September 15, 2024 • 53 mins
For many years Paulina Porizkova was the most recognized face in fashion & beauty - from her iconic Sports Illustrated cover to being the face of Estee Lauder. When she married rock star Ric Ocastek from the iconic band, The Cars. From the outside looking in, it seemed like she was living the dream.
To look at her, she really did seem like the woman who had it all. But while Paulina was as visible as you could be…she didn’t feel like she was being heard. Not by the photographers and fashion people, not by producers and directors, and not by her husband, Ric.
But then, during COVID, she became known to a whole new generation of women for an unlikely reason…crying on Instagram. And as you’re about to hear - Paulina had a lot of really good reasons to cry. (But, she also gets the last laugh).
When Paulina hit her low point, she shared her grief and pain - and tears - with Instagram. As you’ll hear, Paulina had a lot of reasons to cry (and a lot of new reasons to laugh).
You can follow Paulina on Instagram here.
You can order Paulina’s book, No Filter, here.
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CREDITS:
Host: Mia Freedman
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Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Audio Producer: Thom Lion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Three big envelopes arrived at the house, one for me
and one for each of my sons. And I opened
it and it said, you know, last Will and Testament.
And I was like, you know, I'm barely processing anything,
and I've seen this note that said in like somebody's
handwriting my wife she's not going to inherit anything because
she abandoned me.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
For Mama Ma. I'm Meya Friedman and you're listening to
no filter. Thanks for having me in your ears. I
want to tell you a story that I first heard
when I first started in magazines, because it's about my
guest today. It was the early nineties and someone I
worked with had just got back from New York, where
they'd been a guest of Este Laura, who'd flown them
(01:09):
over for the launch of some new product. At this
fancy launch, there were a whole lot of fancy people
from all around the world, magazine people sitting around, and
she was eating her fish or her steak or her chicken,
and next to her suddenly appeared Paulina Partskova, a supermodel,
(01:30):
the face of Este lauda fashion model, Paulina Forskova.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Helena Poruskova continues to get major contract sday Lauder's Self
Action tanning cream now in very dark ten to order
all year round.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And this was back at a time when nobody really
knew the names of models. It was sort of pre supermodel,
and Paulina Parrotskova was the most famous face and the
most famous woman in the world in the modeling industry.
And so she came and sat down next to my
friend and she said, have you got a cigarette? I
(02:06):
need to get away from all of these people. And
I just loved that story because it was so different
to the perfect image on all the Esday Lorda advertising
billboards and magazine ads that I'd seen where you might
recognize her face. She also was famous because she was
(02:27):
the girl in a music video for The Cars. Their
most famous hit was called Drive. I wasn't going to
sing it to you, but I know that you want
to hear it, so it kind of goes, Who's going
to drive you? Hold tonight? Doo doo do doo doo doo?
Shall I keep going?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
You know I'm mean to keep going, but probably you'll
remember the song that was a huge hit in the eighties,
and that's where she met her husband, who was the
lead singer of that band. His name was Rick Ocasek. Anyway,
he was kind of different looking, and they got this
nickname in the press as Beauty and the Beast, which
was kind of a bit insulting to them both. But
(03:08):
then Paulina kind of disappeared. I didn't see her face anymore.
She was replaced in magazines and on catwalks and in
ad campaigns by the next generation of supermodels until around
COVID time, when I was scrolling through Instagram like so
many people were, and I saw this lady crying, not
(03:29):
just like you know, an artful tear rolling down her face,
but that full, ugly cry that you do, and she
was looking into the camera, lying on her bed and
bawling her eyes out. That's when she became known to
a whole new generation of women as the crying Lady
on Instagram. And it turns out it wasn't just covid tears.
(03:52):
She had a lot of really really good reasons to cry.
But also she kind of gets the last laugh in
this story. You're going to enjoy it. So of course
my first question was, why were you crying?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Oh haha, okay, so I think that it's not well
In my case, at least, it certainly wasn't a conscious
decision to film myself crying and then post it to Instagram.
It wasn't done for Instagram. I was just in a really,
really horrible part of my life at this point. My
(04:28):
husband had died, I was utterly alone. There was a
pandemic raging. I had to sell my house. I mean,
I was in at the shittiest place of my life
since I can use the word. And you know, I
cried every day. I cried for hours and hours and
hours a day, and I cried so much that it
(04:49):
became boring. But you know, it wouldn't stop just because
it was boring. It didn't mean that, you know, that
it wouldn't keep going. So at some point I just
thought I'll film myself crying, because you know, because I
was so good at crying. And when I saw it,
I thought, I wonder if anybody else out there, feet
(05:09):
else this way, you know there? Mind you, this was
in the middle of the pandemic, and I was not
the only person that was crying at least at home, right.
We were all having a pretty shitty time of the pandemic.
I was so lonely, and I wanted to sort of
reach out and to see if there was anybody out
there that felt as lonely as I. Just one person,
(05:30):
give me another person that's also that also is crying
all day. And I think it was for that, because
I thought if I saw a video of a woman
my age crying and talking about how miserable she feels,
it would make me feel so much better that I
wasn't alone. So, in a mad fit of you know,
(05:51):
whatever it is that I was doing, I posted it. Now,
doing the video, I think that's not that big of
a deal. Posting it was the crazy bit, and I might,
you know, it might have been a sort of a
temporary insanity. Looking back at it and seeing the video now,
I think, oh my god, it's really it's really disturbing.
(06:12):
I can't believe that I revealed myself so nakedly to everyone.
So yeah, I think there was a bit of madness involved,
but it did hook me up with people that felt
the same way, or other women that were feeling like
they were drowning, and I felt like they saved me.
(06:36):
You know, I helped them and they helped me. So
putting myself out there this way, like that ugly and
that real.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
That's how you connect with other women, though, isn't it.
It's something that I learned a long time ago as well.
And it's as you say, sometimes I'll share things and
people will say that's really brave, and I'm like, it's
not brave, it's I feel seen because I feel normal,
like it's a risk putting it out there. But then
someone says me to me too, me too, and you go,
oh phew, it's not just me. So it helps them
(07:08):
and it helps you.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Exactly, because I think the worst, the worst part of
being a human is feeling like you don't exist, no,
like nobody hears you, nobody sees you. And so just
one person that hears you and sees you helps a
little bit. And I desperately, I desperately needed for somebody
(07:32):
to just acknowledge that I existed.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
What was so interesting to me watching that video and
it was upsetting to watch, but it was also it
struck me as very defiant and you really demanding to
be seen because you couldn't look away, Like, you know,
you're flicking through Instagram and there's this beautiful woman sobbing,
and it was so raw and so I mean, we
(07:57):
all were a little unhinged during COVID, but it's not
what you would usually see, and particularly from someone who
is famous and famous for being so perfect. What's interesting
to me about you? Know, you've written in your book
about you always felt seen, but you never felt heard.
You were one of the most visible famous women in
(08:20):
the world in the late eighties around that time when
you were the face of Este Lauder. You seemed so
womanly to me then, but you were really still just
a girl, weren't you.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Well, yeah, I mean to take into account that I
started when I was fifteen, so what you were a
member of me being you know, the woman of Vestie Latter,
I'm like twenty one.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, and you seemed impossibly grown up, but you were
kind of the same age as me, not much older
than me. At the time. You were already i think,
either married to Rick or you'd already met him. You
were nineteen when you met him making the film clip
for Drive. What was your life like at that time
(09:08):
when you met him? I mean, you were a model.
You're a hugely successful model in New York City. It
was the eighties. Was it wild?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You know what, Yes, it was. At the time, it
didn't seem particularly wild. It was just my life. You know,
I was nineteen. I was actually living with a boyfriend
at the time that I met Rick, and that I
had to break up with first, you know, before starting
anything with Rick. And you know, I had an apartment
in downtown New York and I was a kid. You know,
(09:41):
there was no My idea of what was a head
was infinite, Like you don't know where where life is
going to go when you're nineteen, and you assume it's
going to go to all the places you wanted to, right,
that's just the assumption. Nobody assumes that you're going to
die a year later, or that you're going to get sick,
or some tragedy is going to befall you that happens
(10:02):
to other people. Your immortal life is stretching out ahead
of you as just infinite pass abilities. That's true whether
you're in college or whether you're you know, working in
a bar, or whether you're a model. To me, you know, yes,
of course, my job seemed very glamorous, you know, to
(10:23):
the person wasn't in it, but really it was. You know,
it's a physical job. It's one that doesn't require a
whole lot of thinking. It requires a lot of sort
of physical aptitude. In some ways. I always thought it
was a bit like being good at a sport. So
there's a certain kind of like physical wisdom, physical intelligence
to the job. It's sweaty and a little painful at times,
(10:48):
but that's really about it.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
You know, you've said that models are always called girls,
and there's a reason that the modeling industry likes girls
to be young, and it's partly because of how you look,
but that's not all of it. Can you explain why
models of girls?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, yes, and I do think both of those are
probably equally as important. The number one thing, really is
that light bounces off differently from young, smooth skin, and
it looks better on film. That's just the way it is.
And the second and this didn't dawn on me, and
I think until I was writing the essay for my
book was, Oh, girls are so much easier to manipulate,
(11:31):
aren't they. You know, as a girl, you grow up
and you are reared to believe that you're supposed to please, that,
you're supposed to be nice, and they can really take
advantage of that when you're also renting your body out
as a canvas. Because there's really no limits. You know,
(11:55):
an obliging young girl will do as she's told.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
There are a lot of much older men that ran
that industry. Some of those men have been charged with
sexual assault. Was it the Wild West? Like through what
we know now? Like I know you say that it
just was what it was and you didn't question it.
But looking through the twenty twenty four prism back at
(12:20):
that time, what was it like? That would be horrifying
to people today.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
You know what, you just answered your own question. It
was the wild West, you know, looking back at it
through the prism of twenty twenty four, there were no rules.
