Entertainment
The adventures of Lauren Hutton, the original supermodel
Lauren Hutton was told again and again in the 1960s that she wasn’t cut out to be a model. She recalled being told, “‘You’ve got that space between your teeth, your eyes are crossed a lotta the times. I had improper … everything.'”
While the gap in her teeth was sometimes visible, in the beginning she was discouraged from showing it. “I had to buy a little $300 plastic thing that went there, that I would sneeze out and lose,” she said.
She still owns the record for most cover appearances on American Vogue: 26. And at 82, she still has that smile.
Asked how she feels having been the first supermodel, Hutton said, “Yeah, certainly, if it was about money. And I changed the whole money system.”
In 1973, Revlon signed her to an exclusive deal for a quarter of a million dollars a year, then the biggest contract in modeling history.
Coming from college in New Orleans, she saw New York as a gateway to the world and to the wild places she wanted to visit. Ask her about modeling, and somehow you’ll almost always end up in Africa: “I lived with pygmies, and I lived with Karamojong, and I lived with Kalahari bushmen,” she said. “You’re constantly excited. You’re constantly thrilled. And everything’s beautiful. My life was none of this stuff. My life was traveling. That’s the only reason I came to New York.”
“You never really wanted to be a model?” I asked.
“Never heard of it!”
“In so many ways, it was all an accident.”
“Amen! Amen!” Hutton replied. “I’ve always been lucky. I was born lucky.”
A “believable” beauty
She was born Mary Laurence Hutton in Charleston, South Carolina, during World War II. Her dad was an Army pilot overseas: “He wrote me every single day from the war. And my mother, very kindly and beautifully, put it into books for me.”
Her parents split in 1945. Lauren grew up in Florida with an abusive stepfather. So, she treasured her father’s letters: “‘Cause I wanted my daddy bad,” she said.
But she never met him. “No. No. But he gave me a love, enough love in those letters that held me all this time, and made me love men!” she laughed.
Hutton made her screen debut in 1963 as a decoy contestant on the TV game show “To Tell the Truth,” while working as a “Bunny” at the Playboy Club in New York City. But at the beginning she was turned down by five modeling agencies.
Eileen Ford, who’d call Hutton a “believable” beauty, finally gave her a shot, later admitting, “I still don’t know what made me take her.”
Bert Stern/Conde Nast via Getty Images; CBS News 
Hutton was sent to see the legendary editor of Vogue, Diana Vreeland, a meeting Hutton described as “heaven.” “And she said, ‘You!’ And I looked, and she had pointed this long, beautiful finger at me. And she said, ‘You have quite a presence.’ I had no idea what that was. What was a presence? But I took a chance, and I said, ‘Well, you sure do!'”
Vreeland quickly connected her with one of Vogue’s top photographers, Richard Avedon. “And he made wonderful – they’re still some of the best pictures I ever took,” Hutton said.
Avedon and Hutton became frequent collaborators. Soon she was the hottest model in the country, and a household name. Artist Robert Rauschenberg, a friend and neighbor, created a collage portrait of her. Hutton landed film roles, too, in “Paper Lion” with Alan Alda; “The Gambler” with James Caan; and “American Gigolo” with Richard Gere.
Photographs by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation 
I asked, “For someone who didn’t want to be a model, or an actress, you turn out to be really good at it. And you seem to not only understand how to do it, but you seemed to figure out the economics of it?”
“Twice. I did that twice,” Hutton said. “‘Cause Bob lost all the first bunch.”
“Bob” was Bob Williamson, for nearly three decades her boyfriend, father figure, and financial manager. Hutton said, “You’d hear all those girls say, ‘Well, my sweetheart’s in high finance. What is yours in?’ I’d say, ‘Low finance.’ And I was right!”
They travelled the world together, until she discovered he’d lost nearly $13 million of her money. “Bob was very, very smart about all kinds of stuff,” she said.
“But he also lost all your money?”
“Yeah. But you know what? I’d do it again in a second,” Hutton said.
CBS News 
She went back to fashion and earned her fortune all over again. “I just kept on plugging at it,” she said.
Resilience is a recurring theme in Hutton’s life. In 2000, a motorcycle accident knocked her 20 feet into the air: “I can remember every second of it, and it was really sort of rapturous.”
She’d been riding to Las Vegas with a group of friends that included Jeremy Irons and Dennis Hopper, and was badly hurt: “Oh, I was dead, and I wasn’t breathing at all. Those boys saved me. My gang, my guys saved my life. My wingmen! Don’t make me start crying!”
But the cover girl came back from that, too.
Lauren Hutton has never regretted an adventure. “I was not there to see myself on the stands,” she said. “I was there to get the money to go see the world. I’ve had a great life. I’ve been very lucky.”
