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Two poses in a recent issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED (both by Walter looss, who also took the full-page photo of Tiegs that appears on page 51) show why she is a rarity. One has the model facing the camera in a wet, white fishnet suit that is, of course, transparent. Her full breasts show clearly. Most women would look like a sack of potatoes in this suit, and most models would look like a half-empty sack of potatoes. Tiegs' body is awesome, and her face is so fine and strong and unembarrassed that questions of taste do not arise.
The other picture is more interesting. It shows Tiegs sitting in a small wooden boat, wearing a modest, white one-piece bathing suit. She regards the camera gravely, with a look of total self-absorption. Her body and face are womanly, but her expression is that of a three-year-old girl playing intently at the beach. She sees the photographer, but from a place far inside herself. She seems profoundly calm. A viewer wonders: What does she find there? What is so fascinating?
How to get a reputation as a dumb blonde: appear on a local New York talk show whose host asks, "How tall are you?" and "How much do you weigh?" Tiegs does her best with the material. "Five-ten," she says, her face alive and warm, the sparkle in her eyes working at perhaps 55% of max; "One-twenty." She ballooned up to 155 lbs., she says, just after she and her husband Stan Dragoti, a well-established TV commercial maker, were married, and she dropped out of modeling. Then she stopped eating fattening foods —"Sorry," she says, "but that's the secret"—and the blub dropped away.
There is an authentic friendliness to Tiegs, and it is a large part of the surprisingly personal contact that she manages to make with strangers who see her pictures. But there is also a professional friendliness, of the kind that good politicians develop. She gets first names right, listens thoughtfully to tedious questions. On this morning of the solid-mahogany talk show, she woke too late for breakfast, grabbed a few pieces of candy on the way out of her Sherry-Netherland suite, reached the TV studio on time, politely declined an offer to redo her hair and makeup, and was greeted by the off-putting Siegel with "Hi, hi, hi. And who are you?" She smiled as if he had offered her one perfect rose.
Now, on the way from the talk show to the studio where she will shoot Virginia Slims ads, there is a series of irritating mix-ups with taxis, ending with Tiegs standing in the snow at the wrong address. She is going to be late, and she hates that; it is unprofessional. But she reassures the embarrassed driver, and when she reaches Photographer Abe Seltzer's studio on West 22nd Street, she is unruffled, full of hellos.