Reeva: A Mother's Story (12 page)

Barry and I both felt nervous about her going to Johannesburg, but it was so exhilarating for her. When she had first learnt to drive, she had a little beat-up old car which her father bought her, because that’s what they all want at that age. Barry said that sending her to Johannesburg in the beat-up car would be like sending her naked. He scraped together to get her a new car and bought her a brand-new little Spark. He just wanted her to be safe.

I’d had Reeva at home with me for twenty-two years when she spread her wings and flew off to pursue her own life. We had an arrangement to have long weekly phone calls: Saturday was my day, Sunday was Barry’s. Just as I’d written in the letter for her eighteenth birthday, I had no worries about her on many levels. I knew she was sensible, intelligent and very together – but I did still fear her heart might get her into trouble.

Reeva went off with Abigail’s words ringing in her ears:

‘Keep grounded. Remember where you come from. Don’t get lost. Don’t get caught up in the cattiness. Be true to yourself. And forget about these riffraff jockeys! You need to go to Johannesburg and you need to find yourself a nice man, not a boy, a man, who is going to look after you and treat you well.’

Johannesburg

In 2006 Reeva packed a single suitcase and moved to Johannesburg to follow her dream of being a model. If she had stayed in Port Elizabeth and carried on with her law studies, she would almost certainly be alive today. That’s a difficult fact for Barry to absorb because he always said he would prefer her to continue in law and not take up modelling as a career. In fact, whenever he spoke to her on the phone, he’d end the call by asking her when she was coming home. It was his sign-off, almost a joke, but not really. In the last few months of her life he even started calling her and begging her to come home. It was as if he had a feeling in his bones that she would come to harm in the city-slicker world she inhabited more than a thousand kilometres away from the slower pace of her home town. But I understood why Reeva felt the need to move away and take up an exciting opportunity. You have to let your children find their own vocation. Just as I urged Barry to get his licence and try his hand at racehorse training when we were first married, I supported Reeva in her desire to pursue modelling. I was so proud of our beautiful daughter. What mother wouldn’t be? And I’ve always been one to encourage people to give things a go.

We didn’t see Reeva for a year after she moved to Johannesburg. She found city life difficult and slightly alienating when she first moved there; she had to work hard to find a sense of belonging. Johannesburg is all about work, all about money. In comparison Port Elizabeth is a calm, sleepy coastal town which most young people leave behind as they go off to a big city – Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban – to earn a living and forge a career. I think she felt that if she came back for a short break, it would be hard to throw herself back into her Johannesburg whirl again. And, of course, she was afraid she might be tempted to go back to Wayne. She really loved him, you know.

I missed her so much that first year. When she came back for her first visit home, Barry and I both went to meet her at the airport and there were a lot of screeches and laughs, a real carry on. We’d all cry with laughter. I always kept her bedroom ready for her in my little cottage, but she often came and slept by me. On that first trip back, she came to the races to support Barry’s horse and of course I worked there too. When the races finished, all her friends came in. Wayne was the last to arrive but they kissed each other and she said, ‘I still love you, you know.’

Modelling gave Reeva a path and a direction. It is a world where image is everything, and that can make for a very competitive, judgemental environment. Each girl is selling an individual ‘look’, and it’s hard not to take it personally when that ‘look’ is rejected. Equally, each job is so hard to win that praise from your peers is rarely forthcoming. Reeva’s experience of modelling in Port Elizabeth was not so much about competition as about camaraderie. It wasn’t a profession; it was something she did for fun. As her mother, I knew she was in safe hands with Jane at ICE Models in Johannesburg and I knew Reeva had not underestimated the fact that modelling at national level required serious focus. To be ready to forge a career as a model, rather than prepare for an occasional shoot or assignment, she had to get into shape, and she had the brains to realise she was going to have to work on it. It wasn’t going to just happen. She could see what she needed to put in, in order to get well-paid assignments out of it. A lot of girls don’t see that. They’re not driven enough. But Reeva understood her shortcomings.

