The Cindy Crawford Chronicles

Should we do the fucked-up blonde or should we do the bombshell?” she is asking Ritts as they walk along Zuma Beach, in California, one brisk Saturday afternoon. She has come to work, to play characters, for a pictorial portfolio evidenced herewith. “We also have to do Cindy as Cindy,” she urges, concerned. Already, she has been an angry young man, stalking about in a dark suit, bulge protruding from the crotch. A white crew sock had been crammed there for effect. (“Just let me pin the dick in,” she said, trying to prevent slippage.) Now she becomes the Fucked-Up Blonde — “I should look like I slept in my makeup”— wearing only a wan smile, a teased wig, ruffled panties and mule slippers. Waiting for Ritts, she strolls around the porch of the beach-house location, cupping her bare breasts with her palms. Photo assistants and stylists busily hover about her. “All right, everybody — so I don’t have to worry about hiding all day — these are my tits!” All present comport themselves with a studied lack of interest. And pictures are produced until night falls.

The Importance of Being Cindy, Part 2: Madcap intellectual Camille Paglia, who once spoke on a feminist panel at Princeton University with Crawford, interprets the phenomenon: “My theory is that there’s something in Cindy Crawford that’s both soft and hard, that’s sexually ambiguous,” Paglia says. “Even when she looks soft, there’s an implied toughness. She can either look like the girl next door, or she can look very slutty and trampy, which I think is great. Even her name is this weird fusion: You feel the winsome femininity of Cindy and then the power and assertion of Crawford. That’s the part she’s used to take control of her career. As she said at Princeton, ‘I’m the head of a company called Cindy Crawford.’

“Also, pictures make her look much more light skinned than she is,” Paglia continues. “When I saw her in person, she was kind of mysterious and misty. She has a wonderful dusky quality, a multicultural quality that I feel the mass audience must be identifying with. Under the surface, there’s something that’s non-Caucasian. I’m thinking that what’s under there might be Native American. She looks like, whatever, maybe an Apache princess? Ask her.”

White trash is what I am!” says Crawford in response. Then she laughs lightly. “Well, Richard calls me white trash, and I say, ‘You’re not allowed to call me white trash — I’m allowed!'” Her heritage, she contends, is “mostly German-English, but I think there is a lot of other stuff mixed in along the way that I don’t know about.” Thus, whenever in Italy or Greece or Spain, she is regularly taken for one of their own. But she is, of course, pure domestic property, bred on and of the Plains, the middle daughter of an electrician and wife who divorced messily, a girl of forged mettle who lost a baby brother to leukemia, who knew struggle and would not forget it. Without apology, she learned to exploit a culture that was only going to exploit her. “I don’t have a big hang-up about commercialism,” she says, shrugging. Nowadays, she makes money because she can, not because she must. “It’s very hard for me to say no, coming from a family where you never had enough,” she says, even though she is altogether weary of supermodeldom and its velvet grind. “Richard’s been great in that sense, because he says, ‘You don’t have to do anything for money!’ But sometimes I still don’t believe any of this is real.”

Because they are who they are, they are simply not supposed to be. On the cover of People, they are called “The Sexiest Couple Alive!” (“Not very original,” she says, dismissively.) They are called many things, largely out of awe or envy or denial. In a leery age, they contemporize Gable and Lombard, who were ultimately doomed in their day. Living now, Gere and Crawford incite rumors of all colors, then ignore them. “Richard’s obviously been accused of being gay,” says the missus, tarrying briefly in the muck. “Why? Because he has a lot of gay friends? It’s amazing to me, considering the number of women he’s associated with. Like when does he have time to be gay? Plus, we won’t ever say he’s not gay, because he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with being gay.” (A gent of great reticence, Gere abstains from being quoted in any text devoted to his wife.) For her part, Crawford has drawn similar murmurings — especially after having been seen shaving k.d. lang on a recent Vanity Fair cover, which she did as a favor to Ritts, who took the picture. Of lesbianism, she soberly states: “Particularly for a young woman in a world of AIDS, I’ve said that it seems to be a safer way to explore your sexuality, rather than screwing around with a lot of boys. I mean, if you’re not into it, you’re not into it. For me, though, it’s like Sharon Stone has said, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that schwing!’ ”

If anything, theirs is a marriage of inconvenience. To spend a night together in any of their houses, they must regularly fly back and forth across the map, chasing each other, which is exactly what they do. Large careers do not bend or coincide easily. So there must be infinite patience, although such a thing has yet to be found in actual Homo sapiens. “Richard always says that he wishes that I’d been through a few more relationships,” she says, a bit sheepishly. “Because I’m still very, very idealistic. And unrealistic. I hadn’t even been through bad relationships — only kid stuff. Richard is really my first big one. I mean, big relationship, you know?”

Final thoughts: Certain realities must be faced. Sooner than we may imagine, she will cease to model. But she will not disappear. If she has her way, genetically gifted Crawfordian offspring will one day enter the human race, bringing with them biological hope for future generations. Also, she vows to turn up in public as often as possible, if only to bolster morale. “When is my life ever going to not involve taking pictures?” she says, reassuringly. “Not for a long time! I mean, look at Lauren Hutton. Or even people who aren’t models, who are actresses or TV people. They still get their pictures taken, right?” Lately, however, she has heard about a disturbing new trend among actresses, especially those who fancy themselves serious. “Apparently, when they’re posing for photographers, so many of them are saying, ‘Don’t make me look like a model!’ — like that’s such a terrible thing,” she says, taking full umbrage. “When I hear that, I always want to tell them: ‘Don’t worry about it! You couldn’t if you tried.'”