Amanda Lear, Iconic Salvador Dalí Muse, Looks Back at Her Life in Parties

Aside from a good DJ, Lear has one mandate for a successful soirée. “It’s very important to have people who are well-dressed,” she says. “Whenever we used to go to Studio 54, we had to dress up. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let you in. You have to bring out the paillettes and the glitter and the feathers. You don’t just walk into the party in jeans like it’s your office.” As long as you’re making an effort, however, Lear doesn’t care about your background. “A good party has a mixture of rich and poor people—models and truck drivers together. That’s important.”

“Nowadays, most model girls dream of going out with a football player. But in my day, as soon as the boy had long hair and was holding a guitar, we were in love with him,” says Lear. She was linked for a while to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and was close friends with Pattie Boyd, the model who married George Harrison from the Beatles. “Everybody says, ‘Oh my god, you knew the Beatles?’ When people say that to me, I feel like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. I mean, lots of other girls met them as well. It’s nothing special.”

In the ’70s, Lear was offered opportunities to expand her modeling career but chose nightlife instead. “Diana Vreeland told me, ‘I like you, but if you want to work in New York, you have to be ready every morning with your hair washed and your nails done, and looking really fresh and well made up to see all the photographers.’ Obviously, I couldn’t do that because I was out dancing.”

Lear was a star member of Dalí’s posse. She appeared by his side at press conferences, galas, and parties and stayed with him at the St. Regis hotel in New York, where the artist made his presence known in grand fashion. “He was always surrounded by all kinds of photographers and parasites and models,” she says. “He enjoyed every day at five o’clock what he called tea time—having all these people around him at the hotel. Most of them were hangers-on. They were just there to have a free drink.”

The artist did not make a good first impression. “He said, ‘You have the most beautiful skull I’ve ever seen.’ I wasn’t very pleased being called a skull,” recalls Lear. “He said, ‘What do you do?’ In those days, being a model was not something very glorious. So I said, ‘I’m a painter, like you.’ He was very cold and said, ‘Oh, forget it. You cannot be a painter because women cannot paint.’ So I thought, This man is an asshole, and I’ll never see him again.”

Dalí, however, quickly recovered from his fumble. “The next day, he called me, and this time we got along very well. I stayed with him as his model and friend for 16 or 17 years.” Lear spent her summers with Dalí and his wife, Gala, in Catalonia, Spain, and traveled with him across the globe, but always by boat (“He was terrified of flying,” says Lear). She served as a model for several of his artworks and wrote the 1984 autobiography My Life With Dalí. At one point, Lear even persuaded the artist to take the part of the emperor in director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-produced adaptation of Dune. Lear was to be Princess Irulan, the character played in the current franchise by Florence Pugh.

It was through her trips to New York with Dalí that Lear started to mix with Andy Warhol. “They liked each other, but there was a competition between Warhol and Dalí,” she says. “Both had crazy entourages.” While Lear was decidedly in Dalí’s camp, she socialized freely with Warhol (left) and his superstars. Here, she’s at the 1974 wedding reception for rock star Sly Stone and model Kathy Silva, at the Waldorf Astoria.

In the early ’70s, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry (above) spotted Lear modeling and was instantly transfixed. “He took me to his flat, where he had a framed photograph of Kim Novak. He said, ‘Kim Novak is my ideal woman.’ I said, ‘Me too. The only reason why I made my hair blonde was because of Kim Novak.’ ”

Ferry had envisioned a Novak-like woman for the cover of his band’s next album, For Your Pleasure (right), and decided Lear was perfect. “I was terrified of the black panther. I didn’t like the way she looked at me,” Lear recalls of the shoot. A tranquilizer and some retouching fixed the issue. The album was a commercial success and remains a glam rock staple. It also brought Lear wider attention. “David Bowie fell in love with that photograph. He didn’t fall in love with me—he fell in love with a photograph.”

“One night, I got a call from my friend Marianne Faithfull: ‘I’m here with David Bowie. He wants to meet you.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure he does. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m in bed.’ She put Bowie (above) on the phone, and he said, ‘You look fantastic in that photograph.’ ” The pair had what Lear calls “a sort of two-year affair,” but Bowie also sensed Lear’s potential star power. “He was the very first person who said, ‘Amanda, you should sing.’ I said, ‘But I’m not a singer. I’m a model.’ And he said no. He paid for my singing lessons. He put me under contract with his manager. That’s how it started. In fact, it all started from that photograph.” Her debut album was aptly titled I Am a Photograph.