There were no rules, there were no laws, there were
no protections. It was you know, you arrived, you got
tossed in the pool, and if you were strong enough,
you swam, and if you weren't, you synk and that
was pretty much all there was to it. I remember
(12:48):
this instance, you know, years later, I was probably in
my forties and my girlfriend, who was also a model,
and I sat around and we were watching Oprah and
Oprah is talking about sexual harassments in the workplace. My
girlfriend and I are sort of looking at it and
we're both kind of snickering, and when the episode ends,
we sort of turned to each other and we go,
(13:10):
sexual harassment, please, that's called compliments. And we literally had
absolutely zero empathy towards the victims of sexual harassment because
that was our entire life, that was our livelihood. It
was learning how to fend it off. No, you couldn't
be in the business if you got upset by men
(13:31):
proposing to your women proposing to you whatever, people proposing
to you that were twice your age.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
When you say proposing, you may try to have sex
with you.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, yeah, of course you know sexual propositions, yes, and
that we weren't proposing.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Mary. So you turn up at a job and how
would you be treated.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
You would be treated for the most part, you would
be treated as an object. You come to the job
and you sort of check your humanity at the door.
It is sort of understood that as a model, you
are a blank canvas. You have rented yourself out so
that they can paint you, spray you, and pin you
and make you wear whatever needs to be worn, and
(14:15):
your job is to just let them do it. Let
them do it, and then you know, like I said,
your bit of physical activity make it all look like
you're you know, like it's the greatest day ever. And
then you get a lot of money for it and
you go home.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Did your fame give you more power? When you became
Polina Partscoverer and you were the face of Vesta Laura?
Did things change for you then?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah? I mean obviously being famous, you know, changes everything
and everybody you know you can't. Fame makes everything much
easier because when you are famous, they want you more
than you want them. So it of course it gives
you power and then you get to decide which As
(14:59):
a young woman and as a young woman model, it
was a sort of a heaatey feeling because it's not
a it's not a feeling that you were used to.
You know, usually you're really just the object that's being
kind of pushed around. Once you get famous, you are
on top of the heap and you get to make choices.
(15:19):
That's the one good thing about today and social media
is that that young women you have that voice. You
can go on Instagram, you can go on TikTok or whatever.
And if a photographer mistreated you, you have a voice.
You can go out there and go, this is what
happened today and they will be in trouble. But we
(15:41):
didn't have that.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
What did miss treatment look like as a model?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
I mean it really it could be anything. If you
if you imagine treating a young woman as an object,
putting her into dangerous physical situations. You know, if you
don't sleep with this photographer, you're not going to get
hired again. If you're not nice to this one, you
might not you know, he's not going to hire for
you for this job. I mean that sort of that
(16:08):
overhanging thing of having to please everyone and yet try
not to completely be obliterated by them. That's a pretty
tricky thing for any woman. And never mind a teenager.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You were nineteen when you met Rick and he was
the lead singer of the Cars, a big rock star.
And you say that from the moment you met and
watched him walk across the room to you, you knew
you'd marry him. How did you know that?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Like? Why, oh, dear guy? Okay, So at nineteen I
thought it was an affair that was just you know,
it was like, you know, it's Rome and Juliet. You
meet your perfect soulmate, and you instantly know across a
crowded room that this is the person you've been waiting for.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I'm nineteen, right, he's married with kids.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, well he forgot to mention that for a little while.
You know, I thought it's a past life connection. We
had been together in a past life and we were
meeting each other again, and I mean it was all
just you know, you cue the violence. It was incredibly
romantic and potent. Of course, now as a fifty nine
year old woman looking back, I think, oh, yes, right,
(17:21):
that's called childhood trauma is coming back to bite your ass.
You are seeing a person that is reminding you of
everything familiar to you, aka your parents, the people that
raise you, oftentimes the worst part of them. You're seeing
it right there in front of you, and you go, there,
you are, I recognize you right this way.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
What was it about Rick that reminded you of your parents?
Because your parents essentially abandoned you and you were three
in Czechoslovakia to escape to Sweden. They left you with
your grandmother. What reminded you of them? In hidden? Because
he hadn't abandoned you yet that was to come.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
That was to come Like my father. Well, first of all,
age wise, he was not not far from the age
of my father. He was tall, he was slim, He
had you know, blue pale eyes and black hair. That's
the way my father looked, big ears. He was talented
(18:22):
like my father, he knew it all like my father.
And he had quite a narcissistic personality like my father.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
So he was familiar to you. And yet oh yeah,
he loved you and shone all his attention on you,
at least at first.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yes, he did. Rick didn't really want me to model
because he didn't want to share me with anybody, which
I thought was, you know, such an incredibly romantic thing
to do and say. I didn't realize quite how isolated
I would get by acquiescing to his wishes.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
What were your ambitions for your career and what were
Rick's ambitions for you?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I thought writing was really something that I loved to do.
Was when I write, I lose time. That's how I
know that it's something that I really loved to do.
And so I thought I would sort of increasingly go
towards the writing part, you know, how to learn how
to punctuate things first, because I had only gone to
(19:21):
school to grade nine in Sweden, and so now of
course I'm in the United States, and you know, I
have to sort of learn English and all of that
with English grammar. So I thought, you know, my success
as a model was beyond even my wild as dreams,
because I had never even dared to dream that I
(19:42):
would become a successful model. That just seemed so utterly crazy.
So I just felt like it happened to me, and
like I didn't really have much to do with it.
It was just something that was you know, it's like
somebody gives you a million dollars here and you're like, wait, what.
I wasn't aware I deserved it, or I had earned it,
(20:03):
or I hadn't even wanted it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
You said that Rick didn't want you to model because
he didn't want to share you. He didn't I want
you to act. He didn't want you to model. You
acted in a movie called her Alibi with Tom Selleck
around that time.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That was a shitty movie.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I don't know if it was shitty it was, you know,
it was a mood, was what it was. But you
didn't have a great experience on the set and Rick
was there. You didn't have a lot of chemistry with
Tom reconsistent on going to work with you, which obviously
now we look at that and say that's incredibly controlling
and a big red flag. But at the time, how
did you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, at the time, I thought, well, you know what,
I was a little bit. It's funny because if you
really listened to your body, your body was sort of
trying to give me a hint that it wasn't right.
It felt awkward. I couldn't really work, I couldn't really
do my job with my boyfriend sort of breathing down
my neck and telling me that I shouldn't get so close,
(21:01):
you know, and don't look so into him, like I'm
doing a movie I'm supposed to be into him. That
was difficult, and we had a lot of arguments during
that movie because of all the things that Rick thought
that I should do instead of the things that the
director thought I should do. Like like my own personality,
my own wishes were sort of completely immaterial. I was
(21:25):
just like everybody's you know, service and the director wants this,
the producer wants this, and my boyfriend wants this. And like,
what do I want? I don't get to say. Wow,
there wasn't enough time for me to have a say,
So it was. It was kind of a horrible experience
for all of those reasons, you know, and I thought,
(21:45):
you know, nothing was more important than love to me.
I felt like I had missed out on being loved,
you know, being unconditionally loved, feeling like somebody really heard
me for who I was, which was a person that
wasn't just looks but actually had you know, a mind
(22:06):
and a soul. And maybe it wasn't as attractive as
my physical one, but god, I wanted somebody to see it.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Did Rick say it?
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Well, he made me feel like he did, because because
he criticized me quite often, and that made me feel
at ease.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
That put me at ease. I thought that meant that
he really saw me the little girl, the little the
girl that deserved to be left by her parents, that
a little bad seed that I was. He knew that
I was bad, and he loved me anyway, So it
felt very reassuring. Oh yeah, you can say a lot
of carpy.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's so toxic, Paulina. What did he like? What kind
of criticism?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Oh, you know, just little things about the way I
would dress, or the way I would eat, or the
way I would do something that annoyed him or that
wasn't lady like. You know, there was there was always
something to criticize.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Wow, that sounds very much like a man who doesn't
want a woman to leave him, so he slowly chips
away at her self esteem.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah. I don't know that he I don't know that
he was conscious of what he was doing. I think
that he really felt like I did. That we had
this love, this amazing, you know, breathtaking, earth shattering love connection.
And yes, and I was much younger, and yes, I
could have anybody that I wanted. And yes, he was
(23:38):
afraid that he might lose me if he's not at
constant guard.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
After this shortbreak, time takes a toll on Polina and
Rick's marriage, and Paulina feels more invisible than ever before.
In the last few years of your marriage before he died,
where were you at as a couple.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh, we were in a desert, blundering around alone, starving, thirsty,
and having absolutely lost sight of having once been the couple.
It was terrible.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, he was in his seventies you had turned fifty.
You're in your early fifties. That's a really difficult time
for any woman, speaking from experience, You become invisible, the
world tells you invisible. Your self esteem drops. And I'm
not a woman whose career was based on how I looked,
(24:34):
and I really struggled. I still struggle in some ways.
I think many of us do, because it's when you're
told you're not fuckable anymore, exactly in a society that
only values fuckibility in women. And I think that the
role of your partner, if you have one at that time,
is really interesting. How did Rick make you feel as
(24:54):
you got older?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Well, see that this is a part of the problem.
I don't think again, I don't think he meant to.
I think he was aging and he was incapable of
sharing vulnerability with me. I think he felt like he
had to be sort of the man, the masculine, you know,
the force, and so he couldn't be weak, he couldn't
(25:15):
be vulnerable with me, and so he couldn't tell me
that he was maybe not feeling the same way, or
that physically things were more difficult, and instead he sort
of turned it against me, you know, like he would
This was a very ugly thing. He told me once,
which is hard to forget, that he would fuck me
(25:36):
if I wasn't such a bitch. And this is not
something that I talk a lot about because of my children.
I don't really want my children to know that. But
of course here I just said it, so he turned
it on me. You know that he didn't desire me
because I was such a naggy, horrible person. And of
course I was a naggy horrible person because I was
(25:58):
married to somebody who no longer. He had never really
heard me, but now he didn't see me either, so
I didn't know how to go about getting his attention.
