Supermodel Paulina Porizkova: "It's really freaking hard to be a woman over 50"
The face on this fashion shoot is likely familiar. Paulina Porizkova was a cover girl in the 1980s and '90s. Now, 54, the supermodel is on assignment again, as "Sunday Morning" witnessed for Harper's Bazaar
"You haven't always loved modeling," said "CBS This Morning" co-host Anthony Mason.
"It's true; I don't really love modeling," Porizkova replied. "But what it afforded me was the world."
Her husband, Ric Ocasek, had just died last September. It was Porizkova who found him. "It was horrifying. It was the worst moment in my life," she said.
They had two sons together, but had been separated since 2017.
Mason asked, "You said the age difference became a problem?"
"Suddenly in our marriage it seemed like only one of us wanted to be married," Porizkova said, "and that was me! I just know that it's really hard to be married to somebody if you're the only one putting in all the work. And maybe it was age; maybe he just was tired. Maybe I was too – maybe I took too much energy to love. I don't know. It's possible."
"You were separated, but you still lived together?" Mason asked.
"Yeah. He was still the man that I loved and that I had grown up with. And I couldn't really imagine life without him."
She'd even accompanied Ocasek when The Cars were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. She wanted, she says, to stay friends: "Because I couldn't imagine not," she said, tearing up. "I didn't know how life would work that way."
CBS News' Anthony Mason and Paulina Porizkova. CBS News
They'd begun divorce proceedings when Ocasek died suddenly. But the real shock came when Porizkova, who says she put all of her modeling earnings into the marriage, learned she'd been cut out of her husband's will, along with two of his children from an earlier marriage: "It's made the grieving process really, really tricky. Because I would love to just be able to be sad and miss him, and not also feel this incredible hurt of his betrayal."
Mason asked, "You feel betrayed?"
"Oh, oh yeah. I feel betrayed. I sure do."
"Do you have any sense of why he would have gotten to that point?"
"No."
"So, you're not gonna get an answer to that question."
"I'm never gonna get an answer. And that sucks."
Paulina Porizkova says she is working her way through it, through the depression and the sorrow.
"So, where are you now, mentally?" Mason asked,
"Yesterday I was kind of having a nervous breakdown," she laughed. "And today I'm feeling a little bit stronger. And in a way, this is freeing me. It's really, really scary. I didn't necessarily want it. But this is what I got. And so, I have to learn how to use my wings now."
For more info:
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon.
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