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  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Paulina Porizkova

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The Open Field/A Penguin Life Book

  THE OPEN FIELD is a registered trademark of MOS Enterprises, Inc.

  The essay “Medicated” was previously published in slightly different form as “Ending a Midlife Affair with Meds” in The Huffington Post in 2011 and the essay “Occupied” was published in slightly different form as “I Was a Child When Russia Invaded My Country—and My Mind” in the Los Angeles Times in 2022.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Porizkova, Paulina, author.

  Title: No filter : the good, the bad, and the beautiful / Paulina Porizkova.

  Description: [New York] : The Open Field/Penguin Life, [2022] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022031683 (print) | LCCN 2022031684 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593493526 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593493533 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Porizkova, Paulina. | Models (Persons)—United States—Biography. | Models (Persons)—Sweden—Biography. | Widowhood—United States. | Women—United States—Social conditions.

  Classification: LCC HD8039.M772 .U5369 2022 (print) | LCC HD8039.M772 (ebook) | DDC 746.9/2092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220801

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031683

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031684

  Cover design: Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover photograph: Adeline Lulo

  designed by lucia bernard, adapted for ebook by molly jeszke

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  pid_prh_6.0_141773393_c0_r0

  Dear Reader,

  Years ago, these words attributed to Rumi found a place in my heart:

  Out beyond ideas of

  wrongdoing and rightdoing,

  there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

  Ever since, I’ve cultivated an image of what I call the “Open Field”—a place out beyond fear and shame, beyond judgment, loneliness, and expectation. A place that hosts the reunion of all creation. It’s the hope of my soul to find my way there—and whenever I hear an insight or a practice that helps me on the path, I love nothing more than to share it with others.

  That’s why I’ve created The Open Field. My hope is to publish books that honor the most unifying truth in human life: We are all seeking the same things. We’re all seeking dignity. We’re all seeking joy. We’re all seeking love and acceptance, seeking to be seen, to be safe. And there is no competition for these things we seek—because they are not material goods; they are spiritual gifts!

  We can all give each other these gifts if we share what we know—what has lifted us up and moved us forward. That is our duty to one another—to help each other toward acceptance, toward peace, toward happiness—and my promise to you is that the books published under this imprint will be maps to the Open Field, written by guides who know the path and want to share it.

  Each title will offer insights, inspiration, and guidance for moving beyond the fears, the judgments, and the masks we all wear. And when we take off the masks, guess what? We will see that we are the opposite of what we thought—we are each other.

  We are all on our way to the Open Field. We are all helping one another along the path. I’ll meet you there.

  Love,

  Maria Shriver

  For Jonathan and Oliver.

  Or

  Oliver and Jonathan.

  The birth order is indisputable, as is my love for you both.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  The Crying Lady on Instagram

  We Were Always Called Girls

  Beauty and the Beast

  Childhood

  The Nature of Beauty

  Falling in Love

  Knowing the Future

  Height

  Magical Money

  The Responsibility of Beauty

  Fame

  Grief and Betrayal

  Heartbreak

  Real Money

  Shock

  Courage

  Nude, Not Naked

  Medicated

  Occupied

  Every Woman Is Beautiful

  Fate and Choice

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  Years ago, I sat across the table from a journalist, a young woman, as she pulled out her phone to record our conversation. We sipped our lattes and chatted informally before she planned to plunge into her questions. I asked her about herself, something I know interviewers often don’t get to talk about. She was all of twenty-two and had just started her job at the magazine. As we talked, she loosened up and said, laughingly: “Yeah, my publisher said, ‘Let’s get Paulina Porizkova for this, she has no filter and will say anything!’ ”

  No filter. Say anything. So this is how others thought of me.

  Certainly, I am unfiltered when it comes to myself. My thoughts. My feelings. I have always been this way. But “say anything”? That gives me no credit whatsoever for keeping the secrets of others. Yet the truth is that I’m weighed down by all the secrets I’ve kept for other people. Those are mine to keep forever. And so I lighten that load by being unfiltered about myself.

  This collection of essays contains things I want to share, things I have thought about, things that hold me back, and things that propel me forward. It is all of me. But it is not a revelation of anyone else. I bring up others only insofar as how they have affected my life.

  I spent thirty-five years with my late husband, the most important person in my life, and as such, I have to include him. But he is not here to agree or repudiate my take on things, so this is only my perspective.

  And I feel the need to clarify a few points before you leap into these essays with me.

  My widowhood and the subsequent events of my life have gotten much attention, and for reasons that have to remain hidden, I must be careful where I tread.

