Carolyn Murphy
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Interview with Carolyn Murphy in British Vogue July 2017
Sweet Carolyn
Enduring beauty Carolyn Murphy remains every inch America’s golden girl in the season’s Sixties-inspired looks. Tilly Macalister-Smith meets a most unassuming supermodel.
Only twice in her life has Carolyn Murphy been starstruck. “I was having tea in a hotel and in walked Malcolm Gladwell,” says the model, reaching up to pull a copy of his book Outliers from a shelf in the small bookshop we are browsing around in preppy Sag Harbor – Murphy is currently house-hunting in Long Island. “The way he explains things, he’s so smart,” she says, genuinely in awe. And the second? “Neil Young.” One could be forgiven for thinking, given her trips on private jets with Karl Lagerfeld and dancing with Donatella Versace until dawn, that Murphy’s heroes might be of the more glamorous sort. With a modelling career that began in the early Nineties, Murphy has been on Forbes’s highest-paid models list for over a decade, thanks to campaigns for the likes of Miu Miu, Oscar de la Renta, Fendi and Tiffany&Co. And the work continues. This year, aged 43, she will celebrate her 17th anniversary as the face of Estée Lauder, an unprecedented reign with one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world.
But although she lives in New York with her 16-year-old daughter, Dylan, she’s most at home in the great outdoors with her animals – hence our pre-lunch pit stop at a gleaming riding stables where she keeps Doc, a skewbald Western horse she’s had for 22 years. Lightly tanned with tousled blonde hair, she’s dressed in perfect vintage Levi’s – stiff true-blue denim with a subtle kick flare that stops right on the ankle; loveworn black leather Acne cowboy boots; a J Crew denim shirt with mother-of-pearl stud buttons (“Jenna Lyons is a dear friend. I can’t wait to see what she does next”, she says of the former J Crew president), and a men’s tawny knitted belted cardigan from Steven Alan. Her love of horses started young: “Mum would just throw me on bareback with her and we’d go off through the woods,” she says in a subtle Virginia drawl as she fishes a treat for Doc from her pocket. As we talk, her two labradors, Rupert the Bear and Emerson (“named after the American philosopher Ralph Waldo”), scamper about.
Born in Florida – a place of “strip malls, highways and brick houses with plastic vinyl blinds, where I never fitted in” – Murphy always hankered for fresh air and open space. As a teenager, she was more keen to befriend wildlife than other people. “I was a really good student, but socially I had a difficult time because southern America is a débutante-loving, cotillion, Laura Ashley-styled, very proper place, and I never felt comfortable. I was the child who would bring home baby birds to raise. I was just immersed in my own little world.”
When Murphy was eight, she moved to Britain with her father and brother, on an RAF base in Oxfordshire, while her mother stayed in Florida. Eventually, the peripatetic military lifestyle took its toll on her parents’ marriage. “My brother and I didn’t really know what was happening,” she says. “My parents were so amicable about it and are still good friends.” Her mother, Laura Leigh, has been a big influence; liberal- minded, she encouraged her children to eat fermented foods 30 years before it became trendy and practised Dayananda yoga. Her father, meanwhile, was “very literal, pragmatic. He was sliced white and she was wholegrain,” Murphy says.
As progressive as her mother was, Murphy was still packed off to a Florida finishing school for eight weeks at the age of 16, in the hope of dispelling her tomboy ways. Loath to conform,Murphy would skip school to visit her teenage boyfriend, but when model agents arrived at the graduation, she caught their attention. Her parents agreed to a brief modelling trip to Paris, catapulting a reluctant Murphy into the fashion world. She confesses she cried continuously for the first few days of castings. “Remember, this was like ’89, ’90. It was the tail end of the whole glamazon moment, so everything was bigger and better – the shoulder pads, the hair, the power. It was when Cindy and Christy made it big,” she says. “They were really sexy, dating rock stars, and I was this little twerp in jeans wearing sweaters with tags in them that said: ‘Made with love by Nana.’ I was terrified! I went home to the States and said, that’s not for me, that is not my thing.” But after a brief stint at college in Virginia, batting away offers from eager agents, she relented and moved to New York. “It took me a while to cotton on,” she jokes.
