You Only Get One Life by Brigitte Nielsen Read Free Book Online Page B

a name for myself in Hamburg for a couple of months. A new set of photographers and their clients would prepare me for fashion week in Paris which would, so everyone hoped, be my big debut on the world stage of modelling. The agency were confident that I would be a star and the way they explained it, nothing could go wrong.
    My mum kissed me goodbye and I boarded the night train to Germany on a bitterly cold winter evening in 1980. The agency had paid my fare and apart from the address of a shared apartment in Hamburg, I had very little in my purse. But that didn’t matter – I was going to be a fantastic success and I firmly believed it would happen just as it had been described. My dreams were fuelled by the romantic evening I’d spent the night before when Christian and I said goodbye. In my mind I was certain that the two of us would spend the rest of our lives together. I felt an all-consuming love and I could see it was the same for him. I wasn’t going to be away that long and it wouldn’t mean anything. We were sure that what we had could certainly survive all that.
    Put to the test, it wouldn’t be long before I discovered that I wasn’t actually that good at making long-distance relationships work. My love needed so much fuel that it would quickly flicker out without constant attention, but on the train that night all I knew was the world was waiting for me and so was the perfect boy.
    The train pulled into Hamburg in the early hours andthings immediately began to look different. It was snowing and I had to make my own way to the apartment. Nobody answered the door, so the first few hours of my promising new life were spent slumped on the stairs outside with my suitcase. My confidence and excitement were frozen out of me and I felt lost, stupid and too young to be away from everyone I knew. I cried through sheer cold and exhaustion. It wasn’t until after 8 o’clock that someone finally woke up and let me in.
    There were another five girls who lived in the agency-owned apartment and all of us aspiring models had to bust our asses from first thing to get assignments. My Danish success meant little here. We would be called up for endless ‘go-sees’, the model equivalent of an audition. When my limited portfolio of Denmark pictures was picked for a job I would be called in so they could check me out. They barely looked up before saying, ‘No.’ Again and again it happened: Hamburg was my first taste of rejection. I’d never struggled as a model before. It was cold, that curt, bored, ‘No – next’, ‘No good – next!’, ‘Wrong smile… too thin… too fat…’ You could be in and out in less than 60 seconds. Dogs at Crufts are treated with more dignity. The humiliation was rolled into days trying to find my way around the city by bus, sweating to make sure I wasn’t a second late for an agency who would immediately throw me out and on to the next disappointment.
    When I began to get work it was mostly in catalogues. Hardly glamorous, 14-hour assignments, but the money was very good and it began to restore my self-esteem. I’d been thinking that I was back at school again, the giraffestarting to raise her long neck uncertainly inside me and I had been losing the battle with every successive ‘No’ to push her back down into her place.
    The reality of modelling is that it’s tough and degrading. There is nothing emotional in it, no heart. I couldn’t feel sorry for myself for being looked at as if I was no more than the clothes I was wearing. The choice was between giving up or developing an attitude which told the world I didn’t need anyone but myself. That’s what I did in the end: stand up straight, walk tall, smile, thank them as they’re saying get lost, dash to the next gig. Inside I crumbled and when I did manage to get a job there was the constant terror that it might be the last.
    Agency waiting rooms were packed with groups of girls sobbing together uncontrollably. Aspiring