My Dinner with Kirsty, Linda, Cindy, RuPaul, Niki, and Elizabeth

They are the beauty world’s hired guns, the genetic-Lotto winners who stare at us with such vacant intensity every time we turn a corner or flip a page. For exclusive access to their lips and cheeks and eyes and hair, a make of lipstick, mascara, and haircolor will gratefully pay more than a million dollars a year.

They are also rather lovely, and to do the reporting for this piece on models with cosmetic contracts, it was necessary for me to meet as many of them as humanly possible. In fact, I insisted on it. And so, over the period of a couple of weeks, I sat down with Chanel’s Kirsty Hume, Clairol’s Linda Evangelista, Revlon’s Cindy Crawford, M.A.C.’s RuPaul, Cover Girl’s Niki Taylor, and Estée Lauder’s Elizabeth Hurley. I met them at dusk in a dark velvet banquette in the rearmost corner of a spacious SoHo restaurant, and I vacantly stared right back.

And while no one sitting nearby was likely to have confused these interviews with intimate encounters between consenting adults, I saw and heard things that may make it impossible for me ever to return completely to civilian life.

The worst part is that these women grow on you, appearing in retrospect even more attractive than they did at the time. I know it sounds like sour grapes (and it is), but it could just be that models aren’t meant to be enjoyed in the flesh. It’s not their medium.

To survive an assignment like this, one has to manage one’s expectations. Beauty is only skin deep, but we drink it in. So how can you not hope for some crumb of intimacy, some shard of genuine human contact with faces whose features are already as familiar as those of the cashier at the corner bodega? But if beauty is personal, business isn’t. The models who sat across from me may be the hottest things in a hundred years of nights, but nothing they said had anything to do with me. They arrived under the auspices of the companies they represent, and they left the same way.

Choosing a face is one of the most crucial decisions a cosmetic company has to make. After Estée Lauder decided not to renew its contract with Paulina Porizkova, it spent two years scouring the rosters of model and talent agencies before deciding on Elizabeth Hurley; and in certain circles, the possible replacements for Isabella Rossellini at Lancôme and Vendela at Elizabeth Arden are handicapped with the same passion Vatican watchers bring to their speculation on the next pope.

How does one stone-cold beauty get chosen from a hundred others? Why does one have her image plastered on every bus shelter in Manhattan while another, just as blessed, never makes it out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog? These may be questions better to a rabbi or priest, but after poring over my interview transcripts, I can say with confidence that these beautiful winners are marked by the same traits that distinguish anyone who squeezes the last drop from a career – ambition, tunnel vision, a capacity for work, and an inclination to kick some butt. No one, not even a model, succeeds on looks alone.

None of these six come from money. Linda Evangelista’s father worked on a General Motors assembly line in Ontario, Canada, and her career has been a long, steady climb from the Miss Teen Niagara beauty pageant. Cindy Crawford’s mother spent time on welfare, and before modeling, Cindy herself was shucking corn in a food plant in De Kalb, IL. Kirsty Hume comes from a working-class family in northern Scotland, and RuPaul recalls that when he was growing up in San Diego and Atlanta, his sisters, “who were my heroes,” foretold a time when wealth would be so fairly distributed that every American would have enough money to buy 13 pairs of shoes.

As a result, they share a simple, bottom-line appreciation for what they are paid to do. “All the stats and numbers are on the computer,” says Linda Evangelista. “How many magazines are sold when certain girls are on the cover, how many sweaters you sold on page 97 of the catalog. I think I’ve proven that I can sell a product.” Cindy Crawford refers to market testing that shows that women find her unusually credible for a model, which is why Revlon often uses her for products based on new technology. “In the end,” says Elizabeth Hurley, whose face on the cover of Tatler triggered on the highest newsstand sales in that publication’s history, “Lauder picked me because they think I will help sell the lipstick.”

Despite their shared financial security, the six are at distinctly different points in the modeling trajectory. Kirsty Hume, born two blocks from the sea, whose accent drifts in and out like the fog and is particularly sublime when she’s wobbling the vowels in Patrick Demarchelier, is the model of the moment. Signed by Chanel soon after her first turns on the 1994 runways, Kirsty is enjoying that heady stretch when her career is established but her potential unlimited. Perhaps because of that, she exudes a chilly confidence that makes her the most daunting beauty of this group.

In her first interview for this magazine, Kirsty made it sound like it was all happening a little fast; she wasn’t sure if she was ready for Johnny and Kate and the whole supermodeldom shtick. But in our banquette she takes pains to assure me that there is nothing the least bit intimidating about her new environs. She’s been pictured gallivanting around the world with Donovan Leitch. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss are now old pals of hers. And besides, she says, she was misquoted.

And although Kirsty is still in some ways in the simple girl who got her start when her father, discomfited by the sight of her slouching round town in combat boots, sent her to a one-day modeling class – “so that I’d be a young lady, have etiquette and all” – she is not naïve about the business.

After meeting me, she is on her way to talk to her agent, and it’s not going to be a lot of nods and giggles. “It’s very important that a model takes control and says, ‘I like this, but I don’t like what’s happening with this,’” explains Kirsty. “At the moment, I really want to do stronger editorial for the magazines. And I have to change my look a little bit – nothing as simple as cutting my hair, dyeing it dark, or whatever – just as in the bookings I take and the bookings I don’t.”

