A Father's Love (4 page)

Working with Claudia Schiffer shifted my career into overdrive. Modeling opportunities flowed in my direction, and calls came for jobs at much higher levels. Over the next eight years or so, I found myself in ads with some of the most beautiful women in the world, including Heidi Klum, with whom I did a Caress body wash television commercial. I played the role of Heidi's boyfriend.

In 1997, I was chosen as “Mr. November” by
Cosmopolitan
magazine, a distinction that supposedly set me apart as one of America's most eligible bachelors. In the ad for
Cosmo
, I was the down-to-earth guy who loves to work with his dad as a “hunky” fishing guide. Actually, that was not much of a stretch for me, since my dad did indeed own a charter fishing boat, and I loved working with him. Of course, the magazine portrayed me as their sexy fisherman, which was okay with me. The photos came out so well that
Cosmo
chose me to be on their “Man of the Year” cover. I was just a regular guy from New Jersey, and felt lucky and humbled to be selected.

I made some good friends in the modeling world, but I never immersed myself in the wilder, more debauched aspects of the job to get ahead. My attitude was basically “Here I am and I hope you think my image can help sell your products. But if not, that's okay.” I was always professional, cooperative, and respectful, but I refused to cross certain moral boundaries that others suggested might enhance my career. I was careful not to put myself in compromising positions, or if I found myself at an event that looked as though it could spiral downward, I'd greet the hosts and then make as hasty and gracious an exit as possible. Sometimes I'd simply leave.

Little by little I established a reputation of personal integrity in the business. One person described me thus: “David is very professional; he's real, doesn't have an attitude, and is always a pleasure to have on the set. He can sure fill out an Armani suit, and he can sell a swim suit or surf trunks. He's the guy we will use for our job.”

Every agency that takes on a model hopes he or she will ascend to the top financial tiers in the business, and apparently some people thought that I had the potential to work at those levels, although I never really thought of myself that way. In fact, I often wondered,
Why me?
There are thousands and thousands of attractive people out there, and only one guy gets the job. To me it felt like a numbers game, and I was the lucky one. Sometimes I'd be in New York when I'd get a call to fly to South Africa the next day. Although I was happy to do it, I thought,
I'm flying halfway around the world to Cape Town to be in some pictures. Surely, there are a lot of local guys in that city who could do the shoot just as well or better than I could.
I never understood why they wanted me. But I enjoyed the work, and keeping myself healthy and in good physical shape was something that came naturally to me, so it was not exactly drudge work. Sure, the hours sometimes could be horrendous, and the jobs often entailed spontaneous arduous travel to distant exotic locations, but if that was the worst of it, I could handle that.

My career was going well, so I bought a three-bedroom town house in Eatontown, New Jersey, not far from my folks. I traveled so much the town house became a marvelous sanctuary for me, a place of rest and restoration each time I returned from another hectic nation-hopping trip.

Since I lived close to New York, it was only natural that television commercials should be a part of my portfolio, although my first national commercial was actually shot in Chicago. I appeared in a Christmas holiday ad for Sears clothing, presenting my female “love interest” a gift from under the tree. It was great fun, and the pay was fantastic. I joined the Screen Actors Guild and appeared in more television commercials, for which I not only earned a good paycheck but also received residuals, a pension, health insurance, and other perks. I never ruled out going back to law school, but my career was working out well, so I kept going with it. I think one of the main reasons for my longevity in this very fickle industry was the fact that I was just a regular-looking guy. I didn't do fad diets or work out constantly to keep my body buff. I was just me, an ordinary, approachable guy with whom people could relate.

Even my dad finally came to appreciate my success. At first, Dad regarded my modeling as some sort of sissy career, but when he saw how hard I was working, and how successful I had become, he changed his opinion. He was even proud of me.

I did a lot of work in Florida for a while, and didn't go back to Italy for a couple of years. But then one day I received a call from an agency asking me if I was interested in working there again. My four-year relationship with a woman from Indiana had recently ended, so I thought perhaps the change of scenery would be good for me.