And besides, you know the obvious. At first, you go,
let's go to therapy, let's read these self help books.
Let's go on vacation. But when your husband says, now
(26:19):
you do therapy, you go on vacation. I'm fine. I'm
just gonna wait until you return to the woman I met,
the nineteen year old girl. That's kind of not gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Did he not like you finding your voice and having opinions?
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And no, I think he needed to be adored, And
I think a fifty year old woman has possibly a
hard time adoring. Yea, you've gone through it. You know,
you've gone through life. You know better, and just that
blind adoration is no longer what we do.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
What was the turning point for you? What made you
say I'm out, I can't do this anymore? And was
it a slow dawning thing or did you actually have
the conversation?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
It was a very slow sort of dissolution of and
again me sort of coming back over and over saying please, please,
I'm dying. I am so lonely. Isn't there anything we
can do? And so at one point, after years of course,
you know, you don't leave the man that you think
(27:23):
you're going to stay with for the rest of your
life and you have children with you know, on a whim,
it was years. It was seven eight years of this
constant trying, and when I finally decided that I couldn't
take it anymore, and I went downstairs to tell him.
I still was hoping that maybe it would wake him up,
and he just kind of shrugged and went, well, okay,
(27:44):
that's what you want.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Fine, he stayed living together with your boys, who were
adults by that.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Time, in their late teens.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, but there hadn't been infidelity in.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Your marriage, No, not as far as I know.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah, and you met someone and you started dating, and
Rick knew, and your kids had met this guy, and
it was all pretty open. What were relations like between
you and him when you had this boyfriend?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Well, again, I don't know, because at this point he
had already stopped talking to me or confiding or really
saying anything of substance, so I had no idea. He
acted as though it was all good, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
So you sort of became flatmates essentially.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, we were absolutely roommates, and I thought we made
okay roommates.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You had separate bedrooms, You hadn't had sex for years.
It wasn't really anything different except in your mind and
in your heart.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I was fifty two, had not been touched by my
husband for years, and felt invisible. All I wanted to
know was if I was ever going to have sex again,
What was the sex like when you finally had it again?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It was incredible to find that my body was still working.
It was so much fun. I was so delighted that,
you know, like, oh my god, it still works, and
you know, and of course, when you first have sex
after thirty three years of having sex with only one person,
it's a little odd, so you have to get used
(29:17):
to a new system. But you know, I've always really
liked sex. I thought sex is a really great thing
to do. It's a fun, healthy hobby to have so
and also kind of an important part of a relationship,
you know, to keep you close. And I still go
by it. I always said to my girlfriends, if sex
(29:38):
is not the best sex you're having that you've ever
had with your partner, you're going to look for it
somewhere else. And it's like other things, like if you
like museums, your partner doesn't have to love museums. You know,
you can go to with a golfriend to a museum,
but you can't have sex with your girlfriend. So the
partner that you're going to pick you need to love
having sex with them. So I really enjoyed having sex
(30:01):
for the brief moment that it lasted before my menopause.
Hormones really started flying and all sorts of hot things
started happening to my body. But then this man sort
of walked away from me and COVID happened, So I
was the end of that.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You say, all sorts of things happened to your body.
I was going to ask you before that happened, did
having sex again make you feel differently about yourself, because
it seems like you were in a pretty low place,
self esteem wise, as many of us are as we
hit fifty.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
You know, I thank you for asking me. Nobody asks
about sex ever in America. It's such a shame because
it's such an important part of the one's life. Yes, yes,
this man that I met made me feel desirable, at
least in the very beginning, and it felt incredible to
be desired. I thought, Oh, it's not over yet. Life
(30:55):
is not over yet. Yeah, I can still feel this way.
I think the most wonderful thing was that I knew
that I could feel this way and that my body
could still feel this way, and so it was immensely
exciting at first. But of course, you know, because I
was so thirsty wandering through the desert, I did go
(31:16):
for the first guy who showed any interest and should
not have done that.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You say that you've got to have the best sex
you ever had in marriage, but I think also we
can all agree not every sexual experience you have within
a marriage or within a long term relationship is always
the best sex you.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
No, all of it is going to be terrible, that's fine. Yeah, yes,
and someone is going to be really boring, that's all fine.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Did you find that menopause really hit your sex drive?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I was on the pill in my late forties four
perimenopausal symptoms which were driving me crazy, and with a pill,
it sort of righted itself and it felt fine. And then,
unbeknownst to me, I also had fibroids, and at some
point in my fifties, of course, just when I meet
this new guy and restarting my sex life, I start
(32:06):
hemorrhaging like crazy, and you know, like hemorrhaging to point
where you're like, oh, you might have to have a
blood transfusion because it's like all my blood is being
drained out.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
That's sexy, really hot, yeah, so hot.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And so I had to quit taking the pill, which
meant no hormones, which meant complete readjustment to wait, where
what is going on here? And then my husband dies,
my boyfriend leaves me, and COVID begins. So I have
no fucking idea, Oh my god, which was.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What as if menopause isn't hard enough, that's a triple whammy.
You really hit a wall, Like, just as the green
shoots in your life were starting up again, your husband died.
He died at home, unexpectedly, he was recovering from surgery.
You were taking care of him. That must have been
a horrible shock and an incredible trauma to discover him. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, I mean, there's not much more to sort of
say about that. That is something that for me and
my children. It's going to be the most head art
moment of my life forever. Yeah, every time somebody sleeps
in in the morning, I panic. It's still you know,
for I think that's gonna happen forever. It's what happened.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
After this break. The shock of Rick's death followed by
an even bigger shock for Paulina. The next day, though
you discovered his will. How did you find out what
his will said? And why so quickly?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Well, I guess he died. I think it was. It
was a Sunday, and on Tuesday, three big envelopes arrived
at the house, one for me and one for each
of my sons. And I opened it and it said,
you know, last Will and Testament, And I was like,
you know, I'm barely processing anything. Yeah, And I've seen
(34:02):
this note that sort of stuck in the front on
top of it, and it just said, in like somebody's handwriting,
my wife, she's not going to inherit anything because she
abandoned me. And I thought I just couldn't I couldn't
comprehend it. I just thought it was like a post
it note that he had stuck on because he was
pissed off or was having a bad day. And I
(34:25):
couldn't really pay attention to it for the amount of
time until I had to pay attention to it, because
suddenly it became a reality of Oh, your husband does
not want you to get half the estate. He doesn't
want you to get anything, but you know, very basic
(34:45):
stuff that was still mine because we were still married,
which were our houses and pension plans.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
That strikes me as an unimaginably cruel thing to do,
not just to you, but Rick had four children before
he met you, two by his first partner too, by
the woman he was married to when he met you,
and then you had two sons together. He left everything
to your two sons that you shared and his middle
(35:16):
the middle children his first two sons also he cut
out of the will. Did he have contact and relationships
with them through their lives? Like what was that about?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yes, he did. He wasn't extremely close to his two
oldest sons because they hadn't grown up with him, which
is not their fault. And during our time together that
we were together, I would sort of try to merge
the families back together. One of my step sons was
having very serious drug problems and so it was a
(35:49):
little difficult to be close to him because he was,
you know, not doing well. But the other one, I mean,
his daughter and his wife were like my closest friends.
It was it was a mess.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
There was a bomb into a graving family.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, it was like, you know, he it's one of
those things where it like he just detonated a hand
grenade in the middle of the family and just everything broke.
You know. It's like brother against brother, mother against sons.
It became a shit show because it wasn't just oh,
I don't have any money to live on. I have
to sell the houses immediately, you know, I have to
(36:26):
figure out a way of staying afloat what am I
going to do? But it was also pitying brother against
brother because my kids got much more than the middle kids.
And all these kids got nothing, and they've you know,
of course they felt like their father like didn't acknowledge,
like he didn't just disinherit them monetarily. It's like he
(36:46):
wasn't their father, Like at the very end, he just
scratched them out of his life, like they never existed.
They got nothing, not even the guitar. I mean, it
was cruel. And I know my husband well enough to
know that all these decisions were made sort of flippantly
at the moment where he wasn't feeling it, you know,
(37:09):
when he was like mad at somebody, and so he
just leented. Oh that's you know. I never want to
see them again.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
I can't imagine pulling in such quick succession, the gut
wrenching grief of losing him, the trauma of finding him,
and then the betrayal of him doing this to you
in terms of cutting you out. How is the process
(37:35):
of grief interrupted by the very understandable fury you must
have had towards him for what he did not just
to you, but to all his children, to your relationships.
How do you grieve someone you also want to punch
in the face.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I think, and this is in some ways sad because
it makes me think how much we as women are
willing to take on and do take on. Because in
that moment, when it was all falling down around me,
I thought my children. I saw my children grieving. They
(38:15):
were so incredibly upset and shocked, and I thought, I
have to be their mom first of all. First of all,
I need to be their mom. Yes, I know there
are practically fully grown men, but my first duty was
to them as a mother, which meant that I had
to put aside my grief, and I had to put
(38:37):
aside my anger, and I had to sort of process
their grief with them, and so I stored it all inside.
I think it was very healthy for me, but also
I felt kind of numb. Honestly, it was so much,
It was so much to take on that I didn't
have the space to feel. It was like poisoning.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
You ended up suing his estate for your rightful share
and was awarded it. Thankfully. They must have been some really,
really tough time. So how long did it go on?
Speaker 2 (39:11):
For two and a half years?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
I can't even imagine how you got through it. But
what I saw during that time and following you is
the voice that you rediscovered because you'd been kind of
invisible in terms of pop culture for a really long time,
and I imagine that echoed how you felt just inside yourself.
(39:35):
But I watched you over the last few years emerge,
and it's been so interesting because there's been the vulnerability,
but there's also been the defiance in the way you've
chosen to portray yourself, whether it's showing yourself crying or
showing yourself naked or showing yourself in underwear. Tell me
about how it's been received.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
The majority of the reception is overwhelmingly wonderful. That mind you,
I didn't do this to get a following on Instagram
and to recapture career, like, none of this. You saw
my crying video, you heard my story. This is where
I was when I posted a crying video on Instagram.
