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Some souls must endure fate's buffets, and others are favored guests at destiny's sitdown dinners. Except for her fat period and a bit of mid-marriage bumpiness, Cheryl Tiegs' life seems to have been uncommonly secure and successful from the beginning. The warmth and strength she now shows so easily to the camera is clearly to some degree a reflection of what she knew as a child in Alhambra, Calif. Theodore Tiegs, an undertaker, was a steady, thoughtful, attention-paying father, says Cheryl, and her mother, Phyllis, was a laughing, cuddling person. Phyllis worked in a flower shop when her two daughters were growing up, and Vernette, four years older than Cheryl, took care of her little sister. The Tiegs family went to Quaker meetings on Sundays. They were healthy and moderately affluent. The girls did well in school, and though Vernette was the more intellectual, Cheryl got good grades, played the violin skillfully enough to qualify for a city-wide youth orchestra, and read a lot. She was, appropriately, a pom-pom girl.
When she was 16, a talent agent came to her high school to speak about careers, and, he says now, "I saw this stunning young girl listening very attentively at the back of the room."
Soon she was doing cover work for True Romance and Teen mag azines. That soon slides past the hard work of learning to be a model. "I would look at those photos of Jean Shrimpton flying across the pages of Vogue and I'd try to fly across my room," Tiegs says.
She was seen in a memorable swimsuit ad for Cole of California in Seventeen. "There was gentleness that came through. Her face was almost Victorian," recalls the stylist for the session, Marion Samerjan. "You just had to fall in love with her." West Coast Talent Agent Nina Blanchard saw the photo and offered Cheryl a contract.
Cheryl was enrolled as an English major at Cal State, in Los Angeles, when Glamour magazine packed her off to the Virgin Islands with Ali MacGraw, then a star model, to shoot a cover. "She was so nice to me," says Tiegs now. "I had brought all the wrong clothes.
She just pulled out all these gorgeous things from Paraphernalia, with the price tags still on them, and loaned them to me."
At 19 Cheryl left college and took off for New York. With another blue-eyed California blonde, Kelly Harmon, daughter of former Michigan Football Hero Tom Harmon, she lived in an apartment above the Shoreham Hotel's garbage chute. "Neither of us really fit into the New York scene very well," says Harmon, who now models and studies acting in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that Cheryl was working hard, she never seemed happy there. "She was an outdoors nut like myself," says Kelly, and in those days a suntan did not help. A California girl was tagged, she says. "You'd go to New York, and Eileen Ford would look you up and down and say, 'My God, get rid of that blonde hair, make your skirt longer, and tone down."