Ironically, I thought I was done with that chapter in my life, but I chose to return. That decision proved to be one of the best choices—and one of the most fateful—I would ever make.

W
HILE IN MILAN IN 1996, I HAD LIVED AT THE GUISTI APARTMENTS for most of that year, but when I returned to the city in 1997, a flatmate from Australia and I rented an apartment at the Residence La Darsena, just off Via Vigevano, a main thoroughfare running alongside a canal in a historic section of the city. Over the next eight months, I worked consistently. I enjoyed the city and the Italian people, and met new friends. A successful model's lifestyle outside the work environment can be as frenetic as he or she wants it to be. Advertisers constantly hold events at which it is desirable to have “pretty people” in attendance, so it is possible for a highly sought-after model to flit from party to party almost any night of the week.

I didn't do much of that. I hit some of the celebrity events, but for the most part I preferred hanging out with ordinary, everyday people like me. Some models I knew, as in any business, liked to put on airs, perpetually giving the impression that “I'm the best.” Others leaned more toward an uneducated, rough “punk” image; some were involved in lifestyles and activities that didn't appeal to me, and some were simply good-looking, athletic types. I preferred to hang out with the men and women who just wanted to make a buck, travel, and meet interesting people; I shied away from the unsavory elements of the fashion industry.

 

 

EARLY IN 1997 my landlord in Milan informed my flatmate and me that we were going to have to move to another location in the complex because the corporate owner of our apartment planned to return soon. At first, we were not overjoyed at having to move, but the landlord made it all go as easy as possible. One day, my flatmate spotted an attractive young woman entering the flat at the corner of the hall, right next door to our new apartment.

“Did you see her?” he asked me excitedly.

“See who?”

“The girl next door to us!”

“No, I missed her,” I said.

Over the next few weeks, I noticed a beautiful fair-haired young woman using the same elevator as we did. We'd nod to each other, but that was all. Then one afternoon as I was coming back to my apartment, we acknowledged each other as we passed in the hallway. She had a vibrant, bubbly smile. I watched as she continued on past our apartment to the door at the end of the hall. It was the woman my flatmate had mentioned, all right.

A number of models and other people associated with the fashion industry lived at our apartment complex, so I guessed that the woman and I might have some common acquaintances and interests. She seemed to have her own place; I never noticed her with a roommate.

My Australian flatmate and I were intrigued as we tried to figure out who she was. Once when we saw her going into her apartment with an older gentleman, my flatmate suggested that he must be her “sugar daddy.” We later learned that she was a student working on her master's degree at Domus Academy, an Italian school for fashion design, and that the man was her father, who had come to visit her and see Italy.

I was hurrying out to work one afternoon, crossing Via Vigevano, when I saw her heading toward me carrying a small take-out pizza box. She seemed to be on her way home from school. We hadn't really spoken, except for a few words in the elevator, but now she was right in front of me. I felt compelled to say something. I stopped in the street and said, “Hello, I'm David, your next-door neighbor. I've seen you in Residence La Darsena.” I was rather shy, but I ventured to ask, “Would you like to have a pizza together? I'll go get one.” The remark sounded silly the moment it came out of my mouth, but the woman didn't seem to mind. On the other hand, she didn't offer any encouragement either.

“Sorry, it's a personal pizza,” she said. “It's just for one.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Maybe some other time.” I hurried to turn away and get on across the street so she wouldn't see me blushing with embarrassment.

Much to my surprise, as I was turning away, she called out to me, “But wait!”

Wait?
I turned back to look at her and she smiled warmly at me. “My friend is coming over to pick me up around nine-thirty or ten tonight, and we're going to a party. Would you like to come?”

That was an offer I couldn't refuse. As soon as I got in from work and washed up, I was ready to go. Right on time, I knocked on her door.