Before a model is cast for an editorial or TV commercial shoot, a brief goes out to the talent agencies describing the job for which models are to be auditioned. Thanks to Jane’s warnings about the need to push her personality, Reeva’s trump card was that she always made a huge effort to study the brief. If a client wanted a girl to appear in, let’s say, a TV coffee shop commercial in the guise of a corporate worker, Reeva would go out of her way to interpret the brief. She would figure that the client might not have the imagination to see what she’d look like dressed as an office worker if she turned up in the normal model outfit of leggings, flat shoes and casual top, so she would attend the casting looking polished and professional above and beyond. She always went the extra mile to get the booking. In between jobs, she worked extremely hard to maintain herself. She ate well and drank three litres of water a day. She went to the salon to keep her hair in tip-top colour and condition, and her nails camera-ready. She went to the gym to hone her body. She loved the whole business of skin care. A few years later, in 2008 or so, she would decide to have implants to boost the number of jobs she would be eligible to audition for. She underwent quite a transformation, but it was for the purpose of achieving her goals. Whereas some models would consider an
FHM
cover the pinnacle of a career, Reeva viewed it as a stepping stone.

Her portfolio contained a huge variety of styles and poses. She loved the play-acting side of modelling; she could take on a range of roles – from a tough-glam girl member of a SWAT team for a cinema commercial for Pin Pop lollipops to the yummy mummy cover girl for Afrikaans parenting magazine
Baba & Kleuter
. She flew between Johannesburg and Cape Town for the cities’ respective annual fashion weeks in October and July, and to film and shoot some of the leading national campaigns for brands such as Toyota, Clover and the Italian designer label Zui. When you get your
FHM
cover, they produce a book bound to the main magazine to present the new cover girl. In
Introducing Reeva
, she posed in roles based on a Marilyn Monroe theme. She could play lots of different parts and project different attitudes. I loved her modelling – because, as her mother, I loved bragging about it. She’d phone up and say, ‘Mummy, get this magazine and that magazine.’ I had to. I made it compulsory for her to tell me whenever she was in a publication, and then I’d go and get the magazine and show it to, well, anyone and everyone! She could be in a military-style autumn/winter fashion spread or a ‘new nudes’ summer special; she looked beautiful in full-on red-carpet glamour for Pallu, the exclusive designer clothing shop, and very sophisticated for Zui, an Italian emporium. It’s horrible really, bragging that way, but I was so proud of her. That’s how I felt. Your kids are your pride and joy, aren’t they? You gave birth to them.

Barry’s attitude towards her modelling did not become more enthusiastic. Of course he was proud of her and the effort she put in, but he didn’t like the
FHM
shoots. He’d say, yes, they’re beautiful pictures, but she hasn’t got enough clothes on. He was worried that the more visible she became, the more she’d be at risk of being followed home or attacked after leaving an event. He just didn’t like her being so far away in Johannesburg.

Through sheer hard work, her profile grew year by year in the seven years she spent modelling professionally from 2006 to 2013. As
FHM
editor Hagen Engler commented after she was killed, she was just so obsessed with making something out of herself and prepared to do what she needed to get there. Even though she was such a friendly, lovely person, she was ruthlessly dedicated to that part of being a model. She would do a hundred press-ups, a hundred sit-ups, lunges, squats, the stretches, the weights. I mean, her body was superb when she got her
FHM
break, but she had to toil away in the gym to get that. She had to go back to be appraised and re-appraised three times. Twice Hagen sent her away and said she needed to hone her physique harder. That is the sort of dedication she went to Johannesburg prepared to commit to – and it wasn’t easy, not least because she worried that she was wasting her hard-earned degree status.

Work meant work on many levels – maintaining her body and appearance in the gym and salon, attending industry events, attending auditions, then participating in the shoots either in studios or locations. The rhythms of the modelling season structured her life in Johannesburg and with it came a social life in terms of launches, industry fairs, fashion shows and red-carpet fixtures, and access to a widening circle of friends involved in the business. I’d go to stay with her and get a glimpse of how she spent her downtime. It was fun – pizza and drinks with friends, chilling in front of movies because work could be so intense, baking for the girls at the agency and lounging at home with her cats.

