June 17, 2021 • 66 mins
Laverne visits with one of her idols and sources of inspiration Tracey ‘Africa’ Norman to talk about her dramatic career in fashion in the 70s and 80s. Norman became a trailblazer when she was chosen as the first Black woman on a box of Clairol hair color in 1975. This was momentous for the entire Black community. It was also momentous for the transgender community, but nobody knew it then. Tracey had been assigned male at birth. She came up in the days of secrecy, but she’s open now and finally sharing her historic story. //
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. A reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio Transition to Putt.
She looked absolutely beautiful. She had to kiss curls going.
She was in a pair of Type Jean. She had
breast at that time. So we started talking and she
(00:25):
told me, girl, you need to get on models. Girl
used to get on moans. Yes, Hello, and welcome to
the Laverne Cox Show. On today's episode, we'll be talking
about the life of someone who means so very much
(00:47):
to me. Tracy Norman is legendary in the modeling world.
In the nine seventies, she helped great color barriers as
a black high fashion and commercial model. She was the
first black woman to appear on a box of clear
Ale hair color number of five twelve dark auburn and
incredible achievement for any model at the time. Norman has
(01:07):
modeled and been photographed for publications such as Essence, Vogue Italia,
Harper's Bizarre India, among others. She used to walk the
runway twice a day in Paris for Valenciaga. All this
from a woman from Newark, New Jersey, who had been
assigned mail at birth, but no one knew. I discovered
her about eleven years ago and couldn't stop talking about her.
(01:32):
Discovering Tracy just opened up this this world for me
of just imagining what her life was like, what trans
life was like in the seventies in New York, which
I've always been obsessed with the fact that there was
a black trans woman on a claral hair color box
(01:53):
that was in drug stores all over the country. Just
is deeply in aspiring to me to this day. And
found her number and called her, and eleven years later
we get to have a conversation here on this podcast
about her life, her groundbreaking career, and how her resilience
(02:17):
and ability to reinvent herself have carried her back into
the arms of the modeling world today, Open and free.
But first, please be advised that there is a short
story which references an assault that some may find disturbing
and or triggering. Please enjoy my conversation with Tracy Africa Norman. Yes,
(02:39):
I'm here, Hello, Tracy Norman, Welcome to the podcast. How
are you feeling today, Darling? I am doing great and
thank you for allowing me to be a part of this.
It is my absolute joy and pleasure to be able
to have this conversation with you. You you are your
(03:02):
living legend, and you are so important to me and
to our community, and I believe to the world. I
would love to get started by letting folks know a
little bit about you. But I want to start with
the day that you met Irving Penn, one of the
fashion world's most iconic photographers and ended up on the
(03:24):
pages of Italian Vogue. Can you talk us through the
day that that happened. Yeah. Sure. I got a phone
call from a friend album Brundy, and he gave me
a phone call because at that time I was still
learning how to walk. Because he was training me, so
(03:44):
a listing of when the seven that venue shows were
going on. So he would send me to these places
and what I would do is take my portfolio with
me and in order for me to get in, because
it's invitation only, I would to tell them that I
am a student at f I T and they would
let me come in and line up behind the wall.
(04:06):
The day that I was discovered she sent me to
the Pierre Hotel. I was assuming that I was going
to see another fashion show, so as I was coming
across the street. I noticed on the opposite side of
Fifth Avenue, in front of the hotel, there was a
group of models that I had recognized, so I followed
(04:29):
him all on the elevator. We attendant was there and
they knew the fort that they were going to, so
she let us off at the floor. I went to
the right, not knowing where I was going, and the
other girls went to the left and they went down
this very long hallway to this huge suite on the end.
(04:51):
But all the girls was lined up outside and they
were going in. One time. I just send online. For
some reason, my feet would move and I just stayed
there and I was the lastly all mine. So when
I went in, I didn't realize that I was speaking
to Mr Penn at the time. He asked me my
name and was I was an agency, and I told
(05:13):
him no, and yes that I had if I had
a picture, that I could leave him with my information,
which I did, and about three days later I got
a phone call from his assistance telling me that that
I'm being vote for Italian Vogue and it's the two
days shoot fifteen hundred dollars for each day. That is amazing. Yes,
(05:35):
do you remember how old you were roughly when all
of this happened. Yeah, I graduated in seventy two at eighteen,
and that didn't take place until seventy five, so I
was in my early twenties. And for the very first
go see that you didn't even know you were on,
you ended up an Italian vogue. That is an unbelievable story.
(05:57):
It's so crazy. Can you tell me what the she
was like? Well, when I got to the studio, there
was people were setting up the cameras. I saw Mr Penn.
He was sitting out a desk and he was talking
on the phone. I waved to him and he pointed
me to the dressing room and there were a couple
of girls that were already there who was getting their
(06:20):
makeup and hair done. I said good morning to everybody,
but no one spoke m hmm. Interesting. And so afterwards,
Peggy Diller came through the door and came into the
dressing room. I said hello to Peggy, and she was
the one that spoke back to me, and she told
me that I was pretty. I thanked her and it
(06:44):
was just her aura that I levitated to. And then
we got dressed, we got our makeup, and hair done,
got dressed and sat in front of the camera. He
placed everybody started taking photos and that was that full day.
And then the second day we went through that whole
(07:06):
process again. And after the phone shoot, even before I
got undressed to to leave, he approached me and said,
let me make a phone call. So he called an
agency and he was speaking on the phone to the
owner and said that he was going to send this
(07:27):
new girl by and he wants him to sign me
up to the agency. M hmm. And when he was talking,
he said that he had a young Beverly Johnson standing
in front of him. That's amazing. And there to restarted,
because after that then I had the meeting with Soli himself.
(07:48):
He signed me and things were progressing from there. That's amazing.
I want to just unlet folks know that Zoli was
a modeling agency at the time. They represented a lot
of the models in the day. This is and Peggy Dillard.
Folks told know is the second black woman to be
up here on the cover of American Vogue after Beverly Johnson.
(08:11):
So how did your life change after he was signed
with Zoli. It was a whirlwind because I started booking immediately,
and I wasn't even seeing clients. They were making phone
calls and the word was getting out that there was
a young Beverly Johnson on the scene and so first,
because I didn't know what I was doing, basically, he
(08:33):
started sending me to Florida to do catalog work. Even
though he didn't want these pictures in my portfolio, he
still wanted me to get comfortable in front of the camera.
And when I came back, he said that I needed
to show up at such and such a place at
such a time and it was a test. So I
(08:55):
did not knowing that this test was for cloud All
uh and that's how they were picking girls. So the
hairdresser was there, the makeup artist and the photographer. They
liked my photo and two days later I got a
phone call from Jobe saying that I got the job
(09:18):
to be on a hair color box and the photo
shoot went well and he wanted me to come in
to sign the contract. So I signed a three year contract. Wow,
how long after the Italian Vogue you did the Claire
All hair color box moment happened to you? Remember that?
I think was about six months later because I was
(09:38):
still flying down to Florida to to get familiar being
in front of the camera, learning how to move and
also at that time still trying to lose weight. That's amazing.
So this is an iconic moment. Tracy was on a
clear all hair color box and the color was all
burned and it's a born beautiful on that hair color box,
which is just such a beautiful image. In the first
(10:00):
time I heard about Tracy, were read about her with
Monica Robert's blog The Transgrio. May Monica rest in peace,
and immediately googled you after I read the article and
saw that iconic image, and I think my mother used
that hair color. I remember seeing that hair color box
when I was a little kid in Alabama. So is
it my understanding that this claral hair color boxes in
(10:22):
drug stores all over the country. Yes. I went into
the drug store one day with my mom and I
came around to look for shampoo and hair conditioner, and
then that was the same aisle that their hair color
boxes was in, and I saw my boxes, started yelling
for my mom in the store. Oh my god. Yeah,
it was very exciting. It's so exciting to think about.
(10:45):
So you are this black trans girl from Newark, New Jersey.
We're going to get to all of your background. But
you're standing in a drug store and you're on a
Claral hair color box. I mean, anything else about how
you felt in that moment seeing that it was for real.
I was just like an awe and yelling for my mom,
and she was just so proud. And so we just
(11:06):
took a couple of boxes off the shelf and took
them home, and she kept one. I kept one for
as long as I could. We were just delated. Wow.
So so at this time, it's because it's about nineteen
seventy five, you're getting you're starting to model. You're modeling
for Essence magazine, You've already model for Vogue, You've booked
in the first six months, you booked a Claire All
campaign with the Whirlwind part of it. Can you paint
(11:29):
a picture for us of what you know a day
and an evening might be like in the life of
Tracy Norman modeling in the seventies. So I went to
a couple of parties. Well, I went to the garage,
of course, but then all the models were going to
the garage anyway, so I went there. I also went
to studio fifty four at one point where a local
designer who was from Noork who lucked up and got
(11:53):
a big contract in his own showroom on Seventh Avenue.
His name was Jamie McDonald. He rest us all. There
was three three girls and two guys and got off
the limo and they opened up the gates and the studio.
Do you remember the night. I'm obsessed with that whole era. Yeah,
(12:13):
it was a lot of celebrities that you recognized in there.
There was a lot of models you recognized in there.
It was a very busy place. And then they had
the huge balcony and so you know, I was just
making the rounds going up into the balcony. There was
a lot of um, drugs and sex going on in
the balcony because it was very dark. So I excused
(12:34):
myself from the balcony came back down to the thing war.
So the whole group got together because we were in
coordinating colors. Um, we were all in white and the
designer was in red. So we all just stayed on
the dance floor and started dancing. Amazing. That's incredible. And
now along your trens and no one knows do you
(12:56):
have I just think about the moment in my life
early transition, when I before or I would sort of
disclose to people that I was trans and sort of
the anxiety that I would have. Um, and I've talked
to other girls who lived stealth, and that's sort of
the anxiety of people discovering and like losing it all.
Was that under the surface for you during that first
shoe for Vogue, during the shoe for Claire All and
when you were doing modeling for the catalog? What was
(13:17):
that whole thing like for you psychologically and emotionally. Um,
I didn't give it a second thought because I identified
myself as a woman all of that time. I didn't
identify with being trans There was no such word back
then in the seventies anyway, So I always identified with
being a woman. So can you take us back a
(13:41):
little bit. You so you were born and raised in Newark,
New Jersey. What was your family life like growing up
in Newark? Well, growing up with my mom, I mean
she had to hold down jobs. This was a woman
back in the fifties and sixties, a single mom, So
you know, she was very busy and we had different
(14:04):
babysitters at some point, and there was a, um, a
house that I was in. I believe it might have
been my mother's brother's wife we were staying at, I'm
not really sure. And so she lets she let me
out while she sat on the steps with with my sister,
holding my sister, and she let me out. There on
(14:25):
that particular street, you know a lot of kids were
in front of their homes and playing in the streets
and riding their bikes, and so I just you know,
was playing with the other kids and wandering, and a
teenage boy that was across the street called me over,
invited me into his house, and that's when I was
(14:46):
already molested. Wow. Wow, did this just happen once? Um?
Did you tell your parents about it? Um? It only
happened one time. The second time he called me over,
he invited me into his bed. Mom at that time,
and so as he was undressing, you know, his chicking
down his pants and his underwear. UM, a friend of
(15:09):
his came out the closet and I jumped up and
ran out. And then so days after that, it was
the first time I was hearing the words fagged gay.
I didn't know what all of that meant. Wow. So
after the after the assault O. Their kids started calling you,
(15:31):
calling you fagged and cissy. After that you were assaulted. No,
just the two guys that were going to assault me.
But I ran out the house. Wow, I'm so sorry
that happened to you. That is there's so many stories
about young people. I'm experiencing this and I experienced it
(15:51):
myself and it was not easy, and I'm still dealing
with the sort of the trauma and the shame from
that incident out. Yeah, I'm so sorry that happened to you.
Do you? Do you ever? Do you want to say
anything else about that moment in your in your childhood? Um? No,
because I never went back over to their house anymore,
(16:13):
and I just stayed um near the house that I
was being baby set hat M. Do you I'm gonna
skip ahead a little bit. Do you remember the first
time that you dressed up in girls clothes and went out?
Do you remember that first experience? Is like, Yeah, two
friends of mine, Jamie McDonald, the designer and Dale Rochester,
(16:39):
who was a dancer at the Albany Dance Troupe, And
they said we were going out to Halloween. Did you
want to come? And I said sure. She said, well
we want to dress you up like a girl. So
Jamie created dis turban from my head. Dar Will put
on all of its makeup. Jamie, it dis dressed for me.
(17:01):
And so we went into New York trying to get
into some clubs that they knew about, and they wouldn't
let us in because we looked too young. So we
hung out in front of the clubs and there was
a lot of you know, gay men going in and
out of the club. So that was my first experience.
And I was loving me because I saw myself in
(17:21):
a mirror and I was like, okay, how old were
you roughly when this happened. I was living as my
father saw fifteen fifteen years older in New York City,
trying to get into the clubs. They wouldn't let you in, yes,
and here I am dressed up like a girl. So
I was feeling beautiful. I'm sure you were, um and
(17:45):
so this would have been the mid sixties or so. Yeah, yes, amazing, amazing.
When you graduated from high school. I love this story.
When you graduated from high school, what did you say
to your mother? Well, immediately after I received my diploma
with what we went outside. We sat on the steps
I handed her my diploma and she was very proud,
(18:09):
and so I just looked at her and told her, Mommy,
I'm gay, And I told her that I wanted to
be a woman. And she said she always knew. She
was afraid to approach me because she thought that maybe
that I would reject what she was saying to me.
(18:31):
So she opened up her arms and gave me a
huge hug. At that time, I wasn't even thinking. I
didn't think that my mother was going to throw me
out in the streets. I didn't know. You know, I
just had to get it out because at that particular
time in my life I just had to be free. Yeah, free,
and who that male person was? Yeah? Absolutely. So it's
(18:55):
interesting that you said you're gay and you wanted to
be a woman, and so I think there was set
to conflation between being gay and being trans at the time.
Rumor learning how you learned that language where you had
you started hormones by then, Um, how did you begin
to understand that you could become a woman. Well, I
I learned those words when I was like fifteen, like
(19:18):
it was my father and being around Jamie McDonald and
Daryl because they were going to gay clubs, and so
I just associated being gay. Do that? Got it? Got it?
Did you see trans people at the clubs when you
were going to the clubs? Yes? I did the trans people,
(19:38):
but that wasn't until later. Um. I went to a
club called the Up to Down Staircase, and that's one
of my first experience of seeing of women like myself.
There were a mixture of white, Hispanic and black, and
they just looked absolutely beautiful. So I knew I was
in the right place, and I that's what I wanted
(19:59):
to be. How old were you? Do you remember how
old you were when you saw these women at the club?
I think I was about seventeen, and I was just
amazed and wondering, how did they, you know, started looking
like that? But I did run into a friend, um,
but we weren't in the same class and junior high school.
(20:20):
And her name was Putting at the at the time,
not at that time, but to transmition to Putting. And
so I was sitting out in pint of my father's
building and she was coming up the streets and I
recognized her, but she looked absolutely beautiful. She had to
kiss curls going. She was in a pair of type Jean.
(20:42):
She had dress at that time. So we started talking
and she told me, girl, you need to get on mold. Girl,
you need to get on moans. Yes, So what she
did was reach into her pocket book and she gave
me a box of birth control pills. Because it's pure hormones.
(21:04):
They were white pills and then they were blue pills
on the bottom. She said, don't take those. She didn't
explain why, she just said, don't take those, just take these.
And I saved them until I graduated high school because
I didn't know what was going to happen. I was
still living with my father and he thought this was
(21:27):
a phase that I was going through and I would
grow out of it. You obviously did not gride of it,
so you didn't start taking the pills until after high school.
Until after high school, I still had them with me,
and I started popping them in that summer that I graduated.
And now, in terms of getting more birth control pills
or hormones, did you continue to get them from her?
(21:48):
Did you find other sources? What was that process? Like,
I'm always curious about that. Yeah, I found other sources
through other girls that I had ran into in New
York and they knew a doctor in New York City
on Fifth Avenue and he was giving hormone shots. You
had to bring cash so you could get a single
(22:09):
lot of double and so I started going there. Once
I learned where he was, I was going. UM started
going every two weeks, then once a month. When I
was getting injections, it was a funny taste in my mouth,
and at one point I did throw up, but I
don't know what it was from what I kept going back. Absolutely,
(22:33):
Oh my god, this reminds me of my first hormone shot.
There was a doctor on the Upper West Side this
is He was a plastic surgeon, but on Wednesdays he
it was sort of trans day. So you go into
the waiting room and they're all these trans women who
were just gorgeous, and they had stories and they had
a lot of surgery and apparently he had been around
for a long time. Wow. So so you're so you're
(22:56):
taking hormones for a while. Um, you you're transitioning. Did
you still live with your mom or did you move
to the city. No, I was still living with my mother,
and so UM. Person by the name of Tommy Garrett,
who was a big Ford mom who lived in Nork
at that I knew before my transition. He looked at
(23:17):
me and so he said me that I was beautiful
and I should become a model. And I was like, okay,
why not? Same for a short break. When we come back,
Tracy tells us about the day that changed her career
and life forever. Okay, we're back. I want to fast
(23:44):
forward a little bit. Um, So you've been modeling, you've
done mcclar all campaign. What I want to talk about
the day at the Essence magazine photo shoot where everything changed.
Can you talk us through what you remember about the
day when everything changed for you in the modeling business. Yes? Um,
my second time assessors magazine, Susan Gailler, called the agency
(24:07):
and had me come by the office to explain to
me exactly what the photo shoot would be about. So
I met her in the office. She introduced me to
a woman that was going to box brade my hair
individually and then beat my hair. And you know, all
of these gold bees and so that's about two and
(24:27):
a half days for them to blade my hair then
beat each in every grade and so, and mind you,
I wasn't able to get any sleep becaus soon as
you turn, you go clink clink clink lit while all
those bees and the beats were very heavy. So the
fourth day was the photo shoot. I showed up, got
(24:48):
my makeup done, and susan Um was explained to me
what she wanted from me in front of the camera
to act like Cleopatra sailing down the Nile. So we
was walking around with this beautiful shoal around her and
she took it off, and she told me to take
(25:09):
my bra off, and she tied that around me and
nodded it in the back. Then we went on home
to set. She sat me down in front and gave me,
you know those two states that my mind is going blank,
but those two ghold states that Cleopatra would hold when
she was sitting on her throne. So she gave me
bold and told me to pretend that I was Cleopatra.
(25:33):
And for I was just concentrating on the camera and
giving them the different angles and moving my body slowly.
And suddenly, after a few minutes of them taking the photos,
and they were very excited, the photographers in the stand,
oh my god, these are so beautiful, and she yelled out,
(25:54):
Tracy D's are so beautiful. We might even use one
of these for the Christmas edition. So after she said
that someone came into the door, he called Susan over
to him and they had this conversation. I was still
taking photos, but twill Susan got to him, it just
(26:15):
felt wrong. It felt very neative, and it Smartford notice
that I was losing concentration, so he told me the rest.
When he told me the rest, I just glanced over
to who was talking to Susan and it was one
of the assistant hairdressers from the first photo shoot that
(26:35):
I did with Essence, and he left. I was still
sitting in front of the cameras. She went over to
the camera box and looked at the photos, then looked
at me, looked at the photos and said, well, I
think we have it. So she liked cut the set.
She'll tell you she didn't, but she cut the set.
(26:57):
That was it. And I went into the dressing room
and I was, you know, putting on my clothes and
I was sitting down, um, and then she came in
and started rubbing my shoulders and looking at me in
the mirror. And that's when I realized what was going on,
because the way she looked at me was different than
(27:18):
the other times being in her office. Anyone ever looked
at you the way she was looking at you in
that moment. No, no, unprofessional, No unprofessional. But in the
world before you were modeling, had you seen that? Luck Well,
doing transition, it's a mess. Yeah, the hot men, you know,
(27:41):
until you can get to the point where you you know,
your look is developing and and you're getting to know
your body and you're you know, you're dressing better and
you're wearing a braa now because your breast is growing.
And until those things take take place. Oh yeah, So
look you saw her give you in the mirror that
(28:01):
day was a look you had seen when you were
in transition and people were basically spooking your tea or
you know, clocking you yes. And then what happened when
she was massaging, even looking at you in the mirror,
What happened next? She just thanked me for coming. And
then she took her took her shawl and and went
went off. And I had her sign my voucher. And
(28:26):
the next day when I got up, I called the
management to my booker and they said that I didn't
have anything. I didn't have any ghos sees. I didn't
have any testing. There was nothing, and that went on
for two weeks. Two weeks. So before the essence shoot,
how many ghostees would you be going on a day?
For example, I was going to be clients every day
(28:47):
since I joined the the agency. After they stopped me
from going to Florida, UM, they started setting me out
to different magazines, et cetera. So I was definitely testing
in front of the camera and seeing photographers. But after
(29:07):
that essence shoot, there was literally nothing. My career stopped,
did you so you you don't know for sure what happened, right,
So two weeks go by? What do you do after
those two weeks? Yeah, I just got up one morning,
got dressed and went to Zulei and tried to find
what was going on. And so they had me wait
(29:29):
in the meeting room and uh Zoli came in itself.
Instead of me talking to my booker, he came in
and told me that he was dropping me and didn't
give me a read. The only reason that he gave
me was a photo shoot that I had did a
test with down by the Port Authority. I had on
these leather pants, a white jacket, my hair was snatched back,
(29:50):
and I had some sunglasses standing next to a up sign,
and so he pointed at my hits in that picture,
and so he said, you're still too too big for
the agency, and that was his excuse. But I had
lost weight because I was spending the sample close, which
were a size six at that time. So you're fitting
(30:13):
the samples and you've booked jobs. You're you're consistently booking,
you know, And so you he tells you he's dropping you.
You basically think and suspect that you're you know, I
guess your secret is out on What was your life
like after that? But my life kind of was going
downhill because after I got my check from Cleveral, I
(30:37):
was able to leave New Jersey and get my very
first apartment on seventy of Street and Western Avenue, and
I had my dog with me, So my mind was
that I had rent to pay and a dog to feed.
So I was just working and thinking in those terms
(30:58):
as I was going to work, Yeah, this is this
is a job that pay you pay your bills, and
all of a sudden, you don't have an agency, so
you can't pay your bills. So what happened next, Well,
I was running out of savings, and you know, I
wasn't able to at some point pay my rent. My
mom came over and just packed up my clothes, wrapped
(31:19):
my dog, and got in the car and went back home.
Did you were you able to work at all? I
tried to work at short Hill small and I did
landage job and one of the smaller boat Peaks. Instead
of working at at the Bloomingdale's or the Macy's or
any of the department stores, I got a job at
(31:39):
a smaller boat Seek. It was a shoe store, Italian
shoe store called Milono Um. They made Italian shoes for
Moni and most of the high end Italian designers. So
the store had just opened and I got a job,
and I was thereful maybe about I would say five months.
And one afternoon all of a sudden was getting full
(32:03):
with people just staring in the window. And I'm assuming
that somebody in the mall, the gay person knew me
and brought the girlfriends by to see me. Wow, and
so reading their lips they were asking where where I'm
(32:24):
the only female in the store besides the owner of
the store, and and and my coworker, which was a
male and they just said where, and you could see
that word coming out of their mouths. So late that day,
when you know, I was getting off this confirmed it
and get catching a bus back to north from Short Hills.
(32:48):
I got on the bus, sat down in the front
like I normally do, and a girl got on and
she was yelling going back to the bus with that
man that looks a woman. Oh my god, yeah, Paul me.