(40:18):
I was literally fucked and my life was like I
had reached the bottom and I thought there was nowhere
else to go. So, you know, my reaching out on
social media was just purely out of kind of self preservation.
Please someone, is there somebody out there? You know, this
is a message in a bottle tossed into the waves.
(40:41):
And what happened from that again, it feels very sort
of accidentally. I don't feel like I had that much
to do with it. It was just that, you know,
like minded women, and it turns out that there are
so many other women that feel the way I do.
Maybe their lows weren't quite as low, but maybe they were.
There's plenty of women that have had horrible things happen.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
What's interesting about you? Pullina and I agree. I think
he just wanted to be seen, you know, That's how
I read it. You know, I was watching you try
to find your identity, as we all do.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
I think I wanted to be heard. I think I
wanted to be heard more than anything else, because scene
is overrated. I've been very, very seen, and I didn't.
It really was about the voice.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
You know, when I say seen, I don't just mean
you're outside. I mean seen as a person.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know I always have to separate the two because
when we say scene, I think most people think seen
and heard. But I was seen, yeah, but I wasn't heard.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
And it's almost like Instagram allowed you to synthesize those
two things, because it wasn't just the images that you
put out there, which a lot of people put images
out there. But it was also the incredibly thoughtful, beautifully written,
lengthy captions that you would write, where you would be
very open about I want male attention because I feel invisible.
But then I realized that that's fleeting and that I
(42:03):
should have myself worth from inside. But yes, I do
feel good when people say my body looks great, But
then when they say my body looks great for my age,
that's another level of condescension. So I loved how you
were playing it all out loud.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, it's how I was feeling, and I wasn't holding back.
I was speaking with no filter about how I feel
as a woman of a certain age and a woman
that is relegated to a pastor because she is a
certain age. And I was, and then suddenly I wasn't anymore.
So that I guess putting myself out there nakedly vulnerably
(42:44):
allowed me to be seen again. But again that was
not the intention.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
What made you draw a line in the sound about
not having botox? There are decisions that we have to
take increasingly as we get older, about whether we die
our hair, what that we do to our face. When
did you draw that line in the sand?
Speaker 2 (43:03):
You know, with boatoks. Really, I was watching my girlfriends
get it, you know, early fifty and I would see
my girlfriend walk in and I'd go, you look really
great and be like, oh, thanks, and they wouldn't tell
me that they had Boatoks, And you know, an hour
or two hours later, i'd go, are you okay? Is
everything okay? Because you I can't really tell if you're
(43:25):
happy to see me or like, I could feel that
there was some emotional barrier that like, I wasn't understanding
them as well as I usually understand them. And they'd
be like, well, botox, and I thought, oh, that's what
botox does to me. It looks wonderful on you, It
looks great, but I can't tell how you feel. And
(43:48):
my face, I've had the incredibly good luck of being
seen just as a beautiful face. I know what that's like.
I also know how lonely that can make you. That's
not what I aspire to. I want to use my
face for what it was meant for, which is tell
my story, you know, to connect to you. And i'd
(44:09):
to find that that's impossible for me with both tops.
I have a hard time with people who have a
lot of it, and so I don't want to do
it myself, that's all.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
So eventually you were ready to date again, and you
made a deliberate decision to date non famous people. How
did that go?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well, I made a deliberate decision to date anybody who
would date me, and it turned out to be like
five mens. So it really wasn't that much.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
That's very depressing. So what were those dates like?
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, the initial ones were very sweet. I've met some
guys that were very sweet, and then some guys that
were ridiculous. You know, I mean, out of this small
pool of men, most of them would have a drink
or two and then suddenly, you know, it would spill
out of their mouths that oh you know, I told
my friends I was like meeting with a supermodel, and
(45:01):
then right away it's like, okay, well, thank you very much,
and this will be it will be the only date.
It's really hard to date when you're in your fifties. A.
It's really hard to date when you're a widow. It's
really hard to date when you're a celebrity. Yeah, those
things are just not a great mix of things.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Tell me about Jeff. I was so happy when you
met Jeff. Oh yeah, How did you meet Jeff?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
It was a pretty hard and long road to get
to Jeff, and there was a lot of like, you know,
I said, I took dating, you know, in the last
year before I met Jeff. I did dating as a
job because I have single girlfriends that are my age,
and they all said the same thing. Look, it's in
the numbers, you know. One of my girlfriends would do
(45:50):
like drive by dating. She would like she wouldn't even
waste her time with like having a coffee with them.
She would just go, why don't you drive by this
cafe as I'm sitting there, and we'll wave to each
other and see if we even want to have a coffee.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
I was going to say, you've got a fuck a
lot of frogs, but sometimes you just drive by the
frogs and wave.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
You're gonna drive by to see if you want if.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
You want to fuck the frogs. Yeah, that's so true.
Exactly did you meet on the apps? How did you meet?
Speaker 2 (46:17):
We did meet on the apps? Well, I would have
never met him if it wasn't on an app because
he lived in LA I lived in New York. We
don't really move in the same circles and ours was
in some strange way and old fashioned romance, because even
though we met on an app, which is very modern,
we then fell into this having conversations with each other
(46:37):
for a month, like you know, we would do zoom,
we would have a cup of tea and then we
would have a glass of wine and we would talk
for hours and hours, and we would write to each other,
and it was a month of just talking like a courtship. Yeah,
it was kind of like an old fashioned portup.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Pauline, You've had such issues with abandonment. You know. There
was your parents. There was even though your grandmother didn't
abandon you, you had to leave her when your parents
took you to Sweden. There was the partner that you
had before Rick died. Thore was Rick who had abandoned
you inside your marriage, and then of course him dying
and then what he did to you after his death.
(47:18):
How do you trust?
Speaker 2 (47:20):
That's such a good question. Thank you for asking that
for me and for all the other women that have
been through some shit and are having a really hard
one trusting. I don't. I can't. And Jeff, being the
wonderful human being that he is, understands that, and he
sometimes he says you know, I have to remind myself
(47:41):
that you're still grieving and that all the things that
you've gone through, so I remind myself which place you're
operating from. But I understand, I get it, and he
just lets me do the things that we sometimes do
when we are having trust issues, and he just he's
there and he holds my hands and he says, I'm here,
(48:04):
I got you. I hear you.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
What a beautiful man he really is.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
And this is with his help. I think, you know,
maybe little by little I thought my trust thoughts a
little bit. I mean, at the moment that we're talking
right now, I can't conceive of the time that I
will fully be able to trust someone. But at the
same time, it doesn't stop me from jumping in and
(48:31):
trying to. I know I might get hurt again. I
know how much it hurts, but I also know I
can survive anything.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
That's so eloquent. You're absolutely right. We should put that
on a T shirt. Hey are you feeling so generous
with your time? Oh?
Speaker 2 (48:49):
It was such a pleasure talking to you, And really,
I haven't nobody's asked me these kind of sex questions
ever before.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
You're first no filter, where two of a kind. You
and I. Goodness, we cover it a lot of ground
in that conversation, didn't we. And we actually had to
edit it back a little bit because we talked about
so many things. I loved the part about how she's
(49:17):
more bendy after a two hip replacements, the betrayal of Rick,
choosing bad men, the daddy issues. Oh, I just it's
so interesting. I once spoke to this guy and he
was a really rich guy. I was just making a
comment about how beautiful his wife was, and he said,
(49:41):
you know, for every beautiful woman, there's a guy who's
sick of fucking her. And I was like, Oh, my god,
isn't that just awful? And this guy was not someone
that I knew or someone that I saw again, but
I just was like, oh, you're awful. And I think
that there's a certain type of guy. I shouldn't generalize,
(50:03):
but I will, in my experience of interviewing a lot
of models and ex models, a certain type of guy
who's attracted to models because it is like the ultimate trophy,
the ultimate status symbol that the world actually pays this
woman because of how beautiful she is, she's objectively considered
(50:24):
one of the most beautiful women in the world, and
she can even monetize it. And so what I'm going
to do is that I'm going to make her feel
really insecure so she won't leave me. And I just
I've seen it again and again, and I just really
feel for these women. And what's so interesting about the
difference with Paulina and a lot of other models that
I have watched grow older is how comfortable she's not
(50:49):
completely comfortable with it in that I think all of
us look in the mirror as we get older sometimes
go oh wow, goodness, that's older than I feel. But
she's not one of those women that just post throwback
photos of herself. And she's clearly very comfortable or growing
comfortable in her skin. And the times when she's not comfortable,
(51:10):
she's open about that, like she's honest about the fact
that she still likes male attention and validation, particularly from
her partner. And I just you know that the word,
the term that I'd use to describe Paulina Poortskova is
hot mess. And that's a real compliment from me, Like
I mean it in a really complimentary way, because the
(51:32):
hot is not about how she looks. It's about her
life force and the mess is not again a negative
to me. It's a generosity of spirit in being vulnerable
and having no filter and sharing the stuff that might
not be hermetically sealed and you know, perfect and literally
(51:53):
filtered on the internet. And I can think of some
other models who were her age who were growing old
in very different ways, and you know, all props to them,
no shade on them, because I can't imagine how hard
it would be for a woman who's career and her
paycheck is literally indexed to the way she looks in
(52:14):
a world that wants women to always look young and
perfect and frozen in time. And Paulina's just said, screw that,
I'm not doing it, and I'm loving watching it and
loving watching it. They say, you can't be what you
can't see, and I love looking at her as a
woman you know who's around her age too. Anyway, if
(52:35):
you've never watched the music video for Drive where Paulina
and Rick Mett, go watch it on YouTube. It's a hoote.
