… And God Created Gisele
Bounding down the stairs of her Greenwich Village town house to greet a visitor, Gisele Bündchen commands the shock value of a close encounter with a giraffe: you can hardly believe an earthly creature is built this way.
Everything about her is so elongated and slender—those impossibly attenuated limbs! the swanlike neck!—that she seems almost preposterous, like a cartoon figure. Nearly six feet tall by the age of 13, she spent her childhood being teased by classmates who called her Olive Oyl.
But Popeye’s rail-thin girlfriend never tantalized anyone with the luscious curves that catapulted Gisele to stardom in her late teens, replacing the pale, wasted “heroin chic” of that era with “the return of the sexy model.” Since then, the tanned, athletic Brazilian beach babe who seemed born to wear a bikini has become the world’s most successful supermodel, amassing a fortune estimated at $150 million; last year alone, according to Forbes, Gisele earned $35 million. The 16th-richest woman in the entertainment industry, she has been featured on more magazine covers than any other model and has appeared as the face of more than 20 brands internationally, with current contracts including Dior, Versace, Max Factor, Ebel watches, and the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance The One.
At 28, Gisele has already spent 14 years in front of the cameras, not to mention in the gossip columns—and now she’s begun a whole new chapter of her life. On February 26, seven days after our cover was shot, she married New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in a private twilight ceremony at a Catholic church in Santa Monica that was followed by a small gathering at the couple’s home in Brentwood.
Although the union had the iconic inevitability of typecasting, all-American-style—“the jock marries the prom queen,” as one Web site put it—the news surprised even their friends. Earlier the same week, Gisele had been partying at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, where she made an appearance for Pantene hair-care products that was widely photographed—and then she suddenly turned up married in Los Angeles. But Gisele, who once described her ideal wedding as “a simple ceremony,” always knew she didn’t want an enormous extravaganza. “I don’t like parties. I prefer something more intimate, just for the closest people.”
Which was precisely what she got. Crestfallen, the paparazzi press had to settle for an after-the-fact description of Gisele’s attire: “The bride, 28, donned a form-fitting ivory lace strapless gown with a trumpet skirt, scalloped edges, long train and a floor-length veil with attached handmade satin roses and attached satin headband, all by Dolce & Gabbana. Her three dogs also wore matching Dolce & Gabbana floral lace collars,” Us Weekly reported.
To Gisele, getting married was merely a formality. “I already feel that way,” she told me a few days before the wedding. “We’ve been together over two years; we’ve been living together. My idea of that is you have a partner who’s got your back. When I’m weak, you can be strong; when I’m strong, you can be weak. That’s what I believe marriage is. Loving someone, you want to grow with them, share with them, share the same values, the same feelings about things, the same beliefs.”
And Gisele—who was raised in a large Catholic family by parents who have been married for 37 years—is convinced she has found her soulmate in Brady. “He’s very close to his family,” she said. “He’s Catholic. His parents have been married 40 years. He’s got a pure heart. That’s all that matters—he’s got the purest heart. I feel grateful because I have a lot of love in my life. I found the person I’m sharing my life with. I have a good man.”
In the months leading up to the wedding, the tabloids buzzed excitedly with rumors of impending nuptials, claiming that Brady had proposed on a private jet on Christmas Eve or that he had gotten down on one knee with a diamond solitaire in mid-January—neither of which was true, according to Gisele, who says they were secretly engaged for considerably longer but she avoided wearing her ring in public because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself. The fact that their stealth wedding remained dignified and discreet, and that the news didn’t leak until after it was over, represented a noteworthy victory over the celebrity media that have remained obsessed with Gisele’s every move since she became Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend nine years ago.
Heightened by the raging “Leo-mania” that followed Titanic’s popularity as the highest-grossing film of all time, the irresistible pairing of gorgeous supermodel and heartthrob superstar kept the gossip columns in overdrive throughout their five-year relationship, which was fraught with dramas that included an eight-month breakup, a reconciliation, and recurring reports of Gisele’s exasperation at Leo’s womanizing ways.
