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I always worked with the same components.
Sky, sun, sand, girl, swimsuit.
Those five things happened every year.
The magazine reaches 70 million adults each year.
Jule Campbell is theSwimsuit's founding editor.
She oversaw every issue between 1965 and 1996.
Let's get her jacket off.
- Walter. Wait. - What?
- You wait till she works it. - Okay.
Because this is kind of a dock jacket.
It's really important.
How tight are you shooting?
- I'm getting full body. - Good.
That's not the way you wear one of those jackets, though.
You're looking at one of the most profitable ventures in publishing.
No, not a picture of her bum,
but a picture where you see her bum.
- No. - You don't want that?
No. I think the way she's doing it,
three quarters, a little cover. The rest will-- I got all the
- NOW feminist women after me. - Okay.
And I'm already going straight to hell.
♪ Oh, she looks cute In her bathing suit ♪
♪ Oh, me, oh, my
♪ I see reflections of her...
But amidst the setting of serene water,
there's been a storm of protest
from anti-pornography groups.
I'm taking the brunt for the others
whose magazines expose a great deal more than we do.
♪ She looks cute In a bathing suit ♪
♪ All men agree
♪ She could be Miss America For eternity ♪
♪ Oh, baby She's the one for me ♪
The woman who lives in this historic farmhouse
in rural New Jersey
is a cook, a gardener, a grandmother,
and the creator of one of the most controversial icons
of American pop culture,
the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
I am happy that I never had a boring life.
A lot of struggles, but struggles are good.
If you survive them, you're a stronger.
Fight for what you really want.
It wasn't easy working as a woman in Time Inc.
The 1986, '87 and '88 cover model, Elle MacPherson.
She was such a powerhouse with these guys.
Just to go into the all-boys club at Sports Illustrated,
especially at that time.
It was run by men for men.
She came in with a voice and an opinion,
and she stood her ground
and she never really got the credit that she deserved.
Footballs were flying through the air,
and she was being sexually harassed
and making a lot less money.
And then, meanwhile, guess who creates
the billion-dollar franchise.
Beauty is in the beholder's eye.
So, if someone finds this terribly sexy, that's okay.
But I haven't exploited her.
People are like, oh, it's gratuitous.
That's because they didn't know the whole picture.
Women who support women?
Women who see the beauty in women?
Why would you not want to support them?
She changed my life.
That issue is seen by an estimated
50 million people every year,
one third of them women.
That might not be what you'd expect.
But then again, Jule Campbell
is not what you'd expect either.
If you respect beauty, you've nourished your soul.
Oh, my God.
This is how I feel. Like an editor again.
That's Cheryl.
This is a good one.
There are just so many things
you can do on a beach and so many poses.
And there's something a little special to it.
Yes. Yes.
I wasn't into the obviously sexy,
which made it even sexier that you weren't.
There's so much smut out there
that to see a really kind of...
semi-naked but clean,
you really wanna keep it.
I love this one.
It's so modern.
The hard thing for me working for a sports magazine
is all the editors were guys.
And when I showed the pictures,
I would have the managing editor there,
and he could salivate while he looked at them.
Sometimes I'd wanna do this.
And they wanted the sexiest pictures.
And I would take them out so they'd never even see them,
because I thought it would cheapen the woman.
This is not usable.
Go in the bad pile.
And they didn't care if they cheapened the woman at all.
But I did.
These are grown men with children, little boys.
You have to tell me about this documentary.
It's gonna be about you and your life.
- That's very ambitious. - Do you like the idea?
Yeah, I'm astounded.
I wouldn't even be here to say,
"No. That didn't really happen that way."
I'd love to hear what you would like to do,
because I'm a pretty good visionary.
I've kind of helped a lot of people
that said, "I never thought of that."
That's kind of why I'm doing what I do.
It's kind of unveiling tragedy...
- Yeah. - ...and unveiling happiness.
You need to look at other people's lives to learn.
What is the true meaning of documentary?
Ooh, that's a good question.
"Documentary: dealing freely with historical events,
especially of a recent and controversial nature."
Nobody uses a dictionary anymore.
No.
Yes.
Wow. Okay.
Is that a Tyra one?
Oh, my God. It is.
Christie.
I wonder if this is Africa.
So, her career, I don't think she ever thought of it
as a business.
She wasn't trying to create
the most successful magazine in publishing history.
I really wanted to be an artist.
My parents dissuaded me.
They said I could be an art teacher.
And that did not appeal to me.
So, I went to journalism school.
But I majored in advertising so I could use my art.
She never talked about money.
She didn't like talking about money.
But she was driven by her aesthetics,
the beauty she perceived in people,
nature,
clothes,
objects.
Sea glass, for example.
She would collect things of no value.
These are just doodles.
I'm in the garden room looking out.
"What does the heart see that the eye doesn't or can't?"
Can you move that water thing? It's in the shot.
Would Jule Campbell from SI want the Pyrex in the shot?
No. The cleaner the better.
So you know what your subject is.
Everyone thinks differently, I think, when they're filming
because they're seeing
and then they're trying to get it down
so other people can see it.
But I think filming is very personal,
and it doesn't have to mean anything
as long as you enjoy doing it.
You were sort of in the first wave
of independent women after the war
who were making their own way out in the workplace.
What was your first job after school?
Marketing consultants called Amos Parrish.
I said, "I want to be in your fashion office."
And he said, "Most of the women in our fashion office haven't been to college.
He said, "Do you think they're gonna take you by the hand to teach you?"
So, I said, "Well, you know, how can I get ahead?"
And he said, "Go and work in a store and learn retailing."
And that's why I got the job at Glamour.
They said, "Well, we see you have your retailing experience.
This is your first course
in preparing for an office job.
You're starting a new career.
The big job was filing. I've never filed in my life.
The woman I was working for said,
"If you read everything that goes into this file,
you'll know more about this magazine than anyone else."
So, I started going into the office on Saturdays.
From that point, it seems like every six months,
I had a nice promotion.
There was a long corridor, and I was in an office here.
But over here was the fashion office
that I always wanted to get into
because they were the ones
who worked with the famous photographers
and the models and so forth.
Betty Downey was the fashion editor of Glamour.
And I guess she'd been watching me, and she said,
"I want that girl in my department."
I eventually became accessories editor.
You told me once that you worked with Andy Warhol at Glamour.
Yeah. When I knew him, he was just coming up.
Do you like to talk about it?
Yeah, I'm comfortable with it.
How did you get started at Sports Illustrated?
How did I get started at Sports Illustrated?
Oh, my God.
That seems like a thousand years ago.
It's like, "When did you have your first buggy ride?"
Well, I remember when I was at Conde Nast,
we were in a bar one night, and everyone was talking about
this new sports magazine that was coming out.
And, you know, in a hundred years,
I never thought I would end up there.
Fred hired me right on the spot.
One interview, and we just clicked.
He was tough on me. You know, he made me cry sometimes.
You were a reporter within Smith's fashion section?
Yes. We did menswear, womenswear,
we did vacation houses and so forth.
Very often, on ski stories, we went together.
You go to the best. The best source,
you go to the best hotel, you get the best guide.
And those are the kind of things I learned from him.
Winning his respect is
probably one of the highlights of my career.
I started, I guess, by covering football games.
What are you supposed to wear
if you're an elegant woman, and it's November?
Oh, you don't have to be that bright to know.
Number one, you bring a blanket.
Number two, you wear something warm.
Number three, you might have a little, uh,
a little bottle of hooch to warm you up.
I don't feel I was a woman ahead of my time
because there were fashion magazines all over the place.
I was tired of fashion magazines.
So, you go out and find something else.
You gotta do what interests you.
And then you hit on something
that's like a new roadway.
It's amazing how things happen, isn't it?
How long were you there for?
In Sports illustrated? I worked 60 years.
The '60s, the '70s, '80s, the '90s, the aughts.
I mean, they were just nonstop.
I was freelance. I was contract. I was staff.
I went through, you know, a lot of phases up there.
That could have been the tennis.
Jule Campbell's sporting look.
That was my test shoot.
My first recollection is when she hired me
to do tennis fashion. I guess she was breaking me in.
It was just to be able to recognize talent, or humor.
People who had adventure in their background.
I found sports people were not phonies.
I mean, she'd use other sports photographers,
but there were no girls in my portfolio.
I look back, I mean, I don't even know
how many women I shot as athletes.
In the beginning, Jule did a ski story.
She would kind of audition the models.
How are they gonna be to travel with? What are they like?
