(3 of 8)
Cheryl Tiegs is, good Lord, 30 years old. She appears not to mind, perhaps because from a distance of four inches she looks 20. The employers who pay her the highest rate in modeling also appear not to mind (she has raised her rates for commercial modeling from $1,500 a day to $2,000, though she receives the standard $150 a day for high-fashion work). Model Cristina Ferrare, 28, on hand for the shoot (as photo sessions are called), thinks that there is much less panic about age these days in the fashion business. "Part of the change is feminism, probably," she says, "and part is that everyone is exercising, keeping themselves together. But a lot of it is just Cheryl. She has that incredible face, and her body is the best in the business."
The cluttered studio is crawling with bodies: several photographer's assistants, a studio manager, a couple of art directors, two stylists, two hairdressers, gofers of both sexes, several admen in three-piece suits, the models, a makeup man, journalists. Everyone is gossiping, talking agency talk, watching the underbrush for poisonous serpents. The same Donna Summer tape has been wailing for three hours.
Strobe lights detonate at one end of the big room; Photographer Seltzer is working with Nancy Dutiel, a wan, lovely blonde who is new to the Slims ads. Tiegs, her hair piled and pinned with a flower, sits as Makeup Man Way Bandy, an old friend, dips his fingers into tiny pots of color and touches up her face. What he achieves is a stronger version of Cheryl: the wide eyes more enormous, cheekbones more prominent, the nose a more perfect narrow line. "The only thing you have to be careful with is her lips," says Bandy. "They're thin, and she doesn't like a definite line or a lot of color."
The stylist decrees a red chiffon evening dress, and Tiegs, with as much modesty as she can manage in a room full of people, slips it on. Wearing ballet slippers and carrying a pair of elegant red sandals, she pads across to where she will be photographed against a white paper drop. She grins at an onlooker. She can look a 6-ft. 2-in. man in the eye. The red flower in her hair looks like a pennant at the masthead of a racing sloop. Ellen Merlo has said that the one overriding reason for Tiegs' appeal is that her sexiness is not forbidding to men or offensive to women. This seems logical; how could anyone take offense at a sailboat?
Now Suga, the tiny Japanese master hairdresser, approaches, and Tiegs bends her knees, lowering her head so that he can give it a last swipe with his brush. A small, wren-colored woman, a stylist, darts up, makes an odd little ducking gesture that may be obeisance, and slips a bracelet on the racing sloop's left arm. Photographer Seltzer, a big, bald, hard-looking man, lies on his belly, chest soothed by a pillow, and begins to talk in the style parodied in Blow-Up: "Good, good, wonderful, great."