refugee camp three days before the Soviets closed the border. Then, from Sweden, where they settled, they launched an aggressive media campaign—the centerpiece of which was a hunger strike—to get their daughter out, too. Pictures of Paulina, then an ungainly child with a dumb smile, made the front pages of Swedish newspapers—to no avail. In a recklessly bold rescue effort, Swedish pilots next put Paulina's mother, Anna, down at a small, little-used airfield close to where Paulina was living with her grandparents. But not even a wig, a doctored passport and cover of night were enough to pull this one off. The guys in the trench coats had been alerted. Anna was arrested, jailed and, because she was pregnant, finally released to house arrest. The relatively happy ending is that, three years later, the lot of them—mother, daughter and a little brother, Jachym, born while Anna was under arrest—were expelled unceremoniously and bidden never to show their faces in Czechoslovakia again.

For Paulina, the ordeal has had lasting consequences. First, anticommunism, inherited, in a sense, from her father and mother, runs pretty deep in her. Husak, the name of the current Prague front man, is also, she is quick to point out, the Czech word for goose. "A good name for him," she says. Glasnost? She's for it. "But who cares? It's about as interesting as Raisa Gorbachev's having her American Express card refused in New York."

Second, though she professes to believe in home and family, she doesn't really have a home, except where she hangs her hat and has her piano moved in. Nowadays, she travels on a Swedish passport, but Sweden certainly isn't home. The five Swedish years were the really miserable ones. The family was, in fact, no sooner reunited than her father abandoned it and Paulina was left to cook and look after baby brother while her mother swabbed floors in a hospital. "Sweden is supposedly the freest country in the world, because you're allowed to be anybody or anything," she says, "but people kill themselves because it's so boring."

If Sweden isn't home, neither is Paris. She was invited there at the age of 15 when a friend put some make-up on her and took some pictures, which found their way into the hands of that impresario of style John Casablancas, head of the stable of beauties that is the Elite modeling agency. Her success was immediate and Paris was nice—but yesterday.

Even New York, the town with the big pay checks, the town that a girl like Paulina can't afford not to live in, is hardly more than a rest stop of opportunity. At first, she didn't like it, or America, at all—and, of course, said so. "Nobody in the damned place listens to Chopin!" she groused. "Nobody in the damned place reads!" To add to her essential, one might even say existential, homelessness, the house in which she had been living burned down four years ago. "I had finally set myself up," she says. "I had a little kitty, a piano, a carpet, the whole bit. And I lost it all. I was lucky to get out alive—me and the cat. And it kind of teaches you that material things are not that important. The next time I got an apartment, the first thing I bought was a new piano. That's one material thing that is very important to me. Next I got a bed. As long as I have a piano and a bed, I'm fine."

What motivates her, she claims, is money. If not for the pretty things it can buy, then for security? "No," she says, "I care about money as a source of freedom. I care about money because it can buy you less work."

•

The other thing that could keep Paulina in New York right now, the high-quality paydays aside, is a live-in American boyfriend. What she loves about him, she says, is everything, and she means to marry him as soon as possible, whatever that means; but his identity and what he does for a living are secrets. In the past, she has identified him as a starving writer or a starving artist. To playboy, she said, "There's no sense in my telling you what he does, because I'm not going to tell you the truth.... OK, he's a window washer." A few conclusions can be drawn about him, nevertheless. We know, for example, that Paulina doesn't much care about famous men, and she also doesn't much care about conventionally handsome men. "Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, all the national heartthrobs, all the pretty boys pretty much leave me cold. They look like male models to me, and male models excite me about as much as baby soap. My ideal dream prince, whom I started constructing as a child, has to be mysterious-looking, and he has to be intelligent and have a sense of humor and he has to read books and be passionate about music and art." Asked if her friend's identity wouldn't be easy to discover simply by watching for the two of them at concerts and restaurants, she admitted, "Yes, but that just shows how uninteresting I must really be, because nojournalists have been hunting me down to get at my private life."

Having appeared a couple of years ago in the Cars' video Drive, she has also recently completed a first feature film, Anna, which opened this past spring at the San Francisco Film Festival to positive reviews. It is expected to be distributed commercially in the fall. "It's a low-budget movie, a very low-budget movie, and I'm quite proud of it. I play a Czech farm girl named Krystyna, who's just gotten out of Czechoslovakia and comes to New York. She doesn't speak any English, and the only person she even knows of here is this Czech actress who was very big in the Sixties and then got expelled. Krystyna tracks her down, and then it becomes sort of an All About Eve story." Paulina accepted the part after turning down numerous offers to play corpses on Miami Vice and naked bimbos in space. No second movie is in the works.

She tries not to work more than three or four days a week, never evenings, never on weekends. "Work," she says, "is an irrational interruption of one's private life." She works, however, in pastels on canvas, plays Chopin on the piano, reads, takes an occasional stab at writing a children's book on the life of her cat, stays out of discos and night clubs.

Her two best friends are British-born model Joanne Russell, who appears on the cover of the February 1987 playboy, and Kenyan-born model Khadija. Sometimes they go horseback riding in Central Park. They also shop and help clean one another's apartments and sit around in coffee shops, smoking cigarettes and bitching about the business. "Being a model and being a girlfriend isn't any different from being a secretary and being a girlfriend. Girlfriends are girlfriends. We talk girl talk; we talk about work. What other chance do you have to really complain and say exactly what you think and not have anyone write it down and make headlines out of it?"

She was brought up as a Catholic but doesn't "think" Catholic, though she does still believe in God and occasionally likes to walk around in a church and maybe light a candle and "feel a little religious for about five minutes." She hasn't been to confession in a long time. "Are you kidding? I go to interviews," she says. "As long as you're allowed to talk about yourself for hours and hours, you're going to stay completely healthy and sane."

Irreverent ... Outrageous ... Sizzling...

The world's hottest model has the magazine covers to prove it; on the following pages, shots from her new calendar.

"Paulina seems to recognize that the market place can bear a whiff of titillation."