WASHINGTON — Tyra Banks is one of the most resilient celebrities you’ll ever meet.
Once told that she had a “not-fit-for-camera face,” Banks fought to become the first African-American model on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, then parlayed that into hosting the reality show “America’s Next Top Model” and the Emmy-winning “The Tyra Show.”
But did you know that her mother was a key inspiration throughout that entire journey?
“My mom bucks convention and says, ‘To hell with you. Talk to the hand,'” Banks told WTOP.
Now, Banks teams up with her mother Carolyn London to pen the new memoir “Perfect is Boring: Ten Things My Crazy, Fierce Mama Taught Me About Beauty, Booty and Being a Boss.”
“We had a shared Google Doc,” Banks said. “[Our editor] would pass it to my mom and I, we would make sure it was in our words, add our sauce and sass. I did many final edits. I’d like to say I did one final edit, but I probably did three final edits. I would hole up and look at the ocean in L.A. and sit by the beach and just polish, polish, polish, tighten, tighten, tighten.”
She admits a lot of the tightening was to pare down her mother’s stories.
“My mom tends to be long-winded,” Banks said. “She would get the Google Doc and go on these beautiful tangents with this beautiful prose … then I would get it and say, ‘Mama, this is five pages, but it just needs to be one line. I’m going to take one sentence from that.’ She’d be like, ‘What? I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning and did that!’ And I’m like, ‘Mama, I’m telling you, this is how it works. I edit television and I’m going to edit this to make it really good.'”
Childhood stories include talking frankly about the “down and dirty.”
“I had the birds and bees talk in elementary school … but when I turned 13, my mom booked a train from Los Angeles to San Diego and proceeded to tell me the down and dirty,” Banks said. “When you’re making out with a boy, how your body will feel weak and floating on Cloud Nine and the Eight Words He’ll Whisper In Your Ear that you need to watch out for. … I bet there’s guys all across the country like, ‘Tyra, why’d you have to put us out there like that?'”
She also shares the terror of her first menstruation.
“My parents were divorced and I started my period at my dad’s house,” Banks said. “I was so nervous and I didn’t want my dad to know. So I called my mom so nervous like, ‘Don’t tell Daddy,’ and she ended up telling him. I was so devastated and freaking out about it.”
Sensing her daughter’s frustration, Banks’ mom threw her a Period Party.
“When my mom first started her period, my grandma said, ‘You’re a woman now,’ threw her a box of Kotex and that’s it!” Banks said. “My mom was like, ‘I’ve gotta stop this cycle of fear, confusion and shame,’ so she threw me a Period Party, had my friends over, we had food and a cake and my mom made this big basket of sanitary napkins, Kotex and tampons! It was just this celebration of womanhood. … If I had a little girl, I would have thrown her one, too.”
Upon entering her modeling career, her mom helped her through criticism. When one modeling judge told her she needed to lose weight, her mom took her out to get pizza.
“My mom was like, ‘Let’s go get pizza and you’re gonna talk about the kind of career you’re gonna have where you can still eat pizza,'” Banks said. “She is like, ‘What clients like ass?’ I’m crying and like, ‘Uh, Victoria’s Secret?’ She is like, ‘Write it down!’ … ‘Who has an ass?’ I’m like, ‘Cindy Crawford?’ She is like ‘Write it down!’ … I had this whole list and she is like, ‘Those models are the kind of career that you can be inspired by. Those are going to be your future clients.”
It was a valuable lesson that ultimately came to fruition.
“The paper came true!” Banks said. “We put it into action, as opposed to crying and saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to leave the fashion industry or starve myself to fit in a high-fashion designer’s dress.’ My mom has always been that rock for me, in an atypical way but effective.”
Likewise, her mom helped her overcome the aforementioned “not-fit-for-camera” critique.
“The first modeling agency that signed me said I was not a photogenic model, I was just a runway girl,” Banks said. “But I was so happy even at that because the six agencies before that said flat out ‘no’ to me. So even just that tiny door opening saying, ‘You can’t do photos but we’re going to put you in the runway division’ was great. I was like, ‘I’m gonna do it!'”
Her mother knew from experience that her daughter had the goods.
“My mom was a medical photographer and had a glamour portraiture business on the side,” Banks said. “She felt I was photogenic, so we just continued to practice and fill up my portfolio on the weekends. Slowly, I got booked for jobs, Seventeen magazine, Spanish Vogue, a lot of big clients when I was in high school, so I slowly started to show I was a photogenic model too. I guess that agent didn’t see it … but I was like, ‘You got me in this door and I am gonna work this runway.’ My mom wanted to pummel them. She wanted to slap them in the face.”
Yes, if Tyra’s mom had her way, she’d give the doubters a not-fit-for-camera face.
Find more details on the book’s website. Listen to our full conversation with Tyra Banks below:
