Beverly Johnson: In Vogue

 Beverly Johnson: In Vogue is moving, fascinating, funny and empowering.  That’s a lot of adjectives but it and The Gardens of Anuncia are the two shows that have meant the most to me during the 2023-24 season that began in June, and are the only two that left me in tears.

I didn’t receive a press invitation for the show, at 59E59 Theaters, but I pursued one because I’m a contemporary of Johnson — she’s 71; I’m 68 — and, being a lifelong lover of fashion magazines, I remember well her appearances on cover after cover of Glamour, which led to her history-making achievement as the first Black model to grace the cover of American Vogue in August 1974.  As 30 of her 500 magazine covers were  projected on the screen behind her I felt I was seeing old friends.

I was curious to see how she looked now and to hear her story.  I’m sure that was the motivating factor that drew the largely older Black female audience.  Probably anticipating this interest in her appearance, she and possibly her director and co-script writer, Josh Ravetch, downplayed it.  She actually looked almost like a crone or a witch sitting in a black director’s chair on the right side of the minimally lit empty stage, with waist-length stringy black wavy hair and her face hidden behind enormous black glasses.  The only concession to her glamorous past was her black cocktail dress slit high up the front and stilettos.

If this was intentional to put the focus on her story, it worked beautifully.  I was engrossed for the entire 70 minutes.  Enhancing her story is the way it’s presented, especially at the start and the conclusion.  When we entered the theatre a large color photo of Johnson at her heyday of success was on the screen.  Then the light went out and projections (also by Ravetch) began a montage of black and white photos of mostly famous Black women, from Harriet Tubman to Michelle Obama, as the song “It Goes As It Goes”played.  This nicely placed Johnson in the company of strong, groundbreaking Black women.

And then she tells her story, which she related earlier in her 2015 memoir, Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All.  With all that familiarity and with her model’s poise and experience being interviewed on television I was surprised that she read the script for the entire show, looking intently at the music stand and rarely at the audience to whom she was telling the story.  This didn’t distract me for long.

Johnson was raised in Buffalo, the middle child of five whose father was a steel worker and mother a nurse.  As a student studying law at Northeastern University she was often told she should be a model so she headed to New York and presented herself to Eileen Ford, the owner of the most prestigious modeling agency at the time.  Ford booked her and she began appearing on Glamour covers.  Not content with that she told Ford she wanted to be the first Black model on American Vogue.  Ford laughed and said, “You’ll never be on the cover of Vogue.  Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?” to which she replied under her breath, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”  She then did the unthinkable.  She wrote a polite letter to Ford telling her she was leaving for the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency.   

When she first met Wilhelmina that formidable woman had a cigarette in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.  Johnson told her she had her sights on American Vogue.  Wilhelmina sized her up, took a drag on her cigarette and said, “We’ll get it.” Six months later, she did. 

Johnson fell into the usual model traps, including constant anxiety that someone younger would replace her and dependency of cocaine to keep the railing thin body she needed to meet industry standards.  Cocaine suppresses the appetite so it became the drug of choice for models who feared even water would make them gain weight.  

“As a model, you had to be a hanger.  You could be 90 pounds and chiseled to the bone, and they worshiped you for it.  You could not get too thin.”

Johnson became addicted but now, even though she is still railing thin, she says she has been sober for 40 years.

She shares her heartbreak when Arthur Ashe ended their relationship and details of her turbulent two-year marriage to Danny Sims, who brought reggae music to the United States in the 1960s and who she says was the first Black man to get “made” by the Mafia.  He took her money and her home and, for many years, her beloved daughter, Anansa, who in photo projections is a dead ringer for her mother in her modeling years.  Anansa hold an M.B.A. and has six children with whom Johnson is close.  And Johnson found happiness more than a decade ago with Brian Maillian, an investment banker with whom she lives in Palm Springs.  She said he was in the audience.

But the big thunder of her story involved Bill Cosby.  She tells of the day in 2014 when she was at her daughter’s house with the TV on mute and saw her close friend of 35 years, model Janice Dickenson.  Turning on the volume she heard Dickenson claim Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted her and was shocked for two reasons: Dickenson had never spoken of it to her and she could look at the TV and hear her story coming out of Dickenson’s mouth.

In Johnson’s case, she had been invited to a taping of “The Cosby Show” and two days later the star invited her to his brownstone.  He handed her a cappuccino.  Not a coffee drinker she tried to decline but he encouraged her to take a sip and then another.

“Almost immediately the room starts spinning.”

He told her to put her hand on his shoulder and read a scene and she realized she had been drugged.  She started saying “mother-fucker” over and over, louder and louder until he dragged her down the stairs and put her in a taxi.

After witnessing Dickenson’s courage, she chose to speak out in Vanity Fair, resulting in death threats, rage from the Black community that saw Cosby as a leader and questions about why it took her 40 years to come forth.  She said the time wouldn’t have been right.  He was America’s father, she said, “NBC gold.”  But as what came to be known as the #MeToo Movement strengthened she spoke out.  Cosby sued her for defamation but withdrew his case as more accusations came out against him. 

A projection behind her of a New York Magazine cover shows rows of women sitting in straight chairs with one left empty, representing, Johnson says, all the women who are not yet able to come forth.  The headline reads, Cosby: The Women.  I don’t know how I missed this jarring cover at the time.

Johnson said the first defining moment of her life was the Vogue cover.  Speaking out was the second..

“When I was 21 I was on the cover of Vogue and became a face.  When I was 61 I found my voice.”

She says she now tells her grandchildren the future is theirs to build on from the courageous women seen at the opening.  She says they were once children too.

Then another moving montage begins.  We see pictures of those famous women as babies or children followed by their adult selves.  And then precious photos of contemporary little Black girls, one after the other, with the header: THE FUTURE.