For more info:
- Thanks to the Rauschenberg Foundation, New York City
- Photographs by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Carol Ross.
The Traitors’ winner Rachel Duffy has shared a sweet yet emotional tribute to her mother, Anne.
Throughout the show, mother-of-three, 43, shared her plans for how she would use the prize money if she won ,by creating memories with her mum, who was tragically diagnosed with Parkinson’s at just 47 and spent her last few years with dementia.
Sharing the heartbreaking news on her Instagram on Tuesday morning, January 27, 2026, Rachel Duffy said she was “heartbroken” at the death of her “beautiful wee mummy.”
On Sunday, Rachel took to Instagram where she shared a montage of photos and an emotional message. She wrote: ‘Thank you Mummy, thank you for loving us so much.
‘Thank you for teaching us our worth. Thank you for so much kindness shown and taught. Thank you for endless laughs and lots of fun. Thank you for helping us parent our babies. Thank you for being a shoulder to cry on when we needed one.
‘Thank you for the many words of wisdom over the years. Thank you for showing us the true meaning of integrity. Thank you for giving us a beautiful life. Thank you for a lifetime of happy memories.
‘Thank you for being our mummy. We love you x’.
It comes after she won the BBC reality show The Traitors along with her fellow Traitor, Stephen Duffy.
Trevor Noah hosted the Grammys for a record sixth time after the show’s producer, Ben Winston, revealed ahead of the ceremony that he begged the comedian for his services.
“It got to December, and we hadn’t found anybody that we absolutely loved. I sent him a video, and I was literally, I was on my knees in this video, and I said, ‘Please look at this incredible lineup that we’ve got on the show — the only thing that’s missing is you,’” the producing executive admitted. “‘Come back and do one final year, it’s the last year on CBS, let’s make it your last year too.’”
While Noah generously accepted the offer, the ceremony ended up on Donald Trump’s radar due to the very hosting stint which Winston went all out for.
The American president denounced the Epstein joke which the Grammys host made at his expense and threatened legal action.
“The Grammy Awards are the WORST, virtually unwatchable! CBS is lucky not to have this garbage litter their airwaves any longer,” the head of state shared via his Truth Social profile.
Taking a dig at Noah, Trump continued, “The host, Trevor Noah, whoever he may be, is almost as bad as Jimmy Kimmel at the Low Ratings Academy Awards.”
“Noah said, INCORRECTLY about me, that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton spent time on Epstein Island. WRONG!!! I can’t speak for Bill, but I have never been to Epstein Island, nor anywhere close, and until tonight’s false and defamatory statement, have never been accused of being there, not even by the Fake News Media.”
For the record, Noah initiated his joke about Trump as he congratulated Billie Eilish for winning song of the year.
“There you have it, song of the year! Congratulations, Billie Eilish. Wow. That’s a Grammy that every artist wants, almost as much as Trump wants Greenland,” he said. “Which makes sense because, since Epstein’s gone, he needs a new island to hang out with Bill Clinton. I told you, it’s my last year! What are you going to do about it?”
Trump further listed George Stephanopoulos, host and former White House Communications Director, as someone he has successfully sued. While he told Trevor Noah to “get ready” because he plans to “have some fun” with him.
CEO Jensen Huang has rebuffed the reports claiming that Nvidia was considering retracting its fresh, enormous investment in OpenAI,
Nvidia is poised to make its “largest ever investment” in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, despite recent reports suggesting that the deal may be under threat.
Huang dismissed claims of dissatisfaction with OpenAI as “nonsense”.
While Nvidia CFO Colette Kress stated in December 2025 that the company had not completed a definitive agreement with OpenAI, some senior officials in Nvidia have indicated that an official agreement between the two companies would soon be finalised.
How much is Nvidia investing in OpenAI?
The Nvidia CEO did not disclose the exact amount of the investment but clarified that it would be “nothing like” the $100 billion figure mentioned in the partnership agreement signed in September.
“We will definitely participate in the next round of financing, because it’s such a good investment,” Huang told reporters at a press conference, as reported by Bloomberg.
Being the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia produces a considerable amount of hardware that powers tools like ChatGPT and Sora.
Another point of note is that Nvidia’s technology is crucial to the AI data centres that OpenAI is gearing up to invest hundreds of billions in across the US. These data centres are expected to consume as much electricity as India in the process.
Huang’s clarification on Nvidia’s OpenAI investment comes on the heels of a report from The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, which dubbed the deal “on ice.”
The Journal also reported that Huang had privately expressed concerns regarding “a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach” and the increasing competition from competitors like Google and Anthropic.
Surprisingly, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman also expressed competition concerns recently.
He announced in December a pause on other projects to focus on enhancing ChatGPT’s user experience, after Google’s Gemini 3 outperformed it in various benchmarking tests.
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