She caught up with her fellow law student friend Kristin when she, too, came to the big city to work for Standard Bank about a year later. Kristin gathered that Reeva had been exposed to some bad experiences in her settling-in period when she first moved to Johannesburg, but that she soon found her own life. Early on Reeva spoke about how guilty she felt at times that she wasn’t doing something with her degree, but Kristin told her not to think like that, reminding her that modelling meant she could pay her bills and have the freedom to pick and choose jobs, and that she could return to law later. At some stage she did speak to advocates about taking up a pupillage. She went for some interviews, but it never panned out. The problem is you earn very little money when you take up a pupillage, and it’s a full-time training. It would be impossible to support herself without a job and impossible to combine with modelling.

Modelling demands a mindset and a physical set of requirements beyond most nine-to-five jobs. Abigail and Reeva were both back in Port Elizabeth for Christmas early in their five-year plan. On one level, Reeva had grown comfortable as the polished, urban-based model, but at heart she loved reverting to relaxed country girl at home with us. The girls spent a lot of time together wearing old clothes and going around in bare feet. Reeva loved Abigail’s family farm – they have a pool and horses and lots of animals. One night she slept over and the next day Reeva was up bright and early in a pair of luminous Crocs, helping to muck out the stables, pushing the wheelbarrow while Abigail shovelled up the horse poo.

Abigail was shocked by how very, very skinny Reeva had become to fit in with the modelling ideal. So, too, was her old maths teacher who bumped into her in the Walmer shopping mall. As her mother, I preferred to see her in her more natural voluptuous shape too, but it was an indication of how disciplined life as a model had to be. ‘Our relationship was always that I was the dead frank honest one. There was no making it pretty with me,’ Abigail tells me. ‘Reeva, on the other hand, was the one who loved everybody and could be a bit airy-fairy. I remember saying to her, “
What
has happened to you?” And she was like, “Yeah, well, it’s very hard, it’s very competitive, there’s a lot of cattiness.” Snacking on Nachos that my mom had made and drinking bottles of absolutely magnificent pink JC Leroux and fruit juice, we spent hours talking about how she was coping, how she was going to continue to cope, and I remember saying to her again, “Just make sure you don’t lose yourself in that place. Always remember the barefoot Reeva.”’

As we saw at her funeral, the reality was that Reeva lived two lives. She lived a PE life and she lived a Johannesburg life, and those two lives did not mix. Those friends did not mix. She kept her work life separate from her home life. She could do that because she didn’t differentiate between people herself; she had an innate way of fitting in and she had a natural way of stopping to count her blessings whatever situation she found herself in. As Abigail put it, it didn’t matter if you were a homeless person or Miss Hoity Toity, it didn’t matter what walk of life you came from, Reeva always had the time of day for everyone – and that was her gift. But thinking of others before herself meant she took on everyone’s problems and rarely complained herself. She used to say that she was working to look after us in our old age. For a girl who craved family life, and adored her extended family, the move to Johannesburg gave her some inner turmoil. She didn’t like being separated from her family but at the same time she knew it was her best chance at earning a good living and establishing the profile which would later allow her to practise her ambitions in law.

The good news was that soon after Reeva arrived in Johannesburg she met a wonderful man, Warren Lahoud, a perfect gentleman who treated her like a queen. He was such a good person, ambitious, hard working, going forward in life, and he treated her so well. He was so thoughtful. On her birthday he would scatter a trail of rose petals from the door to the bed, and buy her piles of presents. He would choose clothes in shops for her and put them on the side so she could go back and try them on and be absolutely sure she really loved them. He bought her Jimmy Choo shoes, and a dishwasher because he didn’t want her doing dishes. He whisked her to New York and the first thing they did when they got off the plane was to find a legendary Starbucks in New York City and have a coffee. (There are no Starbucks outlets in South Africa.) Warren was like someone sent from heaven in man terms.