Cindy Crawford Talks About Her Midwestern Brand And Growing Up In Cornfields
By Emma G. Gallegos in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 6, 2015 3:48PM
Back in high school (Handout art via The Daily Chronicle)
Her new book 'Becoming'
Crawford, 49, grew up in DeKalb, and she was the second of four children. Her early childhood sounds almost idyllic. She told her hometown paper The Daily Chronicle, "Back then we didn’t lock our doors. Our parents would say come in at dark. It was such a great place to grow up. It felt very safe."
But when she was 10, she lost her brother to leukemia. The event shook her family: her parents divorced four years after he died. She and her two sisters buckled down and worked hard, because they didn't want to make life harder for their grieving parents. During summers in high school, she worked in cornfields for ten hours a day detasseling, cutting back the ear buds, inoculating cornstalks and spreading fertilizer, The Daily Mail says.
It was actually a photographer from The Daily Chronicle, Roger Legel, who first encouraged her. He was asked to shoot some high school girls setting up a retail shop, and right away he noticed she was poised and "more sophisticated" than the other girls. He gave her his card so he could arrange future photo shoots. Crawford told The Daily Chronicle, "He was the first one other than your mom or your grandma telling you you’re a cute kid — and I don’t even think my Mom or Grandma thought I was especially cute or cuter than any other cousin or sister. But when he asked to take my picture, that was the very first step in that direction."
That meeting later led to this shoot:
Crawford's first paying modeling job was a newspaper ad for Marshall Field. She earned $150 for wearing a Cross-Your-Heart bra, The Daily Mail says. The ad got passed around her school. Later, some of her classmates pranked her and told her to show up to model at a local business—when she showed up the business had no clue what was going on. She says, "The last laugh was on (them)."
She shared that anecdote in her new book, she says, not to get revenge but to share, "The lesson that nobody gets through high school without an experience like that. I don’t think anybody gets out of high school completely unscathed."
Crawford graduated as valedictorian of her class and went to Northwestern on a scholarship briefly before she dropped out to model full-time. Modeling in Chicago wasn't easy. The first photographer she worked with in the city complained she had a difficult face to photograph, and he cut ties with her completely when she got a high-profile gig. It stung but Crawford told New York Magazine she owes her career to that snub: "Thirty years later, I'm so grateful that he did that to me, otherwise I might have just been complacent and stayed in Chicago."
Make no mistake: she still has fond feelings for her hometown. New York is where her career took off, but she told The Daily Chronicle she tries to come back to DeKalb, Naperville or Chicago every year. She has maintained close friendships with her family and childhood friends. When her kids were little, she enjoyed bringing them to the Midwest for Fourth of July parades.
GQ asked her what her brand is, and the Midwest figures heavily into it: "If I had to describe my brand, I would say all-American, sexy girl next door. But maybe now I'm the MILF next door. And I was accessible. Not elitist. I did Pepsi. Revlon. They were accessible. As I started making bigger decisions, it was about access. Even the book—I could have made it big and expensive. But that's not my audience. That's not me. I'm Midwestern. I always think of my sisters—could they afford the book?"
The Union League Club of Chicago is hosting a Luncheon with Cindy Crawford on Wednesday from 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. at 65 W. Jackson Blvd. Tickets are $47. Barnes & Noble will be hosting an event at 6 p.m. at 55 Old Orchard Center in Skokie.