The face has been prominent in the collective consciousness (not to mention the Universal Fantasy) for 20 years now.
It has flashed out so often from the pages of the glossy fashion mags, the tube and movies that the fabulous bone structure and that great gap-toothed smile seem almost to belong to some glamorous, sultry-but-remote next- door neighbor.
Still and all, says the Face`s illustrious owner, public recognition is no big problem. She knows the trick of deflecting unwanted attention: Wear glasses and a hat, keep the eyes down and walk fast.
”I have a very comfortable amount of infamy,” she`ll tell you, which means that for all her media fame, people generally don`t hassle her on the street.
Right now, though, here in Caffe Roma in North Beach, in the midst of an interview, an interruption looms. You can feel it. A Latin-looking guy at the next table has performed a marvelous series of double-takes upon encountering the Face, and now finally he has gathered up his courage to mount a move. He tiptoes over, leans down and deferentially begins.
”Hooten?” he says, almost whispering in his anxiety. ”You are Hooten?”
Lauren Hutton laughs merrily. ”I am,” she says. ”I`m Hooten. I am. Nice to meet you. How do you do?”
The guy lets loose a fawning jumble of words, all to the effect of how stunningly lovely she is.
”Thank you, thank you,” she says, and adds, politely but firmly, that work is going on here.
Chastened, he retreats back to his table, but his gaze remains riveted on the Face. Later, when she leaves the place, Hutton will stop to engage him in a few moments of conversation.
”I think it was a face-saving thing for him,” she says outside on the street. ”He had told his friend that he knew me or something and couldn`t back down. I helped him out a little.”
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Beauty, at its best, is of course a function of soul, which just may be the simple secret to Lauren Hutton`s down-home allure. Truth to tell, off-screen (or off-page) her looks are not of the neck-snapping variety.
She`d be the first to say that she`s a downtown sort of girl, not a lot of flash. She doesn`t neon out at you (her style of dress is decidedly understated, mostly second-hand stuff with a dash of Armani), but she does emanate a steady, warm, low-wattage glow that works a slow magic, muting the minor flaws of facial proportion until you finally comprehend the gorgeous, intelligent implosion of life force that the camera sees.
For the better part of two decades Hutton, 43 (and not at all coy about it), reigned as the country`s top fashion model, the fresh and natural exemplar of how modern young American women wanted to look.
Hutton says it all came about more or less by chance. The only reason she ever went into the game, she insists, was to finance her itch to travel to exotic places. When she found out she could make as much in an hour of modeling as she could in a week of, say, cocktail waitressing, she knew she had to give it a shot.
”I mean for unskilled labor-and I happened to have the right bones-it was the most money I could make for any job I could see,” she says.
”I hadn`t come to New York to be a model, but as a jumping-off place to see the world. And to take acid,” she says, adding with a grin, ”when acid was legal, of course. I wanted to jump on tramp steamers and all that, all those fantasies of the early `60s. But I had $200 when I got there, and there weren`t any tramp steamers anywhere, so I had to get a job.”
She put enormous energy into the pursuit, pinballing around Manhattan day and night for eight months, beating down doors and eating a steady diet of refusals and turndowns. The lanky, leggy stringbeans like Verushka and Jean Shrimpton were ascendant in fashion, and here was this relatively tiny, unknown, gap-toothed Floridian from the swamps outside of Tampa vainly trying to catch a break.
Finally, Eileen Ford saw something in her (Hutton thinks it had something to do with her finishing-school education at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans) and she was sent to see the legendary Diana Vreeland at Vogue.
”The whole youthquake was on in America and I was an early dropout and very much of my time,” Hutton said. ”But Diana Vreeland was the only one hip enough in the fashion business then to see it. They were still going for that old late `50s look, the old `high-haute,` and she was the only one noticing that there were these wonderful baskets of vegetables walking around growing their hair long and not wearing makeup and being very natural.