She really looked for, like, who the person is,
and can she connect with them?
Billy Kidd.
Oh, my God. I'm not a skier. You can see that quickly.
So, Jule asked me if I could ski, and I said yes.
I didn't tell Jule I had only skied once,
but I thought, "You know what? I'll go and I can do it."
We get to the top of this mountain.
The photographer, sports photographer...
Because of course that's who she would hire.
...was gonna ski along with me.
And very quickly, as I nearly took him out, he's like,
"How about we just photograph Kathy holding the skis?"
But, my goodness, what I wasn't prepared for was Jule Campbell.
What an education.
Experiencing this dynamic, brilliant, strong woman
in a world that was really dominated by men.
And I was in a world that was dominated
by a lot of men who were of kind of sketchy character.
It was a world that didn't feel safe.
And I know I would not have stayed
in that industry as long as I had if not for Jule.
She always missed the farm.
The trees that were so meaningful,
that represented her parents.
The memories that she had there.
She fought so hard just, you know,
to always keep and protect that farm.
Feels like a good beach wedding dress.
- Beautiful. - Yeah.
Do I just put my right foot back up,
or do I bring them together first?
Because, look, I'm doing this.
And then do I just do this?
That doesn't seem right. So, I do this.
Maybe another time when you come,
we can take the Christmas tree down.
Or at this point, just leave it there.
It's only six months till Christmas.
There's something... So, like, when we go back...
It's too bad youth doesn't appreciate...
being the way she is now
because she won't be like that in even 10 years.
Gotta enjoy every age.
Make sure you do all the twirling. That's good.
Yeah. You don't have to twirl.
Marriage is not easy.
I don't care how much you love each other.
You're realistic.
It's a give-and-take share.
- Yeah. - It's a big step.
I have to thank your mother
for keeping this a family after they broke up.
I know. It's very nice.
And I'm also glad you aren't just a kid. You're 30.
- I was 30 when I was married. - I think it's good.
Well, call me if you want the shoulder.
- I got two of them. - Okay, I will.
- I don't want to leave you. - God bless you.
- You're not leaving me. - I know.
- I've got the phone right here. - That's true.
Bye, mother of the bride.
- You're gonna cry. - I'm gonna cry for sure.
You are gonna cry.
That's why when I say goodbye to people...
Because I always think that might be the last one.
But I don't say anything. I just think it.
How did you meet Ronnie?
Fire Island.
I was with a bunch of people from Glamour magazine
and he was with Fortune magazine.
We danced together weekends.
I wasn't madly in love with him.
I thought he was a snob.
You ended up marrying him.
Yeah.
I wasn't in a hurry to get married, no.
I didn't like that feeling of, "you're mine now.
You don't do anything without going through me."
It didn't sit well.
Will you look at the waistline?
My mother made my dress.
After the ceremony, the best men rocked the car.
It was a blue Buick. And they rocked it and rocked it.
♪ Happy birthday to you
I get very disturbed when I think of this.
I don't remember a lot of things of Ronnie.
Thank you, too.
Have to figure out how many years he's gone.
We were the same age.
I wonder why he had to die so much earlier than me.
You know, it's like it came and went quickly.
Let's talk about the history of this at Sports Illustrated.
It's somewhat of a tradition at this magazine
to do an issue on bathing suits.
It started in 1964.
In those days, we didn't have Super Bowl yet.
The last football game was on Christmas
or it was on New Year's.
And the magazine was very thin.
And it was before baseball, after football.
Sports Illustrated didn't make money for 10 years.
Started to make money...
Believe it or not, the whole magazine did.
...with the arrival of Swimsuit Issue.
Andre Laguerre was the second managing editor of the magazine.
He took the magazine from nowhere and created a form to it.
Andre was more of a renaissance man.
He was a sports nut, but he wasn't a jock.
He did a story on Proust.
There was bridge in the magazine.
So, it was much more involved
with things other than sweat.
The writer James Michener said
the only American magazine that was better written
than Sports Illustrated was the New Yorker.
And it became the quintessential
middle-class magazine of post-war America.
And Andre Laguerre, a completely visionary editor
who understood how magazines would work.
Everybody was terrified of him.
I was too, but not that terrified
because I knew he liked me.
You know, you could tell.
Me being, you know, like, 22 or something
and getting the elevator with Laguerre was like...
He may have said hello to me, I'm not sure.
And then, you know, after lunch,
everybody been putting down the sauce.
It was just like, you know, the old New York lunches
you've seen in shows like Mad Men.
Not a lot of things got done after three o' clock.
We're talking about a time
where there's men chasing women around desks.
Laguerre wasn't like that.
Laguerre recognized in Campbell this spirit,
but she also had this veneer of toughness.
And he sort of took her under his wing.
And one fall day in 1964, he calls his young assistant,
fashion editor Jule Campbell into his office and says,
"Jule, my dear, how would you like to go someplace beautiful
and put a pretty girl on the cover?"
I went to California because I thought we should use
more natural kinds of women.
California, they're bigger and healthier
and look more like beach girls.
That was in the days of Twiggy.
Everyone was really, really skinny.
When she appeared on the cover,
it caused quite a sensation.
Middle America just lost its mind.
They made a big thing out of nothing.
And that's how it got started.
That the cover had to be something sexy
that's gonna catch your eye.
There was nothing sexy about it except it had cutouts.
You had hundreds of letters coming in saying,
"Who is this Sue Peterson?
She's wonderful. I wanna marry her."
One writer wrote nudity was as dangerous
to our country as the atom bomb.
With those two polarized, very measured responses,
Laguerre and Jule Campbell knew they were onto something.
And then I found this.
These are all very early pictures.
The beginning of the swimsuit story.
One of the things that made it work was
I didn't have makeup people, I didn't have hair people.
If a model got a sunburn, we photographed it.
That looked natural. It was news.
The element of surprise in any kind of merchandising and so forth,
is what everybody tries to do.
It was a phenomenon because it sold
twice as many magazines
when I put one of my models on the cover.
A woman in a swimsuit is hard to beat,
no matter what kind of athlete you are.
This was a time where, as pro football is growing,
advertisers are becoming aware
that sports fans, which previously had been
sort of this undesirable audience,
was actually an upwardly mobile,
attractive audience.
It was a total male-dominated universe.
And yet the one lady over there in the corner
in this little small office
with swimsuits hanging all over the place
did the one issue of the year
that generated a lot of money.
Men ran the world and the staff
and that was the way it was.
You know, it's like...
It wasn't easy for her.
My whole kind of theory in showing sexy pictures,
I didn't like lewdness.
I found it not attractive,
and I didn't feel it represented me.
And I think the public respected that.
What is lewd?
Lewd is bad taste to me
because how can you make nudity lewd...
unless it's up here?
Because nudity is quite beautiful.
What do you think about these new
topless bathing suits?
I suppose
if I saw everybody else wearing them, I'd wear one.
But you'd get picked up for indecent exposure.
- But otherwise, you don't object? - Oh, no, not at all.
Men walk around with only one half a bathing suit on. Why shouldn't I?
On that very first story that I did for Andre,
there's also a story by Liz Smith, "The Nudity Cult."
Rudi Gernreich wasn't in Jule's firstSwimsuit Issue.
He understood about fun and liberation of the female body.
Not for the male gaze, but for the woman herself.
That was the mood of the moment.
I think a girl would have to go pretty low to wear such a thing.
I think men won't have respect for any girl at all, whether she's good or bad.
It'd be going back to the caveman days.
Women are always under the microscope
and we're always being judged by what we wear
and what we should have worn.
And it's just, here we are,
in one of our most revealing and natural
and raw versions of ourselves in a swimsuit.
And people are going to dissect that.
I think I was very pretty.
But, you know, I never felt pretty.
I never slept with any of my boyfriends.
And it was because I was afraid of sex.
I was raised with the nuns.
You didn't even say the word "sex."
But I did slide a little bit.
Sliding's good.
I was a bad girl.
That's great.
Is there a line between modesty and immodesty
that you draw on?
People should know I'm censoring
while we're working. Believe me.
I strive to take beautiful pictures,
and that's why our locations are so important.
If we were taking girly pictures, we could do that in the studio.
She was very interested in the composition of the photography.
That it was more like a fashion story
than it was a sort of gratuitous "girl on the beach" story.
She captured spirits. And yes, it was encased
in these beautiful locations and bodies.
And it wasn't about the very overt sexuality
that we're seeing today.
She loved giving people a start.