It's like a time machine back to the eighties. But
she's more beautiful now than ever before, I honestly think,
and yeah, love her work, follow her on Instagram. She
doesn't cry that much anymore. She's happy now. The executive
producer of No Filter is Niama Brown, a child of
(52:56):
the eighties who did not have a Paulina poster, but
did have a Rob Low one. Like me, I had
a Rob Low one. He had a pierced ear. I
think he was the only straight guy I had on
my wall. My other posters were like of Adam Ann
and Culture Club. I had big crushes on them, very
bad Gator when I was a kid. Audio production on
(53:16):
this podcast is by Tom Lyon. I don't think he
was born in the eighties, so he's got nothing to
add to this conversation really, except I do know that
he appreciates women of all ages, whether they're crying or not.
I'm mere friedman. And have I ever cried on Instagram? Well,
yes I have
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Three big envelopes arrived at the house, one for me
and one for each of my sons. And I opened
it and it said, you know, last Will and Testament.
And I was like, you know, I'm barely processing anything,
and I've seen this note that said in like somebody's
handwriting my wife she's not going to inherit anything because
she abandoned me.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
For Mama Ma. I'm Meya Friedman and you're listening to
no filter. Thanks for having me in your ears. I
want to tell you a story that I first heard
when I first started in magazines, because it's about my
guest today. It was the early nineties and someone I
worked with had just got back from New York, where
they'd been a guest of Este Laura, who'd flown them
(01:09):
over for the launch of some new product. At this
fancy launch, there were a whole lot of fancy people
from all around the world, magazine people sitting around, and
she was eating her fish or her steak or her chicken,
and next to her suddenly appeared Paulina Partskova, a supermodel,
(01:30):
the face of Este lauda fashion model, Paulina Forskova.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Helena Poruskova continues to get major contract sday Lauder's Self
Action tanning cream now in very dark ten to order
all year round.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And this was back at a time when nobody really
knew the names of models. It was sort of pre supermodel,
and Paulina Parrotskova was the most famous face and the
most famous woman in the world in the modeling industry.
And so she came and sat down next to my
friend and she said, have you got a cigarette? I
(02:06):
need to get away from all of these people. And
I just loved that story because it was so different
to the perfect image on all the Esday Lorda advertising
billboards and magazine ads that I'd seen where you might
recognize her face. She also was famous because she was
(02:27):
the girl in a music video for The Cars. Their
most famous hit was called Drive. I wasn't going to
sing it to you, but I know that you want
to hear it, so it kind of goes, Who's going
to drive you? Hold tonight? Doo doo do doo doo doo?
Shall I keep going?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
You know I'm mean to keep going, but probably you'll
remember the song that was a huge hit in the eighties,
and that's where she met her husband, who was the
lead singer of that band. His name was Rick Ocasek. Anyway,
he was kind of different looking, and they got this
nickname in the press as Beauty and the Beast, which
was kind of a bit insulting to them both. But
(03:08):
then Paulina kind of disappeared. I didn't see her face anymore.
She was replaced in magazines and on catwalks and in
ad campaigns by the next generation of supermodels until around
COVID time, when I was scrolling through Instagram like so
many people were, and I saw this lady crying, not
(03:29):
just like you know, an artful tear rolling down her face,
but that full, ugly cry that you do, and she
was looking into the camera, lying on her bed and
bawling her eyes out. That's when she became known to
a whole new generation of women as the crying Lady
on Instagram. And it turns out it wasn't just covid tears.
(03:52):
She had a lot of really really good reasons to cry.
But also she kind of gets the last laugh in
this story. You're going to enjoy it. So of course
my first question was, why were you crying?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Oh haha, okay, so I think that it's not well
In my case, at least, it certainly wasn't a conscious
decision to film myself crying and then post it to Instagram.
It wasn't done for Instagram. I was just in a really,
really horrible part of my life at this point. My
(04:28):
husband had died, I was utterly alone. There was a
pandemic raging. I had to sell my house. I mean,
I was in at the shittiest place of my life
since I can use the word. And you know, I
cried every day. I cried for hours and hours and
hours a day, and I cried so much that it
(04:49):
became boring. But you know, it wouldn't stop just because
it was boring. It didn't mean that, you know, that
it wouldn't keep going. So at some point I just
thought I'll film myself crying, because you know, because I
was so good at crying. And when I saw it,
I thought, I wonder if anybody else out there, feet
(05:09):
else this way, you know there? Mind you, this was
in the middle of the pandemic, and I was not
the only person that was crying at least at home, right.
We were all having a pretty shitty time of the pandemic.
I was so lonely, and I wanted to sort of
reach out and to see if there was anybody out
there that felt as lonely as I. Just one person,
(05:30):
give me another person that's also that also is crying
all day. And I think it was for that, because
I thought if I saw a video of a woman
my age crying and talking about how miserable she feels,
it would make me feel so much better that I
wasn't alone. So, in a mad fit of you know,
(05:51):
whatever it is that I was doing, I posted it. Now,
doing the video, I think that's not that big of
a deal. Posting it was the crazy bit, and I might,
you know, it might have been a sort of a
temporary insanity. Looking back at it and seeing the video now,
I think, oh my god, it's really it's really disturbing.
(06:12):
I can't believe that I revealed myself so nakedly to everyone.
So yeah, I think there was a bit of madness involved,
but it did hook me up with people that felt
the same way, or other women that were feeling like
they were drowning, and I felt like they saved me.
(06:36):
You know, I helped them and they helped me. So
putting myself out there this way, like that ugly and
that real.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
That's how you connect with other women, though, isn't it.
It's something that I learned a long time ago as well.
And it's as you say, sometimes I'll share things and
people will say that's really brave, and I'm like, it's
not brave, it's I feel seen because I feel normal,
like it's a risk putting it out there. But then
someone says me to me too, me too, and you go,
oh phew, it's not just me. So it helps them
(07:08):
and it helps you.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Exactly, because I think the worst, the worst part of
being a human is feeling like you don't exist, no,
like nobody hears you, nobody sees you. And so just
one person that hears you and sees you helps a
little bit. And I desperately, I desperately needed for somebody
(07:32):
to just acknowledge that I existed.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
What was so interesting to me watching that video and
it was upsetting to watch, but it was also it
struck me as very defiant and you really demanding to
be seen because you couldn't look away, Like, you know,
you're flicking through Instagram and there's this beautiful woman sobbing,
and it was so raw and so I mean, we
(07:57):
all were a little unhinged during COVID, but it's not
what you would usually see, and particularly from someone who
is famous and famous for being so perfect. What's interesting
to me about you? Know, you've written in your book
about you always felt seen, but you never felt heard.
You were one of the most visible famous women in
(08:20):
the world in the late eighties around that time when
you were the face of Este Lauder. You seemed so
womanly to me then, but you were really still just
a girl, weren't you.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Well, yeah, I mean to take into account that I
started when I was fifteen, so what you were a
member of me being you know, the woman of Vestie Latter,
I'm like twenty one.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, and you seemed impossibly grown up, but you were
kind of the same age as me, not much older
than me. At the time. You were already i think,
either married to Rick or you'd already met him. You
were nineteen when you met him making the film clip
for Drive. What was your life like at that time
(09:08):
when you met him? I mean, you were a model.
You're a hugely successful model in New York City. It
was the eighties. Was it wild?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You know what, Yes, it was. At the time, it
didn't seem particularly wild. It was just my life. You know,
I was nineteen. I was actually living with a boyfriend
at the time that I met Rick, and that I
had to break up with first, you know, before starting
anything with Rick. And you know, I had an apartment
in downtown New York and I was a kid. You know,
(09:41):
there was no My idea of what was a head
was infinite, Like you don't know where where life is
going to go when you're nineteen, and you assume it's
going to go to all the places you wanted to, right,
that's just the assumption. Nobody assumes that you're going to
die a year later, or that you're going to get sick,
or some tragedy is going to befall you that happens
(10:02):
to other people. Your immortal life is stretching out ahead
of you as just infinite pass abilities. That's true whether
you're in college or whether you're you know, working in
a bar, or whether you're a model. To me, you know, yes,
of course, my job seemed very glamorous, you know, to
(10:23):
the person wasn't in it, but really it was. You know,
it's a physical job. It's one that doesn't require a
whole lot of thinking. It requires a lot of sort
of physical aptitude. In some ways. I always thought it
was a bit like being good at a sport. So
there's a certain kind of like physical wisdom, physical intelligence
to the job. It's sweaty and a little painful at times,
(10:48):
but that's really about it.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
You know, you've said that models are always called girls,
and there's a reason that the modeling industry likes girls
to be young, and it's partly because of how you look,
but that's not all of it. Can you explain why
models of girls?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, yes, and I do think both of those are
probably equally as important. The number one thing, really is
that light bounces off differently from young, smooth skin, and
it looks better on film. That's just the way it is.
And the second and this didn't dawn on me, and
I think until I was writing the essay for my
book was, Oh, girls are so much easier to manipulate,
(11:31):
aren't they. You know, as a girl, you grow up
and you are reared to believe that you're supposed to please, that,
you're supposed to be nice, and they can really take
advantage of that when you're also renting your body out
as a canvas. Because there's really no limits. You know,
(11:55):
an obliging young girl will do as she's told.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
There are a lot of much older men that ran
that industry. Some of those men have been charged with
sexual assault. Was it the Wild West? Like through what
we know now? Like I know you say that it
just was what it was and you didn't question it.
But looking through the twenty twenty four prism back at
(12:20):
that time, what was it like? That would be horrifying
to people today.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
You know what, you just answered your own question. It
was the wild West, you know, looking back at it
through the prism of twenty twenty four, there were no rules.
There were no rules, there were no laws, there were
no protections. It was you know, you arrived, you got
tossed in the pool, and if you were strong enough,
you swam, and if you weren't, you synk and that
was pretty much all there was to it. I remember
(12:48):
this instance, you know, years later, I was probably in
my forties and my girlfriend, who was also a model,
and I sat around and we were watching Oprah and
Oprah is talking about sexual harassments in the workplace. My
girlfriend and I are sort of looking at it and
we're both kind of snickering, and when the episode ends,
we sort of turned to each other and we go,
(13:10):
sexual harassment, please, that's called compliments. And we literally had
absolutely zero empathy towards the victims of sexual harassment because
that was our entire life, that was our livelihood. It
was learning how to fend it off. No, you couldn't
be in the business if you got upset by men
(13:31):
proposing to your women proposing to you whatever, people proposing
to you that were twice your age.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
When you say proposing, you may try to have sex
with you.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Well, yeah, of course you know sexual propositions, yes, and
that we weren't proposing.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Mary. So you turn up at a job and how
would you be treated.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
You would be treated for the most part, you would
be treated as an object. You come to the job
and you sort of check your humanity at the door.
