VeruschkaVeruschka was the world's first supermodel, a playmate of Hollywood stars and a pioneer in the art of body painting. Then she dropped out. George Gurley tracks her down in New York.
Veruschka (nee Countess Vera von Lehndorff) grew up in East Prussia in a 100-room house on an enormous estate that had been in her family for centuries. Her father, Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, was a wealthy landowner and German army reserve officer who became a key member of the German resistance after witnessing Jewish children being beaten and killed. Hitler's headquarters at Wolf's Lair was a few kilometres from the von Lehndorff estate, and his diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop, ignorant of Vera's father's sympathies, took over half of the Lehndorff castle and lived alongside the family; little Vera was filmed playing with von Ribbentrop for propaganda purposes.
After a plot to blow up Hitler, hatched by disillusioned German officers, including von Lehndorff, failed in July 1944, the authorities showed up to arrest Veruschka's father. He escaped, only to give himself up after seeing a machinegun pointed at his wife's head. On the way to Berlin in an armoured car, he escaped again to the forest for four days; again worried about the safety of his family, he turned himself in.
Veruschka's mother and her three sisters spent the next five months in camps. That September, Count Heinrich wrote a last letter to his family before he was hanged by piano wire from a meat hook.
By the end of the war her family was homeless. Vera, who attended 13 schools, tells me she spent a lot of time alone in the woods hiding among the trees and wishing to become one. "I was living a totally underwater life after the war. We were under shock about what had happened to us."
At 14 she was a gawky 185 centimetres. Children called her Stork and she thought she was ugly, and her body badly proportioned and "horrible". She escaped into art, studying in Hamburg, then Florence. By that time she was no ugly duckling. At 20, photographer Ugo Mulas discovered her on the street and soon she was modelling full-time.
Here was the one-time bombshell who appeared as herself in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 movie Blow Up in what has been voted the sexiest scene in cinema history.
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