She didn't even look at me. She passed me and
was saying it, Wow, Jesus, did you continue to work
(33:12):
at this door? After that, the work got around to
him maybe about I would say a couple of weeks later,
because he was full time. Then I went part time
and then I went no time. Now, mind you, mind you.
I had a little specistication behind me during you know,
(33:34):
doing my little modeling day, so I knew how to dress,
I knew how to conversate with with the customer, and
so I was slowly building up a clientele and so
they would come in and asked for me. And then
you know, it got back to him and it went
from full time part time, no time. So you lose
(33:57):
another job because people find out your business. Yes, So
after all of this all that you've been through, where
do you go from here? So? Um, I ran into
a girlfriend of mine who started modeling around the same
time that I did in North before all the Claire
All and the Essence magazine and so her name was
(34:21):
Sherry Gordon, beautiful, breathtaking woman. And she said that she
was going to Paris that I want to go, And
I said, okay, when are you going? She said right now,
I'm going to the airport's every night to see if
I can get a standby ticket on c w A.
So I said, okay, let me get my money together,
(34:42):
and you know, give me your number. We exchanged numbers
and so my mom gave me the money and I
told her that I was going to Paris, but I
had to get a passport, so we had to wait
for that. But when I got my ticket, my standby ticket,
I got my past that the same day. Do you
have any issues or we're getting your passport? No, because
(35:03):
I used my sister's per certificate and your sister's name
Gail correct, Yes, so you became Tracy Gail Norman after that. Yeah, modeling,
I was Tracy Gail Norman. But my passport, said Gail
Norman and between Sherry and I we may have had
a hundred and fifty dollars between the two of us.
(35:23):
So we landed in Paris, got into a hotel, and
the model that I told you about, Tommy Garrett, he
was already there, but we didn't know where he was.
We just had his number and he was only three
blocks away. And so when he came over, we went
out and got something to eat, and that afternoon he said, well,
you guys got a better hotel room than I have
(35:45):
that I do, so I'm going to get my stuff
and move him with you. So he he moved in
with us. And so Sherry already had a connection with
the Marbeling agency, and so did Tommy. Tommy had his
connection with the modeling agency. I didn't, so I won't
with Sherry the next day to go to her agency
(36:07):
to see if they would book me. But they didn't.
So the goal sees that she was going on, I
would just follow her. But I wasn't tall enough. My
his was still too big. I still had to lose
weight because you really had to be skinny to be
in Paris, because the clothes were cut more narrow, so
(36:28):
a size fix was not happening. Ye, so, but I
was able to land a job at the palace. Now
the Palace is equivalent to Studio fifty four in New York.
Tommy already knew the owner and the proprietor to the
project club underneath the palace, which was the Privilege, and
(36:49):
that's where we would he walked about every night, and
it happened to being maybe a three months later. Um
the owner was having his birthday party at the palace,
and so the proprietor for the Privilege wanted to put
on something special, so he asked me to get a
(37:11):
couple of other girls. Sherry didn't want to do it,
So I got a couple of other girls that Tommy knew,
and we put on the show Diana Russ and the Supreme.
So I was panamoning to stop in the name of love,
and it was such a hit. He loved it because
it was you know, it was just so magical, and
he tired us and we were making a hundred dollars
(37:32):
each night. That's amazing. So does Tommy, does Tommy know
the t Does Tommy know your secret? Does the girl
what I forget her name? That you were staying with
the other of them know your business or no, yes,
both of them knew. Sherry I met doing um after
my transition and I was becoming the smaller in locally
(37:52):
and doing local shows. But she knew, she knew that
well she was she was told or she knew. It
didn't matter to her anyway, however she found out and
so Commy knew me before my transition. Got it. Got it?
So how long did you work at the Palace and
then how how did you end up working for Balenciaga.
(38:13):
I worked at the Palace for about a year doing that,
so we were able to save up money and get
our own place. Tommy and I and Sharon had met
her future husband doing that whole year, so Tommy and
I we got a flat. But Tommy had got hooked
up with a guy that he liked, and so three
was a crowd. So he found a dancer who was
(38:36):
with a friend of America, black American dancer who was
in need of a roommate. So I joined him and
became his roommate. But he traveled a lot with the
dance company that he was with, so basically I had
the apartment to myself. So one day a phone call
came through and the woman who was asking for the
(38:57):
girl that was there before. So the girl I was
there before was a model, but she went back to
New York. So I told her that she went back
to New York. And then I instantly said, are you
looking for a model? And she said yeah. I said,
well I'm a model. Can I come in for the interview?
She said sure? Can you come in? Like this was
(39:17):
a Monday, can you come in on Wednesday? And I
lied to her and I told her what, I have
a previous engagement and it will be finished in two weeks. Uh,
why why did you lie? Because under its too big
to fit in anything, and so I needed time to
lose weight. And in order for me to lose weight,
(39:38):
I went on my popcorn diet, which that wall I
ate popcorn, water, and hot tea. How often did you
eat the popcorn? Did this work? I'm like popcorn and
picking all the carbs and popcorn popcorn when you eat
one thing? And I was drinking um. I was drinking
hot tea and just water all day and that's all.
(40:01):
And then I went down to the corner store and
got um this sandwich wrapped plastic and I literally wrapped
from my knees all the way up to my breast
in sandwich wrap. And I walked all over the city
for two weeks to lose this weight. Wow, how much
(40:24):
weight did you lose? Do you even remember how much
it was? I had no idea, but I went to
the to the interview. She took me upstairs to the
dressing room and she gave me this beautiful, super narrow
leather skirt to put on. Someone called her from the
(40:45):
room and so I was trying to squeeze it up
past my buttox and it wouldn't go. So what I
did would lay down on the floor to flatten my
butt wriggled into the skirt, and so she came in
(41:06):
the room and I asked her. I said, well, can
you help me with the zipper? So I just sucked
my gut in and she just wipped it up. Wow.
And she took me in there to see the designer.
He asked me to walk. I walked to him and
he said great. And that's how I got the job.
Being in the showroom for Balonciaga. It was four girls
(41:28):
and all of them were white, and I was the
only black girl. In my mind was a showroom where
you just modeling for potential culture clients? Were you modeling
for buyers? Who were you showing the clothes to? What
was that process? We were modeling for both for some
buyers and couture. One day, there was just one woman
in the audience sitting with the designer and she saw
(41:50):
the whole show and she bought clothes like that. You're
basically modeling in house, then basic modeling in the showroom. Yeah,
I was just in house. I wasn't able to do
any of the other shows because I didn't have an agent,
which kind of saved me because all the black girls
from New York were also in Paris, so they would
(42:10):
have recognized me, and I would have lost any job
that I got with a designer. So you're at Balenciaga
doing two shows a day. How long did that last?
How long did that go on? Do you remember? That
was about a year that I was a show room model,
and it was kind of torturous because French shoes are
very narrow and so I we have two hour lunches
(42:35):
and every day that after the first show, I would
go home to my apartment and run cold water in
the tub and stick my feet in the cold water
thing because the shoes were so tight. They weren't my side.
I've been there, girl, I've been really the worst. Juice
(42:56):
are too small are absolutely the worst. It's like you
feel like you're gonna I um, but you have to
keep a smile on your face and you have to
stand toll and walk. Absolutely, so it happened to you
were at Bluntiago for a year. Why did you leave Blantiago?
Well after that, it was during the summer, so everybody leaves,
and so my friend told me, he suggested I should
(43:18):
go to Italy. And there was the same situation where
the summer everyone leaves and they go abroad, or they
go come to America. Wherever they go, they just leave
the city. And so the city was dead. But I
was able to do a Trump show at a coliseum there,
(43:38):
and then after that, um, I got a ticket back
to New York. I didn't even go back to Paris.
I should have went back to Paris. That was just
a regret that I had that I should have went
back to Paris, but I didn't, and I went back
to New York. Why didn't you go back to Paris?
You know, there's no work that wasn't even magazine book.
(44:01):
So I just went back to mom's house and went
to a smaller boutique agency, which was Grace de Marco.
There was a black loan agency, and so they hired
me on the spot, and that's how I got the
Ultra Sine cosmetic contract. And that's also the that was
(44:22):
a test that I did for Avon and the photographer
took the work up there and they liked my photo
that he took, and so they called me in and
I signed a contract with them for a year. And
the cosmetic company with Johnson's Cosmetics, Ultra Schine, they signed
me to a year contract. Amazing. Roughly what year with
(44:44):
this has been? Are we in the eighties now? Yeah,
we're about in the mid eighties, in the mid eighties.
So you come back from Paris, you get a boutique agency,
and then you get an ultrachine and an Avon contract.
That's pretty awesome. I've seen those photos there, um pretty epic. Yeah.
I I hadn't been with them for a long time either,
but I already had like, you know, shots that I
(45:06):
did in Paris, shots that I did in New York.
Of course, being on a hair color box. So do
you think by the time you got back to New
York from Paris that like the rumor, I guess you're
in a new agency. Were you concerned that people were
gonna know know your business? What was that like? I
wasn't really even thinking about that. I just wanted to work.
(45:29):
So but they did find out because any magazine ran
the ads, Um, well they're magazines, you know, ran the ads,
and so people started recognizing me. Glas and Marco got
a call. I got discharged. Oh my god. So basically
right after the ads started running, someone called the agency
(45:52):
and then you got dismissed. Jesus Christ. Yeah, people started
recognizing me, so um, they made a phone call, and
that was that. Wow, we have to take another break.
But when we returned, why would you Chasey's mind when
she got a message from Clarel after almost four decades? Alrighty,
(46:21):
then let's just dive right back in. When I think
about how it was a big deal for black models
to have any kind of campaign, I just just think
about reading about Veronica Webb and Naomi Campbell and and
a mom back in like the seventies and eighties, and
how difficult it was to get beauty campaigns and that
was the goal for a lot of models at the time.
(46:42):
It's the way is the way I understand it. And
so at this too point, by the eighties, you've booked
three like sort of major campaigns. I'm just thinking if
you hadn't been outed, Like, what could you have done
if like because you were when you were booking a
lot and you were working a lot. Do you ever
think about that? Well, I mean, yeah, but you know,
like said, when I got with dres Dell Marco, I
had no I you know, I had no idea because
(47:03):
I wasn't thinking in those terms. I had started working
with it, and I you know, and I was loving
the atmosphere, and I figured that, you know, a smaller agency,
I was able to hide longer, you know, instead of
a high end agency like UM Solely and because he
was famous it was like the third biggest agency in
(47:25):
New York at the time, Solely and so UM. I
just thought, you know, I might be able to just
slide in there and start working again. But it didn't happen.
What happened after you were dropped by this agencing? Well,
I after that I kind of got depressed about I
(47:45):
guess it was depression. The thing about depression that you
don't even know you're you're depressed, because I've never experienced
depression before. So I started hanging out with the wrong people,
and the drugs got involved in my life. And and
and when I did that, my best friend knocked on
my door one day and literally saved my life. Oh
(48:10):
how did your friends tape your life? I had hit
rock bottom and so there was no joy in my life.
And Douglas is a very funny, silly person, and he
started out all putting a smile back on my face,
and he was starting to come over to my to
my apartment every day and we would just hang out
(48:31):
and start talking and sorry, getting a little emotion, It's okay, okay, mhm.
And then he um started putting me in front of
the camera and building my confidence back up. Yeah, and
(48:58):
that's how mhm I became his news mm hm, m hm.
And we started hanging out more and more. And people
like Tommy and Douglas have a tendency, like my mom,
(49:20):
to shelter me, to protect me, and so he started
doing that. And I was being spoiled by him because
he would just give me dresses, make me dresses any time.
That I knew dresses, and that was around the time
that I needed to work. So he told me about
(49:41):
still Center, and I went and got hired a show Center.
I just I want to just pause for show Center.
For people who saw Opposed, they saw a little bit
of what show Center was. But show Center was basically
a peep show that was existed in Times Square in
the eighties and I think early nineties and the Madonna
Open Your Heart video, it kind of like what the
peep shows were. I guess at the time. Is that
(50:03):
how you would describe show Center, Tracy exactly. And I
didn't mind it because the dates couldn't touch you. They
were behind this petition they hand your money through the slot,
whatever it is that they need you to do, etcetera, etcetera.