But by the early Nineties, a grungier aesthetic was taking hold. Aged 20, Murphy found kindred spirits in her fellow waifs, and began to enjoy New York for the first time. “Kate, Amber, Shalom, Stella Tennant and I formed a sort of sisterhood. We would go vintage shopping together when we touched down in Paris. Kate was this tiny otherworldly being who just made me want to pluck my eyebrows and wear slip dresses and Adidas Gazelles.” Murphy and her girl gang were travelling the world enjoying tremendous success, appearing on her first shoot for British Vogue in March 1996 and campaigns for Prada, Max Mara, Versace and Tom Ford. Sitting with her now, in a health-food café slurping parsnip soup, it’s hard to picture her in the jet-set life. Does she look back on that time fondly? “Are you kidding me? I loved it,” she beams, eyes widening. “When I decided to embrace modelling, I saw it as such a beautiful circus. We were flying Concorde, staying at five-star hotels and hobnobbing at Versace parties. Retouching shoots was unfathomable back then – if you’d had a late night and hadn’t slept, you had to ask for the reflector! We knew all the tricks.”
But success comes at a price. Aged just 23 and with her first Manhattan loft under her belt, burnout was fast approaching. Murphy left New York for a holiday in Costa Rica – and ended up staying for three years. It was there she fell in love, both with the place and with her (now ex-) husband, Jake Schroeder. “I was so enthralled by the place and its biodiversity and I thought, ‘I’m going to have my Jane Goodall moment’,” she explains. Murphy worked with local schools and veterinarians rehousing stray dogs, but when she fell pregnant with Dylan in early 2000, she returned solo to the farm she’d bought in upstate New York. “I only went back to Costa Rica once after I gave birth,” she says flatly. Her divorce from Schroeder followed a year later.
Murphy is relatively low-maintenance – no trainer, no assistant, no publicist. “I don’t want more people in my life telling me what to do,” she says. “I prided myself on that and took Dylan everywhere with me.” It hasn’t all been a breeze, though. “It’s important to talk about how stressful [being a single mother] is because I have lost sleep over the years. It’s definitely a lot of work, being a woman in this day and age and raising children with integrity and a foundation of morals and values. It feels like a lot of pressure when people are looking to you to uphold that because you’re in the public eye.
Motherhood, she says, gave her confidence which has only grown since she has got older. “From being 40 onward, I embraced myself as a woman much more. In your twenties you’re exploring, you want to find your so-called ‘people’, and you think you’re so cool and interesting. God knows, we did.”
She and Dylan have a “very close” relationship. “Now that she’s getting older I talk to her about the divorce. And she’s so different to me, racing around to see her friends, wanting to go to exercise classes. I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s so busy being you!’” Like any self-respecting adolescent, Dylan has had her instances of rebellion against her mother’s wholesome lifestyle. “We’ve had Kardashian moments, for sure. I’m like, ‘What do you mean, fake eyelashes?’” Dylan will also attempt to borrow the odd piece from her mother’s wardrobe, but recently pushed it too far. “I had to tell her, ‘You cannot carry a Céline bag as a book bag at school!’”
Although Murphy rarely shops, she admits to a weakness for accessories and recently splurged on a Victoria Beckham handbag. She’s also added another notch to her CV working on strategy and design for Detroit accessories label Shinola. “I have a pay cheque, I have a desk, I have health benefits. I actually have a proper job and I love it,” she says. Kicking up her heels means a couple of beers with fellow models Chandra North or Christy Turlington. “Everybody always asks about the grunge era and drugs, but I didn’t know of anybody who was... Well, actually that’s not true, but it’s not the ones that you would think. I experimented – I would be a liar to say I didn’t – but it just wasn’t really my thing.” Instead she took writing classes or worked with a chakra healer, hence her nickname Mama Murphy.
