The Woman I Wanted to Be (15 page)

Women like tiny, four-foot-six Sunitha Krishnan, who was gang-raped by eight men at fifteen and went on to form an organization in India called Prajwala that rescues and rehabilitates girls from brothels and sex traffickers. Sunitha has been beaten up and regularly receives death threats, but perseveres, harnessing what she calls “the power of pain.” You barely notice Sunitha, she is so small, but once she starts speaking, she becomes so beautiful and majestic.

And Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, a Kenyan who was engaged to be married at five and later bartered with her father to be circumcised in return for the opportunity to go to high school. Kakenya went on to college and graduate school in the US and returned to her Masai village to establish a girls’ boarding school that changed the direction of education in her country.

And Chouchou Namegabe, a young journalist from the Democratic Republic of Congo who recorded the stories of hundreds of voiceless rape victims and played them on the radio to try to shame the government into taking action, then testified on behalf of the women at the International Court in the Hague.

These are but a few of the many women I’ve met through Vital Voices who have left me almost breathless with their courage and determination. “My God,” I think to myself. “I’ve done nothing.” Though I’ve
dedicated myself to empowering women through my work in fashion, mentoring, and philanthropy,
I
am empowered, mentored, and filled with riches from these women. It is they, and many others like them, who inspire me with their strength and beauty.

One day, after hearing me talk so much about Vital Voices, my children had an idea: “You are always talking about these Vital Voices women. You’re so inspired by them; you should give them awards. The family foundation can sponsor them—we can help finance their work.”

That idea stayed in the back of my mind, but it was unresolved until my friend Tina Brown, editor then of The Daily Beast, asked me to join her in organizing the first Women in the World Summit: three days of the most powerful women meeting, talking, and coming up with solutions for global challenges. I was so excited to be involved in this conference and it felt natural to turn one evening into a big dinner at the United Nations, and give awards, each with a $50,000 grant.

And that is how the DVF Awards were established in 2010 by the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation to honor and support extraordinary women who have had the courage to fight, the power to survive, and the leadership to inspire; women who have transformed the lives of others through their commitment, resources, and visibility. Since 2010, we have honored so many inspiring and truly beautiful women, among them women from the Vital Voices network. We have also honored Hillary Clinton; Oprah Winfrey; Robin Roberts, anchor of ABC’s
Good Morning America
; and Gloria Steinem with Lifetime Leadership Awards. Ingrid Betancourt, Elizabeth Smart, and Jaycee Dugard have received Inspiration Awards. What these three women have in common is that they were all kidnapped and, like my
mother, held in harrowing captivity, and, like her, refuse to think of themselves as victims. “My hope is to be remembered for what I do, and not what happened to me,” said Jaycee, who was held for eighteen years and has since founded the JAYC Foundation, which helps families recover from abduction and other trauma.

We also established a People’s Voice Award, chosen by popular vote from four nominees who are working within the United States. They are women who all start in a small grassroots way. As my mother told me, if you save one life, it begins a dynasty. The life you save can save another, so one life is never too small.

Bravery and determination: that is also beauty.

B
eauty is health and health is beauty. That is the reminder I email, as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America to designers every season before their shows. When I was elected president of the trade organization in 2006, there was a lot in the press about the causes of anorexia and its prevalence in young girls. I had no personal experience with eating disorders for myself or my daughter or anyone close to me. So I was puzzled at first when I was told that the fashion industry was complicit in the rise in eating disorders.

I was naïve, perhaps. Many top models have become celebrities so it would be natural for young girls to want to emulate them. Still, starving themselves was not the answer. Long, thin bodies are genetic, not engineered. Models watch what they eat, of course, but for the most part, their bodies are predisposed to be thin. This can be difficult for young girls to accept.

