Donyale Luna: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of the First Black Supermodel

Donyale Luna was the first black super model. Her life was brief, intense and tragic.

It averages the sixties in London. A luxury restaurant. Someone comes in. His mere presence makes the rest of the diners stop attending to their dishes, abandoning their conversations. They turn to look at her. She is a woman. She young, tall, beautiful. Black. Her beauty, her presence, dazzles. Her short dress shows off legs that look like something out of a Giacometti. The delicate, personal, exotic features. Her overwhelming attitude. And her eyes: they look like a huge almond, a caramel-colored teardrop, drawn by Picasso. It seems like a mirage. People spontaneously begin to applaud. So much perfection, so much beauty, she must be recognized.

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Donyale Luna was a Super Model when the word, the category, did not yet exist. She was the first model to break the color barrier. The one who managed to lead fashion shows, appear on the cover of the most important fashion magazines, chosen by the most important designers. She was a protégé of Richard Avedon, a favorite of Paco Rabanne and Balenciaga, a muse of Salvador Dalí who called her “the reincarnation of Nefertiti.” She was directed by Fellini, Otto Preminger and Andy Warhol. She had affairs with celebrities: Brian Jones, Klaus Kinski, Terence Stamp, Maximilian Schell, among others. Her splendor was brief, too brief. Her story ended in tragedy. She died at age 33 from a heroin overdose. She was long past her prime.

HBO has just released a documentary about his life. Her name is Donyale Luna: Supermodel. It covers her life. Participating is her 44-year-old daughter Dream, who was only 18 months old when her mother died. The woman not only provides her testimony, she also lends her mother’s voice: she reads fragments of the letters that Donyale wrote to her friends and of the personal notes and diaries that were found after Donyale’s death. she.

The first cover she appeared on was Harper’s Bazaar. It caused a scandal. Many subscribers unsubscribed and several advertisers removed their ads.

Her real name was Peggy Ann Farmer. She not only changed her name, she not only acquired a new identity for her career. The movement was bigger, much more radical. She created an alter ego. Donyale Luna didn’t have Peggy’s past. She didn’t even talk like her. She developed a strange, personal accent that didn’t come from Detroit or anywhere else she’d lived. She also modified her lineage, she said that she had ancestors from such diverse cultures (Afro, Mexican, Irish, Polynesian), that this mixture was what produced such a unique result. She was a construction, one more facet of that character that she conceived, that she became. An intriguing, sophisticated woman, with the perfect combination between the ethereal and the profane.

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He grew up in Detroit. His parents fought constantly. Four times they separated and four times they got back together. Peggy – she still didn’t dream of being Luna – she wanted to be an actress. She participated in theater groups and performed plays at her school.

“No one in Detroit thought I was pretty. She was ashamed of myself. I just wanted to be normal,” she once said. She wanted to be like the others but she was very different. The first she noticed was the photographer David McCabe, her discoverer. He proposed doing a photo shoot. Then the one who took her to work with him was Richard Avedon. She did not take the cursus honorum, she did not climb step by step. She did not have to suffer rejections, postponements in eternal castings, be postponed by colleagues, occupy a subordinate place in a great parade. Her career took off immediately.

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From being discovered on the cover of magazines. The first was in Harper’s Bazaar in 1965. There she appears drawn, her skin color is hidden. Inside a large production of 8 pages with photos of her. It was the time of the fights for civil rights, of the constant battles against segregation. Donyale made it to the cover when no one expected it, not even her. Readers did not take it too well: they did not accept that the paradigm of beauty was a young woman of color. There was a drop in subscriptions, several newsstands returned the publication, many advertisers withdrew their ads. A discipline.

She was the first black model to reach the cover of the most important fashion magazines in the world.

Soon she settled in New York and was in high demand to work. In those first days in New York, she did not go unnoticed. In a letter to a childhood friend of hers, she wrote: “New York is a dream. A man started dancing for me in the middle of Fifth Avenue, all along Broadway men look at me, shout at me, compliment me and do things that are incredible. Jobs are raining down on me.” Then she wrote, in confident handwriting, a premonition, a prophecy: “I’m going to send you a photo of the new me. I’m going to get to the top of the world. I feel it in my body, I know it. Soon I’m going to be some kind of star. Coming soon”.

Donyale moved to London. There he reigned since his arrival. In a short time she was the cover of the British edition of Vogue magazine, the first model of color to achieve this. The photo became an icon. A very close-up, the hand covering a large part of her face, two fingers open, as if making a v, and her eye.

London proved to be the ideal place to develop and make yourself known. It wasn’t London, it was Swinwing London: the Beatles, the Stones, the miniskirt, Mary Quant, the artists.

At each appearance she was seen surrounded by celebrities: Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine. She usually didn’t appear alone; She did it accompanied by Christianne, her Maltese dog, with her thin white hairs touching the ground.