Clearly, clean(ish) living suits her. Murphy is strikingly wrinkle-free. She insists it’s hereditary and thanks to her Native American father’s oily skin, but she plasters on sunblock and doesn’t drink coffee or (much) alcohol. “I’ve definitely tried. I’ve had plenty of hangovers. But my body just doesn’t process it well. I would love to be more European in that way, and drink and smoke. Steven Meisel used to say, ‘You’re one of those weird people who can just have one cigarette and not get addicted.’” Her kitchen cupboards act as an extended make-up bag; she’ll eat two tablespoons of coconut oil a day and smooth a third in her hair as a conditioning treatment. “A lot of it is internal. It’s about your happiness. Nothing exciting, just those old ideas – drinking a lot of water, sleep. I’m a big sleeper. I need at least eight hours.” She physically recoils at the mention of a workout routine. “I can’t stand exercise. I’m outdoorsy, but that’s different. I will hike like a billy goat for hours up a mountain, I will ride horses, I will surf, I will do whatever it is, but it’s strictly activity rather than a workout.”
So what next? Is she dating? “Let’s just say I’m in a place in my life where I’m enjoying my own company,” she concedes. “It’s easy to distract ourselves with relationships. But I’m starting to get those pangs of...” Wanting company? “Yeah.” Someone to watch box sets with? “Yeah. But you can’t force it. You need to think, who will I be drinking tea with on the porch years from now? And I have to be very careful about who I introduce into Dylan’s life.” Furnished with our bookstore purchases, we agree that relationships can be broken down into chapters: sometimes a poignant little fleeting haiku that you’ll remember for years; others, novels that meander on for so long, you can’t really recall how it all began. “I’m sure he’s out there, you know? I hope he is.” Regardless, the next chapter for Murphy – indeed, a novel of her own is in the works – looks golden.
Sweet Carolyn
Enduring beauty Carolyn Murphy remains every inch America’s golden girl in the season’s Sixties-inspired looks. Tilly Macalister-Smith meets a most unassuming supermodel.
Only twice in her life has Carolyn Murphy been starstruck. “I was having tea in a hotel and in walked Malcolm Gladwell,” says the model, reaching up to pull a copy of his book Outliers from a shelf in the small bookshop we are browsing around in preppy Sag Harbor – Murphy is currently house-hunting in Long Island. “The way he explains things, he’s so smart,” she says, genuinely in awe. And the second? “Neil Young.” One could be forgiven for thinking, given her trips on private jets with Karl Lagerfeld and dancing with Donatella Versace until dawn, that Murphy’s heroes might be of the more glamorous sort. With a modelling career that began in the early Nineties, Murphy has been on Forbes’s highest-paid models list for over a decade, thanks to campaigns for the likes of Miu Miu, Oscar de la Renta, Fendi and Tiffany&Co. And the work continues. This year, aged 43, she will celebrate her 17th anniversary as the face of Estée Lauder, an unprecedented reign with one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world.
But although she lives in New York with her 16-year-old daughter, Dylan, she’s most at home in the great outdoors with her animals – hence our pre-lunch pit stop at a gleaming riding stables where she keeps Doc, a skewbald Western horse she’s had for 22 years. Lightly tanned with tousled blonde hair, she’s dressed in perfect vintage Levi’s – stiff true-blue denim with a subtle kick flare that stops right on the ankle; loveworn black leather Acne cowboy boots; a J Crew denim shirt with mother-of-pearl stud buttons (“Jenna Lyons is a dear friend. I can’t wait to see what she does next”, she says of the former J Crew president), and a men’s tawny knitted belted cardigan from Steven Alan. Her love of horses started young: “Mum would just throw me on bareback with her and we’d go off through the woods,” she says in a subtle Virginia drawl as she fishes a treat for Doc from her pocket. As we talk, her two labradors, Rupert the Bear and Emerson (“named after the American philosopher Ralph Waldo”), scamper about.
Born in Florida – a place of “strip malls, highways and brick houses with plastic vinyl blinds, where I never fitted in” – Murphy always hankered for fresh air and open space. As a teenager, she was more keen to befriend wildlife than other people. “I was a really good student, but socially I had a difficult time because southern America is a débutante-loving, cotillion, Laura Ashley-styled, very proper place, and I never felt comfortable. I was the child who would bring home baby birds to raise. I was just immersed in my own little world.”