And um, show Center was where the girls worked, Okay,
And when we say the girls with the trans girls,
(50:24):
I think what I find so interesting about show Center
is that and what sounds beautiful actually about it at
the time. There's a lot of trans women I've read
about at the time who worked as show Center in
the eighties, and so the trans women were able to
go someplace, make a honest living, be safe and support
themselves and then go about their business and go about
their lives exactly exactly, because we make good money. All
(50:48):
of us make good money, and you start building your
own clienteles, you know, dates that were there specifically for you.
It was great money at the time. So you start
working at show center. Douglas is making you close. Um
did you do? What were you doing outside show center? Um?
I was hanging out with a girlfriend there, and so
we went to the balls and met people from the
(51:10):
House of Africa. That's how I became a member first.
And so the founders didn't want to be mother and
father anymore, so they elected me and Eddie to be
mother and father, and that's how I became mother. What
year with this? Roughly, this was in the early nineties,
(51:31):
I believe late eighties, early nineties, when I became involved
in the Health of Africa and had settled my name
Tracy Africa got over the ball community. I was bringing
something different to the table, and so I stood out
when I would be on the runway. Well, you had
(51:52):
modeled professionally for many years. Yeah, so I only knew
one way to do it, and so that's how I became,
you know, so popular. I first went to a ball
in the early seventies. It was very exciting. I've always
said that the ball community has the most talented people
on earth, and at that time, back then, it was
(52:15):
all about the girls. It wasn't about what it is now,
the vogueing and and predominantly the male part of what's
going on in the ball community. Now, I think the
girls just sending to pick back up. Gotcha, gotcha amazing.
So for those out there who don't know, balls are
these events. If you've seen the film Paris Is Burning,
(52:37):
or if you watched your show Pose, it's balls with
these houses where people sort of in their communities, you know,
for the House of the Asia, the House of Extravaganza,
et cetera. So there were places where there were families,
and in the balls would be these events where kids
would unwalk or vogue for trophies and various categories. But realness,
bim queen face, et cetera, et cetera. For those who
(52:57):
don't know what balls are, I want you skip ahead
a little bit. And when I I discovered you in
two thousand nine, I believe I started telling everyone I
knew about you. And then someone suggests to someone said, oh,
you should play Tracy in a movie. And I was like,
oh my god, that's a great idea. And I read
and I was like, okay, So I like, I did
some research and I got your phone number. I don't
(53:18):
know if you remember this. I got your phone number
and I called you in New Jersey and I, you know,
I explained to who I was. At this point, I've done,
you know, done some reality television. This was two thousand
and ten, and you told me your story. You were
amazing and so generous with your time, and then I said,
I would love to do, you know, a TV show
or a movie, a TV movie about you. When you
freaked out the secondness at TV, you were like, no, no, no,
(53:41):
I can't do that. You know, I can't have people
find out just the whole idea of that was just
like you know, you was like, I would I will
never do this. And then in two thousand fifteen, I
saw an interview with you in New York magazine for
The Cut where you told your story, and I was
so happy and excited that you have finally come forward
(54:03):
to tell your story because it is legendary. It's epic,
the life that you have lived. What made you in
two thousand fifteen, decided to come forward and tell um,
tell your story. Um Douglas Douglas. Uh. They got in
touch with Douglas because nobody knew how to get in
touch with me. And it took a minute for me
(54:25):
to agree to the story. So it took like maybe
about four or five days because he was saying, we'll
look you're older now. You know, if you lived a
full life, you know you have nothing to lose, and
you know, at least tell your story because you've accomplished
something that nobody else had and that you know your
(54:46):
story should be told. I was kind of forced to
live a very private life. Even when I was working
at show Center. After I left that, it was still private.
Even when I was going for the ball after that,
I was still private. Yeah. I wasn't a fixture. I
learned a long time ago. When you're a fixture, whether
you go over a group of friends house all the time,
(55:10):
or you go to the neighborhood bar, or you go
anywhere a nightclub, people that get to know you start
disrespecting you. What do you mean by that started disrespect
you in what way? They feel as though they can
say anything to you and be too familiar with you,
and they don't even really know you. They just see
(55:32):
you at these places, have small conversations with you, and
you know, just like just you know, just saying things
that were all wrong. They make assumptions about who you are, ye,
making a point asking me about my sex life, and
you know, just things like that, things are that are
off the wall and none of nobody's business. Yeah, I
(55:53):
feel you. I feel here well all the sports to
be this owner. Yeah. So when you decide, so you
tell your story to New York magazine, the story comes out.
What what did that feel like after all these years?
What was that like to sort of have this newspaper article,
you know, sort of claiming all of your history and
everything that you've been through. What was that like In
(56:16):
the beginning, when I the story came out, they attached
transgender to my name. That was kind of a throwback
for me, you know, because in the interview I explained
to her that I never identified as transgender, identified as
as a woman. For you, so for you, transgender with
(56:38):
something different and obviously that that word didn't exist back
in the day. So that didn't feel right to you.
It didn't feel authentic to you to have that in
front of your name. No, it didn't. It didn't feel right.
And then you know the girls today, they're very proud
and telling the community, telling people who they are what
(57:00):
they are, and I was trained not to because when
a child that was born in the fifties grew up
in the sixties and seventies, so there was no way
that I was able to wear that T shirt and say,
you know, I'm trans and I'm proud during that quality. Also,
back in the day, the protocol when trans people transitioned
(57:23):
was to like, you don't tell anyone, You keep your
business to yourself for safety, for all kinds of reasons.
It was girl people just didn't say anything. Back then.
Half of them you didn't even know because they left privately. Absolutely,
I'm I'm very happy that we found out about you, though,
because I've always been inspired, deeply inspired by your story.
(57:43):
And what it's also inspiring is that after Claire All
saw the New York Magazine article, they approached you. Can
you tell us a little bit about that. Yes, I
had got this email that Claibar wanted to reach out
to me. I think they tech a Douglas first again,
(58:03):
and he forward the email to me and they were
very evasive. On the phone, the woman on the other
end introduced herself to me and she said she was
representing a company and the company is interested in speaking
with you. Would you be interested? And I said, sure,
why not? And so we went to this restaurant where
we were having lunch and meeting the rest of the clients,
(58:26):
and they all sat down and so um one of
the people that I was meeting was saying, do you
know why you're here? I said, no, I have no clue.
So they think, well, we're from Clara and we would
like to have you come back to clar role, and
(58:49):
so many emotions was going through my brain. I was
feeling like I wanted to cry, I wanted to laugh.
I felt like a you know, like nervous. I was,
you know, like a little shaky because it was just
it was overwhelming that Clarall, even though it's under a
(59:11):
new owner, invited me back to represent the company. And
so I was just so honored with that, so amazing,
so beautiful. The ads are gorgeous, the photos of gorgeous.
How did it feel when you went on the shoot
for Claire All. I think forty years later. Well, I
(59:31):
asked them. I was joking, well jokingly kind of seriously, said, um,
do you guys know how old I am? Laughing and
said I said, well, you know I'm in my early sixties,
because I think I was in my earlier mid sixties
at the time. And yeah, so it was just you know, overwhelming.
(59:55):
And then then flew me out to California, putting me
up in the hotel. We went to the studio and
I met everybody can addresser and makeup people, and then
I had did differmmercial for them that day, and I
also did the advertisement for or the magazine next day.
(01:00:15):
You've been modeling for Douglas, right, So, but did if
how did it feel being back you did? We did
it all just kind of come right back to you
when you're a friend of the camera again. Yeah, when
I got in front of the camera, it felt very natural,
and I was comfortable enough to start moving, you know,
in front of the camera. Amazing. Now I have to
(01:00:36):
ask you this. So Susan Taylor. After the New York
Magazine article came out, she was interviewed by New York
Magazine and said, some really interesting things. Are you aware
of the article and what she said in the article, Yes,
New York Mac called me up and discussed it with me. Yeah.
In the article, she said that she she did not
(01:00:57):
remember shutting down the photos. She that she had no
recollection of that. She also said that she knew that
I don't. The language she used was disturbing, but she
said that she knew your business, um, and that everyone knew,
and that she never would have You were safe at
essence is what she what she said basically, and that
she never would have let you go. UM. She also
(01:01:19):
said in the article that she wanted to contact you
and talk to you about it. Has she contacted you?
What do you think about what she said in that article? Um?
New York mag asked me the same thing and I said,
no comment. They gave me her phone number and I
said no, thank you. I just felt like meeting her
would be a waste of time if she says she
don't have remember things. And I can describe exactly what
(01:01:41):
she had on that day. She had on a cashmere
pull over sweater cream color um, cream color pleated pants.
She had on camel color Italian boots with a camel
color belt, another belt with the a black and green
(01:02:01):
shawl that she had gotten on a trip to Egypt,
and that's what she wrapped around my dress. I remember
for bathing because it was a shocking moment for me.
So I remember everything. I remember what the photographer had on.
I remember what the makeup artist had on. I remember
what the person that came in the Doorheall years ago,
I got to confront a kid who would bullied me.
(01:02:24):
They didn't remember any of the bullying. I remember every
single detail. When something horrible happens to you, you remember
all the details and what's deep. As the bullies often
don't remember at all. They're like, oh that that happened.
Oh I didn't I don't remember. Um. So yeah, Oh, Tracy,
thank you, thank you so much for sharing all this today.
(01:02:45):
I'm just so blown away by your life and I'm
just so grateful that you've shared it with us today.
Is there's something else you want to wrap up with
and share with the people. Sure. I recently received an
email from the Only in Black History Museum and they're
in contact and negotiations with me to put my work
(01:03:08):
in the museum in Washington, d C. Oh my god,
that's amazing. Oh we are History is so important, and
I'm obsessed with our history and you are living history
that everyone should know about. So I like to end
the podcast with a question that comes from my therapy,
and basically the question is what else is true? And
(01:03:30):
it's basically, if something is challenging in our lives and
that creates anxiety or nerves or whatever, there is something
else in our lives that we can also lean into
that is positive, that it's neutral or positive, and it
can shift our nervous systems. It can shift like the
day we're having. So I ask you today, Tracy Africa Norman,
(01:03:52):
what else is true? Well? When I try not to
concentrate on the negative, and so I'm on the spiritual journey.
So I read my daily word every day, I read
the Bible, and I read these self help books that
we're giving to me, and you know, surrounded myself with
positive people and I just stay away from the natives
(01:04:19):
and there you go, there you go. Thank you so much,
miss Norman. I am deeply honored that you've taken this
time to share your incredible story with us. Thank you,
and I'm honored that you reached out to me. It's
just amazing that your love has shined on my light
(01:04:39):
for so long, and we've been in conversations through texting
and it's just so joyful. Thank you so much. I
really appreciate that. Thank you, Thank you, Miss Norman. Thank you,
and stay safe. That was amazing And I think if
there are any takeaway days we can glean, there's there
(01:05:01):
are many. I think about how important it is to
honor our history. Transgender isn't a term that Tracy seems
to want to embrace, but she is living trans history
and having a sense of what her life was like
in the seventies and eighties and nineties is deeply important
to me as a transperson, deeply inspiring. And this, this
(01:05:27):
thread throughout Ms Norman's life is that she had support
Tommy Sherry, her friends who dressed her up for the
very first time, and of course Douglas. These people throughout
her life community that have kept her alive and given
her sustenance and a warm place to land. Community is
so important. Family is so important. If it's not your
(01:05:48):
family of origin, it can be a chosen family. How beautiful.
Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. If
you like what you here, please rate reviews, subscribe, and
share with everyone you know. Join me July when I
kick off our next series of episodes with Dr Cornell West, philosopher,
(01:06:10):
republic intellectual professor, and one of my greatest spiritual teachers.
