LOS ANGELES — Supermodel Beverly Johnson knows all the secrets in the modeling game and has a few of her own. As the first black person ever to grace the cover of America’s Vogue Magazine, Johnson has managed to stay on camera for 38 years.
That’s why she’s the perfect choice to serve as one of the three judges on TV Land’s new show, “She’s Got the Look.” It’s a competition to find the next great supermodel, 35 or older.
The world of modeling can be wrenching, says Johnson. “You’re not protected,” she says. Her first lesson came when she was already working for Glamour and Vogue but had not signed with a modeling agency, and word had not got out about this luminous newcomer.
“I went to the agencies, and they all turned me down. I got a call from the largest agency — now this is the agency that told me I was too fat — I walk into the agency that had turned me down three days earlier and she said, ‘Oh, you’ve lost so much weight.’ I thought, ‘I think I know what this business is about.’ ”
The pressure to stay thin in a world of fat salaries is always there, too, says Johnson.
“I’ve had bulimia and anorexia, you name it,” she says. Johnson was a competitive swimmer as a teenager. She was 17, on a full scholarship at Northeastern University and determined to become a lawyer when she was laid off from her $28-a-week summer job as swim coach at the YWCA.
“I had a girlfriend who was from New York City and she said, ‘Why don’t you become a model?’ I didn’t know what a model was. She got a magazine and I said, ‘You just stand there like that?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ ”
She made history in August 1974 when she posed for that famous Vogue cover.
“The thing is, I didn’t know it was a biggie,” she smiles. “I didn’t know the impact around the world as far as being the first African-American to be on the cover. That was a whole new (thing). It also made me aware of the world. Where I came from, where I fit in and also this huge global responsibility I felt all of a sudden.”
Johnson, who’s been married twice, is single and the mother of a 28-year old daughter who is a plus-size model.
