"I was an introvert—until fashion got ahold of me!” pioneering runway model Pat Cleveland says, as she talks about Walking with the Muses, her memoir out in June from Atria’s 37 Ink imprint. That fashion moment was in 1964, when 14-year-old Cleveland, guided by her single mom, Lady Bird Cleveland—an artist with a bold, unique fashion sense—began designing and sewing her own clothes using fabrics repurposed from elegant 1920s and ’30s garments. It was from those roots that Cleveland became one of the first black models to walk the runways of New York, Paris, Milan—and is still walking them today.
When Patricia Lee Ann Cleveland began modeling in 1966, the (mostly white) fashion industry was a worldwide network of young creatives—designers (Stephen Burrows, Oscar de la Renta, Halston, Karl Lagerfeld), photographers (Richard Avedon, Antonio Lopez), artists (Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol), publications (GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue), celebrities (Warren Beatty, Bill Cosby, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli). Cleveland became a part of this world, and these are the principle experiences she shares in her memoir. As for fashion-industry diversity these days, Cleveland notes, “I was just in an H&M show in Paris, and they had [models of] different ages, sizes, and colors.”
Cleveland is diversity personified. “My mother, a half-black, part-Cherokee, part-Irish fine artist, and my father, Swedish descendant of Vikings, made beautiful music together,” she writes. Cleveland was conceived two years into their romance—a few weeks before her father returned to Sweden for good, unaware of the daughter he left behind. Cleveland met him only once, when she was two years old. She lived with her mother and Helen, her mother’s jet-
setting sister, in an apartment that by night was a salon for New York City’s black creatives, so from an early age Cleveland, surrounded by fashion, art, and literature, aspired to be an artist. “I like to be referred to as an artist: I paint, write music, dance, act.”
Born in 1950, in a “charity hospital” on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island, Cleveland grew up on 100th Street between Park and Madison avenues in Manhattan and says she was taunted as a child by classmates and by kids in the street because she was “funny looking—I was too light to be black, too black to be white, and too skinny to be pretty.” She also stood out because she wore clothes that she designed and made herself, initially to have a wardrobe for going out dancing.
As Cleveland headed home from high school one afternoon, it was one of these very outfits that caught the eye of a writer from Vogue—her mom’s favorite fashion magazine. The writer literally chased her down the street to ask for her phone number for a possible interview about her designs. Although Cleveland didn’t hear from Vogue for another three years, the encounter inspired her mother to have professional photos taken of Cleveland to send to magazines to inquire if they needed models. Lady Bird’s first choice of photographer? Her old friend Carl Van Vechten. He was out of town, but recommended his friend Adelaide Passen. As a result, Ebony Fashion Fair selected the young Cleveland to model in the magazine’s shows. Her first day at work was June 23, 1966—her 16th birthday. A few years later, she was in demand, on her way to decades of being a muse for and companion of fashion designers, illustrators, photographers, and celebrities worldwide.
The book’s title, Cleveland says, “is light, mysterious, not too fashiony” and has a double meaning. It’s partly a nod to the term walking girl, used to describe runway fashion models (although Cleveland’s style is not so much walking as dancing, twirling, and sometimes leaping down the runway), and partly to her ordeal of learning to walk again after a severe accident right after she graduated high school. During a studio photo shoot, she was posing in a hammock that wasn’t secured properly; the ceiling beam holding the hammock fell on top of her, and she spent six months in the hospital in traction or in a wheelchair, refusing any operations. It would be years before she was mostly free of pain.
As for the title: “Everybody tells me, ‘You’re such a muse!’ And I was crippled at one time—I couldn’t walk. So the title is about walking: you walk along the path of life. And people are around you, and they are your muses.”
A prolific journal keeper since the age of 16, Cleveland self-published In the Spirit of Grace in 2001, a book of 366 poems, one (or more) for every day of the year. “In three months, I wrote a thousand poems! Everything was coming at me,” she says. “I did very well with that book.” The same title, along with Cleveland’s voice, was given to a pumping dance track produced in 2001 by the acclaimed Italian deejay and music producer Joe T. Vannelli. “Yes, that’s my vocal! He heard my voice and asked if he could make a song.”
Walking with the Muses didn’t start out as a memoir. “It took seven years to put the book together. I started writing it in Europe, 10 pages a day, free writing. I turned it into poems, I turned it into a screenplay, and a friend said, why not an autobiography? Then I turned it into stories about myself. Some things I didn’t want to think about; going in there was difficult. But sometimes you have to take that ride on the Cyclone, or jump on the trampoline, and just go through it.”
She adds that writing the book led her to create two workspaces in her home. “One was closed and quiet, and one was light and spacious.” Once the manuscript was completed, she started the editing process. “It was a year of intense condensing; I had to keep chopping away. When you have a life with so much detail, it’s important to make sure [the book] isn’t too long.”
The bittersweet aspect, she says, is that although many people from the past reentered her life to share their memories in common, some of them have since died. As a result, Cleveland stopped writing for a year.
Walking with the Muses offers a candid glimpse into many of Cleveland’s international adventures in pursuit of bookings; her romances; and her memories of the players, places, and politics inside the fashion industry. Cleveland, who has appeared in countless fashion spreads and on the covers of Essence, GQ, L’Officiel, Women’s Wear Daily, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, is still working today; she recently appeared in ads for Marc Jacobs and editorials in Town & Country and the Japanese Harper’s Bazaar.
Cleveland is married to fashion photographer and former model Paul van Ravenstein; they live in New Jersey and have 15 peacocks on their property. (“What would peacocks be without their feathers? Just another turkey,” she quips.) They have two children: Noel, a yoga instructor who teaches all over the world under the name Agastya, and Anna, a model with whom Cleveland sometimes shares the runway—or the page.
In 2010, Cleveland appeared as a guest judge in season 14 of America’s Next Top Model and in the documentary Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston. In 2012, she was featured in two more fashion documentaries: Versailles ’73: American Runway Revolution (which traces the 1973 Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, with five French and five American designers in competition), and the HBO documentary About Face: Supermodels Then and Now.
“I love that I had a chance to write my story,” Cleveland says. “My friends wanted it. It opens new doors to wonderful new friendships, too. I hope readers take away that you can have an achievement in life if you keep at it. Look around and try to form something out of it. Life is like a snowball: roll ’em up and throw ’em.”