”The day that I got into her office she saw that in me, and she sent me to Richard Avedon, who had turned me down three times, and I never stopped working from then on. I think if I hadn`t seen her, none of it ever would have happened.”
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Actually, when she landed in New Orleans in the `60s for college she had been en route to Berkeley, drawn by the notoriety of the Free Speech Movement and the fact that ”the kids there were fighting back. And it was (Ed) Meese they were fighting when he was a young D.A. It`s quite shocking to think that the enemy of my youth is the enemy of my adulthood.”
Hutton had been something of an eccentric in her high school milieu. For one thing she was a reader, which is always suspect, and she insists that she was a chronic wallflower growing up. ”Never had a date in high school, and still don`t know how to dance,” she says.
”Oh, there for about three weekends I had a rash of dates when I started reading Huxley and Orwell and some other people, and I suddenly decided that I believed in free love. This was the `50s and pre-Pill, remember, but it made no sense to me to be a virgin when you got married; it all seemed incredibly stupid. So I told all my girlfriends this, and they told all their boyfriends, and suddenly I had this huge rash of dates.”
Hutton laughs at the memory. ”Guys would come pick me up in their station wagons-I didn`t know. I was in a coma anyway. You were supposed to be going someplace and then suddenly the seats would go back and they would jump on top of you and squash you. I would get away and everybody would end up being very confused.”
In New Orleans, she says, ”it all kicked in” for her. Sophie Newcomb and Creole gentility by day, the raw city at night.
”I was working in the Quarter and suddenly I was in the street life. I knew pimps and D.A.s and cops and jazz musicians-it was a great time in a great town and I was trying to absorb as much information as I could and keep my head above water. Because I came from a protective childhood, I was out of my element, so I just acted tougher than anybody else.”
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Well, Hutton finally got to Berkeley, but it was 20 years later and she was a global star. In town to film the ”Falcon Crest” TV series, Hutton is delighted to find she has plenty of time to play.
”I`d really only been out once before, years ago, when some horrible old `50s type producer invited me out to Hollywood for a screen test,” she says. ”But I found out he just wanted me to sit around and go to dinner with him, and, hey, that was costing me $500 a day in modeling fees, so I bagged the screen test and split for San Francisco.
”It was 1964. . . . I never came back, but I was lucky this time because a friend told me to call Jeanette (Etheredge) at Tosca`s, and through her I`ve met many people here I really like and will know for the rest of my life. This town`s been good to me; there`s something very optimistic here. I`m looking for an apartment.”
She has haunted bookstores and blues record shops with young Peter Getty
(all the while pining for her sweetie in New York), played with the gang at Tosca`s and explored Berkeley with Kate Coleman, the writer (they ate dinner in the kitchen of Chez Panisse).
She found Berkeley just as she imagined it all those years ago. ”I`m really sorry I missed it earlier,” Hutton says. ”It would have moved my life in another way.”
As always, she finds a few hours a day to read, right now it`s Machiavelli`s ”The Prince,” Beckett`s ”Murphy” and ”a wonderful Blake book, almost a diary with illuminations, that a cook at Capp`s Corner gave me.”
Another favorite local recreation has been, in her words, picking up people. Hutton laughs. ”I mean, when you`re famous it`s very nice and easy. I picked up this little old lady who`s probably 75 or something, and we`ve gone out to lunch. She`s so incredibly beautiful, has this little white punk hairdo. I took her out to the set with me.”
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Richard Avedon once said that Hutton possesses ”the best inner thighs in the business,” but more important than anatomy is the velvety, athletic texture of her physicality, the easy control she has over her movements that results in a minimalist approach to posing. She is, simply put, a consummate pro, a dream to work with.
”This is wonderful stuff,” the photographer says. ”It`s like you`re making love to the camera.”
”That`s exactly what I do,” Hutton says. ”I put someone I love inside the camera and remember his looking at me. I see his face.”
Lucky someone. It`s almost as good as seeing her face. The Face. –
