Much less apparent have been the nagging mannequin rivalries. As her fame grew, Ms. Johnson fretted that youthful Black fashions, Iman specifically, would eclipse her, a prospect that fueled her already mounting anxiousness.
Nor did it assist that she and her friends usually resorted to cocaine to curb their meals cravings. Medication have been an occupational hazard, Ms. Johnson stated. “As a mannequin, you needed to be a hanger. You possibly can be 90 kilos and chiseled to the bone, they usually worshiped you for it. You possibly can not get too skinny.”
Inevitably, maybe, she developed the physique dysmorphia that plagues her to today. “I’ve been in remedy for it my complete life,” she stated. “Proper now I believe I’m fats.”
In her stage monologue, as in her memoir, she remembers that she got here to rue her two marriages, particularly her 1977 union with Mr. Sims, whose infidelities and threatened violence despatched her right into a tailspin of despair — and extra medication. She sought assist from her sister Sheilah, a therapist and college steerage counselor, who, Ms. Johnson associated within the interview, requested her bluntly: “Will you die for those who keep on this relationship? Will you really bodily die?”
“And I assumed, ‘Sure, I’ll die,’” an epiphany that spurred her to divorce Mr. Sims in 1979. Anansa, a toddler on the time, was despatched to stay along with her father, returning to her mom solely in her teenagers.
Ms. Johnson was linked over time with the tennis star Arthur Ashe, the boxer Mike Tyson and the actor Chris Noth. A couple of dozen years in the past, she settled in Palm Springs, Calif., with Brian Maillian, a financier, who accompanied her to New York final week. They have been married in October.