America’s white rule in 1964 stretched from coast to coast, however Malcolm X preached resistance up in Harlem and Martin Luther King and John Lewis led marches in Selma, Alabama. Change was blowing in the wind and Nancy White, the Harper’s Bazaar editor, transported an unknown black teenage with a African and Quechuan heritage from Detroit to the starry international modeling scene of New York and Paris.
According to Wikipedia Donyale Luna was 5-11, flat-chested and X-ray skinny. Her legs were as stilt-like as a Giacometti sculpture. She had caramel-colored skin, almond-shaped eyes, full lips and an oval-shaped face, which, in certain poses, portrayed an owlish surprise, as if she’d just been pinched from behind.
The world lay beneath her heels.
London’s Telegraph reported that Luna wrote a friend, “New York is a dream, a man danced me down Fifth Avenue, and all up and down Broadway men were eyeing and whistling at me, and so many other unbelievable things. I’m really getting the works from head to toe by Harper’s Bazaar’s best! As soon as possible I’ll send you a picture of the new me. I’ll be on top of the world if it takes every breath I have, every muscle of my skinny body. I feel it, I know it. I’ll be some kind of star real soon. Real soon.”
Avedon shot her for Harper.
After a violent family tragedy in which her mother shot dead her drunken father in self-defense, Luna took solace with high class friends, but defected to London, as her career languished in racist America.
In the city of BLOW-UP she became a star for David Bailey, William Klein, Helmut Newton, William Claxton, and Dali.
“She had no tits, but lots of presence,” quipped her model friend Pat Cleveland in the Telegram article. “We’d walk down the street and men’s mouths would drop open in awe. When we walked into restaurants people would stop eating and stand up and applaud. She was like a mirage, or some kind of fantasy.”
And like a mirage she vanished into the world of drugs and died a model’s death in Rome.
A black beauty forever.
ps America is no longer all white.
No matter what white people think, because goddesses come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.
