Rolling Stone Interview

Gisele Bundchen, who at the age of twenty makes about $7,000 an hour and $5 million a year as the world's most sought-after fashion model, wants to see fireworks. She wants reds and whites and oranges to bloom and pulse in front of her eyes, and thunder-crack explosions to pound from her ears all the way down to the curling, clear-coated tips of her toenails. She wants to shiver with excitement. Only this will delight her. "I do love fireworks," she says breathlessly, "and I have missed them before, and I can't miss them again - oh, that would be horrible!"

There is a problem, however. The problem is that she is in Brazil, her home country, working a fashion show in Sao Paulo, and the fireworks are tomorrow in Los Angeles, home of her beloved bungalow Number Eighty-five at the Chateau Marmont hotel, as well as of Leonardo DiCaprio, who at the moment is still her beau. Those fireworks are a long way off, and time is running short. But it's her last day on the job here, and maybe she can catch the last plane out. It leaves in eleven hours. "I've got to catch that flight," she says. "I am not losing those fires."

So that's her plan, to get to L.A. in time for fireworks. But, really, like anyone else with a plan, she will just have to wait and see what happens.

What's happening now to Gisele is happening inside the W Cabeleireiros beauty parlor at the Patio Higienopolis shopping mall in Sao Paulo. An arty-looking guy in yellow-tinted shades is fooling with her hair, and a glum-looking woman in a white smock is laboring over her feet, near a bowl of foot water. She is surrounded by a number of other people, including her Brazilian agent, Monica Monteiro, and two of her five sisters: handsome Raquel, who is older, and beautiful Gabby, who is younger. And there sits Gisele, laughing in that throaty Brazilian way of hers, babbling away in Portuguese, holding her fingers up to scissor in on a pre-lit and passed Marlboro.

Sao Paulo is where Gisele got her start in the modeling business. It's a great big, honking, stinking city, but they love her here. She's been in town for six days so far, living out of a hotel, modeling bikinis on the catwalk at night and playing the rest of the time. Briefly, she gives an accounting of her last forty-eight hours. Two nights ago, she went dancing until 5:30 in the morning. She struggled out of bed four hours later, exhausted, and drove to the beach. She beached all day long, then returned to her hotel room and "just sat there like a peeg, eating.'' At midnight, she fell asleep; after rising this morning around 9:30, she brushed her teeth, ordered breakfast and began packing to make her Los Angeles getaway.

"I think it's going to be a little bit of a rush," she says speculatively, "but I do so want to make it."

Silent for a moment, she takes a drag on her cigarette and allows as how she'd much rather be smoking a Parliament but that the brand is hard to find in her country.

She speaks quickly, melodically, charmingly, volubly, dizzyingly, jumping from thought to thought. Soon she is holding forth on her sleeping habits. "Sometimes when it's too hot,'" she says, "I just sleep in my underwear. If it's colder, I sleep in pajamas. I don't like to feel closed in. I like no pillows. I like very fluffy beds. I sleep on my stomach and sometimes on my side, but never on my back. Now, if I have my boyfriend with me, I kick him out of bed, because I move around a lot. I'm the worst person. I steal blankets."

Suddenly, the arty fellow pops up in front of Gisele proffering a fresh and evidently quite rare pack of Parliaments.

"Oh, my favorites!" cries Gisele, snatching them.

Leaving her chair, she stands in front of a mirror, one hip cocked, giving herself the eye. She has plump pink lips, a fine array of freckles, a wild tangle of chestnut brown hair and mellow, mischievous blue eyes. She also has the longest legs, the trimmest torso and a bosom most sizable. She's looking at herself like she's quite a package - and she is. According to the fashion world, her presence alone at a fashion show automatically makes it a success. She has just about got it all, and it's immediately apparent whenever she hits a runway, all aeronautic gloss and pneumatic thrust. "It's been a long time since we've had a model that can walk," says Harper's Bazaar editor in chief Kate Betts. "Plus, she has a great personality, she's funny and sophisticated, and she has a great body."

Indeed, it's that body that really sets her apart - specifically, her breasts. Those breasts of hers have been credited with putting an end to the miserable reign of modestly endowed waifs like Kate Moss. Consequently, they're also said to have ushered in the Return of the Sexy Model, as Vogue put it on a recent cover deeply illuminated by Gisele. They are, in other words, a sensation (one fashion writer dubbed them "global superstars''), though not a sensation that anyone but Gisele's intimates will ever get to see in their entirety, because Gisele, it seems, is not that kind of model.

"I don't wear transparent," she likes to say. "If the designers ask me to wear see-through, I say no. I simply won't do it. I don't feel comfortable about people seeing my nipples."

After the toe, hair, fingernail and massage work is complete, Gisele and her companions are ushered into a side room, where a restaurateur from downstairs in the mall has put on quite a spread. There's a mountainous crispy salad for Gisele, followed by a rack of lamb for Gisele and the tenderest kabobs of beef for Gisele, all of which she consumes with gusto.

She has ten hours until her plane leaves. The plan, she says between mouthfuls, is to stay in Los Angeles for five days, then she's off to South Africa for four days on safari and three days exploring the beaches, then she returns to New York, where she has an apartment in Manhattan and a boondocks cabin near Woodstock.

In the midst of this air-puffed chitchat, Gisele's agent Monica coughs discreetly and begins talking to Gisele in Portuguese. Words flap back and forth, and suddenly it seems that Gisele, blue eyes shining, is no longer going to South Africa strictly for fun. It turns out that maybe she has a modeling job in South Africa, and that's the reason she won't be able to attend the haute-couture shows in Paris, which will be going on at the same time and will somehow have to survive without her this year.

The feeling seems to be that if Gisele simply skipped those shows for something as frivolous as a vacation, she would be in danger of a thrashing at the hands of the world's unnecessarily Gisele-deprived designers.

"Oh, they would be so pissed off!" she says. "Like, they're going to kill me. They're going to be like, 'Gisele, you can't do that to us!' If they discover I'm taking time off to go to Af-ri-ca!!" - she shouts the word - "they're going to come after me and kick my ass."

She shrieks with laughter, puts down a lamb bone and in a quieter voice says, "Anyway, I don't like Paris so much, and it's only eight shows. I mean, don't tell them that, of course. But everyone always thinks they're so important. And I'm sure they are. But to me, my happiness is more important."

She smacks her lips and returns to her food.