  I loved my husband for most of my life, and I always will. But we were separated at the time of his death, although we still lived together and I continued to see him as family. After we had separated, I had fallen in love with someone else and was in a relationship with this man when my husband died. I’ve never spoken about this publicly, though I’ve never hidden it either. My friends and family were all aware. My husband knew him, my children knew him, he was an accepted part of our lives. He is unnamed in this book, partly so as not to encroach on his privacy and partly because he no longer needs a name in the story of my life.

  When my husband passed away, he left a will in which he stated that I had abandoned him and was therefore not entitled to any part of his estate. The will was drawn up hastily, a few weeks before his death. By using the word “abandonment,” my husband wasn’t just making a hyperbolic statement—he was making a legal claim. Abandonment of a spouse, legally speaking, is when a person’s partner disappears and cannot be contacted for the duration of at least a year. I understand that my husband may have felt abandoned emotionally (although he never let me in on
that). But it wasn’t the truth. Yes, we were separated. We were in the beginnings of a divorce. Yet we still lived together, we still had family dinners, we still went to dinner parties together as best friends—or so I thought. We laughed about women putting the moves on him, and we talked openly about my boyfriend. We discussed getting apartments close to each other after we sold our home, so our sons could easily go from place to place, and so we could help each other when needed. I thought we had found the perfect way to navigate the end of our marriage, so the will came as an absolute shock. I didn’t for a moment imagine I should inherit the full estate. But I thought I would get what one gets in a divorce—half of everything we had acquired together in our thirty-year marriage. But the hastily written addendum to the will made it so I was to inherit much less—and it was based on a lie. This is why I had to pursue a lawsuit, which got settled out of court two years after my husband’s death.

  No one expected my husband to die. Not his doctors, not his business associates, not his friends, not his family, not me, and not himself. I believe had he known the repercussions that this hasty arrangement wrought on his family, his children specifically, he would have never done it. The will left me in a very strange position of having assets—two large mortgaged houses and our pension plans—but without any income. It pit me against my own business manager and my sons.

  Publicly, I was seen as the grieving, wronged widow by many, and a money-grubbing whore by a few. We are all very quick to glorify or vilify, when life is so much more complex than black and white.

  My husband will never be able to write his part of this story, so there will never be a perfectly balanced retelling of what actually happened.

  I thought I knew him to his bones. I didn’t. There were other surprises for me after his death that will stay in my pocket forever, secrets that weigh me down but are not mine to divulge. As are the secrets of many others.

  I can tell you only of mine. No filter.

  The Crying Lady on Instagram

  I was at the opening of a new private club in lower Manhattan, feeling like I’d crashed a party I wasn’t invited to. The rooms of polished wood and low lighting were filled with a twentysomething financial crowd, sipping cocktails and throwing back their heads to laugh in a way that seem designed to display the fun they were having. All of them were a good twenty to thirty years younger than me.

  As I was heading back from the ladies’ room to my table, a young woman at the bar stopped me. She was no more than thirty years old, with long brown shiny hair and a tiny skirt that had hitched up to her upper thighs on the barstool where she was precariously balanced. She was perfectly made-up and slightly inebriated.

  “Are you? Are you . . .” She was fumbling around for a name.

  Surprised that anyone her age would recognize me, but eager to get back to my table, I smiled and nodded. “Yes, I am.” Who she actually thought I was didn’t much matter. But as I attempted to maneuver around her, she grabbed my arm.

  “Oh my God,” she yelled. “You’re the lady who cries on Instagram!”

  * * *

  —

  I first became famous at the age of four, as a political pawn between the West and the East. A year earlier, when I was three years old, my parents left our native Czechoslovakia to escape the invading Soviets. It was 1968. They fled across the border on a motorcycle and eventually ended up in Sweden, hoping for a better life. They had left me with my grandmother, intending to come back for me once they were settled in their new home. But when they tried to return for me, they discovered that the borders were firmly closed. There was no getting their child back. Out of desperation, they did the only thing they could think of: they turned to public opinion. They staged a hunger strike in front of the Czech embassy in Stockholm. They had no connections to money, fame, or power, but they were young, photogenic, and very sad. The Swedish media loved the story, and my parents’ campaign to get their daughter back became a sort of reality show, dispensed across newspapers, magazines, and TV appearances.

  And so, about once a month for the following five years, someone from the Swedish press would come to my grandma’s house in Prostějov armed with a camera on a Sunday afternoon. As a child, I just assumed all children were having their photographs taken by men who couldn’t speak Czech and wore khaki vests with lots of pockets. It wasn’t until my best friend looked at me uncomprehendingly when I said I couldn’t play that Sunday because the photographers were going to be in town—you know, the ones who always come on Sundays—that I began to realize that my childhood was not typical. It’s about the same time I learned that other people’s parents didn’t all live in Sweden.