You've probably heard him on the Type Rope podcast, seeing
him on CNN, or read one of his twenty books
on race, democracy and justice, and I am so very
excited to share our powerful conversation on love, truth, and
so much more. You can find me on Instagram and
Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox
(01:06:33):
for Real. Until next time, stay in the love. The
Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shonda land Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. A reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio Transition to Putt.
She looked absolutely beautiful. She had to kiss curls going.
She was in a pair of Type Jean. She had
breast at that time. So we started talking and she
(00:25):
told me, girl, you need to get on models. Girl
used to get on moans. Yes, Hello, and welcome to
the Laverne Cox Show. On today's episode, we'll be talking
about the life of someone who means so very much
(00:47):
to me. Tracy Norman is legendary in the modeling world.
In the nine seventies, she helped great color barriers as
a black high fashion and commercial model. She was the
first black woman to appear on a box of clear
Ale hair color number of five twelve dark auburn and
incredible achievement for any model at the time. Norman has
(01:07):
modeled and been photographed for publications such as Essence, Vogue Italia,
Harper's Bizarre India, among others. She used to walk the
runway twice a day in Paris for Valenciaga. All this
from a woman from Newark, New Jersey, who had been
assigned mail at birth, but no one knew. I discovered
her about eleven years ago and couldn't stop talking about her.
(01:32):
Discovering Tracy just opened up this this world for me
of just imagining what her life was like, what trans
life was like in the seventies in New York, which
I've always been obsessed with the fact that there was
a black trans woman on a claral hair color box
(01:53):
that was in drug stores all over the country. Just
is deeply in aspiring to me to this day. And
found her number and called her, and eleven years later
we get to have a conversation here on this podcast
about her life, her groundbreaking career, and how her resilience
(02:17):
and ability to reinvent herself have carried her back into
the arms of the modeling world today, Open and free.
But first, please be advised that there is a short
story which references an assault that some may find disturbing
and or triggering. Please enjoy my conversation with Tracy Africa Norman. Yes,
(02:39):
I'm here, Hello, Tracy Norman, Welcome to the podcast. How
are you feeling today, Darling? I am doing great and
thank you for allowing me to be a part of this.
It is my absolute joy and pleasure to be able
to have this conversation with you. You you are your
(03:02):
living legend, and you are so important to me and
to our community, and I believe to the world. I
would love to get started by letting folks know a
little bit about you. But I want to start with
the day that you met Irving Penn, one of the
fashion world's most iconic photographers and ended up on the
(03:24):
pages of Italian Vogue. Can you talk us through the
day that that happened. Yeah. Sure. I got a phone
call from a friend album Brundy, and he gave me
a phone call because at that time I was still
learning how to walk. Because he was training me, so
(03:44):
a listing of when the seven that venue shows were
going on. So he would send me to these places
and what I would do is take my portfolio with
me and in order for me to get in, because
it's invitation only, I would to tell them that I
am a student at f I T and they would
let me come in and line up behind the wall.
(04:06):
The day that I was discovered she sent me to
the Pierre Hotel. I was assuming that I was going
to see another fashion show, so as I was coming
across the street. I noticed on the opposite side of
Fifth Avenue, in front of the hotel, there was a
group of models that I had recognized, so I followed
(04:29):
him all on the elevator. We attendant was there and
they knew the fort that they were going to, so
she let us off at the floor. I went to
the right, not knowing where I was going, and the
other girls went to the left and they went down
this very long hallway to this huge suite on the end.
(04:51):
But all the girls was lined up outside and they
were going in. One time. I just send online. For
some reason, my feet would move and I just stayed
there and I was the lastly all mine. So when
I went in, I didn't realize that I was speaking
to Mr Penn at the time. He asked me my
name and was I was an agency, and I told
(05:13):
him no, and yes that I had if I had
a picture, that I could leave him with my information,
which I did, and about three days later I got
a phone call from his assistance telling me that that
I'm being vote for Italian Vogue and it's the two
days shoot fifteen hundred dollars for each day. That is amazing. Yes,
(05:35):
do you remember how old you were roughly when all
of this happened. Yeah, I graduated in seventy two at eighteen,
and that didn't take place until seventy five, so I
was in my early twenties. And for the very first
go see that you didn't even know you were on,
you ended up an Italian vogue. That is an unbelievable story.
(05:57):
It's so crazy. Can you tell me what the she
was like? Well, when I got to the studio, there
was people were setting up the cameras. I saw Mr Penn.
He was sitting out a desk and he was talking
on the phone. I waved to him and he pointed
me to the dressing room and there were a couple
of girls that were already there who was getting their
(06:20):
makeup and hair done. I said good morning to everybody,
but no one spoke m hmm. Interesting. And so afterwards,
Peggy Diller came through the door and came into the
dressing room. I said hello to Peggy, and she was
the one that spoke back to me, and she told
me that I was pretty. I thanked her and it
(06:44):
was just her aura that I levitated to. And then
we got dressed, we got our makeup, and hair done,
got dressed and sat in front of the camera. He
placed everybody started taking photos and that was that full day.
And then the second day we went through that whole
(07:06):
process again. And after the phone shoot, even before I
got undressed to to leave, he approached me and said,
let me make a phone call. So he called an
agency and he was speaking on the phone to the
owner and said that he was going to send this
(07:27):
new girl by and he wants him to sign me
up to the agency. M hmm. And when he was talking,
he said that he had a young Beverly Johnson standing
in front of him. That's amazing. And there to restarted,
because after that then I had the meeting with Soli himself.
(07:48):
He signed me and things were progressing from there. That's amazing.
I want to just unlet folks know that Zoli was
a modeling agency at the time. They represented a lot
of the models in the day. This is and Peggy Dillard.
Folks told know is the second black woman to be
up here on the cover of American Vogue after Beverly Johnson.
(08:11):
So how did your life change after he was signed
with Zoli. It was a whirlwind because I started booking immediately,
and I wasn't even seeing clients. They were making phone
calls and the word was getting out that there was
a young Beverly Johnson on the scene and so first,
because I didn't know what I was doing, basically, he
(08:33):
started sending me to Florida to do catalog work. Even
though he didn't want these pictures in my portfolio, he
still wanted me to get comfortable in front of the camera.
And when I came back, he said that I needed
to show up at such and such a place at
such a time and it was a test. So I
(08:55):
did not knowing that this test was for cloud All
uh and that's how they were picking girls. So the
hairdresser was there, the makeup artist and the photographer. They
liked my photo and two days later I got a
phone call from Jobe saying that I got the job
(09:18):
to be on a hair color box and the photo
shoot went well and he wanted me to come in
to sign the contract. So I signed a three year contract. Wow,
how long after the Italian Vogue you did the Claire
All hair color box moment happened to you? Remember that?
I think was about six months later because I was
(09:38):
still flying down to Florida to to get familiar being
in front of the camera, learning how to move and
also at that time still trying to lose weight. That's amazing.
So this is an iconic moment. Tracy was on a
clear all hair color box and the color was all
burned and it's a born beautiful on that hair color box,
which is just such a beautiful image. In the first
(10:00):
time I heard about Tracy, were read about her with
Monica Robert's blog The Transgrio. May Monica rest in peace,
and immediately googled you after I read the article and
saw that iconic image, and I think my mother used
that hair color. I remember seeing that hair color box
when I was a little kid in Alabama. So is
it my understanding that this claral hair color boxes in
(10:22):
drug stores all over the country. Yes. I went into
the drug store one day with my mom and I
came around to look for shampoo and hair conditioner, and
then that was the same aisle that their hair color
boxes was in, and I saw my boxes, started yelling
for my mom in the store. Oh my god. Yeah,
it was very exciting. It's so exciting to think about.
(10:45):
So you are this black trans girl from Newark, New Jersey.
We're going to get to all of your background. But
you're standing in a drug store and you're on a
Claral hair color box. I mean, anything else about how
you felt in that moment seeing that it was for real.
I was just like an awe and yelling for my mom,
and she was just so proud. And so we just
(11:06):
took a couple of boxes off the shelf and took
them home, and she kept one. I kept one for
as long as I could. We were just delated. Wow.
So so at this time, it's because it's about nineteen
seventy five, you're getting you're starting to model. You're modeling
for Essence magazine, You've already model for Vogue, You've booked
in the first six months, you booked a Claire All
campaign with the Whirlwind part of it. Can you paint
(11:29):
a picture for us of what you know a day
and an evening might be like in the life of
Tracy Norman modeling in the seventies. So I went to
a couple of parties. Well, I went to the garage,
of course, but then all the models were going to
the garage anyway, so I went there. I also went
to studio fifty four at one point where a local
designer who was from Noork who lucked up and got
(11:53):
a big contract in his own showroom on Seventh Avenue.
His name was Jamie McDonald. He rest us all. There
was three three girls and two guys and got off
the limo and they opened up the gates and the studio.
Do you remember the night. I'm obsessed with that whole era. Yeah,
(12:13):
it was a lot of celebrities that you recognized in there.
There was a lot of models you recognized in there.
It was a very busy place. And then they had
the huge balcony and so you know, I was just
making the rounds going up into the balcony. There was
a lot of um, drugs and sex going on in
the balcony because it was very dark. So I excused
(12:34):
myself from the balcony came back down to the thing war.
So the whole group got together because we were in
coordinating colors. Um, we were all in white and the
designer was in red. So we all just stayed on
the dance floor and started dancing. Amazing. That's incredible. And
now along your trens and no one knows do you
(12:56):
have I just think about the moment in my life
early transition, when I before or I would sort of
disclose to people that I was trans and sort of
the anxiety that I would have. Um, and I've talked
to other girls who lived stealth, and that's sort of
the anxiety of people discovering and like losing it all.
Was that under the surface for you during that first
shoe for Vogue, during the shoe for Claire All and
when you were doing modeling for the catalog? What was
(13:17):
that whole thing like for you psychologically and emotionally. Um,
I didn't give it a second thought because I identified
myself as a woman all of that time. I didn't
identify with being trans There was no such word back
then in the seventies anyway, So I always identified with
being a woman. So can you take us back a
(13:41):
little bit. You so you were born and raised in Newark,
New Jersey. What was your family life like growing up
in Newark? Well, growing up with my mom, I mean
she had to hold down jobs. This was a woman
back in the fifties and sixties, a single mom, So
you know, she was very busy and we had different
(14:04):
babysitters at some point, and there was a, um, a
house that I was in. I believe it might have
been my mother's brother's wife we were staying at, I'm
not really sure. And so she lets she let me
out while she sat on the steps with with my sister,
holding my sister, and she let me out. There on
(14:25):
that particular street, you know a lot of kids were
in front of their homes and playing in the streets
and riding their bikes, and so I just you know,
was playing with the other kids and wandering, and a
teenage boy that was across the street called me over,
invited me into his house, and that's when I was
(14:46):
already molested. Wow. Wow, did this just happen once? Um?
Did you tell your parents about it? Um? It only
happened one time. The second time he called me over,
he invited me into his bed. Mom at that time,
and so as he was undressing, you know, his chicking
down his pants and his underwear. UM, a friend of
(15:09):
his came out the closet and I jumped up and
ran out. And then so days after that, it was
the first time I was hearing the words fagged gay.
I didn't know what all of that meant. Wow. So
after the after the assault O. Their kids started calling you,
(15:31):
calling you fagged and cissy. After that you were assaulted. No,
just the two guys that were going to assault me.
But I ran out the house. Wow, I'm so sorry
that happened to you. That is there's so many stories
about young people. I'm experiencing this and I experienced it
(15:51):
myself and it was not easy, and I'm still dealing
with the sort of the trauma and the shame from
that incident out. Yeah, I'm so sorry that happened to you.
Do you? Do you ever? Do you want to say
anything else about that moment in your in your childhood? Um? No,
because I never went back over to their house anymore,
(16:13):
and I just stayed um near the house that I
was being baby set hat M. Do you I'm gonna
skip ahead a little bit. Do you remember the first
time that you dressed up in girls clothes and went out?
