Interview: Robyn Peterson - A rare model

Published on Monday 10 August 2009 19:13

WE MEET at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. It's her local. I am so excited, I arrive an hour early. She is 15 minutes ahead of schedule, but still clutches hand to décolletage in alarm at the thought that she might be late.

Robyn Peterson is gorgeous. Part Lauren Bacall (but minus the screaming skull thing), part Kathleen Turner (in a non-puffy way), more than a hint of Deneuve, quite a lot of Candice Bergen (I know she is my kind of woman when she says she always wanted to play Bergman's slutty little sister in Boston Legal) and the occasional breath of Monroe. Of course, if all you have seen of Robyn Peterson is Helmut Newton's iconic nude study of her then you probably won't have noticed this, as her face is not in shot.

It is with her clothes on that Peterson made her name. I say "her" clothes, but they were not, strictly speaking, her clothes. They were Yves St Laurent's and Valentino's; Dior's and Lagerfeld's. Peterson was one of the world's top fashion models in the 1970s. When haute couture ruled, Vogue was fashion's Bible and Bazaar its hymnary, when glamour was glossy, not gaunt, and today's fashionistas were still just a hint of a sneer on the lips of the lovely.

Of course the top girls were stars – big stars – and were treated accordingly. Just not quite to the level of pandering that today's catwalk coathangers demand.

"The first big set I was on was with Cheryl Tiegs, and she had this assistant who held an umbrella over her to shade her," Peterson recalls. "When she moved, the umbrella moved. When she sat down, the umbrella lowered." Peterson's nave attempt to share the star umbrella was comprehensively repelled. But it wasn't long before she had an umbrella of her own.

She had never wanted to be a model. She simply wanted, she says, to get out of Miami Beach. She considered nursing, but not seriously enough to get any qualifications out of her school years. Her Irish grandmother – to whom she was devoted – wanted her to become a nun, but the young Robyn's "Bride of Christ" deliberations seem almost exclusively to have taken the form of making wimples out of dinner napkins to check the look. A sign? Perhaps.

Peterson first felt the "buzz" of being gazed at in admiration when she was very young. She and her sister used to enter diving competitions. At an early one, she tells me, she couldn't help but notice that the other female competitors had a decidedly more "pneumatic" look than either she or her sister. So, she says, "I boosted my assets" with a couple of packs of Kleenex. She still remembers the feeling of everyone looking up at her admiringly.

The girls focused, got into "the zone" and executed a perfect, well-practised double dive. As the young Robyn swam back to the sunlight, she burst through a surface covered in wet tissue. She still remembers the feeling of everyone looking down at her.

You will hear the story of her progress from Miami Beach to Paris via the great Eileen Ford and New York in her show Catwalk Confidential. I have to confess that, until I met Peterson, a show about the life and times of a dowager catwalk queen held about as much allure as being trapped in a lift with Jacqui Smith. But Peterson is an intelligent, articulate, sexy, drily funny, fascinating and immensely charismatic woman. Any hour in her company is hugely entertaining. I know – I had four and loved every one of them. (Apparently she is a great cook, too.)

I cannot imagine any time spent in the company of one of today's multimillionairess, endlessly indulged, globally worshipped, ber super-sticks would be nearly as entertaining. When, I ask, did it all go so horribly wrong for the girls?

Long before Naomi took the abusive phone call to a whole new level and Kate's relationship with Charlie became more famous than her dalliance with Pete, modelling was certainly more a profession – although "not something any father wanted his daughter to do" according to Robyn – than the branch of psychiatric medicine it has more or less become. These were the days of real Haute Couture; no diffusion lines or high street rip-offs here.

But although the fashion was arguably higher, the money was not. It wasn't until 1990 that Linda Evangelista told Vogue she wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. "The money. We didn't earn much… more than the average Joe, but not that much," says Peterson, when I ask her what she thinks it was that turned the stars of the fashion world from models into monsters. "You give any girl that much money and you'll create a diva."

Peterson herself is not even on the "d" of "diva" – but she is on the "d" of "delightfully down to Earth". She admires my watch. Joan Rivers, I say. She loves Joan Rivers, it turns out. She has a favourite necklace from the Joan Rivers Collection.

Today, for the record, she is wearing a navy Zara top ("where would we be without Zara?" she asks), pinstriped trousers and fabulous strappy heels – very this season – given to her by her niece. She is mildly nervous of the heels, having a "dodgy knee", a legacy from a skiing accident on a film shoot. It seems everything about this woman is effortlessly glamorous, even her injuries. She does love clothes, she says. Beautiful, well-cut clothes. "But I'm too Irish to spend the money when I don't need to," she says. She is, however, adamant about the value of great couture, the unique expertise of the great designers and their understanding of the way fabric works.

"When Valentino and Lagerfeld die," she says, "true haute couture will die. They are the only ones left who learned from designers and cutters who were around in the 1940s and 1950s. And they learned from people who were creating couture at the turn of the century." She sighs. Lagerfeld was one of her favourites. He always used to give the girls the shoes from his shoots.

While she has respect for great couture, she is more ruthless than a Kwik-Unpik through a dodgy seam in her opinions on the "must-have" handbag craze: "$3,000? For something to put your tampons and used tissues in?"

I like this woman more and more. But then, what's not to like about a woman who greets you with the words: "I've been killing the babies"? By which she means she's been reducing her script from 80 minutes to 55 to fit the requirements of the Fringe, which necessitates the cutting out of some of her most lovingly nurtured lines.

"Every one is a wrench," she shrugs, and tosses gravity defying swoops and curls of honey blonde bob.

She has created some beautiful babies: stories of working with Helmut Newton ("He had an image in his head … and you were something he used to make it real. He used to grab bare lightbulbs and get you to hold them to light the shot"), stories of being shown her space in the viewfinder of a Hasselblad camera and taught how to fill it, stories of learning to make a dress "stop time" on the catwalk, of using your body to make a dress "talk" to the women who placed the orders and the men who paid for them.

I suggest that all a designer dress might say to me is "I have more money than sense". Peterson laughs and agrees that women wafting round the couture shows would judge how much another woman's husband was earning by what and "who" she wore. Probably not much change there. Peterson had what she calls "my Eve Harrington moment" when a photographer booked her on a shoot with, effectively, a younger version of herself. Since leaving the catwalk and photoshoots behind, her body has successfully "talked" on everything from The Sopranos to LA Law, and from Pretty Woman on film to the original Talk Radio on stage.

But her current ambitions centre on a successful Edinburgh.

That said, she wouldn't pass up a modelling contract were it offered. And in the long term? She and her Catwalk Confidential director Tony Abatemarco have plans for a version of Romeo and Juliet set in a nursing home.

Just before we leave, Abatemarco scribbles something on an old receipt: "Don't look now, but you are sitting back-to-back with Charlize Theron." I didn't. And as we rose to go, no-one else looked at her either. Because they were all looking at Robyn Peterson.

&#149 Catwalk Confidential is at Assembly @ Assembly Hall, until 30 August, 6:20pm.