The 51-year-old supermodel and businesswoman Heidi Klum is worth $265 million. She has a rock star husband, a great love life and zero body issues. She’s also the queen of Halloween parties. Turns out you can have it all.
“I’m Heidi on the catwalk and nicknamed Helga at home. Helga is less cute and fluffy than Heidi, but both Heidi and Helga wear suspenders.” Heidi Klum is a blast. She’s an international star, the Victoria’s Secret Angel with the hazel eyes and blonde mane who lives in Los Angeles, hosts America’s Got Talent, and before that Project Runway, and throws the most notorious Halloween party in the world.
But she’s also a down-to-earth 51-year-old German mother of four who is wholesome and uncomplicated. She arrives five minutes before her interview wearing very little make-up, is happy to talk about everything from sex to sausages, and stirs two sugars into her coffee without any apparent concerns about her weight.
We’re sitting in the breakfast room of Le Bristol hotel in the middle of Paris Fashion Week. She’s wearing a grey T-shirt, jeans, gold jewellery and red cowboy boots and her trademark fringe is scraped back. “This is a little dowdy for me,” she says in her singsong West Coast accent, oblivious to the waiters all competing to serve her. “I liked being called Heidi after an adorable mountain girl in a red dress, but I’m also Helga, the practical one, ‘You vant me to milk ze cow?’” she says, mimicking her German roots.
Klum may possibly be the most successful of all the supermodels. Worth an estimated £123 million ($265m), she’s now more mogul than mannequin, hosting TV shows, running her own line of Heidi Klum Intimates lingerie, swimwear and perfume. She’s appeared on more than 150 magazine covers and done commercials for McDonald’s and Volkswagen, but she doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously.
She laughs. “I’m still very German. I have my dirndls, which I wear to the Coachella festival.” Her German rock-star husband, Tom Kaulitz – a bearded hipster 17 years younger – evidently loves them. “I can knit and I’m a bit crafty. I can make you a scarf and a pompom,” she tells me, settling into the sofa. “I eat sausages all the time and sauerkraut and pickles, even in LA. I make potato salad, schnitzel and goulash for the children. I’d like to set up a kebab shop near my house. And white asparagus. I love it more than anything,” she says. She could discuss food all day.
“I’m also on time, which is very German. At work I’m very correct, straightforward and organised, but I’m super-messy at home. I’m a hoarder, so that’s a slight problem. I love flea markets and I’m always looking for things that belonged to me in the past. They talk to me.” Klum finally pauses for breath. It’s not going to be difficult to convince this celebrity to open up. There’s nothing uptight or pretentious about her. She’s remarkably unjaded and forthright for someone who has been all over the press for 30 years.
What kind of past is she talking about? “I have this weird idea that I’ve lived many lives before,” she says. “So I’ll look at something like that antique clock over there and feel that used to be mine and I want it. Our house has become like a museum over the years.”
Does Klum have any idea who she was in previous incarnations? “I have always been men before – this is my first time as a woman,” she says emphatically. “I get my palms, irises, feet, everything read. When I was 16 I had my future read and the astrologer said to me, ‘Millions of people will listen to what you have to say.’” She now has 12 million Instagram followers. “But I hadn’t even thought of being a model then or hosting Halloween parties. I just used to dream of having a big family, with a big house and garden, dogs and lots of kids. I’m lucky – I’ve got it all now.”
Klum really does appear to have cracked it. But the girl from a village outside Cologne, whose mother, Erna, was a hairdresser, and father, Gunther, a cosmetics company executive, believes her life might have been very different if she hadn’t entered a modelling contest when bored as an 18-year-old. She beat 30,000 other contestants.
“I have a brother who is 10 years older than me. He’s still a bus driver in my home town. He has come once to visit me in America. It was the journey of his lifetime, but he was worried he would get shot. I just wanted to be a professional dancer. I started at six, for 13 years three times a week – tap, jazz, ballet – doing performances on our local stage, then nationally.”
It sounds like the school extrovert Klum was always going to end up famous. “I did like dressing up. There’s this carnival in Cologne every year and I used to go on the float. My grandmother was a seamstress so I always had lots of outfits, or my mum would make something for me and my Barbie to match, which is amazing as Mattel rang me one day and I have my own Barbie now. She is the only Barbie with underwear: it always bugged me that they were naked. I didn’t like how none of them wore any underwear, it’s undignified. Mine has a cute pair of pink knickers and a bra painted on. I’m very proud of that.”
This is what makes Klum likeable. She’s a surprising mix of practical advice and kooky views, a flirty feminist who insisted on her Barbie being modestly dressed but who is happy to be photographed sunbathing topless for her 51st birthday this year. “I’m both a free-spirited person but also a bit of a control freak,” she admits. “I’ve always been relaxed about my body. In Germany sunbathing nude is not a problem, everyone minds their own business. You couldn’t do that in America.” When she was young, the family would go camping to the former Yugoslavia or Italy where “you could do nudity on the beaches”, she says. “I used to love it. You could go shopping in the supermarket naked. My parents were naked, my uncle – they all lay around ‘sunbaking’. I would say goodbye in the morning, run naked and play with the kids. We’d make necklaces with shells on the beach.”
She must find everyone rather prudish and buttoned-up now. “Yes, it’s more complicated, but I wish everyone could do what they want. I love St Barts, it’s quite free – you can go topless still, so I’m not so much of an anomaly. Or I go with my husband to places where it is super remote and you can find a beach where there is no one. Obviously when friends come over I am fully dressed. I don’t run around naked in the house – we have staff – or when we have children’s friends over, but when it is a beautiful day and there is no one around, I lie topless in our backyard.”
Most celebrities in LA have coteries of staff who might be taken aback by their boss stripping, but not Klum. “I do have two cleaners – we have a 12,000-square-foot house, but I Iike doing housework too. In lockdown I learnt which spray worked best for which surface and my husband did the clothes washing. It was very satisfying.”
Klum had applied to a German fashion design school when she saw an advertisement in 1992 for the TV modelling contest while flicking through her mother’s magazine. It’s easy to see why the German audience adored the teenager with the golden hair and huge smile. But when she arrived in Paris, people were less impressed. “They thought, ‘What is she doing here? She is too healthy and happy.’ I was told I was fat. I was tiny, even thinner than now. But the fashion world is obsessed with weight. The only person who has ever said to me, ‘You would look better with a little more weight,’ was my husband. He loves women and he wanted more curves and more meat on my bones.”
Even as a 20-year-old Klum refused to go on a diet. “I heard designers talking about my weight, but I never bought into it. I felt if they don’t want me like that, it’s tough. I’d go to the modelling agencies when I started and there would be a scale and they would measure and weigh me. In Paris they would solemnly say, ‘There are pills you can take.’ I thought I won my modelling contest without being super skinny. People at home had voted for me, so maybe ordinary people didn’t want what they called ‘heroin chic’.”
She didn’t have many offers to walk the catwalks during fashion weeks in the early Nineties. “I went for endless castings. Only a few asked me to try on their sample clothes and I just didn’t fit into them. I was 90-60-90 [35-24-35]. The clothes would get stuck on my breasts or my hips. Instead, I did a lot of catalogues, which was fine – I made money. I bought my first apartment, my second apartment, a house for my parents, my brother and my grandmother. I was making a great living working 200 days a year, but I also love to create. I wanted to be seen as a canvas and used imaginatively rather than wear the same boring outfits for every shoot.”
As a young girl trying to make her way on her own in Europe, she must also have found it hard to fend off men. “I was more voluptuous and curvier for sure. I could see some men liked that. But I never gave out that vibe, you know, that there was anything more. I have always been very ‘I’m not the kind of girl you take home, I am just here to work’. I have gone to dinners where the agent was like, ‘You should have dinner with this client, it will help,’ but it was not my thing.”
There are sleazy men at the top of every profession, Klum suggests, who think they can exert their power. “You have to be careful. I’m not shy about my femininity. I love dressing up where I have my cleavage showing, wearing miniskirts, high heels, gorgeous stockings – but that doesn’t mean I want to go home with you. That’s just my personality. Why not? I want to have fun and show my body, but I have boundaries, as do all women.”
