Literary lives – Donyale Luna The first Black supermodel

Sir Christopher Ondaatje explores the curious history of the American supermodel and actress during the late 1960s who was known for her unique and striking look.

“Six feet three inches tall and slender as an adder, with eyes the size of demitasse saucers, Donyale Luna was not only the first Black supermodel and the highest paid model of her time, she was the most strangely beautiful woman to grace the planet in the 20th century. The fashion world –indeed the world at large – will never see the likes of her again.”

– The Donyale Luna Blog

Donyale Luna was born PeggyAnn Freeman in Detroit, Michigan to working class parents Nathaniel Freeman and Peggy Freeman on August 31, 1945. She was one of three daughters: Lillian, Peggy-Ann, and Josephine. Her parents moved to Detroit from Georgia as part of the Great Migration. Her father worked in production at the Ford plant, and her mother as a secretary at the YMCA.

Luna’s parents married and divorced on four separate occasions – mainly due to alcoholism among Nathaniel’s relatives. They lived a financially stable upbringing in a middle-class neighbourhood of Detroit. She would frequently accompany her father to the local cinema. She attended the Detroit High School of Commerce, and later the Cass Technical High School, where she studied journalism and performing arts.

She began calling herself Donyale George Luna as a way of dealing with a turbulent home life. She invented a sing-song accent and pretended that Luna was the real surname of her father. When she was 18, she wanted to become an actress. She would routinely create fantasies about her background. She had a habit of walking around barefoot –even down the street.

Luna was discovered by English photographer David McCabe on the streets of Detroit near the Fisher Building in 1963. He invited her to move to New York City to pursue a modelling career. Her mother discouraged her, wanting her to become a nurse instead, but Luna persisted on the condition she lived with an aunt in the New York Harbour in New Jersey.

“I wasn’t accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realising I was strange.

Donyale Luna

Arriving in New York in October 1964, Luna called McCabe and, good to his word, he sent out her photographs to various agencies.

In January 1965, her mother fatally shot her father in self-defence as he was reportedly abusive – coming home drunk and threatening her mother. Her sister Lillian witnessed the incident and acknowledged the shooting to be accidental. Luna got the news three months later. She stayed in New York and didn’t go home.

David McCabe introduced Luna to Harper’s Bazaar editor Nancy White, fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and senior fashion editor China Machado. White signed her to an exclusive contract for the remainder of 1964, while Avedon became her manager. Her first job was a shot for Mademoiselle.

Nancy White had Luna’s likeness sketched on to an illustration for the January 1965 cover of Harper’s Bazaar – replacing the already preplanned cover. She was the first Black person ever on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in its 98 years of publication. The January 1965 issue also contained six other illustrations. Denziger remembered drawing 40 brush and ink studies in a one-room studio apartment on Lexington Avenue.

Harper’s Bazaar editors came to the apartment with clothes and uniformed police watched while Donyale Luna modelled them.

In the April 1965 issue she was photographed by Avedon in the What’s Happening editorial together with Paul McCartney, Jean Shrimpton and Ringo Starr.

She was described as having “the tall strength, pride of movement of a Masai warrior. The Sarasota Herald Tribune found the language “deeply prejudiced and racialised” and explored the work prospects of African-American women.

Southern US advertisers reported claims against the inclusion of Luna’s images in Harper’s Bazaar, and cancelled advertisements. Readers cancelled subscriptions. Hearst Communications banned Avedon working with Luna.

Avedon believed that he was no longer allowed to work with Luna because of “racial prejudice and the economics of the fashion business”.

David McCabe stated that he believed the magazine industry was not ready to photograph beautiful Black women.

Luna’s career began to slow down. She had a failed marriage of ten months in New York and a nervous breakdown, causing her to spend time recovering in hospital. Eventually she fled New York at the end of 1965 for Europe, and for the next five years lived in Europe.