Jule Campbell called me, and she said,
"We got your suits, and we love them
and we're gonna take them on our shoot with us."
Holy cow, what's happening?
Jule's like, "Let's really try to make this suit sell
because it'll really help her with her career."
You know, banks would talk to us,
fabric suppliers would talk to us,
big stores would talk to us.
We couldn't really tell our story ourselves
because we didn't have social media.
You know, it kickstarted everything
to have someone like that say,
"Your work means something."
I feel like you had a career that most women envy.
Eh?
Sorry.
Eh?
I can't hear you.
I'm not helping you, am I?
No, it's good. It's awesome.
Oh, God.
Why don't I tell you a story
about how it feels to be getting old?
Yes.
- Really? - Yeah.
I wanna know.
I wanna know what's in front of me.
- Cheers. - Here's to old age.
It's a hoax.
It's what you make it, kid.
It's not always in the glass.
I think old age can be cruel. And it can be beautiful.
It's funny when you get near the end of your life.
I used to wonder what my mother was thinking.
And now that I look back on it,
I don't think she was thinking of anything
because she was losing her memory.
But I'm not in that kind of old age.
I'm surprised I still have fight in me.
And that's good.
Hi, Mom.
Hi.
Nice to have you on the farm.
We already know how photogenic you are
from seeing you constantly on television.
This is just a home made video.
I'm not photogenic.
I'm catching Mom.
She's not wearing her blue and white striped shirt.
Oh, I might say that, for Graham's very first birthday.
He's getting a striped shirt.
♪ Happy birthday to you
♪ Happy birthday to me
♪ Happy birthday Happy birthday ♪
♪ Happy birthday to me
Ninety-five? My God, am I that old, Jill?
Look how peaceful it is down there.
You guys will be sitting out here
maybe next year, reminiscing about this year
and where I was.
And I'll be saying, "Don't you dare forget me."
Jill. I'm somewhere between crying and happy.
Life is all too short.
It comes, it stays, it goes.
This is called an iPhone.
And they keep making these cameras better and better.
Without all the bunch of equipment.
Exactly.
That's called the doggy pose.
I'd say, "No doggy pose."
Photographer always tried to do it.
Because I used to hear the guys
talk about the pictures and the doggy pose.
- I really didn't like it. - It's kind of demeaning.
Yes, very.
That's Cheryl Tiegs. America's first supermodel.
This is her Instagram.
Oh, Jule.
That's me? Look at how lively I was.
I always thought of myself as strolling through life.
He literally is doing flips for you guys.
That's funny.
Kourken. I had a little fling with him.
These photographers are pretty sexy.
You said it, not me.
I rarely stop smiling.
Happy little thing.
It was a long time ago when we started Sports Illustrated.
And I don't mean to jump on board,
but Jule and I kind of became a team.
I was in on it from the beginning.
And my first cover, we were on the boat going home.
I was cold, so Jule put on this long-sleeved bathing suit.
I put my sunglasses on.
Jay Maisel was taking pictures.
He said, "Take your sunglasses off.
Take your sunglasses off."
I said, "No, I'm tired.
I don't want my picture taken."
And they put that on the cover.
That was me, a real person.
I wasn't a model at that moment.
I felt very comfortable that it was a female
because it is a very vulnerable situation.
And I had the confidence
and the security to do what I had to do.
The powerful position she put herself in, my God.
In 1965, Jule featured a model
in a net swimsuit with a flesh-tone lining.
Now, I understand that's not even real flesh.
But the reaction was utter shock.
And then, in 1978,
readers really had something to be shocked about
when Cheryl Tiegs appeared in the real thing.
Oh.
Well, you're not gonna bring up the white fishnet.
I mean, can I... How do I not bring up the white fishnet?
The white fishnet was a throwaway shot.
A picture you wouldn't even wanna show anyone.
Taken on a miserable afternoon
in the middle of nowhere in the Amazon.
We were in Manaus.
It was awful light.
Then I went up to Cheryl, and because the light was bad,
I said, "Would you please get wet?"
Because I thought if her skin glistened,
we'd get some highlights.
Getting the suit wet
was what made it so see-through.
Before, it was just a bunch of cotton.
It wasn't, "I'll see more if the suit's wet."
I edit all my own pictures.
And I always edited them with Walter.
And we pick out what we think
are the best pictures
and that's what we sell.
And we went through the slides
and put them in order
to try to keep the interest going.
And we put that as the last slide in the tray.
It was kind of, "Okay, wake up."
And they printed it.
Everyone knew SI then.
Cheryl became a megastar.
It just exploded. It changed the world.
The simplicity, I think, of just a girl walking on the beach
in a bathing suit like that was... I don't know.
I don't know. It's not my favorite shot.
It wasn't just
that there was a beautiful woman
with visible breasts in the pages of Sports Illustrated.
It was a beautiful woman thatSports Illustrated readers
felt like they knew. It was Cheryl freaking Tiegs.
I mean, it was controversial.
You could see anatomy, which, I think,
even at that time, which wasn't like such a foreign idea,
I think it was a foreign idea in mainstream media.
It was used in an artistic way
to say, "We don't care about your boundaries."
It wasn't to turn you on breasts.
They're so political.
You barely can't even see a nipple. But...
It was the first.
You're that scared of boobs,
you better put your head in the sand.
Like, honestly... Honestly, though,
news flash, we all have nipples.
Except, mine do something. Half the population's doesn't.
Scary.
You've never seen a nipple before?
It's true, though. It comes down to that.
Hey, ho
Beauty pageants gotta go
Jule used to get death threats.
They had people in front of the Time and Life building
picketing.
Join us now!
Swimsuits in a sports magazine
is presenting us with an image that's impossible to live up to.
And that's very degrading and demeaning.
The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women
because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.
- Well, obviously, it's-- - Hold on, now. The day that--
I wanna say-- I haven't finished.
The day that you are willing to come out here
with a cotton tail attached to your rear end...
Some people would consider it nothing more than
soft-core porn.
No. We feel it's done in good taste.
I guess, Jule, we do know that sex sells, doesn't it?
If I felt sex sells, then I wouldn't work on this.
I'm a career woman. I'm a mother.
It seems to be merely an excuse
to show flesh. Come on, Jule.
There has been some criticism that
what you're doing is taking advantage of females
the way some of the magazines that are sold
that are very much more explicit about sex.
I censor it very carefully.
And I care if a feminist calls me and says,
"Oh, well, you're selling out."
I'm not selling out.
It would be much easier
to photograph them unclothed.
To make it attractive and appealing
and still keep it in the realm of good taste
I think is the reason it has been successful.
Dear Jule, you should get a bonus.
Thank you for making a cold winter bearable.
Can hardly wait for the letters.
We got thousands of people
wanting to cancel their subscriptions
or say I was a perv or something.
I didn't know this for a while.
At the bar with Andre,
they used to make bets
on how many cancellations.
Tiegs has no class left.
You should be ashamed.
- I was disgusted. - Smut.
When I want Playboy, I'll buy Playboy.
The powers that be at Sports Illustrated
are overwhelmingly male and white.
You're talking about hegemonic masculinity here.
And they were looking to attract that coveted
18 to 34 age demographic.
There was a very fair question to be asked.
Why are we looking at swimsuit models
in what is supposed to be a news magazine devoted to sports?
Doctoral theses have been written on that very subject.
The objectification.
There's no question about that. Right?
You have females in a magazine that are being consumed.
And that was what made women feel
that other women were being exploited.
The masculine gaze.
But the swimsuit was a subversive item.
When they first started wearing swimsuits in the 1920s,
the patriarchy in America didn't like it.
So, everyone's got to step back
and really accept the freedom of expression happening.
Jule was part of that.
And she had to push some boundaries.
We are all beautiful human beings, all of us.
So, take a picture of it.
You know?
Women should do what they wanna do,
but don't do it with anger.
Do it really quiet, maybe a little sneaky. Why not?
So long as it's not dishonest.
Just be kind of mysterious.
Something comes up and you say, "I'm gonna think about that.
I'll hold on that."
You don't have to tell everybody what you're thinking,
who you are, or why you did what you did.
I was reading the Michael Gross book on models.
He all but credits the beginning of the supermodel era
to Cheryl Tiegs in that '78 Swimsuit Issue.
Jule really is responsible for the supermodel.
Jule wanted to know, who is this person?
And she even included the names
and gave the women an identity.
We have always recognized the name of the girl.
So they become personalities more than models or mannequins.
Models were hangers.
Models were a prop to put the clothing on.