Do you remember that first experience? Is like, Yeah, two
friends of mine, Jamie McDonald, the designer and Dale Rochester,
(16:39):
who was a dancer at the Albany Dance Troupe, And
they said we were going out to Halloween. Did you
want to come? And I said sure. She said, well
we want to dress you up like a girl. So
Jamie created dis turban from my head. Dar Will put
on all of its makeup. Jamie, it dis dressed for me.
(17:01):
And so we went into New York trying to get
into some clubs that they knew about, and they wouldn't
let us in because we looked too young. So we
hung out in front of the clubs and there was
a lot of you know, gay men going in and
out of the club. So that was my first experience.
And I was loving me because I saw myself in
(17:21):
a mirror and I was like, okay, how old were
you roughly when this happened. I was living as my
father saw fifteen fifteen years older in New York City,
trying to get into the clubs. They wouldn't let you in, yes,
and here I am dressed up like a girl. So
I was feeling beautiful. I'm sure you were, um and
(17:45):
so this would have been the mid sixties or so. Yeah, yes, amazing, amazing.
When you graduated from high school. I love this story.
When you graduated from high school, what did you say
to your mother? Well, immediately after I received my diploma
with what we went outside. We sat on the steps
I handed her my diploma and she was very proud,
(18:09):
and so I just looked at her and told her, Mommy,
I'm gay, And I told her that I wanted to
be a woman. And she said she always knew. She
was afraid to approach me because she thought that maybe
that I would reject what she was saying to me.
(18:31):
So she opened up her arms and gave me a
huge hug. At that time, I wasn't even thinking. I
didn't think that my mother was going to throw me
out in the streets. I didn't know. You know, I
just had to get it out because at that particular
time in my life I just had to be free. Yeah, free,
and who that male person was? Yeah? Absolutely. So it's
(18:55):
interesting that you said you're gay and you wanted to
be a woman, and so I think there was set
to conflation between being gay and being trans at the time.
Rumor learning how you learned that language where you had
you started hormones by then, Um, how did you begin
to understand that you could become a woman. Well, I
I learned those words when I was like fifteen, like
(19:18):
it was my father and being around Jamie McDonald and
Daryl because they were going to gay clubs, and so
I just associated being gay. Do that? Got it? Got it?
Did you see trans people at the clubs when you
were going to the clubs? Yes? I did the trans people,
(19:38):
but that wasn't until later. Um. I went to a
club called the Up to Down Staircase, and that's one
of my first experience of seeing of women like myself.
There were a mixture of white, Hispanic and black, and
they just looked absolutely beautiful. So I knew I was
in the right place, and I that's what I wanted
(19:59):
to be. How old were you? Do you remember how
old you were when you saw these women at the club?
I think I was about seventeen, and I was just
amazed and wondering, how did they, you know, started looking
like that? But I did run into a friend, um,
but we weren't in the same class and junior high school.
(20:20):
And her name was Putting at the at the time,
not at that time, but to transmition to Putting. And
so I was sitting out in pint of my father's
building and she was coming up the streets and I
recognized her, but she looked absolutely beautiful. She had to
kiss curls going. She was in a pair of type Jean.
(20:42):
She had dress at that time. So we started talking
and she told me, girl, you need to get on mold. Girl,
you need to get on moans. Yes, So what she
did was reach into her pocket book and she gave
me a box of birth control pills. Because it's pure hormones.
(21:04):
They were white pills and then they were blue pills
on the bottom. She said, don't take those. She didn't
explain why, she just said, don't take those, just take these.
And I saved them until I graduated high school because
I didn't know what was going to happen. I was
still living with my father and he thought this was
(21:27):
a phase that I was going through and I would
grow out of it. You obviously did not gride of it,
so you didn't start taking the pills until after high school.
Until after high school, I still had them with me,
and I started popping them in that summer that I graduated.
And now, in terms of getting more birth control pills
or hormones, did you continue to get them from her?
(21:48):
Did you find other sources? What was that process? Like,
I'm always curious about that. Yeah, I found other sources
through other girls that I had ran into in New
York and they knew a doctor in New York City
on Fifth Avenue and he was giving hormone shots. You
had to bring cash so you could get a single
(22:09):
lot of double and so I started going there. Once
I learned where he was, I was going. UM started
going every two weeks, then once a month. When I
was getting injections, it was a funny taste in my mouth,
and at one point I did throw up, but I
don't know what it was from what I kept going back. Absolutely,
(22:33):
Oh my god, this reminds me of my first hormone shot.
There was a doctor on the Upper West Side this
is He was a plastic surgeon, but on Wednesdays he
it was sort of trans day. So you go into
the waiting room and they're all these trans women who
were just gorgeous, and they had stories and they had
a lot of surgery and apparently he had been around
for a long time. Wow. So so you're so you're
(22:56):
taking hormones for a while. Um, you you're transitioning. Did
you still live with your mom or did you move
to the city. No, I was still living with my mother,
and so UM. Person by the name of Tommy Garrett,
who was a big Ford mom who lived in Nork
at that I knew before my transition. He looked at
(23:17):
me and so he said me that I was beautiful
and I should become a model. And I was like, okay,
why not? Same for a short break. When we come back,
Tracy tells us about the day that changed her career
and life forever. Okay, we're back. I want to fast
(23:44):
forward a little bit. Um, So you've been modeling, you've
done mcclar all campaign. What I want to talk about
the day at the Essence magazine photo shoot where everything changed.
Can you talk us through what you remember about the
day when everything changed for you in the modeling business. Yes? Um,
my second time assessors magazine, Susan Gailler, called the agency
(24:07):
and had me come by the office to explain to
me exactly what the photo shoot would be about. So
I met her in the office. She introduced me to
a woman that was going to box brade my hair
individually and then beat my hair. And you know, all
of these gold bees and so that's about two and
(24:27):
a half days for them to blade my hair then
beat each in every grade and so, and mind you,
I wasn't able to get any sleep becaus soon as
you turn, you go clink clink clink lit while all
those bees and the beats were very heavy. So the
fourth day was the photo shoot. I showed up, got
(24:48):
my makeup done, and susan Um was explained to me
what she wanted from me in front of the camera
to act like Cleopatra sailing down the Nile. So we
was walking around with this beautiful shoal around her and
she took it off, and she told me to take
(25:09):
my bra off, and she tied that around me and
nodded it in the back. Then we went on home
to set. She sat me down in front and gave me,
you know those two states that my mind is going blank,
but those two ghold states that Cleopatra would hold when
she was sitting on her throne. So she gave me
bold and told me to pretend that I was Cleopatra.
(25:33):
And for I was just concentrating on the camera and
giving them the different angles and moving my body slowly.
And suddenly, after a few minutes of them taking the photos,
and they were very excited, the photographers in the stand,
oh my god, these are so beautiful, and she yelled out,
(25:54):
Tracy D's are so beautiful. We might even use one
of these for the Christmas edition. So after she said
that someone came into the door, he called Susan over
to him and they had this conversation. I was still
taking photos, but twill Susan got to him, it just
(26:15):
felt wrong. It felt very neative, and it Smartford notice
that I was losing concentration, so he told me the rest.
When he told me the rest, I just glanced over
to who was talking to Susan and it was one
of the assistant hairdressers from the first photo shoot that
(26:35):
I did with Essence, and he left. I was still
sitting in front of the cameras. She went over to
the camera box and looked at the photos, then looked
at me, looked at the photos and said, well, I
think we have it. So she liked cut the set.
She'll tell you she didn't, but she cut the set.
(26:57):
That was it. And I went into the dressing room
and I was, you know, putting on my clothes and
I was sitting down, um, and then she came in
and started rubbing my shoulders and looking at me in
the mirror. And that's when I realized what was going on,
because the way she looked at me was different than
(27:18):
the other times being in her office. Anyone ever looked
at you the way she was looking at you in
that moment. No, no, unprofessional, No unprofessional. But in the
world before you were modeling, had you seen that? Luck Well,
doing transition, it's a mess. Yeah, the hot men, you know,
(27:41):
until you can get to the point where you you know,
your look is developing and and you're getting to know
your body and you're you know, you're dressing better and
you're wearing a braa now because your breast is growing.
And until those things take take place. Oh yeah, So
look you saw her give you in the mirror that
(28:01):
day was a look you had seen when you were
in transition and people were basically spooking your tea or
you know, clocking you yes. And then what happened when
she was massaging, even looking at you in the mirror,
What happened next? She just thanked me for coming. And
then she took her took her shawl and and went
went off. And I had her sign my voucher. And
(28:26):
the next day when I got up, I called the
management to my booker and they said that I didn't
have anything. I didn't have any ghos sees. I didn't
have any testing. There was nothing, and that went on
for two weeks. Two weeks. So before the essence shoot,
how many ghostees would you be going on a day?
For example, I was going to be clients every day
(28:47):
since I joined the the agency. After they stopped me
from going to Florida, UM, they started setting me out
to different magazines, et cetera. So I was definitely testing
in front of the camera and seeing photographers. But after
(29:07):
that essence shoot, there was literally nothing. My career stopped,
did you so you you don't know for sure what happened, right,
So two weeks go by? What do you do after
those two weeks? Yeah, I just got up one morning,
got dressed and went to Zulei and tried to find
what was going on. And so they had me wait
(29:29):
in the meeting room and uh Zoli came in itself.
Instead of me talking to my booker, he came in
and told me that he was dropping me and didn't
give me a read. The only reason that he gave
me was a photo shoot that I had did a
test with down by the Port Authority. I had on
these leather pants, a white jacket, my hair was snatched back,
(29:50):
and I had some sunglasses standing next to a up sign,
and so he pointed at my hits in that picture,
and so he said, you're still too too big for
the agency, and that was his excuse. But I had
lost weight because I was spending the sample close, which
were a size six at that time. So you're fitting
(30:13):
the samples and you've booked jobs. You're you're consistently booking,
you know, And so you he tells you he's dropping you.
You basically think and suspect that you're you know, I
guess your secret is out on What was your life
like after that? But my life kind of was going
downhill because after I got my check from Cleveral, I
(30:37):
was able to leave New Jersey and get my very
first apartment on seventy of Street and Western Avenue, and
I had my dog with me, So my mind was
that I had rent to pay and a dog to feed.
So I was just working and thinking in those terms
(30:58):
as I was going to work, Yeah, this is this
is a job that pay you pay your bills, and
all of a sudden, you don't have an agency, so
you can't pay your bills. So what happened next, Well,
I was running out of savings, and you know, I
wasn't able to at some point pay my rent. My
mom came over and just packed up my clothes, wrapped
(31:19):
my dog, and got in the car and went back home.
Did you were you able to work at all? I
tried to work at short Hill small and I did
landage job and one of the smaller boat Peaks. Instead
of working at at the Bloomingdale's or the Macy's or
any of the department stores, I got a job at
(31:39):
a smaller boat Seek. It was a shoe store, Italian
shoe store called Milono Um. They made Italian shoes for
Moni and most of the high end Italian designers. So
the store had just opened and I got a job,
and I was thereful maybe about I would say five months.
And one afternoon all of a sudden was getting full
(32:03):
with people just staring in the window. And I'm assuming
that somebody in the mall, the gay person knew me
and brought the girlfriends by to see me. Wow, and
so reading their lips they were asking where where I'm
(32:24):
the only female in the store besides the owner of
the store, and and and my coworker, which was a
male and they just said where, and you could see
that word coming out of their mouths. So late that day,
when you know, I was getting off this confirmed it
and get catching a bus back to north from Short Hills.
(32:48):
I got on the bus, sat down in the front
like I normally do, and a girl got on and
she was yelling going back to the bus with that
man that looks a woman. Oh my god, yeah, Paul me.
She didn't even look at me. She passed me and
was saying it, Wow, Jesus, did you continue to work
(33:12):
at this door? After that, the work got around to
him maybe about I would say a couple of weeks later,
because he was full time. Then I went part time
and then I went no time. Now, mind you, mind you.