It wasn’t until Klum was asked to do Sports Illustrated in 1998 that she entered the ranks of the Supers. Her cover sold 20 million copies. “The magazine was on the stands, at the dentist, everywhere. Overnight, I’d walk down the street and people would swivel. Men had tattoos of me on them. It was crazy. At the same time I became a Victoria’s Secret Angel. The attention became insane, but I wasn’t going to complain.”
Now Klum has slightly modified her views on the fabled Angels. “Was it empowering for women? For a lot it wasn’t. I worked 13 years with the company and had amazing experiences, so I didn’t feel exploited. I’d have no problem walking topless in a G-string, but everyone is different. I made great friends – Gisele [Bündchen], Adriana [Lima], Naomi [Campbell], Tyra [Banks].”
Soon she began dating the British singer Seal. Suddenly she felt she had no privacy any more. “That’s the price you pay and it’s fine. But I discovered racism both ways: some wanted him to be with a woman of colour, others for me to be with a white man. Then we had children and people complained I didn’t do my children’s hair correctly. But we didn’t want to be some perfect poster for integration – we just wanted a family.”
After their marriage fell apart very publicly, Klum waited for several years before dating another musician, Tom Kaulitz from one of Germany’s favourite bands, Tokio Hotel. Now her detractors are even more judgmental about her marrying a younger man; she had to turn off her Instagram comments. “But I have a tough skin. I can cut out the noise when I go home, close the door and have a barbecue with the kids.”
“Toy boy” is not a term she likes to use. She doesn’t see why the generational difference matters, because Klum has never minded ageing. “Look at my phone – the words are huge,” she says, grinning. She shows me her WhatsApp feed in large print and I can see a slew of new messages from her husband, who clearly adores her and has come to Paris to watch her in the shows. “He has to read the menu at dinner or I have to take a photo and zoom in if I forget my reading glasses, but we joke about it.” The menopause hasn’t bothered her yet either. “I haven’t had it. My mum didn’t have any symptoms, so I might be lucky.”
This is not a woman who looks like she will retire anytime soon. She’s the queen of reality TV competitions alongside Simon Cowell, and she’s still doing the catwalks between running her businesses. “Maybe I work too hard. I never felt I was as gorgeous as some of the others around me, so I had to work extra long. I couldn’t say, ‘I have a plane to catch, I’m off.’ I was there at 9am and still there at 6 or 7pm or even midnight, until the client was happy, with my TV shows too. I am doing my 20th season of Germany’s Next Topmodel now and we still have wraps at 3am. I can blame production but I’m not going to let my show suffer, I am going to bite into that sour apple and keep going. It’s the same for all these fittings for the shows. I’m loving walking the catwalk. When I turned 40 people would say, ‘When are you going to hang up not just your wings but everything else?’”
She shows me the photos from the show the day before, where she is wearing a sensational black latex dress. “I like it when designers transform me,” she says. “I don’t like being boring or safe, otherwise I could be at home with my kids. My husband would love me in pink miniskirts all the time. He can wear anything. I love him in a suit or ripped jeans – but best of all, nothing.”
She’s so uncomplicated, I’m beginning to understand why Klum says she has never felt the need to have therapy. “I wouldn’t be against it. I’d be bored talking about myself every week, I think. I don’t take drugs. I smoked a while ago, but I don’t vape. I drink mostly decaf, I’m very high energy as it is.” She looks insanely fit. Does she lift weights, do Pilates or yoga, or all three?
She starts to laugh. “Sport en chambre is my favourite exercise – it sounds better in French. I have a younger husband. I also run around a lot, having four kids. I don’t have an assistant, so I don’t have people pack for me or carry my things, I do everything myself. I eat right, I never exercise too much or do heavy weights. People can push themselves too hard. I listen to my body. I have no back or knee pain and I have my husband.” She smiles at me. So sex is good? “Very good. My husband is my match.”