Jule wrote those captions
mentioning the models by name.
And so the readers started to feel like
they knew some of those models.
She didn't wanna objectify women.
She wanted to make them people.
She was setting us up
for a future of being a person of clout,
putting our names in there first and last.
That's what it did.
Jule wanted that.
A high-fashion model doesn't mean
that everybody knows your name.
It means that everybody in the fashion industry knows your name.
I knew that when Jule called me
and said I was going to be on the cover of this magazine,
I knew that everybody in America would know my name.
I started to already think, "How can I apply this to a business?"
Because, you know, being on the cover
and having this adulation is one thing.
But how can I translate that into a way
that I can become financially independent,
that I can start to command the work that I actually want to do?
I was dreaming about being on the other side of the lens.
Working with Jule truly helped me get there.
They became so much more capable
to, like, take that name and build brands around it
and build lives around it and impact others around it.
Bet your bottom dollar.
Cheryl's billings
multiplied exponentially, and she wound up
on the cover of Time later.
Then I found Christie.
I spoke to the man who wrote
the Sports Illustrated book,
and he sent me the tapes
of when he was interviewing Jule.
So, this is Jule talking about meeting you.
I just found her by chance.
I was in California, passing through LA,
and I called Nina Blanchard,
and I said, "Do you have anyone known?"
And when Christie walked in, I was blown away.
I had just done my first big shoot in Paris.
And then they decided to give me the haircut of the moment.
They chopped off my hair and gave me a perm.
I didn't know what to do with this hair.
So, I bought a bunch of berets,
and I just stuck the whole thing in my beret.
So, now here I am in LA,
and I'm asked to go meet Jule Campbell.
She was as cute as could be.
You know, I thought she looks like Miss California
or Miss Sunkist Orange.
Just exuded health
and had these Mary Blue eyes.
And I booked her for that story in Cancun.
She said that she remembered me
because I was the girl in the beret.
Look at this. I look like one of the Marx Brothers.
The message is that sometimes
it's the things that make you most insecure
are the things that make you the most memorable.
So, be you and get discovered.
My body was pretty bodacious.
It wasn't like a model's body, which was my big insecurity
because I didn't think I looked like a skinny model.
She felt like it was inspirational
for women to feel like, "I wanna take care of myself,"
but she really was pushing the athletic part.
And they took me out on this red dirt road.
And I remember feeling like,
I'm running like an athlete
for Sports Illustrated.
I was really trying to emphasize the run.
So, that made me not feel so self-conscious about it
was to be strong.
She wasn't looking for perfection.
She was looking for some sort of energy.
The mixture of athletic and sexy
to the perfect degree that she did it
created a real niche.
Christie was a natural. That's about the only model
I've ever worked with
who did her first sitting
and she could do no wrong in front of the camera.
She just moved... She did everything right.
And she worked for us... One, two, three, four...
It was five years before she got a cover.
And then she got three in a row, and she was made.
Thank you.
Jule would take off and do her thing
for four or five weeks in the fall,
deliver the pictures to Andre
and Dick Gangel, the art director.
And it was like an 8 or 10-page section in the magazine
for a very long time.
I think Andre liked me.
because I'm very family oriented.
He invited himself up to our farm for the weekend.
He never gave me a big raise.
I thought if he liked me so much, he should have given me a raise.
Roy Terrell succeeded Andre in 1972.
Terrell leaves in '79. And Rogin starts.
I asked him for a raise, Gil.
And told him what I was earning.
And his answer to me was
"You've got a husband."
I went into his office one day, and I said,
"Would you write a letter for me?
I want it from the managing editor.
It's to Carol Alt.
Will you ask her to put weight on
and tell her I'm not gonna use her
if she doesn't.
Time marches on.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Can you remember it all?
I remember a lot of it.
In the very beginning, when I was so young,
my father and mother, they were worried.
So, Jule wanted me to wear this G-string.
And I was like, " It's like being naked.
I can't wear that G-string. I just can't do it."
And Jule's like, "Okay, no worries.
I want you in something you're comfortable in."
Then, when the magazine came out,
there was Christie Brinkley with just the G-string.
And I thought, "That looks so beautiful."
And never again did I ever deny Jule
a suit that she wanted to put on me.
Gonna do an orange suit now and then a white suit.
Because there's a white rim of light where the surface...
The best part was when we had to change on the beach.
And Jule would stand around you with towels.
The suit came down, the other suit went up.
The gutter of the center of the page
will run right through her shoulder
and through her bosom here.
Now Walter and I are gonna have a conference over that.
She worked all year to do this.
We burst through this forest to a shoreline.
And there was this boat painted the rainbow colors of my suit.
I was like, how did she know? Four o'clock in the morning.
That boat, my suit, this guy.
Like it was...
We used to call them "the coffins."
Ten, 15 giant coffins of bathing suits.
And she would try the suits and try the suits and try the suits.
...to have a very subtle color. I haven't come to it yet.
- You said this looked great. - That looked beautiful on her.
Because she looked at you. She looked at your personality.
She looked at your body and said, "Okay, no, not that one."
And sometimes, "What do you mean?
Oh, I should look good in everything.
I'm a model. I'm a model."
- Thank you. - I'm very proud of you.
Thank you.
I sound like a mother. And I am a mother.
Listen, you've been my mother for almost 40 years.
- Or like my mother. - Very happy for you, honey.
So, I'll come back and visit.
Oh, my God.
I'm just trying to open the door a little.
Mom, let's binge-watch Hoarders tonight.
I can't hear you, Bruce.
- But maybe that's just as well. - A show on TV called Hoarders,
where the authorities come and declutter it for you.
I mean, I'm just throwing out...
You don't need this old AARP advertisement.
You're not throwing that away, are you?
- No. This is your box. - Oh.
Your special box.
I was an only child, you know, and I spent a lot of time alone.
So, anything like that that I kept,
I save it just for that memory.
One little snapshot. One moment.
Did Bruce ask you to do this?
No, I offered to do it because I'm tired of--
Because I want the house to be unclogged. Do you mind?
It's...
It's very different feeling
seeing other people going through your stuff.
No, I'm saying, do you wanna look at this?
I'm not getting rid of it.
A lot of people made fun of me
because I was sentimental,
but I didn't let it get to me.
I feel like I just died. That's why we're cleaning it out.
- You did. And you're in... - What?
You're in heaven.
I'm in heaven? This is heaven?
- You're in hoarder's heaven. - Okay.
Throw it out?
- Mm-hm. - Okay.
I'd just as soon have you do it, than anyone, Jill.
Aw.
Actually, it's a really good shot of him.
It's just like he got a really good shot of you
walking in the bushes, which is really nice.
It's called B-roll.
Can we do one more of those?
All right. Turn around and walk up to the porch,
and then I'll meet you up there.
So, is it weird that I'm doing this documentary?
I think, uh...
I'm grateful. And...
There's admiration, respect.
The only thing is, I need my fact checker.
That would be you
since you know more about my mother than I do.
It's a surprising amount I don't know.
Because she kept me out of that life.
And I didn't seek to be in it.
She was hardly around. When she came home,
she didn't talk about work.
All I really cared about
was getting something to eat.
How did having a baby
change things for you?
I would do that differently.
I went back to work after seven weeks.
I would spend more time with my baby.
I have that guilt to live with.
- Do you feel guilty? - Because I can't remember.
I'd come home at night, and I was tired,
and someone else had bathed my baby.
Someone else had fed the baby.
And I missed taking him to school.
Who's that?
You tell me. This is your life.
- This is what we'd do. - That's your dad.
The one with the long, floppy hair must be me.
Look at Brucey.
Nonna. Oh, Nonno.
I know when Bruce was born, my mother took over.
It was like her baby.
When I was very young, I missed her
when she was gone all the time.
I had a support system which included four au pairs.
So, there was Edna, the first one.
I later had Puluv, crazy Russian,
who thought it would toughen me up
to eat poison ivy and get soaking wet in the rain.
And then Greta, the bad one,
who used to throw things at me and beat me.
And then Erica, the sweet one.
Did your mom know that that woman beat you?
Only when I told them. And then they fired her.
Whenever I went on a trip,
I cooked for a whole week.
That's not the same
as having your mother's arms around you.
And I see this because I see
how my son is raising his children.
And I even say that to my husband.
I say, we weren't like that.
She did talk quite a bit about Bruce
and was a little unsure if she had done
all she should have as a mom.
And you know what? That's a kind of a crap thing to put on women,
because what about Dad?