Lear signed to the Munich-based record label Ariola, which specialized in European disco, and took her show on the road. “If you have a great voice like Donna Summer or Grace Jones, you just have to sing. But in my case, because I wasn’t sure my voice was good enough, I decided to surround myself with beautiful half-naked boys.” Nightclub impresario Fabrice Emaer invited her to play at his hot spot Le Palace, the French equivalent of Studio 54. “There were 5,000 people outside, blocking the street. Overnight I was hailed as the disco star of Paris.”

Lear was often on television, and one performance caught the eye of Silvio Berlusconi, the future prime minister of Italy, who was at that time a mere media tycoon. “He said, ‘I would like you to host my big Saturday night show,’ ” says Lear. “He needed someone who could speak French, English, Spanish, and Italian, and I speak five languages. We had lots of fabulous guests, like James Brown and Tina Turner.” Lear hosted several successful shows in Italy for nearly two decades. One program, Ars Amanda, saw her interviewing politicians, intellectuals, and celebrities in bed.

“Grace Jones is a bit like me because she was a model before too. She has kept an image all these years, and she’s one of the few left,” says Lear, who feels she and Jones have influenced some of today’s pop stars. “When I see the girls today, they are a bit like our daughters. They’re doing the same thing we were doing: being shocking, provocative, making gay people dance in the discotheque. But Grace and I were doing it 50 years ago.”

Lear never gave up her original love of painting. “That saved my life,” she says. “All my friends go mad. They go to the psychiatrist because they’ve got problems. I don’t need a shrink because painting, to me, is therapy.” Lear has displayed her work across the globe, including at a show during Art Basel in Switzerland earlier this year. “I sold 12 paintings in Art Basel. If I could pay my rent just by painting, I would probably stop show business altogether and just sit there at home and paint.”

Lear doesn’t miss her modeling days. “They say, ‘Stand straight, close your mouth, be beautiful, shut up,’ ” she says. “And I love talking.” But she’s been persuaded over the years to pose for pictures and get back on the runway, including for Thierry Mugler’s fall 1990 show in Paris (above). “The designers still like me. They say, ‘You’re a fashion icon.’ I hate that word. I am not an icon; I’m a survivor. I’m probably one of the few still alive.” These days she’s a frequent front-row fixture at Diesel, Rabanne, Gaultier, and Kim Jones’s shows for Dior Homme. She also recently worked with Jacquemus.

Lear talks to Jean Paul Gaultier on the phone all the time, but it took a bit of persuasion to get her back on the catwalk for the designer’s retirement show, in 2020 (above). “He said, ‘Amanda, you have the best legs I’ve ever seen. You must show your legs!’ ” After the presentation, dressers backstage removed her gown, and Lear had to take an elevator to change back into her regular clothes. “I walked into that lift and I’m completely naked, and the door closed and I’m all alone with Anna Wintour. It was so embarrassing. I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know you were here.’ She was very nice, actually. She said, ‘No, it’s all right. I enjoyed the show.’ ”

In 2023, Lear took a part in Amazon Prime’s French hit Escort Boys (above), a dramedy about male sex workers. Alongside the likes of Rossy de Palma and Gossip Girl’s Kelly Rutherford, Lear played a client. Her character, she notes, wasn’t satisfied and wanted her money back. “It was very funny to film because that boy was absolutely stark naked. I mean, I didn’t know where to look,” she says. “Aren’t you embarrassed to be totally naked?” she asked. “He said, ‘No, I don’t care.’ I realized that today the boys are really exhibitionists. In fact, they love to be exactly what we girls had been doing for all those centuries, being treated just as a sex object, but they enjoy it.” Lear also had a part in the recent fashion drama La Maison, on Apple TV+, and continues to tour Europe starring in several plays. “The theater is really unbelievable. It’s such a thrill every night.”

Lear admits she’s just pretending to paint in the 1984 publicity photo above. Taken at her home in the south of France, it showcases another of her great interests: men. “That was the good old days. I cannot complain. I had the most beautiful boys in the world—it’s true. Marvelous boyfriends, models, actors, whatever. Even now there are a lot of boys calling me; perhaps they’re into gerontophilia,” she says. “But I’m better alone. Most of my friends my age say, ‘We are so lonely, it’s terrible!’ This is all rubbish. Being alone is wonderful: I do what I want, I dress how I want, I eat what I want, I watch what I want on TV. And I love it.”