I had a little specistication behind me during you know,
(33:34):
doing my little modeling day, so I knew how to dress,
I knew how to conversate with with the customer, and
so I was slowly building up a clientele and so
they would come in and asked for me. And then
you know, it got back to him and it went
from full time part time, no time. So you lose
(33:57):
another job because people find out your business. Yes, So
after all of this all that you've been through, where
do you go from here? So? Um, I ran into
a girlfriend of mine who started modeling around the same
time that I did in North before all the Claire
All and the Essence magazine and so her name was
(34:21):
Sherry Gordon, beautiful, breathtaking woman. And she said that she
was going to Paris that I want to go, And
I said, okay, when are you going? She said right now,
I'm going to the airport's every night to see if
I can get a standby ticket on c w A.
So I said, okay, let me get my money together,
(34:42):
and you know, give me your number. We exchanged numbers
and so my mom gave me the money and I
told her that I was going to Paris, but I
had to get a passport, so we had to wait
for that. But when I got my ticket, my standby ticket,
I got my past that the same day. Do you
have any issues or we're getting your passport? No, because
(35:03):
I used my sister's per certificate and your sister's name
Gail correct, Yes, so you became Tracy Gail Norman after that. Yeah, modeling,
I was Tracy Gail Norman. But my passport, said Gail
Norman and between Sherry and I we may have had
a hundred and fifty dollars between the two of us.
(35:23):
So we landed in Paris, got into a hotel, and
the model that I told you about, Tommy Garrett, he
was already there, but we didn't know where he was.
We just had his number and he was only three
blocks away. And so when he came over, we went
out and got something to eat, and that afternoon he said, well,
you guys got a better hotel room than I have
(35:45):
that I do, so I'm going to get my stuff
and move him with you. So he he moved in
with us. And so Sherry already had a connection with
the Marbeling agency, and so did Tommy. Tommy had his
connection with the modeling agency. I didn't, so I won't
with Sherry the next day to go to her agency
(36:07):
to see if they would book me. But they didn't.
So the goal sees that she was going on, I
would just follow her. But I wasn't tall enough. My
his was still too big. I still had to lose
weight because you really had to be skinny to be
in Paris, because the clothes were cut more narrow, so
(36:28):
a size fix was not happening. Ye, so, but I
was able to land a job at the palace. Now
the Palace is equivalent to Studio fifty four in New York.
Tommy already knew the owner and the proprietor to the
project club underneath the palace, which was the Privilege, and
(36:49):
that's where we would he walked about every night, and
it happened to being maybe a three months later. Um
the owner was having his birthday party at the palace,
and so the proprietor for the Privilege wanted to put
on something special, so he asked me to get a
(37:11):
couple of other girls. Sherry didn't want to do it,
So I got a couple of other girls that Tommy knew,
and we put on the show Diana Russ and the Supreme.
So I was panamoning to stop in the name of love,
and it was such a hit. He loved it because
it was you know, it was just so magical, and
he tired us and we were making a hundred dollars
(37:32):
each night. That's amazing. So does Tommy, does Tommy know
the t Does Tommy know your secret? Does the girl
what I forget her name? That you were staying with
the other of them know your business or no, yes,
both of them knew. Sherry I met doing um after
my transition and I was becoming the smaller in locally
(37:52):
and doing local shows. But she knew, she knew that
well she was she was told or she knew. It
didn't matter to her anyway, however she found out and
so Commy knew me before my transition. Got it. Got it?
So how long did you work at the Palace and
then how how did you end up working for Balenciaga.
(38:13):
I worked at the Palace for about a year doing that,
so we were able to save up money and get
our own place. Tommy and I and Sharon had met
her future husband doing that whole year, so Tommy and
I we got a flat. But Tommy had got hooked
up with a guy that he liked, and so three
was a crowd. So he found a dancer who was
(38:36):
with a friend of America, black American dancer who was
in need of a roommate. So I joined him and
became his roommate. But he traveled a lot with the
dance company that he was with, so basically I had
the apartment to myself. So one day a phone call
came through and the woman who was asking for the
(38:57):
girl that was there before. So the girl I was
there before was a model, but she went back to
New York. So I told her that she went back
to New York. And then I instantly said, are you
looking for a model? And she said yeah. I said,
well I'm a model. Can I come in for the interview?
She said sure? Can you come in? Like this was
(39:17):
a Monday, can you come in on Wednesday? And I
lied to her and I told her what, I have
a previous engagement and it will be finished in two weeks. Uh,
why why did you lie? Because under its too big
to fit in anything, and so I needed time to
lose weight. And in order for me to lose weight,
(39:38):
I went on my popcorn diet, which that wall I
ate popcorn, water, and hot tea. How often did you
eat the popcorn? Did this work? I'm like popcorn and
picking all the carbs and popcorn popcorn when you eat
one thing? And I was drinking um. I was drinking
hot tea and just water all day and that's all.
(40:01):
And then I went down to the corner store and
got um this sandwich wrapped plastic and I literally wrapped
from my knees all the way up to my breast
in sandwich wrap. And I walked all over the city
for two weeks to lose this weight. Wow, how much
(40:24):
weight did you lose? Do you even remember how much
it was? I had no idea, but I went to
the to the interview. She took me upstairs to the
dressing room and she gave me this beautiful, super narrow
leather skirt to put on. Someone called her from the
(40:45):
room and so I was trying to squeeze it up
past my buttox and it wouldn't go. So what I
did would lay down on the floor to flatten my
butt wriggled into the skirt, and so she came in
(41:06):
the room and I asked her. I said, well, can
you help me with the zipper? So I just sucked
my gut in and she just wipped it up. Wow.
And she took me in there to see the designer.
He asked me to walk. I walked to him and
he said great. And that's how I got the job.
Being in the showroom for Balonciaga. It was four girls
(41:28):
and all of them were white, and I was the
only black girl. In my mind was a showroom where
you just modeling for potential culture clients? Were you modeling
for buyers? Who were you showing the clothes to? What
was that process? We were modeling for both for some
buyers and couture. One day, there was just one woman
in the audience sitting with the designer and she saw
(41:50):
the whole show and she bought clothes like that. You're
basically modeling in house, then basic modeling in the showroom. Yeah,
I was just in house. I wasn't able to do
any of the other shows because I didn't have an agent,
which kind of saved me because all the black girls
from New York were also in Paris, so they would
(42:10):
have recognized me, and I would have lost any job
that I got with a designer. So you're at Balenciaga
doing two shows a day. How long did that last?
How long did that go on? Do you remember? That
was about a year that I was a show room model,
and it was kind of torturous because French shoes are
very narrow and so I we have two hour lunches
(42:35):
and every day that after the first show, I would
go home to my apartment and run cold water in
the tub and stick my feet in the cold water
thing because the shoes were so tight. They weren't my side.
I've been there, girl, I've been really the worst. Juice
(42:56):
are too small are absolutely the worst. It's like you
feel like you're gonna I um, but you have to
keep a smile on your face and you have to
stand toll and walk. Absolutely, so it happened to you
were at Bluntiago for a year. Why did you leave Blantiago?
Well after that, it was during the summer, so everybody leaves,
and so my friend told me, he suggested I should
(43:18):
go to Italy. And there was the same situation where
the summer everyone leaves and they go abroad, or they
go come to America. Wherever they go, they just leave
the city. And so the city was dead. But I
was able to do a Trump show at a coliseum there,
(43:38):
and then after that, um, I got a ticket back
to New York. I didn't even go back to Paris.
I should have went back to Paris. That was just
a regret that I had that I should have went
back to Paris, but I didn't, and I went back
to New York. Why didn't you go back to Paris?
You know, there's no work that wasn't even magazine book.
(44:01):
So I just went back to mom's house and went
to a smaller boutique agency, which was Grace de Marco.
There was a black loan agency, and so they hired
me on the spot, and that's how I got the
Ultra Sine cosmetic contract. And that's also the that was
(44:22):
a test that I did for Avon and the photographer
took the work up there and they liked my photo
that he took, and so they called me in and
I signed a contract with them for a year. And
the cosmetic company with Johnson's Cosmetics, Ultra Schine, they signed
me to a year contract. Amazing. Roughly what year with
(44:44):
this has been? Are we in the eighties now? Yeah,
we're about in the mid eighties, in the mid eighties.
So you come back from Paris, you get a boutique agency,
and then you get an ultrachine and an Avon contract.
That's pretty awesome. I've seen those photos there, um pretty epic. Yeah.
I I hadn't been with them for a long time either,
but I already had like, you know, shots that I
(45:06):
did in Paris, shots that I did in New York.
Of course, being on a hair color box. So do
you think by the time you got back to New
York from Paris that like the rumor, I guess you're
in a new agency. Were you concerned that people were
gonna know know your business? What was that like? I
wasn't really even thinking about that. I just wanted to work.
(45:29):
So but they did find out because any magazine ran
the ads, Um, well they're magazines, you know, ran the ads,
and so people started recognizing me. Glas and Marco got
a call. I got discharged. Oh my god. So basically
right after the ads started running, someone called the agency
(45:52):
and then you got dismissed. Jesus Christ. Yeah, people started
recognizing me, so um, they made a phone call, and
that was that. Wow, we have to take another break.
But when we returned, why would you Chasey's mind when
she got a message from Clarel after almost four decades? Alrighty,
(46:21):
then let's just dive right back in. When I think
about how it was a big deal for black models
to have any kind of campaign, I just just think
about reading about Veronica Webb and Naomi Campbell and and
a mom back in like the seventies and eighties, and
how difficult it was to get beauty campaigns and that
was the goal for a lot of models at the time.
(46:42):
It's the way is the way I understand it. And
so at this too point, by the eighties, you've booked
three like sort of major campaigns. I'm just thinking if
you hadn't been outed, Like, what could you have done
if like because you were when you were booking a
lot and you were working a lot. Do you ever
think about that? Well, I mean, yeah, but you know,
like said, when I got with dres Dell Marco, I
had no I you know, I had no idea because
(47:03):
I wasn't thinking in those terms. I had started working
with it, and I you know, and I was loving
the atmosphere, and I figured that, you know, a smaller agency,
I was able to hide longer, you know, instead of
a high end agency like UM Solely and because he
was famous it was like the third biggest agency in
(47:25):
New York at the time, Solely and so UM. I
just thought, you know, I might be able to just
slide in there and start working again. But it didn't happen.
What happened after you were dropped by this agencing? Well,
I after that I kind of got depressed about I
(47:45):
guess it was depression. The thing about depression that you
don't even know you're you're depressed, because I've never experienced
depression before. So I started hanging out with the wrong people,
and the drugs got involved in my life. And and
and when I did that, my best friend knocked on
my door one day and literally saved my life. Oh
(48:10):
how did your friends tape your life? I had hit
rock bottom and so there was no joy in my life.
And Douglas is a very funny, silly person, and he
started out all putting a smile back on my face,
and he was starting to come over to my to
my apartment every day and we would just hang out
(48:31):
and start talking and sorry, getting a little emotion, It's okay, okay, mhm.
And then he um started putting me in front of
the camera and building my confidence back up. Yeah, and
(48:58):
that's how mhm I became his news mm hm, m hm.
And we started hanging out more and more. And people
like Tommy and Douglas have a tendency, like my mom,
(49:20):
to shelter me, to protect me, and so he started
doing that. And I was being spoiled by him because
he would just give me dresses, make me dresses any time.
That I knew dresses, and that was around the time
that I needed to work. So he told me about
(49:41):
still Center, and I went and got hired a show Center.
I just I want to just pause for show Center.
For people who saw Opposed, they saw a little bit
of what show Center was. But show Center was basically
a peep show that was existed in Times Square in
the eighties and I think early nineties and the Madonna
Open Your Heart video, it kind of like what the
peep shows were. I guess at the time. Is that
(50:03):
how you would describe show Center, Tracy exactly. And I
didn't mind it because the dates couldn't touch you. They
were behind this petition they hand your money through the slot,
whatever it is that they need you to do, etcetera, etcetera.