She arrived in London in December 1965, and it proved to be the place where she would make her name as a model, emerging in Swinging London – part of a youth cultural movement associated with Beatlemania, Mary Quant miniskirts, and other models like Kellie Wilson and Hazel Collins in the stylised bobs of Vidal Sassoon, Mods, Teddy Boys, and bright colours and patterns like those sold in Barbara Hulanickis Biba shop, or seen in Carnaby Street or Chelsea.

She was photographed in London by David Bailey, William Klein, Helmut Newton, Charlotte March and William Claxton. She became friends with Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Iain Quarrie, and Yul Brynner. She rented an apartment by the Thames River. She bought a pet Maltese dog she named “Christianne”.

She became the first AfricanAmerican model to appear on the cover of any Vogue magazine – the March 1966 British issue shot by photographer David Bailey.

“She was extraordinary looking, so tall and skinny … like an illustration, a walking illustration. I didn’t care what she was – she could have been a Martian – for all I care … the sales people always had a problem with using her.”

– David Bailey Photographer

She was also chosen by the other British Vogue editor Beatrix Miller for her bite and personality – strange and tall. The cover composition was inspired by Picasso’s ocular-centric portraiture with one of Luna’s eyes peering suggestively from between her fingers. She was wearing a Chloe dress and Mimi de N earrings. In the editorial images she was dressed in Christian Dior silk tunics, Mod dresses by Pierre Cardin, and a silver Yves Saint Laurent dress. Fellow model Pat Cleveland noted: “She had no tits, but lots of presence. We’d walk down the street and men’s mouths would drop open in awe. When we walked into restaurants people would stop eating and stand up and applaud. She was like a mirage, or some kind of fantasy.”

She went to work for French Vogue.

After Harper’s Bazaar, she worked for Paris Match, Britain’s Queen, and also for London Life. In April 1966, she appeared again in British Vogue, shot by David Bailey, in a feature This Summer’s Dancing Patterns, and then on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK in June 1966. She was the hottest model in Europe. This time her features and skin colour were not edited out –shot by Bill King. In the October 15 edition of British Vogue, she was featured in a Klein shoot with Audrey Hepburn.

Luna also returned to New York for work. Adel Rootstein created a fibreglass model of her in 1967 based on her statuesque figure. She was paid $105 an hour to pose – equivalent to $830 in today’s money. She was a celebrity and her flatmates were worried they would be kicked out because Luna was making $500 worth of telephone calls ($4,000 in today’s money) to Europe every month.

On March 27, 1968, she appeared on the cover of the British magazine Queen. She and a party of five including Iain Quarrier and Mia Farrow went for breakfast at the Mayfair Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street when at 4 am they were asked to leave because the men “were not wearing ties”.

Luna asked the managers if it was because she was “coloured”. Eventually all five were kicked out for “causing a disturbance”. They resisted and had to appear in the Bow Street court charged with disturbing the peace.

When the judge Kenneth Harrington said, “I am quite sure it had nothing to do with Miss Luna’s colour”, Iain Quarrie shouted back, “That is not true”. He was charged £10 for disturbing the peace. Luna later explained to the press how that incidence of prejudice occurred.

“… because I am coloured. It was a nightmare. The Hotel staff and police were pushing me around. The Hotel refused to tell us why we were being thrown out.”

– Donyale Luna

The same month she was shot for British Vogue again by Harry Peccinotti.

By 1969, Luna was being paid $1,000 a week ($7,000 in today’s money). Initially, Luna was supposed to be on the cover of Vogue Paris when she arrived in Europe in 1965. Edmonde Charles-Roux had asked William Klein to shoot Luna for the cover, but he was fired by Si Newhouse for attempting to put a black model on the cover. It would take another twenty-two years before Naomi Campbell was put on the cover – but even then only because Yves St Laurent would otherwise cancel his advertising contract. She appeared on the cover of Elle in July 1966, and modelled a number of paper dresses in Sydney, Australia. The Italian magazine Amica then used her to display animal prints and fur coats in 1967, and later she modelled for camera advertisements in 1968. She bought an apartment in Italy in 1970, and would drive around in her Cinquenta car – folding herself up like an accordion to get to her assignments. She was thrown out of Italy for not having the correct paperwork to reside in Italy – but her eventual husband, photographer Luigi Cazzaniga, said she was harassed because of her skin colour.