Her name, I learned, was Bruna Bianchi Carneiro Ribeiro. She was twenty-three years old and had come to Milan from her home near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to get her master's degree in fashion design. Prior to her enrollment at Domus, she had done her undergraduate work in communications in Brazil, and some other studies in Italy. She told me that her grandfather was originally from Italy and had moved to Brazil, the homeland of her grandmother. Although born in Brazil, Bruna possessed Italian citizenship, too, and sometimes traveled on her Italian passport. Since Ribeiro was a common name in Brazil, she went by Bruna Bianchi, which her parents felt was a more prestigious, sophisticated name, and sounded more Italian.

I liked Bruna immediately. She was warm and friendly, a beautiful person inside and out. She had a perpetual sparkle in her eyes. She was also very bright. She spoke several languages, was cultured and sophisticated, and quick to laugh. Bruna didn't smoke or do drugs, and she seemed averse to alcohol because she had seen the negative effects it had on her father. In one of our first conversations, she confided to me that her father “drank too much.”

She had invited me to the party in the hope that she might be able to fix me up with her friend. I wasn't interested in her friend, but I sure liked Bruna. She was dating another man, though, so we struck up a friendship, meeting occasionally at the pizzeria around the corner from our building. One evening, as we talked while eating our pizza, Bruna looked at me with searching eyes. I could tell that she was pondering something, but she didn't reveal her thoughts.

Our first real date was to Lake Como on a cool, rainy day. I was happy it was raining, because we had only one umbrella, so we had to stay close as we walked. Shortly after that, Bruna told me that she had ended the relationship with the man she'd been dating. “We really hadn't been dating very long,” she explained to me. “And he was kind of possessive. More important, if I can feel something for someone else, I must not really care about him,” she said demurely.

“You feel something for someone else?” I asked.

Bruna flashed her gorgeous smile and hugged me. I was hooked.

Our courtship was like a dream come true. Living in Milan was romantic in itself, and we did everything together. We attended some of the social events associated with the fashion business in Italy, and some of Bruna's school events, but mostly we enjoyed the simple things. Bruna loved movies, so we often went out to dinner and then rented a movie. We took day trips to Venice and Switzerland, which were fabulous, but we didn't have to do anything extravagant like that to have fun; we simply enjoyed being together.

During Bruna's spring break before her last semester at Domus Academy, she and I traveled to New Jersey for a brief visit. When I described her to my friend Bobby Chang, I told him, “I think I met the girl I'm going to marry.” Bobby teased me, because I was constantly singing or whistling the old mid-sixties Jobim bossa nova hit “Girl from Ipanema,” a song first recorded by Pery Ribeiro (no relation to Bruna), and later made popular by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz. For months the song reverberated in my mind. Bruna was, after all, a Brazilian beauty, and we were in love.

While Bruna and I were in New Jersey later that summer, I invited her parents, Raimundo and Silvana, and her brother, Luca, to join us. They readily accepted. It wasn't the first time Bruna or her family members had been to the United States. Before Bruna and I met, the family had visited New York, Florida, and other locations.

They had never been to our peaceful little oasis in Monmouth County, however, so when Bruna's family saw it, they fell in love with the area. They stayed with me in my town house for most of the summer. During that time, they saw everything about me—good or bad—including the way I lived, the car I drove, my family and friends. I had nothing to hide, so I readily shared everything with them and their daughter. My attitude was, “This is who I am. If you are looking for someone who loves you, here I am. If you're looking for someone who owns a mansion and a yacht, that's not me.”

Bruna and her family responded positively. They loved me—or at least they said they did—and they loved New Jersey, especially the clean, quiet, safe suburban area in which I lived. It was the best of both worlds: we were less than an hour away from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, we were within minutes of the expansive Atlantic coast beaches, and we lived in a small-town environment where people actually called one another by their first names. For better or worse, Bruna knew what she was getting into when she fell in love with me. And so did her parents and brother.