Overview

• Beverly Johnson, the first Black woman to grace the cover of Vogue, reveals she used cocaine and severely restricted her diet to maintain a thin figure during her early modeling career in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Johnson recalls being congratulated for her thinness and was led to believe that cocaine was not addictive, with the drug being used by models because it suppressed appetite.
• She describes her diet at the time as consisting of two eggs and a bowl of brown rice a week, which often left her shaking and needing to eat something, like a bag of M&Ms, to stop the shakes.
• Johnson's wake-up call came when her mother made her look at herself in a three-way mirror, allowing her to see the skeletal state of her body for the first time.
• Johnson, now 71, has been sober for over 50 years and is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of her historic Vogue cover.