It is sort of understood that as a model, you
are a blank canvas. You have rented yourself out so
that they can paint you, spray you, and pin you
and make you wear whatever needs to be worn, and
(14:15):
your job is to just let them do it. Let
them do it, and then you know, like I said,
your bit of physical activity make it all look like
you're you know, like it's the greatest day ever. And
then you get a lot of money for it and
you go home.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Did your fame give you more power? When you became
Polina Partscoverer and you were the face of Vesta Laura?
Did things change for you then?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah? I mean obviously being famous, you know, changes everything
and everybody you know you can't. Fame makes everything much
easier because when you are famous, they want you more
than you want them. So it of course it gives
you power and then you get to decide which As
(14:59):
a young woman and as a young woman model, it
was a sort of a heaatey feeling because it's not
a it's not a feeling that you were used to.
You know, usually you're really just the object that's being
kind of pushed around. Once you get famous, you are
on top of the heap and you get to make choices.
(15:19):
That's the one good thing about today and social media
is that that young women you have that voice. You
can go on Instagram, you can go on TikTok or whatever.
And if a photographer mistreated you, you have a voice.
You can go out there and go, this is what
happened today and they will be in trouble. But we
(15:41):
didn't have that.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
What did miss treatment look like as a model?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
I mean it really it could be anything. If you
if you imagine treating a young woman as an object,
putting her into dangerous physical situations. You know, if you
don't sleep with this photographer, you're not going to get
hired again. If you're not nice to this one, you
might not you know, he's not going to hire for
you for this job. I mean that sort of that
(16:08):
overhanging thing of having to please everyone and yet try
not to completely be obliterated by them. That's a pretty
tricky thing for any woman. And never mind a teenager.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You were nineteen when you met Rick and he was
the lead singer of the Cars, a big rock star.
And you say that from the moment you met and
watched him walk across the room to you, you knew
you'd marry him. How did you know that?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Like? Why, oh, dear guy? Okay, So at nineteen I
thought it was an affair that was just you know,
it was like, you know, it's Rome and Juliet. You
meet your perfect soulmate, and you instantly know across a
crowded room that this is the person you've been waiting for.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I'm nineteen, right, he's married with kids.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, well he forgot to mention that for a little while.
You know, I thought it's a past life connection. We
had been together in a past life and we were
meeting each other again, and I mean it was all
just you know, you cue the violence. It was incredibly
romantic and potent. Of course, now as a fifty nine
year old woman looking back, I think, oh, yes, right,
(17:21):
that's called childhood trauma is coming back to bite your ass.
You are seeing a person that is reminding you of
everything familiar to you, aka your parents, the people that
raise you, oftentimes the worst part of them. You're seeing
it right there in front of you, and you go, there,
you are, I recognize you right this way.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
What was it about Rick that reminded you of your parents?
Because your parents essentially abandoned you and you were three
in Czechoslovakia to escape to Sweden. They left you with
your grandmother. What reminded you of them? In hidden? Because
he hadn't abandoned you yet that was to come.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
That was to come Like my father. Well, first of all,
age wise, he was not not far from the age
of my father. He was tall, he was slim, He
had you know, blue pale eyes and black hair. That's
the way my father looked, big ears. He was talented
(18:22):
like my father, he knew it all like my father.
And he had quite a narcissistic personality like my father.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
So he was familiar to you. And yet oh yeah,
he loved you and shone all his attention on you,
at least at first.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yes, he did. Rick didn't really want me to model
because he didn't want to share me with anybody, which
I thought was, you know, such an incredibly romantic thing
to do and say. I didn't realize quite how isolated
I would get by acquiescing to his wishes.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
What were your ambitions for your career and what were
Rick's ambitions for you?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I thought writing was really something that I loved to do.
Was when I write, I lose time. That's how I
know that it's something that I really loved to do.
And so I thought I would sort of increasingly go
towards the writing part, you know, how to learn how
to punctuate things first, because I had only gone to
(19:21):
school to grade nine in Sweden, and so now of
course I'm in the United States, and you know, I
have to sort of learn English and all of that
with English grammar. So I thought, you know, my success
as a model was beyond even my wild as dreams,
because I had never even dared to dream that I
(19:42):
would become a successful model. That just seemed so utterly crazy.
So I just felt like it happened to me, and
like I didn't really have much to do with it.
It was just something that was you know, it's like
somebody gives you a million dollars here and you're like, wait, what.
I wasn't aware I deserved it, or I had earned it,
(20:03):
or I hadn't even wanted it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
You said that Rick didn't want you to model because
he didn't want to share you. He didn't I want
you to act. He didn't want you to model. You
acted in a movie called her Alibi with Tom Selleck
around that time.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That was a shitty movie.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I don't know if it was shitty it was, you know,
it was a mood, was what it was. But you
didn't have a great experience on the set and Rick
was there. You didn't have a lot of chemistry with
Tom reconsistent on going to work with you, which obviously
now we look at that and say that's incredibly controlling
and a big red flag. But at the time, how
did you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, at the time, I thought, well, you know what,
I was a little bit. It's funny because if you
really listened to your body, your body was sort of
trying to give me a hint that it wasn't right.
It felt awkward. I couldn't really work, I couldn't really
do my job with my boyfriend sort of breathing down
my neck and telling me that I shouldn't get so close,
(21:01):
you know, and don't look so into him, like I'm
doing a movie I'm supposed to be into him. That
was difficult, and we had a lot of arguments during
that movie because of all the things that Rick thought
that I should do instead of the things that the
director thought I should do. Like like my own personality,
my own wishes were sort of completely immaterial. I was
(21:25):
just like everybody's you know, service and the director wants this,
the producer wants this, and my boyfriend wants this. And like,
what do I want? I don't get to say. Wow,
there wasn't enough time for me to have a say,
So it was. It was kind of a horrible experience
for all of those reasons, you know, and I thought,
(21:45):
you know, nothing was more important than love to me.
I felt like I had missed out on being loved,
you know, being unconditionally loved, feeling like somebody really heard
me for who I was, which was a person that
wasn't just looks but actually had you know, a mind
(22:06):
and a soul. And maybe it wasn't as attractive as
my physical one, but god, I wanted somebody to see it.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Did Rick say it?
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Well, he made me feel like he did, because because
he criticized me quite often, and that made me feel
at ease.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
That put me at ease. I thought that meant that
he really saw me the little girl, the little the
girl that deserved to be left by her parents, that
a little bad seed that I was. He knew that
I was bad, and he loved me anyway, So it
felt very reassuring. Oh yeah, you can say a lot
of carpy.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's so toxic, Paulina. What did he like? What kind
of criticism?
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Oh, you know, just little things about the way I
would dress, or the way I would eat, or the
way I would do something that annoyed him or that
wasn't lady like. You know, there was there was always
something to criticize.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Wow, that sounds very much like a man who doesn't
want a woman to leave him, so he slowly chips
away at her self esteem.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah. I don't know that he I don't know that
he was conscious of what he was doing. I think
that he really felt like I did. That we had
this love, this amazing, you know, breathtaking, earth shattering love connection.
And yes, and I was much younger, and yes, I
could have anybody that I wanted. And yes, he was
(23:38):
afraid that he might lose me if he's not at
constant guard.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
After this shortbreak, time takes a toll on Polina and
Rick's marriage, and Paulina feels more invisible than ever before.
In the last few years of your marriage before he died,
where were you at as a couple.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Oh, we were in a desert, blundering around alone, starving, thirsty,
and having absolutely lost sight of having once been the couple.
It was terrible.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, he was in his seventies you had turned fifty.
You're in your early fifties. That's a really difficult time
for any woman, speaking from experience, You become invisible, the
world tells you invisible. Your self esteem drops. And I'm
not a woman whose career was based on how I looked,
(24:34):
and I really struggled. I still struggle in some ways.
I think many of us do, because it's when you're
told you're not fuckable anymore, exactly in a society that
only values fuckibility in women. And I think that the
role of your partner, if you have one at that time,
is really interesting. How did Rick make you feel as
(24:54):
you got older?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Well, see that this is a part of the problem.
I don't think again, I don't think he meant to.
I think he was aging and he was incapable of
sharing vulnerability with me. I think he felt like he
had to be sort of the man, the masculine, you know,
the force, and so he couldn't be weak, he couldn't
(25:15):
be vulnerable with me, and so he couldn't tell me
that he was maybe not feeling the same way, or
that physically things were more difficult, and instead he sort
of turned it against me, you know, like he would
This was a very ugly thing. He told me once,
which is hard to forget, that he would fuck me
(25:36):
if I wasn't such a bitch. And this is not
something that I talk a lot about because of my children.
I don't really want my children to know that. But
of course here I just said it, so he turned
it on me. You know that he didn't desire me
because I was such a naggy, horrible person. And of
course I was a naggy horrible person because I was
(25:58):
married to somebody who no longer. He had never really
heard me, but now he didn't see me either, so
I didn't know how to go about getting his attention.
And besides, you know the obvious. At first, you go,
let's go to therapy, let's read these self help books.
Let's go on vacation. But when your husband says, now
(26:19):
you do therapy, you go on vacation. I'm fine. I'm
just gonna wait until you return to the woman I met,
the nineteen year old girl. That's kind of not gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Did he not like you finding your voice and having opinions?