Though becoming a model is a dream for many all over the world, the truth is it is not an easy job. More often than not it is about being
rejected, about feeling bad about yourself. Most of the top agencies mean well and are caring for the girls—some are even outstandingly protective—but there are pseudoagencies and there is trafficking and prostitution that happens “in the name of fashion.” I cannot warn girls enough to be vigilant. Don’t dream of becoming a model unless it is genuinely possible. Look for other doors. The business of beauty can often be anything but beautiful.

In fact, I plead with young girls, except the very few genetically exceptional ones, not to try and become models. “Use your brains, your common sense and do not become an object,” I told one graduating high school class. “The way you look is important, but who you are and how you project it is eventually who you will become and how you will appear.”

I became convinced that the CFDA had to take the initiative to promote health as beauty. We established industry standards in 2007, working in partnership with medical experts, modeling agencies, and
Vogue
editor in chief Anna Wintour. These standards include commonsense recommendations to protect the girls; workshops for designers, models, and their families on how to recognize the signs of eating disorders; and encouraging models with eating disorders to seek professional help.

Next we addressed age. Youth is a huge factor in the business of fashion and the age issue is a stubborn and long-standing one—for many, the younger the better. It is a hard battle because many designers think clothes look better on very tall, extremely skinny girls, and the younger they are, the less formed they are. Those designers influence the bookers and force the model agencies to supply girls who are younger and younger. We had to stop that downward spiral, or at least slow it down. Every member of the CFDA—the top 450 designers in America—is now required to check a runway model’s ID to ensure
that she is at least sixteen and that those under eighteen are not kept at work past midnight at fittings or photo shoots. Health is beauty. Beauty is health.

I
was diagnosed with cancer in 1994, at the age of forty-seven. One minute I was fine, the next I was undergoing radiation at the base of my tongue and soft palette. It started at a lunch with Ralph Lauren at the famous midtown New York restaurant La Grenouille. It was supposed to be a business lunch but we talked about everything, including love and the fragility of life. He had recently had a benign tumor removed from his brain, he said. “How did you find out you had the tumor?” I asked. “I kept hearing some noise in my left ear.” As he said those words I heard a noise in my left ear. The following day it was still there. Could it be my imagination? I made an appointment with an ear doctor.

“There is nothing wrong with your ear,” the doctor told me, but he found a swollen gland on the right side of my neck. He didn’t seem concerned and gave me antibiotics. The noise disappeared but the swelling did not. I then had a biopsy and nothing bad came out. “It is a benign cyst, don’t worry,” I was told. I did not like the idea of having a cyst, so I scheduled a surgical procedure to have it removed the following week, on Friday, May 13. The unlucky date proved prophetic. As I woke up groggy from the anesthesia with Tatiana and my mother by my side, the doctor told us the news. When they removed the cyst, they had cut it in half and found tiny, tiny bad squamous cancerous cells that had already metastasized. Tatiana was shocked. My mother thought she’d misunderstood what she’d heard so she turned to Tatiana and kept insisting, “Translate for me! Tell me in French!”

The following days were terrifying, going for all kinds of tests and
fearing the worst. An operation that would cut most of my neck away? Chemotherapy? Everything sounded scary. It did not help when I went home the night of my diagnosis and turned on the news to hear that Jackie Kennedy Onassis had died of cancer that day.

At first I felt in the dark and very worried, but little by little, as I understood better what the doctors were explaining to me, I regained my strength and pushed away the fear. I had to accept that I had cancer and deal with it. Seven weeks of radiation. An unexpected summer was suddenly laid out in front of me. It was going to be a time of treatment and healing. I had no choice but to accept it, take time for myself, and focus on my health. I had to get well, kill the bad cells forever, and never, ever let them come back. I repeated that sentence over and over to myself so often that it became a little victory song in French.

My mother stayed by me. She did not act worried, which gave me strength. Alexandre returned from Hong Kong where he had been working at a bank; Tatiana was nearby. Barry was hit hard by the news. My doctor told me he saw him walking to his car the day I was diagnosed and never had he seen someone’s posture reveal so much distress.

