“A lot of modeling is how much crap you can take.”
— Lauren Hutton
Watching a recent CBS Sunday Morning segment on “the original supermodel,” Lauren Hutton, and her improbable path from poverty to becoming one of the most successful businesswomen in America triggered a memory buried in the smoldering rubble of my brainpan. I vaguely recalled that, in the 1970s, Hutton visited someone in Greensboro, but for what I didn’t have a clue.
Soon after word spread concerning my curiosity, I heard from an old friend, Jane Vaughan Teer, who invited me to the home she shares with her husband, John. Wouldn’t you know, the Teers reside on Hill Street. There, she related the curious story behind Hutton’s surreptitious visit to the Gate City, which happened at the very height of her phenomenal career.
You may recall my slightly salacious recollections of the two-block stretch of Hill Street in Latham Park where I grew up, published in O.Henry’s January 2025 issue. (You do collect ’em all, don’tcha?)
My conversation with the Teers began with their curiosity as to exactly where it was that Mrs. Bunn gunned down her hubby before fleeing to Florida with her paramour. And the address where our 80-year-old neighbor sunbathed au naturel. What I didn’t know, that Jane told me about, was the man who shot dead a teen peeping tom still resided across the street when they the Teers moved to Hill Street in 1978 and would randomly speak about it decades later.
The Teers were surprised to learn that the house next door to theirs once belonged to a couple and their two sons — one of the boys let it slip that their parents had filmed themselves making babies then showed it to them by way of explaining the birds and the bees (I’m running out of metaphors, folks). That whisper rapidly went viral, no tweets needed on this street for speedy promulgation. Soon after, that randy fam relocated. At one point, the Teers mentioned property assessments on Hill Street skyrocketing, a common concern of late. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “After folks get a gander at this, the city will be forced to reassess.” But I digress. When wisps of 50-year-old reminiscence subsided, discussion turned to my memory’s mystery — why Lauren Hutton ventured to Greensboro.
“I had to give up my bedroom for her,” Jane, 27 at that time, recalls of Hutton’s overnight stay in their home at 2018 Pembroke Dr. that, by her best recollection, took place late summer 1974. “It was supposed to be a very quiet thing, no publicity, but Mama had to have a party . . . of course.” Mama being the indomitable Bee Vaughan, a tentpole presence in my life I equated with the Unsinkable Molly Brown. “Mama told Lauren, ‘We’re going to have a little cocktail party.’ Lauren said she wanted to take a nap first, so she goes back into my room to rest.”
As folks began arriving at the cocktail hour, Jane was enlisted to awaken Ms. Hutton who, remember, was one of New York and Europe’s most sought-after socialites. “Lauren said, ‘This early?!? I don’t guess anywhere else in the world they have cocktail hour at 5 o’clock!’”
If you weren’t around for the so-called Me Decade, it’s difficult to unpack the impact Hutton, a small-town girl from the South, had on the fashion world globally. In 1973, she signed the first exclusive contract in modeling history and the most lucrative at $250,000 a year for 20 days work (an almost $2 million payday today) as the fresh-scrubbed face of Revlon cosmetics. That was just six years after landing her first Vogue cover in 1966 at age 23.
“From the very beginning I wanted to see the world,” Hutton told the Today show in 2016 about why she left the South. “I heard that models made this enormous amount of money, ‘a dollar a minute,’ and I said, ‘I have to do that!’ And everybody laughed.” With a gap in her teeth, a “banana-shaped nose,” standing only 5-foot-7 (in heels), she possessed none of the qualities associated with 1960s glamor gals typified by Elizabeth Taylor’s cat-eyed Cleopatra caricature, Catherine Deneuve’s icy glare or Twiggy’s pixie-like androgyny.
Her preppy-chic visage was splashed across some two dozen major magazine covers by 1974. Hutton’s unspoiled, Gulf Coast-casual resting face best expressed what modern, independent women were thirsty for from fashionistas: allure without artificiality.
Just how glamorous was one of the world’s most photographed fashion icons? “She was regular, just plain folks,” Jane insists. That comes through in the photo reproduced here of Hutton taken alongside Bill “Hoot” Roane, the very fellow she came to town to see.
A longtime companion of Bee Vaughan’s after her husband passed, Hoot (a nickname bestowed in childhood) was blessed with a gift for gab that came in handy as a sales exec for WBIG Radio, popular as any of the station’s on-air personalities.
Hutton had come to Greensboro to query Hoot about his adolescent days in Oxford, Mississippi. Back then, Hoot was a close friend of Lawrence Bryan “Cut” Hutton, the father she never knew. “They were in a little gang together,” Jane explains about the pirate-themed crew Hoot and Cut hung with, their ship a treehouse fort for secreting cigarettes and liquor. “You can count on the fact that, however long [Hutton] was here, Hoot kept her entertained. She heard a lot about her father and about their close friendship with William Faulkner.”
The writer William Faulkner? “They were neighbors,” Jane comments casually. “Hoot used to give talks about him. Not about his writing but about neighborhood things, like Faulkner dating the school librarian.” Faulkner was around 20 years older than those boys. But then, as a youngster, I was friendly with older neighborhood folks, too.
There was a small café in Oxford where, daily, Faulkner sorted through his mail. “Hoot had some kind of a job there,” John Teer recalls. The year was 1939 when Hoot was 22. “One morning Faulkner came in with all these magazines, letters and so forth. One of them was Time magazine with his picture on the cover.” Faulkner didn’t even open the magazine, couldn’t have cared less what they said about him in it, laughingly autographing the mag before handing it over to his pal.
“After Hoot’s father passed away, the family gathered down in Oxford,” John continues. “Somebody came in and said, ‘There’s an old man at the back door. He’s kind of sketchy looking, I don’t know . . .’ Hoot went to look and it was Mr. Faulkner. He’d come over with a fifth of [Four Roses] as a gift.”
It’s reassuring that Lauren Hutton reemerges frequently, her look being timeless. Only Princess Diana, and few others, have similarly embodied Hutton’s rarified air of vulnerable likability. Asked by Harper’s Bazaar in 2023 about regrets, Hutton replied: “I would give anything to meet my father, my real father. I didn’t ever get to meet him.” Whether or not her journey here provided meaningful insight or connection, she can’t say Greensboro didn’t give a Hoot.
