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SCMP Reporter

Everything About Me is Fake ... And I'm Perfect!

by Janice Dickinson

Regan Books $200

Above a 'Come hither, ye ole farm boys!' caption, Janice Dickinson - the spirited 51-year-old supermodel who counts Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone and Warren Beatty among her conquests - poses naked and bejewelled on  a ledge: scrawny, scowling, oiled, and lightly grilled, throat tense and lined, taut-armed and with small veiny hands, her belly stretched by pregnancy and with silicone breasts on red alert, she showcases erect nipples bigger than her head. Who needs mystery?

Born and raised in 'Bumf***, Florida', Dickinson has always lived with her fists up.  'I was being battered by my father for not conforming to his idea of parenting, which was to have sex with your children ... My mother beat me for not obeying the rules of our soul-crushing home.'

Shutting out her father's words and deflecting his hands made childhood 'one long string of heart-racing days and frightening nights'. The nuns at school warned her of wearing lipstick: she would go to hell. 'How could I?' she asks.  'I was already there.'

In her long-limbed beauty, she found social value and escape.  She graced the pages and covers of Vogue, Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, and worked with all the top photographers.  All insecurities morphed into an edgy grandiosity.  The beautiful people? 'That era was a buffet of surgery, puking, drugs, booze.'

Hers is a world in which women deform themselves to conform to the design of clothes. 'Cindy Crawford wasn't born looking like  Cindy Crawford ... a highly paid team put her together.' Dickinson is also tuned by specialists. She had a bunectomy to wear Blahniks. She starved herself until she fainted. The dustjacket crows of her 36C implants, blepharoplasty, porcelain veneers and brow lift. 'The amount  of botulism (sorry, Botox) I'm packing in my  face could wipe out several small European countries.' (In some pictures, her  face looks not unlike a Japanese Noh mask.)

At her peak, Dickinson exemplified the late 1970s disco-broomstick look - no breasts, no waist, no hips, long legs, and spacecraft hair: an ideal of beauty founded on eating disorders.  'I've been hearing that a new breed of women will soon be squashing women like me. They're calling themselves plus-size models,' she spits.   'I don't buy this new attempt to shove their supersize images down our throats. When women 10 sizes overweight are crawling all over the fashion mags, what have we come to?' Quite.

Her relentless and carnivorous monomania make the book difficult to read. It's not unlike being stuck in a lift with Jim Carrey on a  bipolar upswing: all you want to do is get away. Indifferent editing, atrocious construction, tabloid prose, death by repetition (Mick Jagger ... world's first supermodel ... Mick Jagger ... world's first supermodel). And yet, compelled, you continue, as if presented with a case study  of the first Martian, or a total lunatic.



Everything About Me is Fake ... And I'm Perfect!