It's like, why are we supposed to be guilty
for not being enough around our kids?
When I had my kids, she didn't want me to work.
Now I understand her better.
I was so angry when she was like that with me.
To this day, it's fucking hard to be a woman
who's trying to balance motherhood with a decent career.
We are supposed to make a choice,
while men can have both. Right?
Because a woman does all the work.
I hated parents that pushed their children.
And I never pushed Bruce, but Bruce pushed himself.
He was always president of the class or whatever.
And he got into Harvard without a problem.
And I don't know why he pushed himself.
He wanted to be the best something, I think.
Yeah, I was seeking approval, for sure.
- Were you proud of her? - Yeah. Yeah, I was.
Hmm.
That is great design. And again here, look at--
She's running off. She's gonna run for a long time.
I remember reading somewhere,
Jule Campbell has to wait outside the photo lab,
because if Mark gets to the pictures first,
he's gonna want to run the ones that are the most revealing.
No, that's not true. It doesn't work that way.
Right, and it never did.
No. He likes to see a pretty girl
like any other man.
But maybe the pictures under his guidance
have been a little sexier.
But it's also because times have changed.
Each of the managing editors,
their perception of women is very interesting.
And I can't really tell you everything.
It's time to start respecting women for who they are,
not the way that they look.
Ann Simonton was Swimsuit Issue model.
And later became one of the biggest critics
of the Swimsuit Issue.
We are anti-censorship.
We're also pro-nudity and sexuality.
Know that it's not the sex per se,
the explicitness per se,
but it's the marketing of women,
taking a real human being and turning her into an object
that we are against.
From her own personal experience,
she talks about sexual assault.
It's time that we make some changes in the society.
Rape is a violent thing that's happening to too many women.
You certainly can make that connection
between violence against women,
because that happens when women are seen
not as subjects with agency,
but as people to be consumed and to be maneuvered at will.
So, Ann Simonton,
she's like, "Okay, we've got this whole issue
about swimsuit models.
What if we devoted that to female athletes?
The guarantee was not to female athletes
that they at least show up in one issue a year.
That guarantee is given to swimsuit models.
My answer to the feminists
who've given me a hard time,
if they knew that I'm never further away
than the photographer's elbow.
And I also have my own camera,
so I can see what he sees.
And if I don't like what he's doing,
I'll say, "I don't want that kind of picture,
a provocative position or whatever."
And they'll say, "Oh, just a few pictures for me."
And I'll say, "No." And if he continues,
I just walk in front of his camera
and I go and fix her hair.
And I can hear him swearing behind me.
And when I turn around, I say, "Are you ready?"
This is somebody's daughter.
The reason this story has lasted as long
is that you walk a very thin line of propriety.
Now pull it over your head.
Or are you gonna be nasty?
I don't care if they think I'm a nun.
And I surprise them the next series.
I always, from the beginning,
had one little picture that stirred the pot.
But it can't be too naughty.
I wasn't there to tease men.
I was there for being outside
and being healthy and being natural.
And I felt like Jule always had my back
and that she wasn't gonna allow
other people to be around
that were gonna exploit us in different ways.
She's doing the best she can with the tools that she has
and is working within the system that she exists in
and the time that she exists in.
One person can exact some change,
but one person cannot take down the whole system
and fight the entire editorial staff.
Sir, once again,
I would like to see Sports Illustrated explore
more of women's athletic abilities
and less of their bare bottoms.
I appreciate the public service you perform
by reminding your female readers
to resume their exercise programs.
May I suggest a similar issue
featuring Olympic water polo or swimming team
modeling the latest in men's swimwear.
Jule's looking for athletic swimsuit models.
Not lewd, fairly covered.
Her success with the Swimsuit Issue
contributes to this real blurring
and this kind of emphasis
on female athletes
needing to look like swimsuit model stand-ins
to get any kind of attention from the magazine.
Sports isn't enough in the way that it's enough for men.
Jule's designed a responsibility.
She does it very well.
It complicates matters for female athletes.
In the beginning, we were doing this shot,
and the guys were in the water
and Kathy, Dara, and I were walking past.
And then we did the same to them.
Is this the men's polo team?
- Yeah. - Let's see.
Because I don't think they have in it
where the women are checking out the men.
And I found hundreds of those slides.
Well, what Jule does is working with the photographers.
They edit everything down to the last couple of hundred pictures.
Then I look at the last couple hundred pictures with them
and my art director and Jule and oftentimes the photographer.
And then pick the pictures from those last couple of hundred.
They always waited till I left the room.
I could hear as the door was closing,
"Oh, my, did you see... Mm. Mm."
And I think, "Grow up."
You have to know what I'm dealing with. Boys club.
Would you try that? Try that. Just...
I didn't show anything I didn't like.
I had that control.
She does have gatekeeping responsibility.
But are there photos that didn't make it into the Swimsuit Issue
that she wanted? And so that's huge.
You've got power. But up to a point.
I think anonymity is really pretty great. You know.
I wasn't ever particularly interested in the actual work,
but I wanted the job. I wanted to do SI.
Yeah. I hang photos of myself on trees.
And I just gaze at them adoringly all day long.
It's only looking back now
with the context of MeToo
and all of us revisiting everything that we normalized so much
that I can say, "Oh, wow."
It's my last day here.
Last day of shooting, I'm leaving tomorrow.
We're just going to do a shot in the hotel whirlpool because it's cold.
Tell me how you feel knowing that this is my last day.
I know you guys are going to be in mourning.
She can go home and get her messages.
"Oh, Stacey, do you want to go eat dinner tomorrow night at Au Bar?"
"No, I don't want him."
"Where's the guy I want? No message."
That's the way it always is, right?
Are you kidding?
The ones you want, you can't get.
There must be men you can't get.
I don't know, I never met one I couldn't get.
Oh, stop.
You just met two.
You met two.
Put it this way Stace, I've intoxicated myself
every night to the point of oblivion.
I still haven't knocked on your door.
Every night.
I'm going to show you in a minute why.
Yeah let's get serious.
This is not Mecca.
Hey, listen, after my last few days, it's Mecca, believe me.
See Stace
This is, I'm sorry, It's going to hurt.
But see, that's the reason. I don't have to...
I get to throw that on the bed and lick her
into a frenzy any time I want, so
you know, what do I need you for?
- Exactly, I agree. - That's right.
Let's hope she's still there when you get home, loser.
Good point.
When I went to Paris
and I suddenly had to be working with
all these really famous photographers
who have been outed, who are notorious rapists,
who were so inappropriate.
And my response was always to joke
or to gross them out.
And that was a defense
against that power being taken away from me.
To make a deal with the devil every single day.
Just stay like that till the model comes out.
When I would vent to Jule about that stuff going on,
she would be outraged and supportive
and share her own stories and commiserate.
When you've almost been raped a few times and roofied
and beaten on the streets in Paris,
and had photographers exposing themselves to you,
and the former president groped you in front of Jeffrey Epstein
and, like, it goes on and on and on.
Um, yeah, I've got--
You know, there's a lot of baggage there,
so there's a lot to sort through.
I do remember at one point this argument about,
"it's a celebration of the female form and everything."
But who was painting and carving the sculptures? The men.
- Can we cut to the Jamaica trip? - Yes.
- Let's go to Jamaica. - Yeah.
We had Kim Alexis, Carol Alt,
and then this phenom coming in. Paulina.
My assistant, Louis, and I were sitting in the bar in the hotel
and all we could think about,
"When is Paulina gonna come in?"
There's, like, an elderly couple
sitting over here to our right.
And this girl walks in.
And her T-shirt, handwritten,
"Too drunk to fuck."
I said, "You're gonna have to take that off.
Jule's gonna have a heart attack."
That was the first time I ever met Paulina.
She's a concert pianist. She could play.
Aha. Hmm.
This is the piece that I played when we were in Jamaica.
When I ended, I noticed that was Walter
and his assistant sitting in the corner.
"Damn, that's great."
I think the pot might have had something to do with the fact
that Walter thought I was such a great pianist.
In 1983, I lived in Paris.
I remember coming into an agency late in the afternoon.
"Guess what? We think you might have a booking
for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
And literally, my reaction was like,
" I don't do tennis clothes, okay?"
And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no. You don't understand.
We're not talking about tennis clothes here. We're talking about..."
And then, of course, they went into a lengthy explanation
of what the Swimsuit Issue meant in the United States.
And then, of course, enter famous story.
What were you doing in Jamaica?