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And no, I think he needed to be adored, And
I think a fifty year old woman has possibly a
hard time adoring. Yea, you've gone through it. You know,
you've gone through life. You know better, and just that
blind adoration is no longer what we do.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
What was the turning point for you? What made you
say I'm out, I can't do this anymore? And was
it a slow dawning thing or did you actually have
the conversation?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
It was a very slow sort of dissolution of and
again me sort of coming back over and over saying please, please,
I'm dying. I am so lonely. Isn't there anything we
can do? And so at one point, after years of course,
you know, you don't leave the man that you think
(27:23):
you're going to stay with for the rest of your
life and you have children with you know, on a whim,
it was years. It was seven eight years of this
constant trying, and when I finally decided that I couldn't
take it anymore, and I went downstairs to tell him.
I still was hoping that maybe it would wake him up,
and he just kind of shrugged and went, well, okay,
(27:44):
that's what you want.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Fine, he stayed living together with your boys, who were
adults by that.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Time, in their late teens.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, but there hadn't been infidelity in.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Your marriage, No, not as far as I know.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah, and you met someone and you started dating, and
Rick knew, and your kids had met this guy, and
it was all pretty open. What were relations like between
you and him when you had this boyfriend?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Well, again, I don't know, because at this point he
had already stopped talking to me or confiding or really
saying anything of substance, so I had no idea. He
acted as though it was all good, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
So you sort of became flatmates essentially.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, we were absolutely roommates, and I thought we made
okay roommates.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
You had separate bedrooms, You hadn't had sex for years.
It wasn't really anything different except in your mind and
in your heart.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I was fifty two, had not been touched by my
husband for years, and felt invisible. All I wanted to
know was if I was ever going to have sex again,
What was the sex like when you finally had it again?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It was incredible to find that my body was still working.
It was so much fun. I was so delighted that,
you know, like, oh my god, it still works, and
you know, and of course, when you first have sex
after thirty three years of having sex with only one person,
it's a little odd, so you have to get used
(29:17):
to a new system. But you know, I've always really
liked sex. I thought sex is a really great thing
to do. It's a fun, healthy hobby to have so
and also kind of an important part of a relationship,
you know, to keep you close. And I still go
by it. I always said to my girlfriends, if sex
(29:38):
is not the best sex you're having that you've ever
had with your partner, you're going to look for it
somewhere else. And it's like other things, like if you
like museums, your partner doesn't have to love museums. You know,
you can go to with a golfriend to a museum,
but you can't have sex with your girlfriend. So the
partner that you're going to pick you need to love
having sex with them. So I really enjoyed having sex
(30:01):
for the brief moment that it lasted before my menopause.
Hormones really started flying and all sorts of hot things
started happening to my body. But then this man sort
of walked away from me and COVID happened, So I
was the end of that.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You say, all sorts of things happened to your body.
I was going to ask you before that happened, did
having sex again make you feel differently about yourself, because
it seems like you were in a pretty low place,
self esteem wise, as many of us are as we
hit fifty.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
You know, I thank you for asking me. Nobody asks
about sex ever in America. It's such a shame because
it's such an important part of the one's life. Yes, yes,
this man that I met made me feel desirable, at
least in the very beginning, and it felt incredible to
be desired. I thought, Oh, it's not over yet. Life
(30:55):
is not over yet. Yeah, I can still feel this way.
I think the most wonderful thing was that I knew
that I could feel this way and that my body
could still feel this way, and so it was immensely
exciting at first. But of course, you know, because I
was so thirsty wandering through the desert, I did go
(31:16):
for the first guy who showed any interest and should
not have done that.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You say that you've got to have the best sex
you ever had in marriage, but I think also we
can all agree not every sexual experience you have within
a marriage or within a long term relationship is always
the best sex you.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
No, all of it is going to be terrible, that's fine. Yeah, yes,
and someone is going to be really boring, that's all fine.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
Did you find that menopause really hit your sex drive?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
I was on the pill in my late forties four
perimenopausal symptoms which were driving me crazy, and with a pill,
it sort of righted itself and it felt fine. And then,
unbeknownst to me, I also had fibroids, and at some
point in my fifties, of course, just when I meet
this new guy and restarting my sex life, I start
(32:06):
hemorrhaging like crazy, and you know, like hemorrhaging to point
where you're like, oh, you might have to have a
blood transfusion because it's like all my blood is being
drained out.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
That's sexy, really hot, yeah, so hot.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
And so I had to quit taking the pill, which
meant no hormones, which meant complete readjustment to wait, where
what is going on here? And then my husband dies,
my boyfriend leaves me, and COVID begins. So I have
no fucking idea, Oh my god, which was.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What as if menopause isn't hard enough, that's a triple whammy.
You really hit a wall, Like, just as the green
shoots in your life were starting up again, your husband died.
He died at home, unexpectedly, he was recovering from surgery.
You were taking care of him. That must have been
a horrible shock and an incredible trauma to discover him. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, I mean, there's not much more to sort of
say about that. That is something that for me and
my children. It's going to be the most head art
moment of my life forever. Yeah, every time somebody sleeps
in in the morning, I panic. It's still you know,
for I think that's gonna happen forever. It's what happened.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
After this break. The shock of Rick's death followed by
an even bigger shock for Paulina. The next day, though
you discovered his will. How did you find out what
his will said? And why so quickly?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Well, I guess he died. I think it was. It
was a Sunday, and on Tuesday, three big envelopes arrived
at the house, one for me and one for each
of my sons. And I opened it and it said,
you know, last Will and Testament, And I was like,
you know, I'm barely processing anything. Yeah, And I've seen
(34:02):
this note that sort of stuck in the front on
top of it, and it just said, in like somebody's handwriting,
my wife, she's not going to inherit anything because she
abandoned me. And I thought I just couldn't I couldn't
comprehend it. I just thought it was like a post
it note that he had stuck on because he was
pissed off or was having a bad day. And I
(34:25):
couldn't really pay attention to it for the amount of
time until I had to pay attention to it, because
suddenly it became a reality of Oh, your husband does
not want you to get half the estate. He doesn't
want you to get anything, but you know, very basic
(34:45):
stuff that was still mine because we were still married,
which were our houses and pension plans.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
That strikes me as an unimaginably cruel thing to do,
not just to you, but Rick had four children before
he met you, two by his first partner too, by
the woman he was married to when he met you,
and then you had two sons together. He left everything
to your two sons that you shared and his middle
(35:16):
the middle children his first two sons also he cut
out of the will. Did he have contact and relationships
with them through their lives? Like what was that about?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yes, he did. He wasn't extremely close to his two
oldest sons because they hadn't grown up with him, which
is not their fault. And during our time together that
we were together, I would sort of try to merge
the families back together. One of my step sons was
having very serious drug problems and so it was a
(35:49):
little difficult to be close to him because he was,
you know, not doing well. But the other one, I mean,
his daughter and his wife were like my closest friends.
It was it was a mess.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
There was a bomb into a graving family.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, it was like, you know, he it's one of
those things where it like he just detonated a hand
grenade in the middle of the family and just everything broke.
You know. It's like brother against brother, mother against sons.
It became a shit show because it wasn't just oh,
I don't have any money to live on. I have
to sell the houses immediately, you know, I have to
(36:26):
figure out a way of staying afloat what am I
going to do? But it was also pitying brother against
brother because my kids got much more than the middle kids.
And all these kids got nothing, and they've you know,
of course they felt like their father like didn't acknowledge,
like he didn't just disinherit them monetarily. It's like he
(36:46):
wasn't their father, Like at the very end, he just
scratched them out of his life, like they never existed.
They got nothing, not even the guitar. I mean, it
was cruel. And I know my husband well enough to
know that all these decisions were made sort of flippantly
at the moment where he wasn't feeling it, you know,
(37:09):
when he was like mad at somebody, and so he
just leented. Oh that's you know. I never want to
see them again.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
I can't imagine pulling in such quick succession, the gut
wrenching grief of losing him, the trauma of finding him,
and then the betrayal of him doing this to you
in terms of cutting you out. How is the process
(37:35):
of grief interrupted by the very understandable fury you must
have had towards him for what he did not just
to you, but to all his children, to your relationships.
How do you grieve someone you also want to punch
in the face.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I think, and this is in some ways sad because
it makes me think how much we as women are
willing to take on and do take on. Because in
that moment, when it was all falling down around me,
I thought my children. I saw my children grieving. They
(38:15):
were so incredibly upset and shocked, and I thought, I
have to be their mom first of all. First of all,
I need to be their mom. Yes, I know there
are practically fully grown men, but my first duty was
to them as a mother, which meant that I had
to put aside my grief, and I had to put
(38:37):
aside my anger, and I had to sort of process
their grief with them, and so I stored it all inside.
I think it was very healthy for me, but also
I felt kind of numb. Honestly, it was so much,
It was so much to take on that I didn't
have the space to feel. It was like poisoning.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
You ended up suing his estate for your rightful share
and was awarded it. Thankfully. They must have been some really,
really tough time. So how long did it go on?
Speaker 2 (39:11):
For two and a half years?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
I can't even imagine how you got through it. But
what I saw during that time and following you is
the voice that you rediscovered because you'd been kind of
invisible in terms of pop culture for a really long time,
and I imagine that echoed how you felt just inside yourself.
(39:35):
But I watched you over the last few years emerge,
and it's been so interesting because there's been the vulnerability,
but there's also been the defiance in the way you've
chosen to portray yourself, whether it's showing yourself crying or
showing yourself naked or showing yourself in underwear. Tell me
about how it's been received.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
The majority of the reception is overwhelmingly wonderful. That mind you,
I didn't do this to get a following on Instagram
and to recapture career, like, none of this. You saw
my crying video, you heard my story. This is where
I was when I posted a crying video on Instagram.
(40:18):
I was literally fucked and my life was like I
had reached the bottom and I thought there was nowhere
else to go. So, you know, my reaching out on
social media was just purely out of kind of self preservation.
Please someone, is there somebody out there? You know, this
is a message in a bottle tossed into the waves.
(40:41):
And what happened from that again, it feels very sort
of accidentally. I don't feel like I had that much
to do with it. It was just that, you know,
like minded women, and it turns out that there are
so many other women that feel the way I do.
