IT’S ALL A CRYING SHAME

A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in

About a year ago I started watching Paulina Porizkova cry. The New York Times told me to. It was right. She cries with gusto. She cries without holding back. She cries all over her Instagram feed. She cries so hard a publisher tried to stop the flood of tears by sopping up the deluge with the many pages of a book deal. She cried so hard and so well that millions of people the world over started watching her cry too. I tell you for nothing that the one thing I never expected was to find myself watching Paulina Porizkova cry. I mean, she made me cry.

Back when I was but a little girl on the cusp of teenagehood I cried great, big tears of shame and frustration. I cried for what was never going to be. I cried for the entire female population which was probably also ugly crying because of Paulina Porizkova. Because when I was a preteen and she was barely pubescent and on every bloody page of every bloody magazine looking as if the heavens had opened up and God, with an accompaniment of celestial harps and small, singing cherubs, had blasted this saintly creature onto every Estee Lauder billboard so every earthbound creature of the female persuasion could bow down to the grace and glory that could create such an embodiment of all that is good and true. And then to be struck by the very nature of human perfectibility — because here she was in glowing Technicolor. And all this would, by extension, lead one to question one’s existence. And not in a good way. More in the manner of troubled existentialists, leading to questions such as: Why don’t the heavens open up again and suck me right up in a vortex of repurposing so I can be spat out in a better, more perfect version? The Paulina Porizkova supermodel version.

Turns out that sort of thing is not all it’s cracked up to be. At 18, at the height of her fame, once she escaped the clutches of Soviet proxy state Czechoslovakia, which would not allow her to join her defector parents, Paulina married a creepy old man. This was the 1980s, so marrying a vocalist and guitarist for some band called The Cars who was more than twice your age (that is, 20 years older than you), but a rock star, was not considered Jeffrey Epstein territory, but rather a sweet coupling of beauty and the creep. A natural pairing. I am sure we are much more evolved now.

Then he took all the money she made off the billboards and campaigns and catwalks — it was huge, blinging, 1980s money — and put it into the “family bank account” to make it all fair and equal because her youth and beauty had to offset his skanky middle-aged swagger. Then he didn’t touch her for 20 years because she made him do it. When she called it quits, but tried to go all Gwyneth Paltrow and consciously uncouple by staying best friends and co-parents of their two children, he got a little angry. I mean why was he not enough for her? So he secretly cut her out of his will, which included all her money that had been gathering interest in the “family account”, and died of a heart attack two weeks later, leaving her penniless and homeless because everything is family until it isn’t. So she started crying. And then couldn’t stop. So she filmed it for the internet. And that is how I found myself watching Paulina Porizkova, supermodel, cry. Not schadenfreude at all!