Fashion is more about taste than money - you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it's all about the fit. I do the alterations myself - I'm quite a seamstress - it's the influence of my Hungarian mother.
We have to program the mind of the public that age is not ugly. Age is just age. Wake up, American children, and stop listening to other people's voices. Know yourself, be true to yourself and make a contribution. It took me half my life to know myself. I listened to other people's opinions and took them as gospel.
I was the Kate Moss of my day, atypical of what the public wanted, which was Brigitte Bardot. I was always tall, skinny and angular. But now, society has bought 55 years of my marketing 'Carmen,' and I'm considered beautiful. I hope that empowers older women.
My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had grown too tall, and had no muscle tone left. I tried a ballet class and couldn't even do a plie without falling over. It was my first death.
There's no way I would have got to see so much of the world, with my humble background, without modelling. We were penniless and hungry for most of my youth. I washed the sheets in the bathtub in my bedroom and hung them out of the window on the clothes line, which in winter was difficult as the sheets would freeze and get stuck to the line.
I respect Gloria Steinem enormously. But I never wanted to be in any kind of movement - and if you're over a certain age, you better keep your bra on because nothing's worse than saggy duds.
I don't believe in funerals. I believe in celebrating life, and showing people, while they're alive, how much I care about them. And I don't believe in this business of burial. I'm an organ donor. Whether its my skin or my eyeballs, use whatever bits are intact and put the rest in the garbage.
I don't live for stuff and things, and if I had to live in a cardboard box, I would put curtains on it.
I was the one who kept telling my second husband he should become a cinematographer. I paid for him to get his director's card, and he went on to make 'Godspell.'
My mother was harsh and constantly told me I had jug ears and heaven knows what else. But she was devoted and a hard worker.
I'm loath to do interviews. What comes out is generally not what I meant or thought I was saying or thought they were asking.
A lot of people around me were really staggeringly rich, which I never have been. I walked in between the raindrops of real money, but I've stayed happy.
My life has been amazing. How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen's card was taken by Norman Parkinson?
As a model, I didn't have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn't full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn't a cover-girl type.