Um, Sports Illustrated, the bathing suits issue,
you know, the very sexy one.
But they was... They were almost ready to throw...
I mean, to send me back after the first night.
Well, why?
Because I wore a very indecent T-shirt.
Well, I would think a pretty girl could wear what she wanted to to any hotel.
Well, there was a text on the white T-shirt.
Oh. Well, what'd it say?
"Too drunk to fuck."
Were you?
Never.
She was a naughty girl,
but I got along with her, and we became friends.
We have to take some comedic pictures of Paulina
because she's got the best humor.
She was a natural beauty with a very dirty mouth.
She used to surprise me.
She was like an angel with a foul mouth.
This was my idea to tie my hair with my bra
because I was always running around topless.
And then Jule was like, "Hey, why don't we...
Why don't we do a shot of that?"
The palm leaf was Walter's inspiration.
This is the girl I was then. You know?
It's one of the best pictures I've ever taken.
And this is what Jule taught me.
When you have a bikini on,
all you have to do is embrace your body and who you are.
And there is such a sense of freedom to that.
Do you find that models
tend to be vain and shallow
- and superficial? - Absolutely.
- Oh, really? - Hm.
But you don't include yourself in that category.
Of course not. I don't think of myself as a model.
Oh, really? What do you think of yourself as?
- Human being, Dave. - Well, see that.
Human being.
It's so funny because the shots
are so much less overt.
They're so much less sexually, whatever, explicit,
or whatever it is these days.
But this is where we get to
how times have changed.
We have, I think, evolved as a society
and things that were absolutely normal
and acceptable 40 years ago no longer are.
And I always just speak from personal experience
that, to me, when I felt objectified,
it was because I didn't have a say in how I was portrayed.
Now, when I put myself out in a bikini or nothing,
that's my choice.
To me, it's objectification or celebration.
Can it be both at the same time?
I don't see why not.
We have been taught
that our bodies are valuable if they're pretty.
So, then, if you exhibit that body,
you are technically objectifying yourself,
but you're also celebrating yourself.
We, as women, this is what we have been given as our powers,
and then we are shamed for using them.
Well, women will be shamed for everything, won't they?
- Whoo! - I got through that one
without fucking up once. Yes. Whoo!
It was under Mulvoy that the thing went
from being 20 pages
to being 36 or 40 pages all of a sudden.
Well, Mark was the one who made it larger
right off the bat.
In 1984, when I did get the magazine,
I set out to do several things.
I wanted to redesign the magazine.
I wanted to run pictures larger.
And I think, in very small order,
we doubled and tripled the size of the annual Swimsuit Issue.
This year has to sell more than last year.
That pressure was always there.
1975, seven pages. 1973, seven pages.
Here we have... I think it was 48. I lost count.
Most of the advertising
that was invested into the business the whole year
came from the interest driven by that particular issue.
So, we had a lot of pressure on us
to perform to a certain extent.
I know Jule did, too.
Sports Illustrated putting out
its 25th anniversary Swimsuit Issue.
Rather than the normal several pages
that they have once a year,
they put out a special entire issue.
And I remember going to the ad people
and said, "Listen, I need a lot of pages."
You put 30 or 40 or 50 more pages with swimsuits,
and you sell a couple of million copies on the newsstand.
That's a lot of money.
Jule was able to take this idea
and migrate it
to all of these different platforms successfully.
This year, the photo spread is the subject
of a new $1 million documentary.
We've already pre-sold 600,000 cassettes.
Jule got Hemmingway's tracker to fulfill her vision.
Knee on the roof, elephants around me,
ears flapping, and all of that.
I think Alexa was there because right before the trip,
I lost my nanny. And Jule's like, "Bring her with us."
The tracker was telling us, "If you were to get between
the mother and the baby elephant, she will be angry.
So, the only thing you can do
to calm an enraged elephant is to purr.
But if you don't soothe the elephant,
they will roll your car over again and again
until they know that everyone on the inside is dead."
Okay. All right, well, let's go find some elephants.
John Zimmerman is in the vehicle
right behind me with his lens,
and Alexa was in my vehicle.
And we come through these bushes.
Right in the middle of the mama elephant and the baby.
Oh, he's doing things with his trunk. Nice.
And the mama elephant is mad as hell.
Here he comes.
It's okay, Christie.
Hemingway's tracker says, "Start purring."
And I'm like, "Purr.
Purr."
Jule's like, "Good, good."
So, I was like, "Protect my baby.
Purr.
I don't know about this."
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Go away.
- Let's go. This is ridiculous. - Hey, Sam.
I love elephants and I would do anything for them.
- She's got the baby. - But at that moment,
I was a mama protecting my baby.
Swimsuit video sales at $19.95 a cassette
could reach $15 million.
Another money maker: swimsuit calendars.
The grand total for the Swimsuit Issue?
More than $32.5 million,
or about 1/3 of SI's profit for all of last year.
How many photographs do you suppose are taken?
Are you ready? Ninety thousand slides.
- Ninety thousand? - Approximately, yeah.
Is this going to be an annual event
where you'll, in effect, put out an extra issue?
- I hope not. - You hope not. Because of the work involved?
Once you do that, you can't say, "We're not doing it next year."
Well, excuse me? How else...
You know, we're accustomed to making a lot of money.
That made more money, that single issue,
than Time magazine made all year.
- Sports Illustrated senior editor. - Senior editor.
- Jule Campbell. - Jule Campbell.
Jule Campbell, senior editor
of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Managing editor told me he was going to fire her.
I said, "Why would you fire her before her 25th anniversary?"
He said, "cost."
What, for Paulina? Yeah. I can't wait.
You know, I'm in a real, real bind.
I can't do that anymore, you know, it's my people.
I don't make that much money.
I have been offered so many jobs through the years.
I told Mark this when I used to ask him for raises.
Look at the money she is making for SI,
Why does she stay there unless she's making a lot of money?
It's been very bad. I know I am the lowest paid Senior Editor there.
And it's taken a lot out of my heart.
She was such an important piece of that company's success.
Would have been nice to see her have some sort of interest in the business,
but at those times, you know, you didn't.
And even for my lingerie business,
I didn't have an interest in the business either.
I'm sure it was horrible for her,
all the politics involved in being a woman in a man's world.
I couldn't have done it.
Do you like a dominant man?
- A dominant man? - Yeah.
What do you mean by dominant?
You mean, like, bigger than me
or just dominant up here?
I got exclusive interviews with many of the models
in this intimate setting.
Just a chance to chat with them.
It was a bit of a zoo once it came out.
And we had those...
big parties,
and I'd always have to do tons of radio interviews,
all those shock jocks and stuff,
and they'd be so disgusting and sexist and...
Are you ready to try this?
- Ready. - Stacey. Have at it.
Well, Ingrid and I were just trying to figure out
how to warm you up on this cold February morning.
And then it came to us. Hardball.
- You're unmarried. - Yes, I'm unmarried, but I'm--
Which athlete would you marry?
Did you mean it when you wrote "love and kisses"
on a poster to me?
Come on.
How can you ask me such a thing?
They really didn't realize they were being offensive.
It was just the way the culture was.
Do you feel comfortable fully dressed in a suit?
Yeah, I do.
What is it that you look for?
Oh, I look for intelligence, believe it or not, first,
and naturalness and how people project.
Those are three important things.
And I look at figures, too.
I would suspect. I mean, isn't that what the--
I mean, this issue sells a multiple.
I mean, what, 25 times or 40 times
what a normal issue on the newsstands sells?
- You bet. - And I would suspect it is not
intelligence, whatever,
- is it, that most people-- - Yeah, it helps.
I'm sure you know this.
In front of the camera,
if you have a beautiful face,
but if she doesn't understand what you're trying to do,
you're through shooting in an hour.
Are you bored?
Bored? No, I'm never bored.
I'm agitated lots of times
because I can't do the things I used to do
if I were a normal person again.
I don't feel like a normal person anymore.
I feel like a shell.
But I'm very grateful I'm a shell.
I could be a piece of dust, too.
Are you losing your memory, do you think?
Are you scared of that?
No. I think as you get older, you get more memory.
Because there are a lot of things
that were wonderful or horrible,
but you never had the time to relive them.
Very often, I can sit there in my chair. And I'm alone,
and I decide what I wanna think about that day.
Oftentimes, beauty is dictated by the powers that be.
And historically, the powers that be
had a lot of power to dictate what beauty was.
Beauty is true diversity.
It took a lot of heat because in the early years,
I didn't have any African American models.
