Cindy Crawford talks about quickie wedding to Richard Gere in new memoir

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As she's about to turn 50, Cindy Crawford talks about her amazing life as a supermodel, wife and mom in new memoir
'Yuk,' she says of her summer job working in cornfields ten hours a day inoculating cornstalks and spreading fertilizer
Nicknamed Daddy Long Legs growing up, Cindy was 5’9.5" and weighed 125 lbs in high school
She's the same height but now weighs between 135 and 140 pounds
'I’m lucky to have a husband who loves my curves' she says of Rande Gerber
After childbirth, she writes 'My waist is thicker, my boobs lost some of their perkiness, and I often have dark circles under my eyes'

Published: 12:27 EST, 28 September 2015 | Updated: 17:01 EST, 28 September 2015

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It wasn’t always glamour for one of the original supermodels, Cindy Crawford, who began her modeling career in 1984 in DeKalb, Illinois and soon skyrocketed to the covers of the world’s fashion bibles.

Shooting a spa story for British Vogue that took place in a steam shower, Cindy began feeling faint. She knocked on the door to be let out but the crew didn’t respond. She heard the photographer laugh right before she passed out and she was finally dragged out of the shower.

On another shoot, she had to lie in a bikini beside a swimming pool with a mean-looking Doberman standing menacingly over her and sniffing her chest.

And then there was the time she was standing naked as a snake wrangler wrapped a forty-pound python around her shoulders. She nearly passing out from the weight and the disgusting smell. But she held still - until the snake started squeezing her shoulders together with his tail. The handler sensed trouble and quickly removed the python.

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Beauty and the bed: Cindy Crawfords shares some of her iconic photographs with Daily Mail Online, as she celebrates her upcoming fiftieth birthday with a new memoir, Becoming, published by Rizzoli

Blondie: 'Yuk,' Cindy says of her summer job working in cornfields ten hours a day inoculating cornstalks and spreading fertilizer

But Cindy has no regrets about her spectacular career. And, as she nears her fiftieth birthday in February, Cindy writes in her autobiography that she has finally become the strong, confident women inside portrayed in the photographs in her book, Becoming by Cindy Crawford, by Cindy Crawford and Katherine O'Leary, published by Rizzoli International Publications.

Raised in a typical American blue-collar family in a small town in Illinois, sixty miles west of Chicago, her father was a machinist, electrician and glazier. Her mother, pregnant at sixteen, was a stay-at-home mom.

It was softball until dark, backyard barbecues and Fourth of July parades in DeKalb until her younger brother, Jeff was diagnosed with leukemia at age two. Cindy was eight.

He went through a year of painful radiation treatments, refused a second year of treatments and died the following year.

‘It was a devastating loss to all of us. I’m not sure my family will ever get over Jeff’s death, although we have all learned to go on with life,' Cindy writes.

‘I learned so much from watching my mother try to process her own grief. She allowed herself to actively grieve and then to try to heal. She was never bitter’.

But Cindy’s father never did get over it and the couple divorced four years later. That was ‘the second blow to the innocence of my childhood’, Cindy writes.

She made all A’s in school, was valedictorian of her class and won a full academic scholarship to Northwestern University in Chicago in chemical engineering.

‘To this day I couldn't tell you what a chemical engineer does…’

Her first summer after high school, she spent modeling in Europe and returned to Chicago to start college. Modeling and studies proved to be too demanding so Cindy decided she could go always go back to school but modeling couldn’t wait.

Cindy in black briefs, holding breasts, photographed by Herb Ritts, Cindy's favorite photographer

It was better than working in the cornfields, her summer job from eighth grade on. Every worker was responsible for two hundred rows of corn and spent ten hours a day walking up and down the rows detasseling, cutting back the ear buds, inoculating cornstalks and spreading fertilizer.

‘Yuck!’

Now about that mole…

‘The mole’, as it is called, always plagued Cindy when she was younger and brought tears to her eyes when the football players shouted, ‘Hey, little Crawford, you have chocolate on your face!’

She talked to her mom about having it removed but her mother’s attitude was, ‘You know what your mole looks like. You don’t know what a scar will look like’.

Even a modeling agency got in on the act of suggesting she remove it. One Japanese makeup artist tried to cover it up with makeup that made it look like one giant pimple.

Cindy’s first paying job was a newspaper ad for Marshall Field wearing a Cross-Your-Heart bra. It paid $150 and beat working in the cornfields. And they never even brought up her mole.

Within hours the picture was all over her high school after appearing in the Chicago Tribune.

After Cindy made her appearance on the cover of American Vogue with her mole, it was never an issue again and in fact ironically became her trademark.

Once Cindy left Chicago for New York – where she knew there were better clothes, bigger ad pages and more money, she was off on a global trajectory, posing for the world’s most famous photographers.

After shooting her for a Vogue cover, photographer Richard Avedon became a mentor who taught her how to do a cover and to always have an idea in your head when you look in the camera. Even if it’s ‘Buy me. I’m $3.00’ – the cover price of Vogue at the time.