When Murphy was eight, she moved to Britain with her father and brother, on an RAF base in Oxfordshire, while her mother stayed in Florida. Eventually, the peripatetic military lifestyle took its toll on her parents’ marriage. “My brother and I didn’t really know what was happening,” she says. “My parents were so amicable about it and are still good friends.” Her mother, Laura Leigh, has been a big influence; liberal- minded, she encouraged her children to eat fermented foods 30 years before it became trendy and practised Dayananda yoga. Her father, meanwhile, was “very literal, pragmatic. He was sliced white and she was wholegrain,” Murphy says.
As progressive as her mother was, Murphy was still packed off to a Florida finishing school for eight weeks at the age of 16, in the hope of dispelling her tomboy ways. Loath to conform,Murphy would skip school to visit her teenage boyfriend, but when model agents arrived at the graduation, she caught their attention. Her parents agreed to a brief modelling trip to Paris, catapulting a reluctant Murphy into the fashion world. She confesses she cried continuously for the first few days of castings. “Remember, this was like ’89, ’90. It was the tail end of the whole glamazon moment, so everything was bigger and better – the shoulder pads, the hair, the power. It was when Cindy and Christy made it big,” she says. “They were really sexy, dating rock stars, and I was this little twerp in jeans wearing sweaters with tags in them that said: ‘Made with love by Nana.’ I was terrified! I went home to the States and said, that’s not for me, that is not my thing.” But after a brief stint at college in Virginia, batting away offers from eager agents, she relented and moved to New York. “It took me a while to cotton on,” she jokes.
But by the early Nineties, a grungier aesthetic was taking hold. Aged 20, Murphy found kindred spirits in her fellow waifs, and began to enjoy New York for the first time. “Kate, Amber, Shalom, Stella Tennant and I formed a sort of sisterhood. We would go vintage shopping together when we touched down in Paris. Kate was this tiny otherworldly being who just made me want to pluck my eyebrows and wear slip dresses and Adidas Gazelles.” Murphy and her girl gang were travelling the world enjoying tremendous success, appearing on her first shoot for British Vogue in March 1996 and campaigns for Prada, Max Mara, Versace and Tom Ford. Sitting with her now, in a health-food café slurping parsnip soup, it’s hard to picture her in the jet-set life. Does she look back on that time fondly? “Are you kidding me? I loved it,” she beams, eyes widening. “When I decided to embrace modelling, I saw it as such a beautiful circus. We were flying Concorde, staying at five-star hotels and hobnobbing at Versace parties. Retouching shoots was unfathomable back then – if you’d had a late night and hadn’t slept, you had to ask for the reflector! We knew all the tricks.”
But success comes at a price. Aged just 23 and with her first Manhattan loft under her belt, burnout was fast approaching. Murphy left New York for a holiday in Costa Rica – and ended up staying for three years. It was there she fell in love, both with the place and with her (now ex-) husband, Jake Schroeder. “I was so enthralled by the place and its biodiversity and I thought, ‘I’m going to have my Jane Goodall moment’,” she explains. Murphy worked with local schools and veterinarians rehousing stray dogs, but when she fell pregnant with Dylan in early 2000, she returned solo to the farm she’d bought in upstate New York. “I only went back to Costa Rica once after I gave birth,” she says flatly. Her divorce from Schroeder followed a year later.
Murphy is relatively low-maintenance – no trainer, no assistant, no publicist. “I don’t want more people in my life telling me what to do,” she says. “I prided myself on that and took Dylan everywhere with me.” It hasn’t all been a breeze, though. “It’s important to talk about how stressful [being a single mother] is because I have lost sleep over the years. It’s definitely a lot of work, being a woman in this day and age and raising children with integrity and a foundation of morals and values. It feels like a lot of pressure when people are looking to you to uphold that because you’re in the public eye.