Even the end of their romance, in 2005, failed to stem the flow of slavering updates: Leo still can’t believe Gisele dumped him because he refused to make a commitment! Leo drunk-dials Gisele just to hear her voice! Leo wants his current girlfriend, Israeli model Bar Refaeli, on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—just to irritate Gisele!
But Gisele herself had moved on. At the end of 2006, she fell in love with Tom Brady—an event she describes as practically instantaneous. “I knew right way—the first time I saw him,” she says. “We met through a friend. The moment I saw him, he smiled and I was like, That is the most beautiful, charismatic smile I’ve ever seen! We sat and talked for three hours. I had to go home for Christmas, but I didn’t want to leave. You know that feeling of, like, you can’t get enough? From the first day we met, we’ve never spent one day without speaking to each other.”
Until then, Gisele was happy to be on her own. “I’d been single for a year, and I wasn’t looking for a relationship,” she says. “I’d always been in serious relationships, but you learn a lot about yourself when you’re by yourself, and I was enjoying that process. But you don’t choose.”
Not when it comes to a coup de foudre, anyway. Does she believe in love at first sight? “I believe in feeling connected. Love is something that grows, that comes from nourishment; it builds. But there is a great feeling that happens, that is telling you, I don’t want to leave this room! Whatever that’s called, that’s what happened.”
Their initial bliss was soon dispelled by an unwelcome development. Brady had recently broken up with his girlfriend of the previous three years, Bridget Moynahan, a model and an actress. Soon after he got involved with Gisele, Moynahan announced that she was pregnant with Brady’s child and would have the baby on her own.
“It was definitely a surprise for both of us,” Gisele acknowledges with a rueful smile. “In the beginning you’re living this romantic fantasy; you’re thinking, This can’t be true, it’s so good! And then, Whoops—wake-up call!” She rolls her eyes. “We were dating two and a half months when he found out, and it was a very challenging situation. Obviously, in the beginning, it’s not the ideal thing.”
Moynahan’s pregnancy made Gisele wonder whether she should encourage Brady to re-unite with his former girlfriend. “You question at times—‘Should I stay here? Maybe you should work this out,’” she admits. “But when people break up, it’s for a reason.”
In retrospect, she believes that dealing with the challenge only strengthened her commitment to Brady. “I think it was a blessing, because otherwise I don’t think I would have known what he was made of, and he wouldn’t have known what I was made of,” she says. “I wouldn’t have seen the integrity in him—the way he was a good person through all the times. I was like, You have the heart in a good place! It made me feel more in love with him; it made me realize who he was. Our relationship has become so much stronger, and I think I wouldn’t be as certain as I am today if it weren’t for that.”
After John Edward Thomas Moynahan was born, in August 2007, Brady and Gisele began shuttling between Boston, where Brady’s football team is based, and Los Angeles, where Moynahan lives. “When we are in L.A. we have Johnny 50 percent of the time,” Gisele says. “He’s a little angel—the sweetest, most cuddly, loving baby. I feel blessed to have him in my life.”
Last year she and Brady purchased an $11.7 million plot of land in a gated community in Brentwood. Despite their commitment to spending time with John, however, Gisele has never met his mother. “I understand that he has a mom, and I respect that, but to me it’s not like because somebody else delivered him, that’s not my child. I feel it is, 100 percent,” Gisele says. “I want him to have a great relationship with his mom, because that’s important, but I love him the same way as if he were mine. I already feel like he’s my son, from the first day.”
One of six sisters, Gisele is also eager to have her own children. “I would like a big family,” she says. “I love children. When you come from a big family, you see that growing up you’re learning how to share. Your sisters have got your back; you’re not alone in this—‘We all support you!’ Your family provides that; it gives you a sense of safety, and it’s a very grounding feeling. That’s why I feel I can fly away, because I have those roots and they’re so deep. This is what I want to have in my life. This is why you get married—you want to create those roots together; you want to give that to your kids. I would also love to adopt a child from Brazil. When you come from São Paulo, you see five-year-olds sniffing glue on the corner. You think, If you make a difference in the life of one of them, that makes your time on this earth worthwhile. I will have a colorful family, like a rainbow. I have dogs from rescue; they are all my dogs. Children are like little angels—there’s no way you can’t love them.”
Recounting all this, Gisele has been talking in her usual mile-a-minute torrent of words, which is virtually unstoppable and exuberantly high-spirited. Whether she is telling the story of her life for hours on end or working from eight a.m. until dark at a photo shoot, her energy doesn’t flag. “I never get physically tired,” she tells me the next day in the ninth hour of a shoot that has her posing outdoors in 40-degree weather wearing only a Dior corset. (“If it’s not torture, it’s not fashion,” she mutters with a mischievous grin.) After every interruption, her running commentary instantly starts up again as if someone has simply flipped the “on” switch.
Some interviewers have made sport of Gisele’s accent, which “can best be described as Continental,” one wrote. “She seems to have learned English from Italian designers, German hairstylists, and French makeup artists. Her enunciation is equal parts Donatella, Hans and Franz, and Maurice Chevalier.” That reporter didn’t mention how many languages he himself has mastered, but Gisele speaks fluent English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish in addition to some German and some French—no small achievement for a girl from the backcountry of Brazil who left school at 14.
No matter which language she’s burbling along in, she is warm, friendly, humorous, and gaily self-deprecating. Right now we’re sitting at the dining table on the ground floor of her town house, where she is nibbling delicately at lamb chops and vegetables ordered from a nearby restaurant. Quivering with anticipation, her Yorkshire terrier sits slavishly at her feet.
“Vida, Vida, Vida,” Gisele croons. “‘Vida’ means life; she’s the golden girl—that’s why I call her Golden. She loves the bone. She deserves a little bone!” Cooing, Gisele hands a lamb chop to Vida, who snatches it and runs. “Vida, let’s make a deal: I’ll give you a bone every day—you live forever!”
Gisele has already paid her own respects to the lamb chops by putting her hand over them and saying a silent prayer. “I eat a lot of meat, and I bless my food before it enters my body, because I need to be aware of what I’m eating,” she explains. “You bless it first and say, ‘Thank you for giving your life.’ This animal has given its life for me. You’ve got to be grateful; you’ve got to be conscious. You can’t just take it for granted. How many people in the world have no food? I think it’s important to acknowledge that.”
An avid reader, Gisele has been deeply influenced by Buddhism. (Her current view of the church she grew up in: “O.K., Catholic religion, we’ve got to update!”) These days she tries hard to practice the concept of mindfulness, which—when combined with her characteristically sunny, upbeat outlook—seems to produce an ebullience so consistent that somebody should bottle it and sell it. Her positive mental attitude proved a considerable asset after Brady learned that his ex-girlfriend was having his child.
“We are saying, ‘What can we learn from this? How can we make the best out of this?’” Gisele says. “We both grew a lot. There is good in everything; it’s just how you choose to look at it. Everything that’s worth it has a price. For me to be a model—I had to leave my family. Do you think I liked that? No! There are sacrifices. Life is meant to be a challenge, because challenges are what make you grow. How boring it would be if we knew what was going to happen tomorrow!” She beams. “Life always surprises me—in a very good way.”
“She is the most positive and energetic person I have ever met,” says Brady. “She always looks at challenges as her greatest opportunities.”
For Gisele, the surprises began when she was “discovered” by a modeling scout at the age of 14. She grew up in Horizontina, a small town in southern Brazil where “there were no buses, no subway—there’s not even a traffic light in my village,” she says. The local population is dominated by Brazilians of German descent, and Gisele’s ancestry is German on both sides of her family. She and her fraternal twin, Patricia, were the middle daughters among six girls, all of whom are good-looking. In the youthful photograph that occupies a place of honor on the big desk that dominates Gisele’s living room, her father is handsome and her mother is strikingly beautiful.
The family’s circumstances were modest. “I grew up in a house with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, for eight people,” Gisele says. “We weren’t considered poor; we were considered middle-class. My mother was a cashier in a bank for 35 years. My father had many jobs: he was in construction, then he did something with packaging milk, then he worked for Amway; he gave courses about self-awareness. He was away a lot. My mother was, like, the one who was more concerned about how to bring home the bacon; she worked and devoted herself to us. She is my hero. She did everything. She was a really great mother; she was always teaching us, helping us, talking to us. My father was more the philosophical person; my mother was the realist.”
Gisele’s childhood world revolved around her sisters, but she stood out even then. “I was extremely hyper when I was a kid, like bouncing off the walls,” she says. “I think that if I was in America they’d probably give me medication.”
Her twin describes her as bold and fearless. “Unlike me, Gisele was very talkative, and she wasn’t afraid to be away from home for some time even when she was little,” says Patricia. “She was very brave, and she was always trying to protect her sisters—something like ‘Don’t mess with my sisters or you’ll have to deal with me!’”
The girls participated in every activity available in their small town. “We did ballet, gymnastics—I think my mom was trying to keep us busy,” Gisele says. “She had to work, so we went to a modeling course—me and my twin and one of our sisters, Gabby, who’s like the second twin because we’re one year apart. We were the Three Musketeers, and we did everything together.”
The modeling course culminated in an excursion to a São Paulo amusement park. “We had to drive 29 hours to go there,” Gisele says. “I couldn’t be more excited! I was eating at a food court in the shopping mall, and this guy from Elite came and said, ‘You should be a model.’ It was the first time in my life that someone thought I looked pretty.”
Until then, Gisele regarded her appearance as an affliction rather than an asset. “I was tall and really thin; the kids in school called me Olive Oyl and Saracura, which is a bird with really skinny long legs,” she reports. “I was taller than every guy in my class. Especially at that age, you think you’re the weirdest thing that ever walked on earth.”
Despite knife-blade cheekbones, wide-set navy-blue eyes, a dazzling smile, and that mane of honey-colored hair, Gisele didn’t consider herself to be beautiful, and she thought her nose was too big. Every one of her sisters was many inches shorter, and all of Gisele’s clothes were hand-me-downs. “I had to wear my sister’s jeans; they were, like, to here on me,” she says, pointing to her knee. “I wasn’t so popular; my twin sister was definitely more popular than I was. She has a great personality—everyone liked her. But I was an A student, and the way I got friends was I used to give help to somebody else. And I’ve always been very athletic; I was captain of the volleyball team. I was such a tomboy. The ‘in’ people weren’t so much into me, but I didn’t care. My sisters were my best friends, always. It was a great life, and obviously it made me know who I am. If I were told I could come back as anything, I would have chosen the same life, the same family, the same experiences, the same friends.”
But her time in that safe, protected world was about to end, and when Gisele returned alone to São Paulo for a modeling contest, her introduction to big-city life was a shock. “The first time I traveled by myself, it was to a city of 22 million people. My father gave me $50, and I was supposed to get a cab to go to the models’ apartment—but I said, I’ll take the subway,” she recalls. “I was thinking about saving some of the money to buy some clothes, because everything I was wearing was my sister’s. I thought I was being very smart. So I get to the station, I went to open my backpack, and my wallet was gone. I had no idea somebody would rob me! In my city, nobody ever robbed anybody; it was all a big happy family. So I was crying. How am I going to get from here to where I am going? I’m asking people for money so I can go in a pay phone and call my father. He’s like, ‘Why didn’t you take the cab? You should listen to your father!’ I walked like 30 minutes and finally got there.” She sighs. “There was a lot of those times, but I learned pretty fast. I never was fearful. I think my parents did a good job; we were very independent kids, because my parents were always working. I was in the worst places and never felt afraid. I always felt like everything was going to be O.K.—and it was.”
Learning how to model was another challenge. “In the beginning I had no idea what I was doing,” Gisele admits. “I had no idea what modeling was. I didn’t know it’s about becoming something—embodying something. It’s not you. I didn’t understand that. I was like this!” She bares her teeth in a horrible rigor-mortis grin. “I wasn’t aware of my body. All my life I felt awkward about myself.” But the idea that somebody had found her attractive was intoxicating. “Out of those 50 girls, that guy thought I was pretty,” she recalls, a dreamy look softening her face. “People weren’t calling me Olive Oyl. It was a different standard of beauty.”
And yet, even as a novice, Gisele had a sturdy sense of her own self-worth that helped her keep the rigors of modeling in perspective. “Some people were like, ‘She’s never going to make it!’ But not everybody has to like me,” she says. “Some people like watermelon; some people like pineapple. It doesn’t mean that watermelon is better. People have different tastes.” She shrugs.
“Her willpower made her successful,” says Patricia. “She has never let the critics put her down, and this has never changed. She has the most amazing body, but what has really made her successful is her personality, her way of doing things, her professionalism.”
As an athlete, Brady says he admires Gisele for “being a ferocious businesswoman who is ultra-competitive and intent on being the best at what she does.”
As the demand for Gisele’s services grew, she felt compelled to accept every job that was offered. “I was just going 100 miles an hour,” she says. “You don’t want to say no, because you don’t know how long it’s going to last, and you have to prove yourself.”
But the frenetic pace finally caught up with her. “When I was working every day I was completely detached from my emotions, and I didn’t know the toll it was taking on me,” she says. “I was traveling everywhere, not having stability. I was very abusive of myself. I wouldn’t sleep; I was eating junk food every day and working 10 to 12 hours. No wonder! How much can your body take? I felt overwhelmed by the whole thing. I went through a time when I was very sensitive and felt very fragile. I would cry, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. When I was 22 I hit a point where I thought, I miss my mom. I want to go home! I want to take six months off. I want my support system; I want that grounding thing my family gives me. I wanted to bond with them. I felt like, ‘I’m part of this family—take me back, please!’”
The sabbatical was just what she needed: “It was great. I took my parents to Africa. I felt nourished and loved again, so I could come back and start all over again. But I was humbled by the whole thing.”
When Gisele returned to work, she stopped smoking and started taking better care of herself. Exercise was never a problem; ever since childhood, she has displayed an alarming appetite for extreme sports. “If somebody had something broken, it was me,” she admits. “I did skydiving, bungee-jumping, kayaking, surfing, jumping horses—my horse was 18 hands and it stepped on my foot and I couldn’t walk. Everything I’ve ever been afraid of, I’ve tried to overcome. I was always on planes, and I always used to be apprehensive, so I thought, I’ve got to find a way to not be afraid. So I started jumping out of planes.”
Her determination is particularly apparent in kung fu, a discipline she has taken up with a vengeance since moving to Boston. “She wants it every day; we actually trained Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. There’s no day off,” says Yao Li, her teacher at the Boston Kung Fu Tai Chi Institute. “I think part of her has a macho spirit. Tom teases her: he’s a fan of Bruce Lee movies, and he calls her Gise-Lee.”
Athletic and down to earth, Gisele—who wears as little makeup as possible and spends her off-hours in jeans and T-shirts—is very different in daily life from the glamorous persona she creates for the camera. “When I go to work, I do pretend,” she explains. “I call it ‘Her.’ Like, ‘I think She needs to be a little bit more like this.’” She tilts her head, sucks in her cheeks, and pantomimes an exaggerated attitude. “It’s almost like some on-and-off button. I don’t see myself as Her. My perception of myself is very different from the perception people have of me.”
Despite all her years at the top, co-workers say, she retains a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and the hype of the job. “When this all ends, she’ll be fine,” says a makeup artist who has worked with Gisele since she was a teenager.
Gisele-watchers who pore over red-carpet photographs often assume she has a fabulous lifestyle crammed with parties and A-list events. “Are you kidding? I like to be in bed by 10:30,” she exclaims. “I’m up at 6:30, doing yoga at 7 a.m. I went to a gallery for my friend’s exhibition last night, because he was my friend and asked me to come. It was a scene, and I was just like, No! No! I have to go! On the way home I walked into this place where they have the best burger in the world, and I was just thinking to myself, Oh my god, I am so lucky to have my life! I’m having a great time here! I just came back from this place where it’s about appearance and who’s wearing this and who’s talking to that, where I felt suffocated, and I’m so happy that’s not my life!”
Not that she hasn’t enjoyed her success and its rewards—she is as excited as a little girl as she shows me photographs of the remodeling job she gave her parents to spruce up their home. The business of being Gisele has also enabled her to employ four of her five sisters. For her work in Brazil, Patricia is her manager, Gabriela is her lawyer, and Raquel does accounting. Rafaela works on Gisele’s Web site. The other sister, Graziela, is a judge.
But Gisele takes even more satisfaction in having earned such success without compromising herself. “I’m really happy with the way I’ve lived my life,” she says. “I’m an honorable person. I’m proud of the way I’ve done things. I’ve never in my life acted in any way that wasn’t of the highest integrity that I was raised with. I’m the same person—with different life experience, but the things that make me happy are the same things. Having barbecue with my family, hanging out with my friends, being with animals, riding bikes—that’s what made me happy all my life. I feel really good about that. I want to finish this life and say, ‘I did the best I could. I lived my values. I kept my integrity.’”
Gisele’s values have also been shaped by her reading, which ranges from the teachings of Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh to her current favorites, Don Miguel Ruiz’s books of Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements, The Mastery of Love, and The Voice of Knowledge. Such works have helped to give her a newfound sense of inner peace. “Everything became so much simpler,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh—now I get it!’ You have this kind of epiphany—I don’t need to sweat the small stuff! Enjoy the journey, not the destination. I want to be happy every day. I want to live life to the fullest, feeling joyful. If I don’t, I’ve got to stop and question why, because I think our natural state should be that. Reading things is so important to me—things that can open up your mind. You need to feed your mind.”
She has even achieved a beatific attitude toward DiCaprio, about whom she has nothing bad to say. “Leo is a really wonderful person,” she says. “We still speak sometimes, and I’m friends with his mom. He still has one of my dogs. He’s done a lot for the environment, and I admire what he’s done. We know what we had; we were very young, and we grew together in a lot of ways. We were just not meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but I respect him enormously, and I wish him nothing but the best.”
Environmental causes remain among Gisele’s top priorities. According to her manager, Anne Nelson at IMG, she donates a portion of the profits from her Brazilian line of flip-flops, Ipanema Gisele Bündchen, to protect Amazon rain-forest water sources through Y Ikatu Xingu (Save the Good Waters of the Xingu River), as well as supporting several other Brazilian programs to protect waterways and restore deforested areas. The Bündchen family has started Projeto Agua Limpa (Project Clean Water) to reforest the land and improve water quality along riverbanks in the region where Gisele was born.
She has also created the Luz Foundation, a project to empower girls and help them deal with self-esteem issues. Last summer Gisele and her yoga teacher, Amy Lombardo, did some volunteer work with Portuguese-speaking teenagers in the Boston suburbs. “She’s always trying to find ways to use her celebrity to good cause, and we talked to them about media images and the effects on young girls,” Lombardo explains. “Gisele is a natural yogi; she’s constantly trying to find new ways to learn, and she has a genuine desire to better herself as a person. Yoga provides her with a way to be who she is, not the image in the media. I think she’s going to be a role model for young women. She’s very passionate about the idea of helping people have access to raising their own level of awareness. We’ve only begun to see what she’s capable of.”
Gisele “has her heart set on making the world a better place,” says Brady.
As her ambitions evolve, Gisele is scaling back her modeling work. “I have a lot of things to juggle. I have a family that comes first; my job already comes second,” she says. “But everything I’ll do in the future has to be something that’s related to higher consciousness. I don’t think I’ll be happy unless I do this. It’s all about using what you’ve got, and what I’ve got is a voice.”
And she wants to use that voice to counterbalance the inadvertent messages that are inevitably communicated by her extraordinary face and figure. “This is just a shell”—Gisele gestures dismissively at her formidable body—“and the shell is going to be changing. You’re going to be 30; you’re going to be 50. That’s why I think it’s important to focus on what matters. Everyone has talents—you’ve just got to find them—and everyone has flaws. Wishing to be something you’re not is the biggest recipe for a sad life. All of us are special. Embrace all that you are! Treat yourself as the special being you are!”
And if you do, she believes, you can accomplish anything. After all, it worked for her. She flashes a radiant smile. “All you have to have is a dream, and then you make it happen,” she says.