And um, show Center was where the girls worked, Okay,
And when we say the girls with the trans girls,
(50:24):
I think what I find so interesting about show Center
is that and what sounds beautiful actually about it at
the time. There's a lot of trans women I've read
about at the time who worked as show Center in
the eighties, and so the trans women were able to
go someplace, make a honest living, be safe and support
themselves and then go about their business and go about
their lives exactly exactly, because we make good money. All
(50:48):
of us make good money, and you start building your
own clienteles, you know, dates that were there specifically for you.
It was great money at the time. So you start
working at show center. Douglas is making you close. Um
did you do? What were you doing outside show center? Um?
I was hanging out with a girlfriend there, and so
we went to the balls and met people from the
(51:10):
House of Africa. That's how I became a member first.
And so the founders didn't want to be mother and
father anymore, so they elected me and Eddie to be
mother and father, and that's how I became mother. What
year with this? Roughly, this was in the early nineties,
(51:31):
I believe late eighties, early nineties, when I became involved
in the Health of Africa and had settled my name
Tracy Africa got over the ball community. I was bringing
something different to the table, and so I stood out
when I would be on the runway. Well, you had
(51:52):
modeled professionally for many years. Yeah, so I only knew
one way to do it, and so that's how I became,
you know, so popular. I first went to a ball
in the early seventies. It was very exciting. I've always
said that the ball community has the most talented people
on earth, and at that time, back then, it was
(52:15):
all about the girls. It wasn't about what it is now,
the vogueing and and predominantly the male part of what's
going on in the ball community. Now, I think the
girls just sending to pick back up. Gotcha, gotcha amazing.
So for those out there who don't know, balls are
these events. If you've seen the film Paris Is Burning,
(52:37):
or if you watched your show Pose, it's balls with
these houses where people sort of in their communities, you know,
for the House of the Asia, the House of Extravaganza,
et cetera. So there were places where there were families,
and in the balls would be these events where kids
would unwalk or vogue for trophies and various categories. But realness,
bim queen face, et cetera, et cetera. For those who
(52:57):
don't know what balls are, I want you skip ahead
a little bit. And when I I discovered you in
two thousand nine, I believe I started telling everyone I
knew about you. And then someone suggests to someone said, oh,
you should play Tracy in a movie. And I was like,
oh my god, that's a great idea. And I read
and I was like, okay, So I like, I did
some research and I got your phone number. I don't
(53:18):
know if you remember this. I got your phone number
and I called you in New Jersey and I, you know,
I explained to who I was. At this point, I've done,
you know, done some reality television. This was two thousand
and ten, and you told me your story. You were
amazing and so generous with your time, and then I said,
I would love to do, you know, a TV show
or a movie, a TV movie about you. When you
freaked out the secondness at TV, you were like, no, no, no,
(53:41):
I can't do that. You know, I can't have people
find out just the whole idea of that was just
like you know, you was like, I would I will
never do this. And then in two thousand fifteen, I
saw an interview with you in New York magazine for
The Cut where you told your story, and I was
so happy and excited that you have finally come forward
(54:03):
to tell your story because it is legendary. It's epic,
the life that you have lived. What made you in
two thousand fifteen, decided to come forward and tell um,
tell your story. Um Douglas Douglas. Uh. They got in
touch with Douglas because nobody knew how to get in
touch with me. And it took a minute for me
(54:25):
to agree to the story. So it took like maybe
about four or five days because he was saying, we'll
look you're older now. You know, if you lived a
full life, you know you have nothing to lose, and
you know, at least tell your story because you've accomplished
something that nobody else had and that you know your
(54:46):
story should be told. I was kind of forced to
live a very private life. Even when I was working
at show Center. After I left that, it was still private.
Even when I was going for the ball after that,
I was still private. Yeah. I wasn't a fixture. I
learned a long time ago. When you're a fixture, whether
you go over a group of friends house all the time,
(55:10):
or you go to the neighborhood bar, or you go
anywhere a nightclub, people that get to know you start
disrespecting you. What do you mean by that started disrespect
you in what way? They feel as though they can
say anything to you and be too familiar with you,
and they don't even really know you. They just see
(55:32):
you at these places, have small conversations with you, and
you know, just like just you know, just saying things
that were all wrong. They make assumptions about who you are, ye,
making a point asking me about my sex life, and
you know, just things like that, things are that are
off the wall and none of nobody's business. Yeah, I
(55:53):
feel you. I feel here well all the sports to
be this owner. Yeah. So when you decide, so you
tell your story to New York magazine, the story comes out.
What what did that feel like after all these years?
What was that like to sort of have this newspaper article,
you know, sort of claiming all of your history and
everything that you've been through. What was that like In
(56:16):
the beginning, when I the story came out, they attached
transgender to my name. That was kind of a throwback
for me, you know, because in the interview I explained
to her that I never identified as transgender, identified as
as a woman. For you, so for you, transgender with
(56:38):
something different and obviously that that word didn't exist back
in the day. So that didn't feel right to you.
It didn't feel authentic to you to have that in
front of your name. No, it didn't. It didn't feel right.
And then you know the girls today, they're very proud
and telling the community, telling people who they are what
(57:00):
they are, and I was trained not to because when
a child that was born in the fifties grew up
in the sixties and seventies, so there was no way
that I was able to wear that T shirt and say,
you know, I'm trans and I'm proud during that quality. Also,
back in the day, the protocol when trans people transitioned
(57:23):
was to like, you don't tell anyone, You keep your
business to yourself for safety, for all kinds of reasons.
It was girl people just didn't say anything. Back then.
Half of them you didn't even know because they left privately. Absolutely,
I'm I'm very happy that we found out about you, though,
because I've always been inspired, deeply inspired by your story.
(57:43):
And what it's also inspiring is that after Claire All
saw the New York Magazine article, they approached you. Can
you tell us a little bit about that. Yes, I
had got this email that Claibar wanted to reach out
to me. I think they tech a Douglas first again,
(58:03):
and he forward the email to me and they were
very evasive. On the phone, the woman on the other
end introduced herself to me and she said she was
representing a company and the company is interested in speaking
with you. Would you be interested? And I said, sure,
why not? And so we went to this restaurant where
we were having lunch and meeting the rest of the clients,
(58:26):
and they all sat down and so um one of
the people that I was meeting was saying, do you
know why you're here? I said, no, I have no clue.
So they think, well, we're from Clara and we would
like to have you come back to clar role, and
(58:49):
so many emotions was going through my brain. I was
feeling like I wanted to cry, I wanted to laugh.
I felt like a you know, like nervous. I was,
you know, like a little shaky because it was just
it was overwhelming that Clarall, even though it's under a
(59:11):
new owner, invited me back to represent the company. And
so I was just so honored with that, so amazing,
so beautiful. The ads are gorgeous, the photos of gorgeous.
How did it feel when you went on the shoot
for Claire All. I think forty years later. Well, I
(59:31):
asked them. I was joking, well jokingly kind of seriously, said, um,
do you guys know how old I am? Laughing and
said I said, well, you know I'm in my early sixties,
because I think I was in my earlier mid sixties
at the time. And yeah, so it was just you know, overwhelming.
(59:55):
And then then flew me out to California, putting me
up in the hotel. We went to the studio and
I met everybody can addresser and makeup people, and then
I had did differmmercial for them that day, and I
also did the advertisement for or the magazine next day.
(01:00:15):
You've been modeling for Douglas, right, So, but did if
how did it feel being back you did? We did
it all just kind of come right back to you
when you're a friend of the camera again. Yeah, when
I got in front of the camera, it felt very natural,
and I was comfortable enough to start moving, you know,
in front of the camera. Amazing. Now I have to
(01:00:36):
ask you this. So Susan Taylor. After the New York
Magazine article came out, she was interviewed by New York
Magazine and said, some really interesting things. Are you aware
of the article and what she said in the article, Yes,
New York Mac called me up and discussed it with me. Yeah.
In the article, she said that she she did not
(01:00:57):
remember shutting down the photos. She that she had no
recollection of that. She also said that she knew that
I don't. The language she used was disturbing, but she
said that she knew your business, um, and that everyone knew,
and that she never would have You were safe at
essence is what she what she said basically, and that
she never would have let you go. UM. She also
(01:01:19):
said in the article that she wanted to contact you
and talk to you about it. Has she contacted you?
What do you think about what she said in that article? Um?
New York mag asked me the same thing and I said,
no comment. They gave me her phone number and I
said no, thank you. I just felt like meeting her
would be a waste of time if she says she
don't have remember things. And I can describe exactly what
(01:01:41):
she had on that day. She had on a cashmere
pull over sweater cream color um, cream color pleated pants.
She had on camel color Italian boots with a camel
color belt, another belt with the a black and green
(01:02:01):
shawl that she had gotten on a trip to Egypt,
and that's what she wrapped around my dress. I remember
for bathing because it was a shocking moment for me.
So I remember everything. I remember what the photographer had on.
I remember what the makeup artist had on. I remember
what the person that came in the Doorheall years ago,
I got to confront a kid who would bullied me.
(01:02:24):
They didn't remember any of the bullying. I remember every
single detail. When something horrible happens to you, you remember
all the details and what's deep. As the bullies often
don't remember at all. They're like, oh that that happened.
Oh I didn't I don't remember. Um. So yeah, Oh, Tracy,
thank you, thank you so much for sharing all this today.
(01:02:45):
I'm just so blown away by your life and I'm
just so grateful that you've shared it with us today.
Is there's something else you want to wrap up with
and share with the people. Sure. I recently received an
email from the Only in Black History Museum and they're
in contact and negotiations with me to put my work
(01:03:08):
in the museum in Washington, d C. Oh my god,
that's amazing. Oh we are History is so important, and
I'm obsessed with our history and you are living history
that everyone should know about. So I like to end
the podcast with a question that comes from my therapy,
and basically the question is what else is true? And
(01:03:30):
it's basically, if something is challenging in our lives and
that creates anxiety or nerves or whatever, there is something
else in our lives that we can also lean into
that is positive, that it's neutral or positive, and it
can shift our nervous systems. It can shift like the
day we're having. So I ask you today, Tracy Africa Norman,
(01:03:52):
what else is true? Well? When I try not to
concentrate on the negative, and so I'm on the spiritual journey.
So I read my daily word every day, I read
the Bible, and I read these self help books that
we're giving to me, and you know, surrounded myself with
positive people and I just stay away from the natives
(01:04:19):
and there you go, there you go. Thank you so much,
miss Norman. I am deeply honored that you've taken this
time to share your incredible story with us. Thank you,
and I'm honored that you reached out to me. It's
just amazing that your love has shined on my light
(01:04:39):
for so long, and we've been in conversations through texting
and it's just so joyful. Thank you so much. I
really appreciate that. Thank you, Thank you, Miss Norman. Thank you,
and stay safe. That was amazing And I think if
there are any takeaway days we can glean, there's there
(01:05:01):
are many. I think about how important it is to
honor our history. Transgender isn't a term that Tracy seems
to want to embrace, but she is living trans history
and having a sense of what her life was like
in the seventies and eighties and nineties is deeply important
to me as a transperson, deeply inspiring. And this, this
(01:05:27):
thread throughout Ms Norman's life is that she had support
Tommy Sherry, her friends who dressed her up for the
very first time, and of course Douglas. These people throughout
her life community that have kept her alive and given
her sustenance and a warm place to land. Community is
so important. Family is so important. If it's not your
(01:05:48):
family of origin, it can be a chosen family. How beautiful.
Thank you for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. If
you like what you here, please rate reviews, subscribe, and
share with everyone you know. Join me July when I
kick off our next series of episodes with Dr Cornell West, philosopher,
(01:06:10):
republic intellectual professor, and one of my greatest spiritual teachers.
You've probably heard him on the Type Rope podcast, seeing
him on CNN, or read one of his twenty books
on race, democracy and justice, and I am so very
excited to share our powerful conversation on love, truth, and
so much more. You can find me on Instagram and
Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox
(01:06:33):
for Real. Until next time, stay in the love. The
Laverne Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shonda land Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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