And I had to fight that all the way.
Now I can talk about it,
but it was very, very, very difficult.
Jule always had Black girls, Spanish girls,
all ethnicities.
I'm talking about the '60s, the '70s and the '80s,
when this wasn't even spoken about.
By the way, back then,
a brunette was something unusual.
So, we've come a really long way.
I did not see myself as the all-American girl, but Jule did.
The fashion runways, you know,
similar looking ladies like me were there. That was acceptable.
But Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue?
Come on.
The response to having
a natural Black woman in it was incredible.
- What do you mean, natural? - Meaning someone
who, when you see me, you know that I'm a Black woman.
Jule made me a standard of beauty.
A woman that's considered desirable, inspirational.
You can aspire to be that.
There's 10 people in a commercial,
and you see, like, nine Caucasian people
and one ethnic person.
That's where you know you're only gonna get one chance.
Okay.
I hated the picture.
The first one. Oh, my God, I hated it so bad.
I was in the Florida Keys.
I was leaning against some bushes or something
in this one-piece swimsuit. Like...
Was that it?
I did not like this picture. What is wrong with me?
I like this picture now. That is so interesting, right?
Maybe Jule wanted to preserve a little bit of, like,
young innocence or something.
And I wanted be like Paulina, like,
ooh, and wet in the water, you know?
And so I think I didn't appreciate it.
But now as an adult, I think it's very sweet.
No wonder my mama... My mama loved this picture.
Jule wasn't the type of person who wanted to check a box.
She spent her time developing a concept.
Her vision was the blueprint
for what we're seeing today as far as standards of beauty.
She was pushing with Roshumba, with natural hair.
Forty years later, natural hair is having its moment.
And she was doing it in the '80s,
when it was all about artifice and everything
and really celebrating Roshumba's natural beauty.
Right now, brands and society
are forced to have diversity and inclusion in fashion,
because if they don't, they get called out.
MJ Day was doing it right before the power of social media,
and Jule Campbell was doing it when it didn't exist.
I always say that if you don't see it,
it's kind of hard to dream it.
I hadn't seen Black girls on the cover of huge magazines
like the Sports Illustrated.
1996.
Dang, look at that.
It was just howling there.
The wind was insane down there on the beaches.
I said, "Just start swirling around."
And they started to have fun.
And one image out of all those pictures worked.
I feel like Jule was being political with this.
This is not just two girls, you know,
on the sand in South Africa. Apartheid had just ended.
You know, this is her putting a Black girl
and a white girl together in South Africa and saying, "What?
What? What, America? What?"
Like she was a little bit of a gangster.
This is a gangster move right here.
The moment this cover came out.
Tyra! Stacey, over here!
Everybody in the center, please!
"Dude, that's Tyra. Oh, my God. Super hot."
Gave everybody permission to say that Black is beautiful,
because it is beautiful, always has been.
But I think there was something about
being on the cover of this magazine that made us say,
"Yes, it's okay to acknowledge that."
Turn your head, take a look. Yes.
Because it's just as beautiful
as the white girl standing next door to you.
The all-American girl can be Black.
Because she is.
It's one of my favorite covers.
It works. It says a lot of things.
I always feel like it's the last time I'm gonna see you.
It's not gonna be the last time because you're in amazing shape.
I don't want you to feel obligated.
We love it.
- Jule. - Sorry I'm crying.
Rapid response team, three reps, nurses' station.
I fell to the floor. Stupid.
What'll they do, take my brain out, fix it and put it back?
Just your hip, not your brain.
- You'll be here when I wake up? - I will be here.
- They're gonna call me. - If I wake up.
- You will wake up. Okay? - Thank you.
God bless you.
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread...
- The other one broke. - What a difference.
Michelle's helping reorganize things a little bit.
Just getting started to--
Kick the leg. You're doing it wrong.
- From the knee. Hold that down. - Watch me. Yeah, just...
- Yeah. - Like that. Yeah.
- Yeah. - Hold the leg.
- Yeah. Good. - Hm?
- Your muscles feel strong. - Well, that's her good leg.
The other one is the one she broke her hips.
That's the bad leg.
Does it hurt?
- No. - That's good.
The only thing I'm grateful for
is that I haven't lost my memory.
I know I forget things and so forth,
but I don't think I forget things
more than anyone else my age.
- Oh, my God. - Get out of my yard.
Oh, my goodness.
I can just remember Jule
always trying to push the envelope.
I remember she would always ask me,
"What are you going to do after modeling?"
"Save your pennies." - Yes, save your pennies.
- Say "Hi" to her. - Hi.
- Thank you. - Oh, my God.
- Jule. - Hello?
Hi, Jules. Guess who's on the phone?
It's Roshumba and Stacey. The Williams sisters.
Oh, I love you, Jule. How are you?
I'm alive, honey.
- Aw. - And I'm pretty good.
Thankfully.
We were just talking about you,
and how much you loved us
and made us feel beautiful and strong.
- You're making me cry. - Aw.
- I love you so much. - I love you, too, Jule.
You were one of the only ones
- where I didn't feel like... - Yes.
I had to sort of diminish myself
um, spiritually, physically, or, you know, intellectually.
- Right? - That's true.
Thank you for your vision,
and seeing and looking forward and always wanting to diversify.
I understand now what you were trying to do then,
- and thank you. - Right now I'm crying.
I am so happy and proud of you.
Will I ever, ever see you again?
Yes, you will.
My dream is to put my arms around each of you.
- Yeah. - So, I have a goal, too.
You're my beautiful babies.
Aw, we'll always be your babies. Forever.
I need a minute.
She was a big part of our lives for a lot of years.
- How are you? - So nice to meet you.
I hope you know you have such an impact,
and I hope to continue that legacy.
You will. And you have us supporting you
- every step of the way. - The sisterhood.
The sisterhood is real.
I never really thought
that modeling was in the cards for me.
I think I've always been very focused on my studies.
I basically got discovered by the SI swim team
through Instagram.
They ran a poll on their Instagram
saying, "What Insta baddie do you wanna see in the next issue?"
Here I am.
I searched "change."
They wanted new women, new models,
you know, more relatable to the public.
So they chose astronauts, they chose nurses, lawyers.
I applied and I got in.
I was like, "Wow, me?"
This is crazy.
This is a fitting photo? Are you kidding me?
Look at this.
It's a little soft core.
That's Ingrid, right? What is that?
Why did I do that?
Wearing a swimsuit
I don't feel that it diminishes me in any way.
What do you guys think about that?
Like, yes, there is sex appeal,
but, you know, you can be both.
And I don't think that one
should take away from the other.
One man even said,
"Well, you're posting it.
You're choosing to be sexualized."
And I'm just like, "I am choosing to love my body
and to be confident in who I am."
Well, the Madonna whore thing is totally patriarchal.
- Yeah, exactly. - So, just reject it.
We're working on a patriarchal society.
We can be sexual. You don't get to sexualize us.
Exactly, exactly. It's our choice. It's our agency.
They don't control what beauty is. We do now.
- And there's a lot of backlash. - And they hate it.
- Yes, they don't like it - It throws them far.
They hate that they can't control what a beautiful person is.
So, we need to get this light on you.
It's intimidating to a certain type of person
to look at a woman and see her
embracing herself in all her glory
and all of her... You know, what makes her special
and even more of a reason
why we need to keep on doing what we're doing.
Because it needs to not be a thing.
If you want ad space,
you must prove you are a brand
creating change for women.
We actively decided
to not take anyone's business
that wasn't supporting progress for women.
Yeah, you're leaving money on the table,
but we are creating content about women.
It's swimsuit content, it's lifestyle content,
it's health and wellness content.
So, there was a tweet by Jordan Peterson.
That is Yumi Nu.
I tweeted out, "Sorry. Not beautiful."
She's not bad-looking.
This woman has some extra body fat.
People who cast this particular model for this cover,
they knew exactly what they were doing
and what kind of audience they were trying to pander to.
They're not on her side. They're exploiting her.
The Sports Illustrated cover, it's obviously exclusionary.
It excludes everyone.
You have to be young. You have to be shapely
in a very particular way.
And that would be with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.68.
Because that's what's being established cross-culturally as ideal
from the perspective of male sexual interest, let's say.
But that's also associated with fertility.
Not everyone is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, period.
And fuck you if you don't like it.
I mean, I don't even know why you girls bother at this point.
Like, give it up, it's me. I win, you lose.
I wrote an article for CNN
called "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
is a step back in time and not in a good way."