She moved to Italy in 1974, where, with her husband, she was a collaborator in photographic shoots. She also modelled for Peter Beard. She appeared in a nude photo layout of Playboy using her husband as photographer. Despite being completely at ease with her nudity, the Playboy photographs were not sexually explicit. With her thin build she seemed to place more emphasis on her spiritual vision.

At about this time in 1975 Luna’s modelling career started to decline because she shifted from modelling to acting, and fashion magazines shied away because of her increasing dependency on drugs. She didn’t show up for bookings and it was difficult to hire her. She didn’t pay her bills. She had also developed her own style of catwalk performances, such as crawling like a lion, grooving to the music, or suddenly freezing and staring at journalists. She sometimes rolled from one end of the runway to the other.

Some designers like André Courrèges, Yves St Laurent, Rudi Gernreich and Mary Quant, however, encouraged such displays.

The ambition to act was not that surprising. She had appeared in some underground films like the 1966 “screen tests” for Any Warhol (Ciao! Manhattan and Prison). She also appeared in Michelangelo Antonionis’ Blowup (1966), and had roles in Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) as “God’s mistress”.

She appeared in the 1970 Happening documentary film Soft

Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali, a biography narrated by Orson Welles for French TV. Luna’s last acting role was the title character in the 1972 Italian film Salomé directed by Carmelo Bene. She went to the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and pitched her life story to American and European film companies like Berry Gordy, who was promoting Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues. In one of her final interviews for the Italian publication Panorama, Luna claimed that Berry Gordy based the 1975 film Mahogany on her pitch.

During the early morning of May 17, 1979 Donyale Luna died of a heroin overdose in a clinic in Rome at age 33. She was survived by her husband Luigi Cazzaniga, and her 18-month-old daughter, Dream. Although still legally married, Cazzaniga and Luna were estranged at the time of her death.

Donyale Luna’s reputation as one who often rejected type-cast labelling, has led to the promulgation of erasure of her achievements in the fashion industry. Phillip Burton wrote in 2009 how clean-cut models like Beverly Johnson and Iman, whose lives were not to end murkily through overdoses of drugs, were louder and prouder ambassadors of the “Black is beautiful” message. Their more palatable versions of Black womanhood loom large in the public consciousness today. Eccentric Luna, on the other hand, who was eternally cagey about her racial identity, waxed lyrical about LSD in interviews and had an endearing habit of not wearing shoes, has, for the most part, been forgotten. Depressingly, the biggest triumph of Luna’s career – her groundbreaking Vogue cover of 1966 – represents a war that is very much still being waged.

However, the designer Stephen Burrows noted that “Luna was ahead of the Black model thing. There weren’t too many around in the US in the 1960s” when commenting on Luna’s extravagant outlook and attitude to her own career opportunities.

“Black models didn’t truly enjoy their coming out until the Seventies, and models such as Beverly Johnson now feature more prominently on Black-firsts, even though Luna’s cover in 1966 predates Johnson’s by eight years. Luna is usually today therefore regarded as a key player in the mid-to the late 1960s fashion, film, and experimental theatre scenes … who by the 1970s was unable to move beyond the external and selfimposed limitations for someone of her idiosyncratic temperamental and tenuous lifestyle … which united to diminish and obscure her once impressive figure, which then led to her public erasure.”

– Stephen Burrows

American Fashion Designer

Thus, Luna leaves behind a mixed legacy as a model who both broke the colour barrier and as an underground actress, best remembered for her 1966 Vogue cover.

• Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia.