Donyale Luna

American model and actress

Peggy Ann Freeman (August 31, 1945 – May 17, 1979), known professionally as Donyale Luna, was an American model and actress who gained popularity in Western Europe during the late 1960s. Generally cited as "the first Black supermodel", Luna was the first African American model to appear on the cover of the British edition of Vogue, in March 1966. Luna made several underground films with Andy Warhol beginning in 1965, and following the experimental film Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966), she appeared in Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968) and Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969).

Donyale Luna as she later became known, was born Peggy Ann Freeman in Detroit, Michigan, to working class parents Nathaniel Freeman and Peggy Freeman (née Hertzog) in 1945. She was one of three daughters, Lillian, Peggy Ann, and Josephine. Her father had moved to Detroit from Georgia as part of the Great Migration. Her father, of African American heritage, worked in production at the Ford plant, and her mother, of African American and German heritage, worked as a secretary for the Young Women's Christian Association and had been given the nickname 'Big Peggy' to differentiate her from Peggy Ann, who was "Little Peggy". Luna's parents married and divorced on four separate occasions due to their "headstrong characters" and Nathaniel's relatives’ alcoholism. Luna and her sisters had a "financially stable upbringing in a middle class neighbourhood of Detroit" on Scotten Avenue. As a child, her father frequently took her on trips to local cinemas, and, in summer, to swim at the "Kronk Gym" in Detroit. She attended the Detroit High School of Commerce, where she studied data processing, and Cass Technical High School, where she studied journalism, performing arts and languages, and was in the school choir. Outside of school, she participated in local community theatre and the experimental Concept East Theater. It was during this time—at age 18—that she began calling herself "Donyale George Luna.” This was thought to have "been her way of dealing with a turbulent home life" when her mother began raising the family as a single parent. She was also said to have spoken with an accent as "Donyale", which "she spoke not with a broad A or a French R, but in an accent she'd invented". Her mother said its tone "was like she was singing". She was not a "fashion conscious" student; her attire mostly consisting of "simple black skirts and long loose sleeved tops.” She stated that in her time in Cass Technical, she "wasn't accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny, and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realizing I was strange." In January 1965, her mother fatally shot her father in self defense as he was reportedly abusive, coming to Luna's childhood home drunk and threatening her mother "just steps away from the family home.” Lillian witnessed the incident, acknowledging the shooting to be accidental. In 1966, she reported to a journalist, "My mother is worried about me. She doesn't know that I have already been hurt." For the next five years, Luna divided her time between Europe and North America. She professed during the filming of Salome in 1971 that she wished to quit modeling and focus on acting, and that she "professo la magia y el'amore e vivo en el mondo vio, deliziomente surreale" (speaks of magic and love, living in a deliciously surreal world) having become heavily influenced by Surrealism and New Age thought by this time; however, she continued accept modeling work in the 1970s. By 1972, when she had moved to Rome, she was working for Danish photographer Gunnar Larsen, modeling for the couturier Ted Lapidus alongside Veruschka and Jean Shrimpton on the streets of Paris, earning "$1000 for the day" ($6,250 in 2020).

In 1963, near Detroit’s Fisher Building, Luna met English photographer David McCabe. Her first job as a model was a shoot for Mademoiselle starring Woody Allen. In November 1964, Luna moved out of her aunt's apartment and into an apartment on Broadway in New York City, sharing the space with a roommate. In 1964, working as a model for Paco Rabanne, Luna witnessed American journalists spitting in the face of Rabanne because his fashion show used only Black models. Nancy White had Luna's likeness sketched into an illustration for the January 1965 cover of Harper's Bazaar, replacing a pre planned cover—the first Black person ever put on the cover of Harper's Bazaar in its then 98 years of publication. However, Luna was portrayed as ethnically ambiguous. The sketch was her first work for Harper's Bazaar, and included six other illustrations in the January 1965 issue. In the April 1965 edition she was again photographed by Avedon in the "What's Happening" editorial, along with Paul McCartney, Jean Shrimpton, and Ringo Starr. In the same month, Luna received news of her father's death but decided against returning to Detroit home for his funeral. Around this time, Luna also began having problems with Avedon. In an interview with an Italian magazine in 1975, she recalled that "The more successful she became, the more controlling and possessive her fashion photographer manager became". Luna's career began to slow down when she met with the color bar of print publishing at the time. Southern U. S. advertisers had reported complaints against the inclusion of Luna's images in Harper's Bazaar, pulling their advertising revenue, with readers cancelling subscriptions. Designers Mainbocher and Norman Norell refused to dress Luna in their clothes, and Harper's Bazaar owner Hearst Communications had stopped Avedon working with Luna after her contract expired. Keenan further wrote how the othering "exotic Black model trope" perpetrated by white media creators that "Luna's breakthrough into the glossy magazines meant that from then on a Black model might actually have some sort of career in front of her yet extraordinary as she was, Ms. Luna did not have a style that other women could adopt. "She looked more like she was going to attack you," wrote one Black girl. White fashion editors used her and immediate successors for impact, as freakish clothes horses on which they could photograph their outrageous garments. [Her] acceptance no doubt boosted the morale of the Black community, but she could not give them a look of their own." Following the death of her father and a short lived marriage of 10 months in New York, Luna had a nervous breakdown and spent time recovering in hospital at the end of 1965. Two years later, she told The New York Times that she fled New York for Europe at the end of 1965, when she found "they said beautiful things on one side and turned around and stabbed you in the back." Living in London, she was described in Jet magazine as "the most photographed girl of 1966 challenging Jean Shrimpton for position (and bankroll) as the model most in demand in Europe's haute couture houses." By 1966, Luna had become an internationally recognized model and in November 1966, Luna appeared in Cosmopolitan. In April 1967 Donyale also frequented Trude Heller's discotheque in Greenwich Village and covered a number of albums for Blue Note Records such as Lush Life, Mustang, A New Conception, Let 'em Roll and Easy Walker. Luna appeared in American Vogue in August 1969 and in 1970 in an advertisement for a colored contacts company which she often wore, it was reported she "changes her eyes to match her moods as she flits through Rome's posh parties while picture making for Carlo Ponti."

She would return for a year between 1973 and April 1974, with her work later published and returning again between October 1974 and June 1975, to the US to do runway modeling in New York and California and Toronto. She appeared on the cover of Warhol's magazine Interview for October 1974. Luna then appeared in a nude photo layout in the April 1975 issue of Playboy; the photographer being her husband, Luigi Cazzaniga. In the shoot she depicts herself as "characters of her own devising as an angel soaring over the Los Angeles skyline or as a mermaid perched on a rock by the Pacific Ocean". Powell notes, "Although fulfilling Playboy's prerequisite for female nudity, the photographs were far from titillating or sexually explicit. Luna seemed not only at ease with her nudity, but completely beyond societal structures and moral rectitude." She was also noted for defying the usual body type portrayed in the magazine of more "voluptuous" women with her smaller build, placing more emphasis on her spiritual "visions" which occurred on her photography shoots such as in Playboy. By this time however, Luna's modeling career began to decline due to a variety of factors; the first being a shift in her career from modeling into acting on her behalf; secondly a negative reception from mainstream popular media, which chastised her "dependency on drugs like heroin, LSD, pot and her eccentric behavior" (see Artistry section). Beverly Johnson in 1974 was asked about how her Vogue cover had been won by other Black women like Luna, said "[Luna] doesn't wear shoes winter or summer. Ask her where she's from—Mars? She went up and down the runways on her hands and knees. She didn't show up for bookings. She didn't have a hard time, she made it hard for herself."

Luna had initially planned to work in theatre having done work in local theatre in Detroit after school hours and doing bit parts in Detroit's repertory theatres. On British TV she appeared on Late Show London on March 14 and The Eamonn Andrews Show on May 1, 1966. On December 12, 1966 (11:15pm – 1:00am), she appeared on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. Luna appeared in several films produced by Andy Warhol, including his series of short Screen Tests in 1965. Among the "stars" Warhol engaged for these short films, each roughly four minutes, Luna is notable as one of four African Americans in the series. Critic Wayne Koestenbaum described Luna in the Screen Tests as "pure diva, presenting a delicious mobile excess of mannerism". Luna also appeared in the feature length Camp in 1965, Warhol's "satire of his own world" where she dances to the Ramsey Lewis Trio instrumental "The 'In' Crowd" wearing a backless dress and fur stole. Luna's only mainstream Hollywood film was the 1968 Otto Preminger comedy Skidoo, in which she was featured as the mistress of crime boss "God", who was portrayed by Groucho Marx. Preminger also signed her with MGM for 3 years after she secured the role at a party for Twiggy. By this period, she had sold her apartments in London and Paris to live full time in Italy and focus on acting. In 1969 she appeared as a background character in a television set in the film Dillinger is Dead. In the 1969 Federico Fellini film Fellini Satyricon, an Italian film portraying the fall of Ancient Rome, she portrayed the witch Oenothea, who according to one commentator, "in a trade off with a wizard long ago ended up with fire between her legs. And it's real fire too, because Fellini shows us a scene in which a long line of foolish looking peasants wait with unlit torches at Oenothea's bed. When their time comes, each devoutly places his torch between her legs to her sex, and, Poof." She then appeared in the 1970 Happening documentary film Soft Self Portrait of Salvador Dalí, a biography narrated by Orson Welles for French TV. Luna's last acting role was the title character in the 1972 Italian film Salomé, directed by Carmelo Bene. In May 1973 at the Cannes Film Festival, considering herself as an international star, she pitched her life story to European and American film production company executives, like Berry Gordy, who was at Cannes supporting Diana Ross in promoting her new film Lady Sings the Blues. Interest was sparked in relation to The Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, but the pitch was never taken any further. In an interview for the Italian publication Panorama, Luna claimed that Gordy based the 1975 film Mahogany on this pitch.

During the early morning hours of May 17, 1979, Donyale Luna died from a heroin overdose in a clinic in Rome at age 33. Luna was survived by her husband, Luigi Cazzaniga, and her 18 month old daughter, Dream.

Luna was known to be a muse of Salvador Dalí, and acted in many of the ways Dali did in accord with the philosophy of Surrealism. The American photographer William Claxton introduced Luna to Dalí when he met her in Catalonian village of Cadaqués, becoming Dali's lifelong muse whom he would refer to as "the reincarnation of Nefertiti". She could be found "lying on a bed of fresh fish" in Dali's home. She was also known to carry around a $1 million check according to the supermodel Pat Cleveland, "a legitimate cheque from her model agency" which she never took out and would try to pay with for a single meal, or her "entourage of boys who followed her everywhere" behind her in file, and because "she'd never sat in chairs, she'd always lounge" while her entourage would lay at her feet and with her penchant for going barefoot everywhere, Luna became known as an eccentric. The eccentric character of Donyale Luna can be seen as both a hyperbolic alter ego and an extension of a fake it until you make it persona which Luna may have thought of as a "metamorphosis". Luna used camp to give off a larger than life character, using hairpieces, lengthened eyelashes, and "a collection of blue, green, yellow, purple and orange [coloured contacts] which she changed like underwear" to play fast and loose with defined boundaries she may have had as Peggy Ann. She would both employ others and use her own designs for her clothes, experimenting with bindis on her third eye, and often wearing loose fitting or flowing garments. These two (Peggy Ann and Donyale) were succinctly distinct however to Freeman, she stated of viewing "Donyale" in photographs: "If I had seen something like me in a magazine as a child, I would have died laughing, or been scared I find my own photographs weird, terribly sophisticated and different". The alter ego of Donyale Luna was created in what Freeman termed future visioning, a New Age approach culminating when she completed attended Central High Theater in Detroit, a technique (drawing from pantomime and experimental dancing and acting) which allowed the individual to create an altogether new identity by drawing on traits seen in "visions" from a desired individual like Baker, to form a new identity. Luna would alter her attire, appearance, social circles, mannerisms and paralinguistic features like altering the pitch in her voice for instance, to create the character of Donyale, crafting subtle bodily perceptions to alter or shift the viewers perception of her as a Black body; too increase her pragmatical social prestige or standing. Exemplified in an advert for a polyester peasant blouse in 1966 for Ebony magazine, the iconography work was said to evoke the black and white images of Man Ray, acknowledging the shift of the early 20th century "visual modernism" morphed into the "disjuncted body" (see Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque and read Negro: An Anthology (1934) by Nancy Cunard, Hugh D. Ford, p. 417), a moving away from the classical Western notion of what a body should be, to one of "distorted corporeal forms" originating in African Arts, Expressionism and Cubism and the body language of Josephine Baker which Luna emulates in the advertisement to create a more "dynamic" image of herself and African American visual imagery. As a content creator, "Luna's referencing of [Baker and Nefertiti] within the European context signaled her identification with them", as Black women "heroines and tropes" which Luna used as a model to emulate what Black success could be presented as in an environment which responded to both figures to by "primitivizing, sexualizing and ultimately dehumanizing [them in] exotic or erotic roles that did not provide occupational transitions to more fulfilling, post spectacle lives". Brown notes of how (in the early 20th century) "the expression of primitive glamour by self consciously urban sophisticates such as Baker could equally be produced as a reimagining of subject object relations, a paradoxical critique and deployment of pleasures[,] despite the motion, vitality, energy and erotic fission imagined to be at the heart of the primitive. [Primitive glamour allowed for self assertion so that the primitive role] offered something more than crippled self expression: primitive glamour [relied] on the use of personae, impersonation, or a kind of eclipse of the human subject, [which although perilous] also offered substantial creative results [so] rather than silencing artists with the gag of stereotype or the limitations of the market, [Primitive glamour] often enabled the merging of the subject and object" questioning perceptions of who and what it was to be 'primitive', creating the formation of early Black glamour aesthetics in 1920's Europe, much as in Primitivism aesthetics. For instance in her "primitive" shoot with Harper's Bazaar dressed in animal print in 1965, Luna "construct[s] and perform[s] an oppositional Black glamour" by using the provided clothes or "[tangible] things [to] interpellate [her audience] in specific ways, combining narrative with history and materiality to structure specific gestures and movements [in] working with her own effective engagement with the material as "dances with things", undoing the work of glamour as a white racial project", thus creating an aspirational lifestyle for potential Black audiences. She was believed to have met the artist Mati Klarwein (who made psychedelic album covers for artists like Jimi Hendrix) through Sam Rivers, at an "occupational gathering" for Miles Davis in New York in 1964 where her likeness appears in his painting Time, of a circle of gold leaf surrounded by scimitars representing the earth and sky. In the circle sits a 'polymorphous figure an aggregate of fire, water, multiple faces of beautiful women, female breasts, male genitalia, rainbow patterns, animal heads, skulls derived from Tibetan and Hindu religious imagery topped off by Donyale Luna's trimorphic head', also being portrayed in 1967 as in a self portrait. "Klarwein dedicated Milk n' Honey (1973), his book of reproduced paintings". In Europe she was also a part of the 'rock music scene', having been featured in the Italian music video for Patty Pravo's song Michelle (1969). In her 1975 Playboy interview, she held the belief that beauty was 'something not physical but something beyond that', she also noted that children were more readily accepting of her form of 'beauty'. She reported to the Argentinian Press in 1969: "Beauty is something else, something inexplicable that each person carries inside. This form of beauty related to Her visions. There's a great division coming about on this planet. There are going to be a lot of people who will die because they just don't know how to live. They don't know what life's about, they don't know how to give, how to love nor do they want to. And those who are beautiful enough I don't mean physically but something beyond that they will have the chance to learn how to fly, to be beautiful, to rise above the level of the normal human to be superior beings first and eventually gods and goddesses." She anticipated a (spiritual) "armageddon" she called "The Great Division" due to her perception that other peoples lack of understanding between themselves would lead to this great divide (based on superficial issues like physical beauty) in the future which she foresaw.

Donyale Luna identified as multi racial. Throughout her life and career, Luna claimed to be of various, mixed ethnic backgrounds, often playing down her African American ancestry since being a teenager in Detroit. She would also claim to be of 'Polynesian' descent in high school. She often made up tall tales to make her seem more grandiose, part of the character of Donyale Luna she began in her teenage years, including beguiling stories designed to shock or amuse such as losing her parents in a car accident and being adopted, or replying to the question of her heritage with the line "I'm from the moon darling" which some have construed to mean she denied her heritage as a Black woman. Due to the prejudices of a white dominated industry where white was the default and Black the other, with racist language, dress, and behavior used toward her in work and everyday life in New York, she moved from North America to Europe "where she likely found an audience more accepting of her skin color", describing herself as "multi ethnic". In the Sunday Times Magazine in 1966, Harold Carlton hailed her as "the completely New Image of the Negro woman. Fashion finds itself in an instrumental position for changing history, however slightly, for it is about to bring out into the open the veneration, the adoration, the idolization of the Negro". With the advent of the civil rights movement in the United States 'so too did society's fascination with the "exotic" and "alien". Almost against her own will, she became a symbol. Some people declared her a Masai warrior, Gauguinesque, Nefertiti reborn. Others claimed she was another species entirely or from outer space!'. Time in 1966 called her a 'creature of contrasts. One minute sophisticated, the next fawnlike, now exotic and faraway'. The so called secondary market, however, was worth an estimated $15 billion and white advertisers who began working in the market preferred Luna's "otherworldy features" (her long limbs, "oval shaped face and almond eyes") not being traditionally readily associated with Black women, as they alienated other African Americans, and provided white advertisers with a manufactured sense of racial superiority and which may be considered as tokenism on the behalf of the advertising agencies involved. Jane Hoffman described the evolution of the acceptable negro from white passing models (first used in 1950s advertisements in magazines like Jet) to the 1960s replacement, the exotic negro, who was 'the Negro girl you'd think of as something else. She wasn't even beautiful just a weird creature, some kind of space thing, She had to be so bizarre that no [Black person] could identify with [them]'. This typecasting of Black models limited Hoffman's own chances because she was "not Negro enough" to be Black under the respectability politics of white industry standards for Black models at that time. White American society preferred 'exotic' Luna over women like Hoffman as they provided an existing false narrative which fuelled their preexisting media biases about Blackness and its otherness, reinforced existing stereotypes, excluded Black women, and narrowed the definition of what Black beauty could take the appearance of how an acceptable negro would appear, in opposition to whites who would be seen as the default of acceptability and whose appearance would not be called into question so easily. Indeed, they infantilized 'Black women [who] could be sexy, sinuous, glamorous marvellous entertainers [b]ut when it came it fashion magazines and advertising, [they] simply not exist. They were not considered to have the necessary spending power that publishers and agencies wanted to exploit.' All fashionable images of Black women were made through the primitivist lens which Baker herself used so successfully to create a new beauty standard in 1920s France. Until when in 1965 Luna broke the color barrier as a model and created new media content which showed an African American woman for the first time in high fashion magazines within visible beauty standards, prior to this an African American woman wearing scant clothing was 'the stuff of the white man's sexual fantasies [and until Luna the] kind of image a black girl could strive for; [that or to] never fall back on imitating whatever the current white style of beauty happened to be as the standard begins with Black beauty from the beginning. For years, [Black] girls [had] literally been through torture in their efforts to achieve the full creative range of hairstyles [using] dangerous hot combs or chemical solutions like sodium hydroxide or lye which could burn the hair away [or] styles of wigs that Black women wore in order to enhance their beauty in a myriad of ways beyond any limitations of tradition or culture. The same thing applied to cosmetics. The Supremes [then being] a perfect example of how Black girls built their glamour around their own ideals stemming from their own natural, rich and glorious beauty and so theirs was the look longed for by blacks from Brixton to Harlem: there was simply no one else you could try to imitate. Although claims are often made that comments like this is a sign that Luna was attempting to shift away from her African American heritage, she would go on to carry out a public anti racial discrimination campaign alongside David Anthony (of The Touchables fame) with clothing designed by Mary Quant, being shot by David Bailey. When she was denied service in 1968 in a Mayfair hotel, she also filed a complaint for racial discrimination with the board of racial discrimination. The American print journalist Judy Stone wrote a now infamous profile of Luna for The New York Times in 1968, describing Luna using racialist language such as "secretive, mysterious, contradictory, evasive, mercurial, and insistent upon her multiracial lineage—exotic, chameleon strands of Indigenous Mexican, Indonesian, Irish, and, last but least escapable, African". Luna responded that "the civil rights movement has my greatest support, but I don't want to get involved racially". After her death, Luna's widower Italian photographer Luigi Cazzaniga said that Luna self identified as a "mulatta" and that she "felt rejected by the Black community and the white one". Penultimately with regards to the racism she faced in the US, Luna believed that questions surrounding her Blackness and how she fit into American society being "a quarter Black" were "America's problem", often attempting to escape labels major publications placed on her, replying to the Times: "Yeah, I'm an American on Black and white, but I'm me, I'm me" From a heady time when "Luna had skipped modelings apprenticeship stage of endlless castings and rejections from racist fashion magazines, and come straight in at the top [having] made the cover of a top fashion magazine, worn the world's most expensive dresses, and commanded a day rate of up to $100 an hour all by the age of 19".

In the mid 1960s, Luna was married to an anonymous German actor for ten months. In 1968, Luna was purportedly dating the Australian pop artist Martin Sharp. Around 1969 Luna was also romantically involved with German actor Klaus Kinski, however, the relationship ended when Kinski asked her entourage to leave his house in Rome concerned that their drug use could damage his career. She would later move to Italy and continue her acting career there. Dream's name was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Luna converted to Catholicism as an adolescent, from her family's Presbyterian roots.

Since her death, Donyale Luna's 1966 Vogue cover has been hailed as opening doors for Black models and normalising the inclusion of African American and African Europeans on magazines previously catering to majority white demographics. Pat Cleveland noted Luna as her own inspiration who (along with Naomi Sims) opened doors for other women of color in the 1960s. Thus leading to more appearances for women, such as Sims 1967 New York Times fashion supplement cover and Beverly Johnsons American Vogue 1974 cover for example. This continued with British Vogue using Black models Gail O'Neill in March 1986, Naomi Campbell 5 times between December 1987 August 2002, and Jourdan Dunn in November 2015 as solo cover models under Anna Wintour, Elizabeth Tilberis and Alexandra Shulman's tenures. Luna's reputation as one who often rejected type cast labelling, has led to the promulgation of erasure of her achievements in the fashion industry. Phillipa Burton wrote in 2009, how "clean cut models like Beverly Johnson and Iman, whose lives were not to end murkily through an overzealous use of heroin, were louder and prouder ambassadors of the "Black is beautiful" message. Their more palatable versions of Black womanhood loom large in the public consciousness today. Eccentric Luna, on the other hand, who was eternally cagey about her racial identity, waxed lyrical about LSD in interviews and had an endearing habit of not wearing shoes, has, for the most part, been forgotten depressingly, the biggest triumph of Luna's career – her groundbreaking Vogue cover of 1966 – represents a war that is very much still being waged. Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm model agency grimly admits that a Black model gracing the cover of a mainstream publication is 'still unusual'" and it has been noted she may have been part of the tokenism of advertising agencies to lure in Black consumers."". Thus Luna leaves behind a mixed legacy as a model who both broke the colour barrier and as an underground actress, best remembered for her 1966 Vogue cover. In her role as the first Black model on the cover of a major print magazine, Luna has had "renewed interest" in her modeling career on social media, fashion bloggers, and among Black business owners. With the promotion of editors at British Vogue such as Edward Enninful in 2017, British Vogue covers starring Black models have also increased. She has also appeared in the 2008 all Black Vogue issue and was recognized by Naomi Campbell in her CFDA acceptance speech in 2019, The Afro Brazilian TV personality Thelma Assis has also recreated the Twen photoshoot on the July 2020 cover of Harper's Bazaar Brazil. In November 2020, actress Zendaya appeared in a photoshoot inspired by Luna for the 50th anniversary of Essence. The HBO Max documentary Donyale Luna: Supermodel was released in September 2023, co produced by her daughter Dream Cazzaniga.