Less obvious were the persistent rivalries between models. As her fame grew, Johnson worried that younger black models, Iman in particular, would overshadow her, a prospect that fueled her already growing anxiety.
It didn't help that she and her peers often turned to cocaine to curb their food cravings. Drugs were an occupational hazard, Johnson said. “As a model, you had to be a coat rack. You could be 90 pounds and chiseled to the bone, and they loved you for it. “You can’t lose too much weight.”
Perhaps she inevitably developed the body dysmorphia that plagues her to this day. “I've been in therapy my whole life,” she said. “Right now I think I'm fat.”
In her stage monologue, as in her memoir, she recalls that she came to regret both of her marriages, especially her 1977 union with Mr. Sims, whose infidelities and threats of violence led her into a spiral of depression and more drugs. She sought help from her sister Sheilah, a therapist and school counselor, who, Johnson recounted in the interview, asked her point-blank: “Will you die if you stay in this relationship? Will you really die physically?
“And I thought, 'Yes, I'll die,'” an epiphany that prompted her to divorce Mr. Sims in 1979. Anansa, a toddler at the time, was sent to live with her father and returned to her mother only in her teens. .
Over the years, Johnson was linked to tennis star Arthur Ashe, boxer Mike Tyson and actor Chris Noth. About a dozen years ago, she settled in Palm Springs, California, with Brian Maillian, a financier, who accompanied her to New York last week. They got married in October.