Maybe their lows weren't quite as low, but maybe they were.
There's plenty of women that have had horrible things happen.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
What's interesting about you? Pullina and I agree. I think
he just wanted to be seen, you know, That's how
I read it. You know, I was watching you try
to find your identity, as we all do.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
I think I wanted to be heard. I think I
wanted to be heard more than anything else, because scene
is overrated. I've been very, very seen, and I didn't.
It really was about the voice.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
You know, when I say seen, I don't just mean
you're outside. I mean seen as a person.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
I know I always have to separate the two because
when we say scene, I think most people think seen
and heard. But I was seen, yeah, but I wasn't heard.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
And it's almost like Instagram allowed you to synthesize those
two things, because it wasn't just the images that you
put out there, which a lot of people put images
out there. But it was also the incredibly thoughtful, beautifully written,
lengthy captions that you would write, where you would be
very open about I want male attention because I feel invisible.
But then I realized that that's fleeting and that I
(42:03):
should have myself worth from inside. But yes, I do
feel good when people say my body looks great, But
then when they say my body looks great for my age,
that's another level of condescension. So I loved how you
were playing it all out loud.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, it's how I was feeling, and I wasn't holding back.
I was speaking with no filter about how I feel
as a woman of a certain age and a woman
that is relegated to a pastor because she is a
certain age. And I was, and then suddenly I wasn't anymore.
So that I guess putting myself out there nakedly vulnerably
(42:44):
allowed me to be seen again. But again that was
not the intention.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
What made you draw a line in the sound about
not having botox? There are decisions that we have to
take increasingly as we get older, about whether we die
our hair, what that we do to our face. When
did you draw that line in the sand?
Speaker 2 (43:03):
You know, with boatoks. Really, I was watching my girlfriends
get it, you know, early fifty and I would see
my girlfriend walk in and I'd go, you look really
great and be like, oh, thanks, and they wouldn't tell
me that they had Boatoks, And you know, an hour
or two hours later, i'd go, are you okay? Is
everything okay? Because you I can't really tell if you're
(43:25):
happy to see me or like, I could feel that
there was some emotional barrier that like, I wasn't understanding
them as well as I usually understand them. And they'd
be like, well, botox, and I thought, oh, that's what
botox does to me. It looks wonderful on you, It
looks great, but I can't tell how you feel. And
(43:48):
my face, I've had the incredibly good luck of being
seen just as a beautiful face. I know what that's like.
I also know how lonely that can make you. That's
not what I aspire to. I want to use my
face for what it was meant for, which is tell
my story, you know, to connect to you. And i'd
(44:09):
to find that that's impossible for me with both tops.
I have a hard time with people who have a
lot of it, and so I don't want to do
it myself, that's all.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
So eventually you were ready to date again, and you
made a deliberate decision to date non famous people. How
did that go?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well, I made a deliberate decision to date anybody who
would date me, and it turned out to be like
five mens. So it really wasn't that much.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
That's very depressing. So what were those dates like?
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, the initial ones were very sweet. I've met some
guys that were very sweet, and then some guys that
were ridiculous. You know, I mean, out of this small
pool of men, most of them would have a drink
or two and then suddenly, you know, it would spill
out of their mouths that oh you know, I told
my friends I was like meeting with a supermodel, and
(45:01):
then right away it's like, okay, well, thank you very much,
and this will be it will be the only date.
It's really hard to date when you're in your fifties. A.
It's really hard to date when you're a widow. It's
really hard to date when you're a celebrity. Yeah, those
things are just not a great mix of things.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
Tell me about Jeff. I was so happy when you
met Jeff. Oh yeah, How did you meet Jeff?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
It was a pretty hard and long road to get
to Jeff, and there was a lot of like, you know,
I said, I took dating, you know, in the last
year before I met Jeff. I did dating as a
job because I have single girlfriends that are my age,
and they all said the same thing. Look, it's in
the numbers, you know. One of my girlfriends would do
(45:50):
like drive by dating. She would like she wouldn't even
waste her time with like having a coffee with them.
She would just go, why don't you drive by this
cafe as I'm sitting there, and we'll wave to each
other and see if we even want to have a coffee.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
I was going to say, you've got a fuck a
lot of frogs, but sometimes you just drive by the
frogs and wave.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
You're gonna drive by to see if you want if.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
You want to fuck the frogs. Yeah, that's so true.
Exactly did you meet on the apps? How did you meet?
Speaker 2 (46:17):
We did meet on the apps? Well, I would have
never met him if it wasn't on an app because
he lived in LA I lived in New York. We
don't really move in the same circles and ours was
in some strange way and old fashioned romance, because even
though we met on an app, which is very modern,
we then fell into this having conversations with each other
(46:37):
for a month, like you know, we would do zoom,
we would have a cup of tea and then we
would have a glass of wine and we would talk
for hours and hours, and we would write to each other,
and it was a month of just talking like a courtship. Yeah,
it was kind of like an old fashioned portup.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Pauline, You've had such issues with abandonment. You know. There
was your parents. There was even though your grandmother didn't
abandon you, you had to leave her when your parents
took you to Sweden. There was the partner that you
had before Rick died. Thore was Rick who had abandoned
you inside your marriage, and then of course him dying
and then what he did to you after his death.
(47:18):
How do you trust?
Speaker 2 (47:20):
That's such a good question. Thank you for asking that
for me and for all the other women that have
been through some shit and are having a really hard
one trusting. I don't. I can't. And Jeff, being the
wonderful human being that he is, understands that, and he
sometimes he says you know, I have to remind myself
(47:41):
that you're still grieving and that all the things that
you've gone through, so I remind myself which place you're
operating from. But I understand, I get it, and he
just lets me do the things that we sometimes do
when we are having trust issues, and he just he's
there and he holds my hands and he says, I'm here,
(48:04):
I got you. I hear you.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
What a beautiful man he really is.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
And this is with his help. I think, you know,
maybe little by little I thought my trust thoughts a
little bit. I mean, at the moment that we're talking
right now, I can't conceive of the time that I
will fully be able to trust someone. But at the
same time, it doesn't stop me from jumping in and
(48:31):
trying to. I know I might get hurt again. I
know how much it hurts, but I also know I
can survive anything.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
That's so eloquent. You're absolutely right. We should put that
on a T shirt. Hey are you feeling so generous
with your time? Oh?
Speaker 2 (48:49):
It was such a pleasure talking to you, And really,
I haven't nobody's asked me these kind of sex questions
ever before.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
You're first no filter, where two of a kind. You
and I. Goodness, we cover it a lot of ground
in that conversation, didn't we. And we actually had to
edit it back a little bit because we talked about
so many things. I loved the part about how she's
(49:17):
more bendy after a two hip replacements, the betrayal of Rick,
choosing bad men, the daddy issues. Oh, I just it's
so interesting. I once spoke to this guy and he
was a really rich guy. I was just making a
comment about how beautiful his wife was, and he said,
(49:41):
you know, for every beautiful woman, there's a guy who's
sick of fucking her. And I was like, Oh, my god,
isn't that just awful? And this guy was not someone
that I knew or someone that I saw again, but
I just was like, oh, you're awful. And I think
that there's a certain type of guy. I shouldn't generalize,
(50:03):
but I will, in my experience of interviewing a lot
of models and ex models, a certain type of guy
who's attracted to models because it is like the ultimate trophy,
the ultimate status symbol that the world actually pays this
woman because of how beautiful she is, she's objectively considered
(50:24):
one of the most beautiful women in the world, and
she can even monetize it. And so what I'm going
to do is that I'm going to make her feel
really insecure so she won't leave me. And I just
I've seen it again and again, and I just really
feel for these women. And what's so interesting about the
difference with Paulina and a lot of other models that
I have watched grow older is how comfortable she's not
(50:49):
completely comfortable with it in that I think all of
us look in the mirror as we get older sometimes
go oh wow, goodness, that's older than I feel. But
she's not one of those women that just post throwback
photos of herself. And she's clearly very comfortable or growing
comfortable in her skin. And the times when she's not comfortable,
(51:10):
she's open about that, like she's honest about the fact
that she still likes male attention and validation, particularly from
her partner. And I just you know that the word,
the term that I'd use to describe Paulina Poortskova is
hot mess. And that's a real compliment from me, Like
I mean it in a really complimentary way, because the
(51:32):
hot is not about how she looks. It's about her
life force and the mess is not again a negative
to me. It's a generosity of spirit in being vulnerable
and having no filter and sharing the stuff that might
not be hermetically sealed and you know, perfect and literally
(51:53):
filtered on the internet. And I can think of some
other models who were her age who were growing old
in very different ways, and you know, all props to them,
no shade on them, because I can't imagine how hard
it would be for a woman who's career and her
paycheck is literally indexed to the way she looks in
(52:14):
a world that wants women to always look young and
perfect and frozen in time. And Paulina's just said, screw that,
I'm not doing it, and I'm loving watching it and
loving watching it. They say, you can't be what you
can't see, and I love looking at her as a
woman you know who's around her age too. Anyway, if
(52:35):
you've never watched the music video for Drive where Paulina
and Rick Mett, go watch it on YouTube. It's a hoote.
It's like a time machine back to the eighties. But
she's more beautiful now than ever before, I honestly think,
and yeah, love her work, follow her on Instagram. She
doesn't cry that much anymore. She's happy now. The executive
producer of No Filter is Niama Brown, a child of
(52:56):
the eighties who did not have a Paulina poster, but
did have a Rob Low one. Like me, I had
a Rob Low one. He had a pierced ear. I
think he was the only straight guy I had on
my wall. My other posters were like of Adam Ann
and Culture Club. I had big crushes on them, very
bad Gator when I was a kid. Audio production on
(53:16):
this podcast is by Tom Lyon. I don't think he
was born in the eighties, so he's got nothing to
add to this conversation really, except I do know that
he appreciates women of all ages, whether they're crying or not.
I'm mere friedman. And have I ever cried on Instagram? Well,
yes I have
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