  Eventually, at the age of nine, when I arrived in Sweden, the newspapers ran stories with my face on the cover: “Poor little Paulina is finally happily reunited with her parents!” Yet it was during this first experience of being so widely “seen” and recognized that I discovered what it meant to not have a voice. My parents had split up the moment we were all reunited, I was longing for the grandmother who had raised me, who had remained back in Czechoslovakia, and I was deeply unhappy at my new school, where the kids called me a dirty Communist. What I felt and what I wanted were irrelevant to the larger story, the one of the “poor” refugee who should have been grateful to have been brought to that country by people’s goodwill. No one asked me what I thought.

  Those early experiences of being photographed and featured in the news soured me on the idea of being in the public eye. And yet, at fifteen I moved to Paris to become a model. At the time, it didn’t feel like a choice that would shape my whole life. It was just an opportunity to briefly get away from school, where I was the least popular kid. But things have a way of snowballing. I stayed in Paris, dropped out of school, and began a career. At the height of my modeling fame, I’d often have two or more simultaneous covers on newsstands in one month. Around the same time, I fell in love with and ultimately married a musician who was also famous in his own right. But just as when I was a child, I discovered that when I was the most seen, I felt the least heard.

  I was used to sell products. Photos and videos of me were indiscriminately altered to best showcase whatever I was selling. In the public eye, I was a manufactured image, not a real person. To be clear, being called one of the most beautiful women in the world was in no way unpleasant. But I felt like an object in a still life. The real me didn’t have a voice.

  When social media emerged, I, like many others of my generation, was intrigued but baffled by it. I joined Facebook, argued with relatives and friends over politics, and found Twitter. And then, upon the urgings of a dear friend, I joined Instagram.

  At first, Instagram was a bit of a shock. Every post had to be visual; there had to be an image of some sort. As I had been a model since I was fifteen, posing for photos was my job. But I never actually created them, and I never got to choose which one of them was published.

  Instagram was a world of self-created content. That gave me a bit of a pause. There was some inherent narcissism in it, and with the pressure that I put on myself to be authentic, it felt intrusive in my life. But I quickly began to realize that Instagram offered me a chance that I’d never had when I worked as a model. It was a chance to give a voice to my face. My voice.

  In some ways, my life had never really been my own. First I was known as the little refugee who was happy at last to be reunited with her parents, when in fact I was devastated by the loss of leaving behind everyone and everything I had loved and grown up with. Then I was seen as a celebrated model who had it all, when the truth was that I was a lonely teenager with daily panic attacks. After that, I was the lucky wife in a rare happy celebrity marriage that had beaten the odds, when the truth was that by the time I was fifty, my husband had not touched me for many years.

  * * *

  —

  For the first time, I was able to speak directly to whomever wanted to listen on
Instagram. I posted photos from modeling jobs, vacations, and everyday life. Along with each photo, I wrote my truth.

  Throughout my career, I had always spoken my truth when asked. I think that because I’d felt so unheard as a child, I always spoke from the heart whenever I was interviewed, even if my attempts to be honest often landed sideways. In one unfortunate incident when I had just turned eighteen, during my first interview for Us magazine, a journalist had asked me what I thought of modeling. I had replied with “It sucks.” Some people found this cool, some people found it endearing, but many people agreed I was a brat who bit the hand that fed her.

  With Instagram, I had another go, this time without the interference of a go-between who’d ask questions and then translate them to best suit the story they wanted to write. Even so, despite my attempts to be completely honest, I still think that many, maybe even most of the people who followed me on Instagram just saw me as a model, and not as a fully formed woman with fears, doubts, joys, and losses.

  There was nothing like a real tragedy to humanize me.

  * * *

  —

  My husband of thirty years suddenly died. A day later, I found out he had cut me out of his will, claiming I had abandoned him. I was consumed with grief and anger. I could think of nothing else. Every ounce of energy I had went into just functioning in front of my two kids. There was no energy left to make posts about gratitude on Instagram. This is when I began to share my grief. And sometimes my anger. I posted makeup-free selfies. I wrote about the pain. On a few occasions, I posted photos of myself crying.

  Those photos shocked people. They commented that I was being performative, that I was objectifying my pain, that I was playing the victim to get others to empathize with me. They said that the kind of self-absorption I had to have to take a photo of myself crying and then post it made me either a narcissist or pathetic.