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What Tiegs does now is a fast, intricate dance. She turns quickly, swirling the skirt of her red dress. She is very good. At the height of the swirl, and an instant before Seltzer's strobe lights flash, she smiles in a way that seems marvelously natural, although the smile's wattage is far greater than anything likely to be encountered in the real world. For perhaps 20 minutes, the pattern of turn, swirl, smile is repeated without letup, but with subtle variations. In these 20 minutes, Seltzer fires off four or five rolls of 36-exposure Kodachrome, perhaps 180 frames of film.
Though smoking is the point of it all, Tiegs does not smoke. She holds her long, skinny cigarette unlit in her long, graceful fingers. In the finished ad, the cigarette will be lit for her, politely, by the retoucher. As she walks off the set to be dressed in her next costume, she drops the Slims to the floor. By the end of the day, Tiegs, Nancy and Cristina will have, in such fashion, gone through more than a pack.
It is not age that will stop Cheryl Tiegs' modeling career; it is aeronautics. She is about to float free. Her face and her body have been recognizable for years, and now her name is known to the kids who rush to get autographs and the distraught high school boys who write earnest letters ("You are by far the most beautiful looking and shaped woman ...") begging for an old sock, a hairbrush, a nude picture. Soon it will be known to the steady and the reasonable, the people who keep their credit cards paid up and have their children's teeth straightened.
Tiegs is about to waft off into celebrity, that peculiar state of matter that is like fame, only without responsibility. Celebrities do not have to do anything. Celebrity is held to be interesting in itself, and this interest in turn sustains the celebrity. Consider the recent photo of Tiegs boogying at a Manhattan disco, Studio 54, with Tennis Player Vitas Gerulaitis. The two barely know each other. As Tiegs explains, "It was publicity." If Cheryl is straining at the mooring ropes, part of the reason is that she and her husband have been working hard to produce the necessary volume of superheated publicity. An odd result is that the makers of Virginia Slims and other products that Tiegs sells, like Black Velvet Canadian whisky and Cover Girl Cosmetics, are now selling Cheryl Tiegs.
Not everyone buys her. One elder of the beauty biz finds the California look distinctly boring. "There have, always been superstars," says Diana Vreeland, who worked as an editor of Bazaar and then Vogue for four decades. She cites Veruschka, one of her own discoveries, from the '60s, "an artist who did the most extraordinary things with herself." The '60s, Vreeland feels, were more interesting. She considers the naturalism of the present period cloying. "There's too much blowing in the wind. At one time, it was fashionable to be made up and it was not fashionable to have your clothes always falling off you and your hair falling down."
Vreeland reflects, then says, "A model becomes what today is. And what today is is the inner force of fashion." A pause. "I think there is a certain monotony about the girls of today. It must be planned that way."