Channeling Brigitte Bardot, Cindy wore a blonde wig for this shoot. She has appeared on more than 400 magazine covers

Cindy says she gained twenty-eight pounds during her first pregnancy with Presley and admits that her body will never be the same again

‘Avedon didn’t want blank. If you started to zone out, thinking about your grocery list, he knew it’.

Working with master Irving Penn, ‘Every day in the studio was about making Art with a capital A. He photographed people the same way he photographed a still life, sometimes even arranging your arm or the angle of your head’.

'Every moment in front of his lens was a lesson,' even if it wasn't a lot of fun, says Cindy.

Photographer Arthur Elgort taught her to throw everything else away and forget the camera was there.

Helmut Newton she describes as a twisted, kinky genius.

Herb Ritts ‘made me look the way I wish I looked when I woke up in the morning’.

Cindy feels blessed to have worked with all these legendary photographers but if she had to pick a favorite, it’s Ritts not just for his work but they also became good friends over the fifteen years they worked together.

It was Ritts who first gathered Stephanie Seymour, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Cindy together for a Rolling Stone shoot in 1989.

He had the girls curl up naked together on the desk of his house in the Hollywood Hills and then asked Christy Turlington to come over and jump in.

Cindy feels blessed to have worked with many legendary photographers but she loved Ritts not just for his talent but they also became good friends over the fifteen years they worked together

‘I think of these images as the day the supermodels were conceived and the Versace show as the day they were born’.

Nicknamed Daddy Longlegs growing up, Cindy was 5’9.5 inches tall and weighed 125 lbs in high school.

Once in New York, she gained weight after discovering pasta and bagels. Now she had to start working out because the sample sizes of the clothing she had to wear for photo shoots were getting too tight. She admits to experimenting with lots of diets over the years.

‘I’m still five nine and a half and I weigh between 135 and 140 pounds. I’m lucky to have a husband who loves my curves. Rande finds me my most beautiful the way I look when I wake up in the morning’.

Cindy posed for the cover of Playboy in 1988 and Herb came up with the idea of asking for less money for the shoot in exchange for total creative license with the option to kill the shoot if she wasn’t happy with the result.

Not happy with full frontal nudity, they shot images similar to what Herb had shot for French Vogue -less than totally revealing.

Back in the States, she met Richard Gere for the first time at Herb’s house while looking at the photo edits.

Cindy was only twenty at the time.

She and Gere were together for six years and got a quickie marriage at a Vegas wedding chapel. She admits that she never really felt married. The wedding and the chapel were surreal to her.

What didn’t feel surreal was her wedding to Rande Gerber.

She met Rande at a wedding when they both were involved with other people. It wasn’t until years later that they actually started dating.

They were living together when Rande proposed on the beach in Malibu.

‘I had been married before, to Richard, and wanted this time to be different.

‘After work one day Richard had proposed marriage, and we flew to Vegas that night for a quickie wedding with a few friends. While there is some charm to getting married at The Little Chapel of the West and then going to Denny’s afterward for some celebratory pancakes,

'I never quite felt that I was really married. I remember the next day being at a car wash in L.A. and hearing the radio DJ announcing my wedding and congratulating us – it was surreal’.

With Rande, Cindy wanted to take her vows in front of people who loved them.

Stunning Cindy appears on SiriusXM Leading Ladies series hosted By Jenny Hutt today in New York City to promote her new book

Cindy and Richard Gere romp on the beach in 1992. They got married in a quickie Vegas ceremony

Cindy and husband Rande Gerber in a post wedding photo, shot just after the ceremony on the beach of Paradise Island in the Bahamas

They were married on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and wanted the ceremony to reflect ‘who we were as a couple: authentic and down-to-earth’.

‘I wanted to look like the best version of the girl Rande loves waking up to every morning’.

‘Rather than have my dad walk me down the aisle and ‘give me away’, Rande and I chose to walk each other down the stairs that led to the beach and the ceremony’.

They both wanted children.

‘I wanted a baby so much, I was willing to sacrifice my body, but I didn’t have to like it’.

Cindy gained 28 pounds during her first pregnancy with Presley and admits that her body will never be the same again.

‘My waist is thicker, my boobs lost some of their perkiness, and I often have dark circles under my eyes from sleep deprivation.

‘Becoming a parent and learning to love a child are probably the most selfless things a person can do. I hope that I can forever be a source of unconditional love to my children – just like my mom was for me’.

Reflecting on aging, Cindy admits the pressure to live up to the fashion industry’s expectations can be overwhelming, but she copes with changes in herself by living in the present moment, and she feels ‘enormous gratitude for all that I do have: a happy marriage, a relationship with my kids that fills me with pride and work that continues to inspire me’.

Cindy will be doing a book signing in the UK at Waterstones on Friday, October 2nd at 1pm. Becoming Cindy by Cindy Crawford, by Cindy Crawford and Katherine O'Leary, published by Rizzoli International Publications is available on Amazon September 29.