On my first weekend in Connecticut after the diagnosis, my friend, producer, and agent Sandy Gallin, gave me a life-changing gift. He sent Deepak Chopra, the famous Indian New Age doctor and author, to visit me at Cloudwalk. We sat together as he taught me how to meditate. His way of explaining things reached me, reassured me, and turned out to be extremely helpful. He invited me to the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in La Jolla, California, and I went before starting the radiation. Tatiana took me there and spent the first two days with me, but I needed to be alone. I meditated and repeated the sutras Deepak gave me: Peace, Harmony, Laughter, Love, Creativity, Affluence,
Abundance, Discrimination, Integration, Freedom, Truth, Knowledge, Infinity, Immortality, Enlightenment, Holiness. I walked on the beach for hours, swam hundreds of laps in the pool, and had long conversations with myself and God. All of that plus the Ayurveda treatments of diet, herbs, and massage, along with the calmness around me, helped prepare me for this unexpected battle.

Back in New York, Alexandre took me to an appointment where they made measurements for a mask and put tiny tattoos on my face to ensure the rays would aim precisely. Years later my doctor told me Alexandre had returned to him after walking me out to ask him to take special care of me, “Remember: it’s my mother you’re dealing with.”

I took a photo of my face in the bathroom mirror before I went to my first radiation session. I wanted to remember me as I was, not knowing if I’d be changed forever. And then the routine began. Every day I walked to Sloan Kettering and put on the mask that was attached to the table. For thirty seconds, the rays targeted each side of my neck and the middle. I would then start walking home to the Carlyle Hotel, stop to have wheat grass juice at the health food store (it was nauseating, but I believed in its natural healing powers), and then walk on singing my little French victory song to kill the bad cells. At home, I meditated for hours, had a daily massage to stimulate the immune system, and gargled with sesame oil. On the weekend, when there were no treatments, I went to Cloudwalk and enjoyed the beauty of nature—the forest, the flowers, the deer among the apple trees. Nature had never felt more beautiful, more peaceful, and more reassuring.

Deepak called every day. So did Egon from Italy, Mark Peploe from London, and my friends from all over the world. I felt loved without being pitied and serene from the strength that comes from
love. Barry started to talk about us living together, getting a house, and started inquiring about my relationship with Mark, which he’d never done before. I was vague. My future was uncertain; I did not know what I wanted except to get well.

In the middle of the treatment my friend Mort Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon, invited me to go to the White House for a state dinner the president and Mrs. Clinton were giving for the emperor and the empress of Japan. I was excited and accepted. The grand master fashion designer of the moment, John Galliano, happened to be doing his first personal appearance at Bergdorf Goodman across the street from my office, and I borrowed his most beautiful ball gown: pale pink and blue chiffon, with lots of ruffles and a long train that went on forever. In spite of the radiation burn shadings on each side of my face, which I managed to hide with makeup, I ended up looking beautiful as I walked into the tented Rose Garden. The dinner was a historic event and I really enjoyed being there. At my table were some important Japanese businesspeople who could not believe that they actually were in the same room as their emperor. In Japan, they would have had to be separated by a screen because no common subjects can be in the same room with his Excellency the Emperor!

For me it was a different kind of excitement. I loved my voluptuous dress, though I had to shuffle carefully with my long train that nonetheless was stepped on by everybody and ended up in shreds by the end of the evening. Feeling frivolous and beautiful in the middle of my painful treatment was a wink to myself. It felt great.

The news from Belgium, however, was not good. Philippe phoned me just before the Fourth of July. My father’s health was failing; we had to get ready for the worst. The radiation center in New York was closed for a few days over the holiday weekend and Barry generously
gave me his plane to visit my father. By then, I had lost all sense of taste, my throat was hurting, and my skin was very burned, but I had to see my father. His Alzheimer’s had taken a bad turn and I knew he would no longer recognize me. Still, I wanted to kiss him and thank him for the love he had given me. Tatiana came with me. It was the last time we saw him.