Klum has recently become the international advertising face for L’Oréal Paris and adores playing with make-up, but her skin routine, she says, is fairly simple. “I always take off all my make-up at night and I love an old-fashioned facial when they squeeze it out, which is hard to find nowadays. I’ve done Botox before around the mouth, but it didn’t work for me on TV.” Other models have found ageing in front of the cameras hard, but she’s astonishingly self-assured. “I think I’ve been confident since childhood. My parents told me I was great as I was. My mum only ever criticises my hair, but she is a hairdresser.”
Her children, now in their teens and early twenties, have grown up with their mother all over the internet. “They’ve never known it any other way. They’ve always seen me on TV, posters, in ads… They have phones, it’s a safety thing, but they also see the gossip. There are images of my face on other people’s bodies doing stuff. It’s not nice. They know about pretty much everything that’s out there, but we talk a lot. I think that is all you can do. For my part, I don’t want to be uptight. With my boys I’m like, be kind, have condoms, don’t make me a grandmother yet.”
Her eldest daughter, Leni, has become a model and they’ve recently modelled for the Italian Intimissimi underwear brand together in matching lacy thongs. “My daughter is so nonchalant. For me the cameras had to become my friends. I had to learn that it’s just a person clicking away, capturing what you give: you play with the lens, not the person. She’s more of a tomboy – she won’t wear my clothes. My younger daughter thinks she wants to be president. She likes politics.”
Politics is one of the few things Klum won’t debate publicly. Donald Trump recently said she wasn’t a perfect 10 any more. Klum raises her eyebrows (no Botox on her forehead). “I’ve known Donald for many years because we both lived in New York. We were in a movie together, 54 [about the nightclub Studio 54]. I always saw him at events. I don’t want to say we laughed at him, but he was funny.” She can imitate him perfectly. “I was amazed he became president. In Germany you have to study the craft to become a politician. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, I’ll give politics a try.’”
Klum is happier campaigning about motherhood. She loved being pregnant and has no horror stories about the births, always breastfeeding. “My father filmed them all; it was for my kids. I was back on the catwalk four weeks after I pushed them out. Leni was my longest at 20 minutes; my fastest was 9. For me it was all in my head. You’d hold your breath just a little bit longer each time and keep pushing and they’d come out. But I had an epidural first. I’m not a masochist.”
Singing is another of her talents and she’s rapped with Snoop Dogg, but she’s possibly best known now for her Halloween balls. “I love musicians. I’ve been married to two and it was fun singing with Snoop Dogg, but what I still like most is dressing up.” Her costumes have become legendary, from an ape to a skinned corpse on an autopsy table and a worm. “There was no cool party in New York for Halloween, which always upset me. It was so lame, so I thought I would dress up a lot so people can get that vibe. Every year I try to make something more fabulous. Once I learnt how to walk on stilts; last year I was a peacock and trained with Cirque du Soleil. I start thinking about it the day after the last one.” Prince Andrew was an early guest. “I know he is important for you guys, but I didn’t recognise him. Elon Musk came, he was a big name, and Jennifer Lopez.”
In her twenties and thirties Klum feels she was working too hard and going to bed too early to party much. Now that the children are older and she has more time, she wishes everyone partied more. “It’s getting boring. I am taking dance classes with my husband. We started with the rumba. I’d love to open a club one day.”
She considers what else she would like to do next. “I have just finished America’s Got Talent. My guy won. Everyone says I’ve found the American Susan Boyle. His name is Richard Goodall and he is a janitor at a school.”
Where would she like to be at 80? “I would like to be in a miniskirt – fallopian length – somewhere having a good time with my husband, children and grandkids.”
I can see it now. This 21st-century Heidi is so sunny and optimistic, it’s hard to remain cynical in her company. “I do worry about world issues: the escalating wars, the American elections, the German far right,” she says. “But fashion should lighten everything. I’m here to let you switch off, sit in front of the TV, flick through photos, buy a lacy bra and relax.”
We’re still chatting two hours later. Klum has finished the biscuits while telling me how to make a pompom and where to buy a red coat like hers for a fraction of the price. She suddenly realises she has another fitting in an hour. “I’m so sorry, I have to go,” the supermodel says. “Please don’t think me rude.” I get up to settle the bill. She’s already paid. Klum knows her worth, but she’s made it her own way by being the hard-working, fun-loving, easygoing girl next door.
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London