In London he became a star. Her presence in the London night was frequent. She appeared surrounded by many celebrities. With her participation in the Rolling Stones Rock’n’Roll Circus Show she met Brian Jones. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

But it must be clear that the choice of London as the city of residence and as the place to launch his career was not due to Luna’s decision. The roads in the United States were closed to him once those who decided recovered from the shock caused by his emergence. Advertisers threatening to remove her advertising, magazine owners preventing Avedon from continuing to work with her, designers removing her from fashion shows at the last minute due to her pressure. A journalist spat in Paco Rabanne’s face because she was leading the presentation of a collection. Fashion magazines did not show the beauty of black girls. Luna collided head-on with the color barrier, with rampant racism.

However, Luna was never a civil rights activist nor did she complain about the discriminatory treatment she often received. She once declared: “It is likely that my presence in the media, that my career improves the situation of some members of minorities, that it limits segregation. It may also not be. If that were the case, I would be happy. But really, I don’t care at all.”

She wanted to be different from everyone. That’s why she played with her origins and her multiple lineages. She wanted to show herself as someone who was racially ambiguous, who wasn’t pigeonholed, who was unique.

In the midst of the vertigo, the triumph came the tragedy. Donyale had only been known for a few months when a phone call woke her up. From the other side of the ocean, from her house, came terrible news but, at a certain point, it did not surprise her. Her mother had murdered her father; She shot him in the middle of a fierce couple’s argument, in which he, drunk, tried to attack her once again. The court exonerated the woman: her own defense. Donyale did not return to the United States, nor to say goodbye to her father, nor to see her mother, nor to comfort her siblings. She continued in London, working, having fun. She was another, she had escaped from that hell, she was not going to look back.

Donyale Luna was chosen for the cover of several albums by Blue Note, the legendary jazz label.

At the end of 1966, Time magazine dedicated an article to him titled The Year of Moon. He maintained that she had a heavenly body and was the most stunning model in Europe. And he stated that “due to its striking uniqueness, it promises to remain at the top for much more than a season.”

Pat Cleveland, a model and friend of hers, said that Luna didn’t have breasts but that no one cared, that almost no one noticed “because she had presence.”

On the catwalk she was not only imposing because of her figure. Every time she passed a dress, a brief happening, a performance, began. She had always aspired to become an actress, one of The Method: there she developed her vocation. She didn’t crawl, crawl or jump on the catwalk. She walked and suddenly froze, defiantly facing the journalists. She could interrupt the pass to perform a dance step, some contortion or address a celebrity located in the front row. She sometimes moved like a robot. Nobody knew what could happen. Each of her interventions was unconventional, an eccentric spectacle.

The drug use, which would end up ending his life, quickly got out of control. In London he discovered LSD. His lysergic trips became legendary. We have a parameter of his addictions: in 1969 she was in a relationship for a time with Klaus Kinski, the wild actor, Werner Herzog’s fetish. In his memoirs I Need Love, Kinski says that he had to throw Donyale and her entourage out of his house in Rome because his drug use was totally uncontrolled. And that’s a lot if the person who says it is one of the wildest beings that inhabited the world of cinema.

The addiction, inexorably, affected his work. She began to arrive late to sessions, to not attend fashion shows, her appearance deteriorated, as did her relationships with her colleagues and with photographers, designers and editors.

HBO MAx has just released a documentary that chronicles the model’s life. Her daughter Dream, 44, gives voice to letters and personal diaries left by Donyale

There was another factor that influenced his departure from the catwalks. The world of fashion already seemed like little to him. He wanted to succeed in cinema. She set out to become an actress. She acted in several films: Fellini’s Satyricon, Antonioni’s Blow Up, Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, several by Andy Warhol. She also participated in the Rolling Stone Rock & Roll Circus. The camera loved that exotic and exclusive beauty of her.

She may have been the most photographed woman of the last years of the sixties. The epitome of cool, he starred on several album covers by Blue Note, the legendary jazz label: Lush Life by Lou Donaldson, Mustang by Eric Dolphy, A New Conception by Stanley Turrentine, and Easy Walker by Sam Rivers, among others.

Donyale Luna in Fellini’s The Satyricon (Reuters)

After London, when jobs were scarce, when her life had become difficult, she married an Italian photographer, Luigi Cazzaniga. They had a daughter whom they named Dream in homage to Martin Luther King’s famous oratory piece I Have a Dream.

On May 17, 1979, in the middle of the morning, she was rushed to the hospital. They found her in her house, fainted. As soon as the doctors came in, they knew there wasn’t much to do. A heroin overdose had ended her life. She was 33 years old. She seemed much older, the excesses had diminished her beauty.

2023-09-17 05:47:59
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