Sports Illustrated vet Carol Alt, 59, spills on harassment in the Eighties

Carol Alt was one of the top supermodels of the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s – she was the first brunette to grace the cover of Vogue, was a Sports Illustrated cover girl and had her name on a Cover Girl campaign.

And on Tuesday the 59-year-old health expert talked for the first time about her experience with sexual harassment as she sat down for a chat with the Accutron Show podcast with Bill McCuddy.

The bombshell revealed that she experienced plenty of harassment in the Eighties. She was hit on by old men wanting to lure her to photo shoots, had to take minders to hotel meetings with movie producers and lost out on starring on an Aaron Spelling TV show – he made Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place – because the casting director dumped her for a woman he fell for.

Alt was candid during her sit down where she unleashed her past. ‘There were a lot of not nice people,’ said the former Lancome model.

‘I had been stopped on the street many times, I was 18, and they would say OH MY GOD you look like a model, and offer me shoots, they asked me to come with them right then to their studio,’ she said, knowing even as a teen the men were most likely trapping her with bad intentions.

‘The best advice my agency ever gave me was have the person call us. If they are legit they will call and you get the job. If they are not legit, they will never call.’

When asked about the Hollywood casting couch the actress – who worked on dozens of movies including Howard Stern’s Private Parts –  said, ‘I was always smart because if the agency sent you on an early morning to meet a producer, I always brought a girlfriend to stand outside the door.

‘Funny enough I auditioned for Steven Spielberg in a hotel room, but there people there and I knew it was legitimate.

‘You have to protect yourself and kind of let them know, and says, my friend is outside, can they come in, you do it innocently.

‘I lost jobs because they knew I wasn’t that type,’ she said who shot a movie with Eric Roberts last week. She shot it in a building in NYC with mask on the crew.

She said she built a reputation for being a smart cookie. ‘I think you get back what you put out.’

Then there was that time she lost out on a big TV show because the casting director dropped her for a woman he wanted to bed. 

‘I was hired for an Aaron Spelling show and my manager called me and said do you know this guy? It was a casting person and I was like yeah it’s my friend, and they said he took the job away from me.

‘And I know why he took it away. He said the girl he hired for the show, he was dating her.’

But here was not a happy ending for the casting director. 

‘Sometimes the table are turned,’ she said. ‘She got the job and dumped the guy.’

But she also reminded listeners that Me Too is very serioys.

‘It’s a very touchy – I don’t mean to make light of it – a woman being seriously attacked, it’s nothing to laugh at. I don’t know what I would do if that happened to me and I marvel at the strength of some of these women who pick themselves up and go on and have a voice.

‘I just find every single movement has gray areas too, the white, the black the gray – we all live within one of these areas.’ 

When asked where the next supermodel will come from, she said she didn’t know

‘It’s gone from blonde to Kardashian and ever shade in between, which is spectacular, now so many women are included,’ she said sounding pleased.

‘Every girl is so much more beautiful and they know at a younger age how to put themselves together.

‘There always seem to be the name girls of every generation. Every generation had the top two or three girls that were the people of the day.

‘The last real known models are the Gisele’s and Kate Mosses and then it becomes very obscure and there’s no one you could really name now because they’re all influencers,’ she says, not acknowledging Kendall Jenner and the Hadid sisters.

She was discovered while waitressing in Long Island. ‘I was modeling during the day and making it home at night to waitress.’

Then ‘this guy walked into the restaurant and told me I should model, I was 18, and I was tired of not getting tips as a hostess so I started to waitress, it was a big deal for me.

‘I said no thank you and my boyfriend broke up with me and I didn’t want to be the little girl he left behind in Long Island. So I looked into modeling. This guy Burt Rockfield gave me the names of the agencies like Elite.’ 

She called around and landed an agent. 

‘I made $200 my first day of modeling, I was like OK this is way better,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for a military scholarship and basically I worked during the summer…. after I was on the cover of Vogue and the owners of the restaurant told me that I should give up my waitressing job.

‘But I was worried because I modeling comes and goes.’

‘I got the scholarship and then John Casablanca said if you can’t BUY a university by the time I make you famous then I will pay for your scholarship!’

At 18, she became the youngest model for Lancome.  

The star said she became famous when Sports Illustrated put her name on the cover of the magazine. Cover Girl picked her up and used her name as well. 

Alt also talked about keeping a raw diet; she started in 1996.

‘Let me put the myths to bed, I am going to steal the Victoria’s Secret slogan, “I’m no angel!”… many people think I eat raw all the time, I don’t, there are moments when like at a hockey game that I eat popcorn. You gotta live to and shock the system.’

When she is told she looks amazing she said, ‘It works.’

She said lots of people exercise but they still age and get gray hair because they are not eating right. One of her pals went from gray to brown because of their food choices.

Alt also said that she is busy with social media because she loves it.

‘Last year I had 200,000 followers and I was really proud of myself because they were 200,000 followers that I worked really really hard to get and then I got wiped out 100,000 followers last year and I don’t know why,’ she said, sounding upset.

‘Now, I’m going into studios shooting all this stuff for free to put it on Instagram and having to use props and things that are around so people are getting promotions for things that my manager used to say “make sure that’s not in the background” – you know if its on a movie in the 80s they used to pay us to smoke in a movie, they would pay you to drink cocoa-cola in a movie or this water.

‘Now I’m in little videos on Instagram because all these influencers are doing this for free and then getting sponsored afterwards. It’s so difficult the change of mind.’