Motherhood, she says, gave her confidence which has only grown since she has got older. “From being 40 onward, I embraced myself as a woman much more. In your twenties you’re exploring, you want to find your so-called ‘people’, and you think you’re so cool and interesting. God knows, we did.”
She and Dylan have a “very close” relationship. “Now that she’s getting older I talk to her about the divorce. And she’s so different to me, racing around to see her friends, wanting to go to exercise classes. I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s so busy being you!’” Like any self-respecting adolescent, Dylan has had her instances of rebellion against her mother’s wholesome lifestyle. “We’ve had Kardashian moments, for sure. I’m like, ‘What do you mean, fake eyelashes?’” Dylan will also attempt to borrow the odd piece from her mother’s wardrobe, but recently pushed it too far. “I had to tell her, ‘You cannot carry a Céline bag as a book bag at school!’”
Although Murphy rarely shops, she admits to a weakness for accessories and recently splurged on a Victoria Beckham handbag. She’s also added another notch to her CV working on strategy and design for Detroit accessories label Shinola. “I have a pay cheque, I have a desk, I have health benefits. I actually have a proper job and I love it,” she says. Kicking up her heels means a couple of beers with fellow models Chandra North or Christy Turlington. “Everybody always asks about the grunge era and drugs, but I didn’t know of anybody who was... Well, actually that’s not true, but it’s not the ones that you would think. I experimented – I would be a liar to say I didn’t – but it just wasn’t really my thing.” Instead she took writing classes or worked with a chakra healer, hence her nickname Mama Murphy.
Clearly, clean(ish) living suits her. Murphy is strikingly wrinkle-free. She insists it’s hereditary and thanks to her Native American father’s oily skin, but she plasters on sunblock and doesn’t drink coffee or (much) alcohol. “I’ve definitely tried. I’ve had plenty of hangovers. But my body just doesn’t process it well. I would love to be more European in that way, and drink and smoke. Steven Meisel used to say, ‘You’re one of those weird people who can just have one cigarette and not get addicted.’” Her kitchen cupboards act as an extended make-up bag; she’ll eat two tablespoons of coconut oil a day and smooth a third in her hair as a conditioning treatment. “A lot of it is internal. It’s about your happiness. Nothing exciting, just those old ideas – drinking a lot of water, sleep. I’m a big sleeper. I need at least eight hours.” She physically recoils at the mention of a workout routine. “I can’t stand exercise. I’m outdoorsy, but that’s different. I will hike like a billy goat for hours up a mountain, I will ride horses, I will surf, I will do whatever it is, but it’s strictly activity rather than a workout.”
So what next? Is she dating? “Let’s just say I’m in a place in my life where I’m enjoying my own company,” she concedes. “It’s easy to distract ourselves with relationships. But I’m starting to get those pangs of...” Wanting company? “Yeah.” Someone to watch box sets with? “Yeah. But you can’t force it. You need to think, who will I be drinking tea with on the porch years from now? And I have to be very careful about who I introduce into Dylan’s life.” Furnished with our bookstore purchases, we agree that relationships can be broken down into chapters: sometimes a poignant little fleeting haiku that you’ll remember for years; others, novels that meander on for so long, you can’t really recall how it all began. “I’m sure he’s out there, you know? I hope he is.” Regardless, the next chapter for Murphy – indeed, a novel of her own is in the works – looks golden.
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US Vogue September 2017
Homeward Bound
Photography: Zoe Ghertner
Styling: Camilla Nickerson
Hair: Rudi Lewis
Make-up: Fara Homidi
Models: Amber Valletta, Binx Walton, Carolyn Murphy, Karlie Kloss, Sara Grace Wallerstedt, Selena Forrest & Taylor Hill
vogue
Homeward Bound
Photography: Zoe Ghertner
Styling: Camilla Nickerson
Hair: Rudi Lewis
Make-up: Fara Homidi
Models: Amber Valletta, Binx Walton, Carolyn Murphy, Karlie Kloss, Sara Grace Wallerstedt, Selena Forrest & Taylor Hill
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POP #37 F/W 2017.18
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Photo: Charlotte Wales
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