My work sometimes makes me a buzzkill.
But you criticize something because you care.
What can be really empowering on an individual level
can actually reinforce systems of oppression
on, like, a societal and, like, macro level.
I don't doubt that the people who are in the magazine
feel empowered, but it doesn't necessarily mean
that it's moving the needle on a systemic level
if we are just reproducing the same idea
with just different kinds of bodies
and different kinds of people.
What about women just wanting
to feel and look sexy and share that?
Because we live in a world
in which the male gaze
is the dominant gaze,
sometimes the things that we think are sexy
are actually impacted by what we've been told is sexy.
We feel sexy because this is what we have been taught
sexy looks like.
So, what would it look like
to take men out of the equation altogether?
What would the gaze look like then?
I consider the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition
to be for women.
And, you know,
if men wanna enjoy
and celebrate it and take a look at it, awesome.
It's something that Jule set in motion long ago.
This is what we are told is attractive,
but the magazine itself
does feel like a holdover from a previous century.
And in a lot of ways, it's archaic.
We've seen females in hijabs.
We've seen females who identify as trans.
Is that good? Sure.
It's expanding notions of femaleness,
but it elevates their physicality over anything else.
I don't have any problem in saying that it's sexist.
I don't think there's any question about that.
People come up to me and say, "I know why you have
that Swimsuit Issue.
It makes money." Yeah.
So the question is, why does it make money?
And what does that tell us about American society?
That we really would prefer to see women in swimsuits,
and when we see our female athletes,
we prefer to see them in swimsuits.
There's two ways that change really happens.
One is the idea that you blow the entire system up.
And the other is attempts to change the system from within.
You have to do it very methodically,
push where you know you can make some gains
and, quite frankly, maybe make some compromises.
At the end of the day, it's important to look back on
what Jule did and really look at the changes she did make,
not the changes that maybe didn't happen during her tenure.
The Jule era was coming to a close.
And it had to come to a close.
I was leaving as editor at the end of '96.
There was a new editor coming in.
Jule had had a 30-year run of doing it.
It was time to change.
I don't want to get into that discussion.
How they treated her,
and who did it and everything.
No, I don't wanna get into that.
No.
I was hired by Elaine.
Elaine quit, like, six months after I was hired.
So, I worked for everybody. I worked for everyone except for Jule.
And I was the assistant.
You know, they literally asked her to retire.
Those are the notes she wrote to defend her job.
"So far, the way I'm doing it
seems to be working out pretty well.
It's my personality, my vision.
You can't train someone to be you."
So true.
"I have to fight in many instances."
I can only imagine what it felt like to get to this point,
to have to write this list.
These hit home.
But that's the industry, right?
When they're done with you, they're done with you.
Is it a symptom of the place
or is it a symptom of the people that were there at the time?
I think it's sort of symbolic for everything.
Like, why is all this stuff so hotly contested at times?
It's because you fear the power that women possess
when they feel the confidence to do what they wanna do.
All these things are in place to kind of stop us.
Why? Because you're a certain age?
Then clearly your expiration date is up.
In the mid-90s, SI does reader studies on the swimsuit issues.
The majority of readers say what they would like is
more familiar swimsuit models in more provocative poses.
They don't care about the beautiful sunsets.
They just wanna see models in less clothes.
You know your worth. We know your worth.
We think we've more than properly
compensated you for your worth.
They don't take into consideration
that institutional knowledge and innate ability.
And I would assume that the same thing
will happen to me and the next person,
and the next person, right?
She brought it to a place that was celebrated.
How did I have time for all this?
Good question.
You did a lot of stuff, lady.
These are all... This is just one little shoot of yours.
Jule, you're very special to me,
to the girls.
I mean...
We did things that, you know, will never be done again.
Dearest Jule, I'm back in my Marrakesh
for vacation with my man. I'm in heaven.
My dearest Jule, just one more month until the big day.
Dearest Jule, I miss you terribly and so much.
Need to talk to you.
I feel so isolated. I miss you and I love you.
Love, Elle.
Hi.
Ooh!
My goodness.
- You're one of my babies. - I am.
Look at you.
- I'm just taking you all in. - Are you happy?
- Very. - Life is good to you.
Life is good to me.
I like it, too, that you don't put a lot of makeup on
because I think that makes you look younger.
You know you can study your face when you're alone.
Yes.
And be comfortable
- using different faces. - Yeah. True.
- And you learned that. - You taught me that.
- You... No one taught you. - You did.
That was the beginning of my understanding
that beauty comes from the inside.
When you look at this face, what do you see?
Very alive picture.
I see my fear.
I see my wanting to do a really good job
and not quite sure of myself.
If I had learned to honor my body when I was this age...
Because I look back, and I go, "Wow.
This girl was phenomenal."
And at the time, I never felt that.
My shoulders are too broad, and my legs are too long,
and my breasts are too big, and my head is too small.
Cascades of hair. I love it.
You're such an amazing woman.
I wish you good things.
Do you have a good man in your life?
Ha-ha! She's always interested in my personal life.
She's always been.
I do that with everyone. It makes me happy.
- Yes. - If I don't like them,
- I don't bother asking. - I know.
- I don't need to have a man... - That's right.
- ...to be happy. - That's...
But then you would see something.
Yeah. And that is my truth.
And you will get happiness
because you already have it in you.
Exactly.
- It's true. - Do you like me preaching?
I love you preaching.
You're not preaching, lady. You're teaching.
I've been there and back a lot.
- It's good I'm not jealous. - What would you be jealous of?
- You. - No!
You're amazing.
- Seriously. - You taught me.
- I see a great future ahead for you. - Thank you.
- You said that to me in 19-- - I do. I'm not joking.
You told me that in 1982.
Wow!
Jule had a Polaroid camera. She took Polaroids of everything.
She would use them to get a feeling
for what the suit was gonna be.
So, we would kind of pose it out with her.
Maybe I can do something with them.
Yes, you should do something with them.
- One, deux... - Trois.
I wrote to you all these postcards.
It's amazing.
I'd forgotten about this.
I found Wiz's old camera.
I'm glad you're using it.
We have a very curious, loving family.
Yes.
- What is this? - This is a real tattoo.
- It's your drawing. - It's not gonna wash off?
No. Wiz helped you with this.
You and him drew these for the Knicks.
You told me to put it on my outside of my arm.
I was gonna do it on the inside, and at Christmas,
you told me to do it on the outside.
Oh, my God. I look like I died and came back.
- You look great. - I have to have a copy of that.
- Okay. - That's you and your brother.
That's my mother.
- Is that your mother? - Yeah.
- No. - Yeah.
How could I get that so mixed up?
I'm his mama. I'm Jill. I'm Jill, the mother.
- No. - I'm Jill. Remember?
I'm Jill. That's Graham.
- Don't do all this to me. - Okay. All right.
Let's talk about something else.
How can I think of anything else?
It's okay, Mumu.
Don't worry. It's okay.
- Okay. - Don't feel bad.
How long have we known each other?
Let me see.
- Thirty-six years. - Oh, my God.
That would make you Bruce as your father?
No, he's my, um, ex-husband.
Bruce and I were married.
- You remember? - We'll talk about that another time.
- Yeah. - It's just too much
- that's come down that I've... - Yeah.
I'm too organized, and I don't have it in...
- Yeah. - In its own place.
Okay. Okay. That's okay.
- Yay! - Thank you, everybody.
Make a wish.
You look ridiculous.
Okay. The fire is going down on these candles.
This is my daughter.
Just a minute. Give me...
There's so many wishes. I can only do one.
What's your toast?
Here's to you.
Here's to me.
I hope we never disagree.
And if we do,
to hell with you.
Here's to me.
It's my favorite toast.
Because it brings a smile to your face.
You guys made this a very special day.
Ronnie says thank you.
And my mother and father say thank you
because they know I'm happy.
Aw.
Always loved it coming down in the morning
and finding all the glasses and stuff on the table from--
Your last drinks.
So, I think we'll do the same thing.
Here's to you and here's to me.
I hope we never disagree. But if we do, to hell with you.
Here's to me. But I do love you.
♪ Oh, yeah
You've taught me so many things,
- so many important-- - I got more.
You got more? Well, bring it on.
I need to hear. What you got for me?
I save some for Christmas.
- Okay. For Christmas I get more Jule lessons. - And Easter.
Yeah, you are... You are my wonderful mentor...
- Yes. At birthdays. - ...teacher, family.
You are awesome.
♪ Oh, yeah