Still, a talk with Kirsty underlines how quickly models shed their youth. Barely 20, she speaks of “my teenage years” as if they can scarcely be recalled and refers to 13 and 14 as the time “when I was growing up.”

Cindy Crawford’s charm is her lack of pretense. “With me, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get hair. You’re going to get cleavage,” she says with the straight-ahead brusqueness of a taxi dispatcher, while washing down a bean salad with a nice little Chablis. (Actually, all I get is hair, as Cindy, arriving directly from a Letterman taping, is wearing a black Leger evening dress that covers all.)

Cindy is Kirsty a decade down the road: not a model in decline, but one who is anxious to move on. “I’ll work for Revlon for the next fifty years,” she says, “and I’ll do Pepsi – you know, high-quality, great exposure kinds of things – and I’ll do my covers until they stop asking me, and that will be it for modeling. It will just go away.”

Cindy has never pretended to be thrilled by her job. “I knew that modeling is a business that uses people,” she says, “and I was determined to use it right back. If I expected to find happiness standing on a white seamless, I’d be a very unhappy person.” The valedictorian of her high school class, who went to college on an engineering scholarship, Cindy has proved to be a real-life Working Girl – with “a head for business and a bod for sin.” And she has marketed that bod as solidly as any brand manager would.

When she didn’t become a major Sports Illustrated babe, she put out her own swimsuit calendar, and when she saw that she would never be as chic as Linda Evangelista, she swam mainstream, posing for Playboy, doing an exercise video, hosting House of Style on MTV. Every move in her carefully plotted career has been an attempt to distinguish herself from her sisters of the runway. Asked to be a partner in New York’s Fashion Café, she invested in Planet Hollywood instead.

Linda Evangelista looks at least as stunning as everyone else, but simpler, more elegant. She wears dark slacks, a violet cashmere sweater, and a large round stainless-steel sports watch; her short hair, which she estimates has been dyed seven or eight times in the six months she has been with Clairol, is a chocolaty brown. As she coolly sits opposite me, her long hands resting on each other on the white tablecloth, the perfection of every choice, like the way the rich brown of her hair is set off by her brick-red mouth, is undeniable. It reminds me of something Lauren Hutton – who by demanding and getting the first cosmetic contract, from Revlon in 1973, spawned supermodeldom – told me a couple days before. “None of my girls, including myself, would look the way they look now if we hadn’t been through this process.” After daily exposure to the best makeup artists, stylists, designers, and photographers, beauty becomes vocabulary, or as Warhol maintained, an intelligence.

Unlike Cindy, Linda is a model’s model, with no apologies. “I love what I do,” she says. “I love wearing the clothes.” And although her performance as her own bratty self, which she says she hammed up, stole Unzipped (Douglas Keeve’s acclaimed 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi), she insists she doesn’t pine for Hollywood. “I’m one of those people you’re probably going to see [modeling] for a long time.”

Linda, more than any model of her generation, has embraced the creative possibilities. While Cindy hasn’t changed in a decade, Linda, 30, is constantly retooling her look, to the point that when strangers approach her on the street it isn’t to ask her if she is Linda Evangelista, but to tell her that she looks a lot like her. And while insiders have speculated that her reputation for being “spirited” is the reason it took her so long to get a contract, it’s just as likely that her many transformations made it impossible for manufacturers to know exactly what they were buying. “It’s nice to do different pictures,” she says simply. “I already have pictures of me looking like me.”

Of all my guests, Elizabeth Hurley is the most inclined to make our interview seem like a conversation. Bundled in a white Gucci faux mink, a diamond cross dangling at the neck of a sheer leopard-print blouse that only partially obscures her famous breasts, and carrying a huge black and white Fendi bag, Elizabeth, looking adorably askew, drags me through a 40-minute verbal ride full of quirky Britishisms and the occasional tour de force riff (“Now off you go and earn your commission,” she says she told her agent when Estée Lauder cold-called).

Elizabeth, 30, is about to go to Los Angeles to produce a film about medical malpractice that, while fictional, is “very close to the knuckle.” When I ask about her country home, she proclaims, “I’m thinking of moving to Switzerland and living in an Alpine hut. I know it’s rather camp, but I love it. I love sleeping under a duvet and being awakened by cowbells. I love all that oompah-pah, oompah-pah. And drinking beer. And it’s just so beaaaauuuuuutiful!”

Although Elizabeth has appeared in nine films, she is an actress whose most defining performances are her interviews. After “a fifteen-minute chat and drink” with the Lauder clan (and a test shoot with Albert Watson), the company signed her to what is believed to be the most lucrative cosmetic contract ever; and in her interview with Barbara Walters, after the Hugh Grant affair, she came off as fiercely intelligent, witty, candid, loyal, and stunning. And even if at times Elizabeth’s performance with me seems a tad over the top, it’s hard not to feel gratitude toward a beautiful stranger who is happy to carry more than her share of the conversational load.

My talk with Niki Taylor is the briefest and most genuine of the six. Tall and blonde, with a smile so perfect that its effect is as automatic as a ding on the knee with a rubber hammer, Niki has been under contract to Cover Girl since she was 16. Although now only 20, she seems far older, perhaps because in the last year she has not only given birth to twin boys but found the body of her younger sister, Krissy, also a model, who died last summer. Niki thinks there is no way her sister would have died if she had not been a model, and makes no effort to conceal her weariness with the whole supermodel juggernaut. “It’s just a lot of hype,” she says.