Back In Bloom

By Joel Stein

She wasn't all that hot. I mean, sure, she looked like a model, but when she showed up for the cover shoot, she was weirdly skinny in her baggy pants and a little tomboyish, so I didn't have that depressing sense of knowing here was something otherworldly I'd never have. Gisele Bundchen, God bless her, even had the remnants of a zit she had popped that morning. "I love squeezing them. I have these big mirrors in my house so even if I don't have one, I look for one to squeeze," she says, her eyes widening. She also likes popping other people's pimples, sometimes going for them without permission. "Not a lot of people let me pop them anymore. And all my friends have pretty good skin. I should be a facialist."

Even with her makeup applied, Bundchen was still in the realm of our planet, the kind of woman who turns every head on a SoHo corner. Then, hair in curlers and wearing a robe, she posed for a few Polaroids to check the lighting. The faces she made--mouth open, eyes squinting, lips pouting, chin thrust forward--are lasered into my memory. They broke my heart, just as I had feared.

Modeling, Bundchen explained, is acting, which she is doing for the first time in this fall's movie Taxi, in which she plays a bank robber. "Everyone can look beautiful in a picture with the right photographer and lighting. I like a challenge," she says. "I like when someone puts makeup on me that makes me look like I've been destroyed. It's not as far from who I am." Though Bundchen, 23, luckily never quite uses the phrase "to find myself," the woman who is probably one of the highest-paid models ever is reappearing this spring after taking eight months off in Brazil. "I wanted to work on myself," she says. "I found out that I need to be happy with myself in order to be happy with anybody else. I wasn't happy with myself. I'm very impatient. I wanted to find a balance where I could work and have fun." Since returning to her home in Los Angeles (she also has residences in New York City and Sao Paulo), she has spent a lot of time on her very rigorous version of chilling out: riding horses, surfing and learning circus trapeze. "You can do a split in the air," she says. "You can have a guy on another trapeze catch you." I am officially depressed.

Bundchen feigns ignorance of being one of the few runway models whom straight men can name. "I think guys like me because they like girls in lingerie," she says about her Victoria's Secret work. "They like any girl in lingerie." Bundchen is surprisingly wise.

When she's not working, Bundchen rarely wears makeup and almost never lipstick. "Lipstick makes you look older. When a woman wears lipstick, she can't wear any other makeup," she says. After her eight months off, she has conflicted emotions about her profession. "I cannot criticize my business because it's the business I'm in. But I don't want to live in it; I just want to work in it. In fashion, they make you feel like you're beautiful and great, and it can get to your head. You can think you're better than other people." So she walks around L.A. in baggy clothes and no makeup and is almost never recognized. And when people do spot her, they're often unsure it's really her. "I hope they don't get disappointed with me in person," she says. And I know that they do, and I also know that it's not such a bad thing.