(Warning: adult content) Jason Meyers
LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Adrianne Curry—the original “America’s Next Top Model” champ, the one who went on to marry TV’s Peter Brady—has a confession to make:
She considered installing onto her slender 5-foot-10 frame an enormous pair of boobs.
“I was standing in line for a chartered flight to Cabo, Mexico, with about 100 or so gorgeous models,” Curry recalls. “We were going to some charity event where we would walk around in bikinis to raise money for battered women.
“And while standing in the security line at the airport with all these fake-boobied women, yeah, I thought about buying myself a big rack like that.
“I thought about it for about half a second!”
Curry sees no need to make radical changes to what’s upstairs, because she has a theory about breasts: Guys make a hullabaloo about massive mammaries, but the truth is, as long as a woman has two boobs, it really doesn’t matter how big or how small they are. “It doesn’t even matter what a boob looks like,” she declares. “It can be decrepit and withered—a man will still look.”
That anecdote speaks volumes about Adrianne Marie Curry, the brash, rock-and-roll-loving, blue-collar party girl from Joliet, Illinois.
She grabbed the brass ring. She became a working model and reality TV personality. She even married the man of her dreams. But she hasn’t let success change how she acts, how she talks or who she is.
“I don’t think it’s changed much of who I am as a person,” Curry says. “I don’t think it ever can. I have too deep of Midwestern roots. Plus, my family would kick my ass if I changed. I think the reason I’m getting any attention and getting the work that I get is that people like me for who I am. And I think the second that changes, I probably won’t even be able to get arrested.”
On the TV front, she and her husband, former “Brady Bunch” kid Christopher Knight, hit the road in “Chris & Adrianne Do Russia,” a two-hour special premiering Sunday, Dec. 2, on WE tv. The couple, a mismatched duo that hooked up during the celeb reality show “The Surreal Life,” went to Russia to host the 2007 Mrs. World competition. The trip led to several wild adventures, although Adrianne was sick as a dog during much of it. Also, season three of VH1’s “My Fair Brady,” twice delayed by the network, starts up in January.
As for the status of her modeling career, one gig that’s sure to turn heads is Adrianne’s return appearance in the January ’08 pages of Playboy.
Curry says the life that she has now and the career she has now is one she always dreamed of having, but never really believed was possible.
“I got rejected for eight years by modeling agencies before I got ‘Top Model,’” she says. “I had basically given up by the time ‘Top Model’ came along. I was working, like, two or three waitressing jobs at the time, trying to save up money to go to college. And when I threw in a submission for the ‘Top Model’ thing, it was more for shits and giggles than anything else.”
Curry wound up beating out more than 32,000 applicants and made the most of the opportunity, although she says she didn’t dig the way that the show tried to make her over into someone she wasn’t.
“‘Top Model’ tried to fool everyone,” she says. “When I won the show, they felt they had to butter everything up about me and make me look just a little bit better than I am. Anything controversial, any signs that I wasn’t white as the driven snow, they tended not to show it.”
In retrospect, Curry doesn’t see winning “America’s Next Top Model” as being the pivotal, life-changing event of her life. “It changed my career,” she concedes. “But ‘The Surreal Life’ is what changed my life.”
Not only did “The Surreal Life” introduce her to the man in her life, after all, but it also opened her up to a world of possibilities on television.
“I remember one time,” Curry says, “it was the strangest thing that an agency told me a long time ago. They said, ‘You are beautiful, but you’re not odd enough to be a fashion model.’ Because most fashion models are almost alien-looking. But then they said, ‘With your personality, you’ve got what it takes to be a TV personality.’ I said, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and walked out. Years later, it turned out exactly like they said.”
If there’s a down side, it’s being recognized virtually anywhere she goes.
“Before I did ‘The Surreal Life,’ I could go incognito to places and most of the time no one would even give me a second look,” Curry says. “Once in a while, somebody would say, ‘Hey, I know you. You’re that “Top Model” girl.’ But now there’s nothing I can do.”
And fame, she emphasizes, is never what she was shooting for.
“Money is what I was shooting for,” she says. “Not having to work at the steel mill was what I was shooting for.
“But getting bothered when I’m trying to buy tampons at the grocery store, not so much. That’s when it stops being fun. Imagine if you had to go buy some hemorrhoids cream and there are people recognizing you while you do it.
“No, there are definitely some parts of your life when you want absolutely no one to notice you.”
Maybe one day, she’ll be able to reclaim that anonymity. But not today.
(Warning: adult content)