It was about the time that Naomi Campbell wanted to scratch my eyes out (or so a trade glossy informed me) that it became clear to me that she was no ordinary model. It was 1996, and I had written an article for the New York Times Magazine about the English-born model of Jamaican (and Chinese) ancestry, enumerating her eccentricities and recounting a few of the seemingly numberless stories about the nutty behavior of this gorgeous, magnetic and nearly pathologically petulant young woman with serious anger-management issues.
Back then, Campbell had not yet started routinely chucking phones at her help or for that matter serving five-day sentences sweeping a Department of Sanitation depot for her misdeeds, as she did last week. But a Vanity Fair columnist had already termed her the "biggest brat in the modeling business," and she had been fired by an agency on the ground that "no money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed" on its staff and clients, and she had been informed that the agency would not employ her again if she were the "last model on earth."
They rehired her, of course, after just six months. And 10 years later it is obvious why. Tempestuous Naomi Campbell may also be fickle and grandiose (she once furiously refused a specially ordered sandwich at a four-star French restaurant, apparently because the crust was scratching her gums) and ostentatious and evidently immune to some fairly basic civic lessons.
But there is something else about Campbell that gets overlooked and that is clearly at the center of her enduring appeal. Unlike most models (an occupational misnomer if there ever was one), she represents a clear link to the famous beauties of the ages, flamboyant types like Georgina Cavendish, the alluring, spendthrift and gambling-addicted 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire; or Lady Diana Cooper, the actress and wife of the diplomat Duff Cooper, celebrated for her porcelain looks and equally for her tastes in morphine derivatives and men; or the movie actress Louise Brooks, who considered it a given that a woman was an idiot if she didn't play the genetic hand she'd been dealt by fate.
And that is why it was so entertaining to watch last week as Campbell paid her debt to society, turning up every day to do court-ordered community service in designer furs, boots, hats, bags and eyeglasses and hairstyles freshened constantly for her public appearances by Amoy Pitters, her hairdresser of many years.
There was a lot of moralistic clucking in the press, of course, particularly when the gossip columns passed on rumors that MTV was filming a reality show about her (not so, said Campbell's publicist, Jeff Raymond) and that the fashion photographer Steven Klein was also shooting a fashion feature of the experience for W. ("They are friends, and they work together on a lot of projects," Raymond said. "Steven has been photographing her, but it's not clear where it will go.")
None of it was too convincing because, of course, it pleases people to think ill of the fashionable. This has apparently always been so. "The best dressed of every age," read an 1859 handbook called The Habits of Society, quoted in Joseph Epstein's 2002 book, Snobbery, "have always been the worst of men and women."
You would be hard pressed to find someone more truly a creation of fashion than Naomi Campbell, who grew up in the business and who has been earning a living from her looks for 21 years, ever since she made her debut in a video for a band put together by Boy George, another performer who has also since swept up for his misdeeds.
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