Mistie Savage-McGuire (left) formed an unlikely friendship with former supermodel Paulina Porizkova (right), after connecting online. Photo / Todd McGuire
Paulina Porizkova and Mistie Savage-McGuire met online after the bottom had fallen out from each of their lives. They formed a needle-in-a-haystack friendship.
The two couples were on a Jamaican holiday. They had been having so much fun - snorkelling, dancing, sipping cocktails and talking late into the evening - that they had forgotten to take photos. But on the fourth day, as the two women walked into the water and embraced, one of their partners finally grabbed an iPhone to capture the moment.
The women - one a supermodel known by her first name and the other a self-described “nobody from Ohio” - met online after the bottom had fallen out from each of their lives. They formed a needle-in-a-haystack friendship.
In the summer of 2021, Paulina Porizkova - a.k.a. Paulina - had reached a low point. She was not only mourning the death of her husband, Cars front man Ric Ocasek, she was also struggling with the fact that he had left her out of his will. (The couple had separated but were living in the same New York townhouse when she found him dead of cardiac arrest in September 2019.)
“I thought I knew him to his bones. I didn’t,” she wrote in her memoir, No Filter. After a brief relationship with writer Aaron Sorkin ended, Porizkova began posting so many tearful selfies on social media that she earned the moniker “the crying lady of Instagram.”
Around the same time, Mistie Savage-McGuire was coping with a devastating health diagnosis. In 2020, at age 52, she found out she had Stage 2b colorectal cancer. The treatment was brutal, and Savage-McGuire was not shy about sharing on Instagram some of the graphic details of her experience, including losing her hair and getting a colostomy bag. She delivered bad news with dark humour, a lot of exclamation points and gratitude for the encouragement from her followers.
Savage-McGuire followed Porizkova on social media, and when she saw one of the supermodel’s crying posts - and some of the harsh feedback - she reached out in the comments to offer support.
“She was raw and honest, and some people were mean about it. It made me sad,” Savage-McGuire said in a recent video interview from her home in Ohio. “I told her I could feel it.”
She also told Porizkova about her illness.
Porizkova said the comments from Savage-McGuire stood out. “I don’t remember the exact words Mistie wrote,” Porizkova said by video interview from her home in New York. “But I remember the sentiment, how it felt to me.”
Porizkova replied to her.
“Here was someone in a much more difficult position than I was, and she was offering empathy,” Porizkova said. “Everybody in my life was telling me you’ll get over it. You’ll be fine. You’ll snap out of it, you always have. But Mistie was the one rare person who, while having her own serious issues, could actually empathise. And I just thought that was extraordinary.”
Porizkova and Savage-McGuire began a tentative conversation in the comments. It moved into direct messages and, soon after, texts. “We just started talking. It was weird because we just clicked,” Savage-McGuire said.
A few months later, when Savage-McGuire learned that cancer had metastasised and that her chemotherapy treatments would continue indefinitely, she shared the news with Porizkova. Soon, plans were hatched for Savage-McGuire and her husband, Todd, to visit Porizkova in New York.
Todd McGuire, a director of aircraft maintenance who serves part-time in the Air National Guard, was sceptical - was his wife really friends with an international supermodel?
Still, he agreed to drive with his wife the 800-plus kilometres from Athens County, Ohio. “I honestly did not think this was a real thing until halfway to New York when Paulina sent me her cellphone number,” he said.
When the couple arrived, Porizkova, greeted them at the door, wearing jeans, a sweater and fuzzy slippers. “I never saw it as, we’ll have a quick coffee with those people from Ohio,” Porizkova said. “To me, it was friends visiting. I wanted to make it worthwhile.”
“I was kind of dumbfounded,” Todd McGuire recalled. “You couldn’t pinch yourself hard enough to believe that we were here. I am standing in the apartment of the woman who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1984, when I was a junior in high school - and she and my wife are talking in her kitchen.”
During that first visit, Porizkova introduced the couple to her son Oliver and took them shopping and to a performance of the hip-hop comedy show Freestyle Love Supreme. They ate caviar and drank Champagne. Porizkova did Savage-McGuire’s makeup and had a photographer friend take some glam shots. “That first meeting in person established the real friendship,” Porizkova said.
After that trip, Savage-McGuire and her husband - empty nesters with three grown daughters - have visited Porizkova’s country home and seen the Rockettes and Blue Man Group with her. Porizkova has insisted on covering some of their non-travel costs.
“They keep saying, ‘We don’t know how to pay you back’,” Porizkova said, adding that she tells them there is no payback among friends.
Plus, she adores the funny gifts they send her - goofy pyjamas and a life-size cardboard cutout of her favourite Star Trek actor, Leonard Nimoy, for instance.
The relationship grew closer when Porizkova, 59, began dating Jeff Greenstein, the Emmy-winning writer and producer of such shows as Friends and Desperate Housewives. The supermodel was eager for her Ohio friends to meet him, so she invited them out to California. “As a foursome, we coalesced pretty quickly,” Greenstein said of the meeting.
“We text each other all the time,” Porizkova said, often continuing conversations they started in person or just checking in at the end of the day.
“Mistie’s not great for hanging out on the phone, but she likes texting,” Porizkova added. Their partners text each other, too.
Then, around Thanksgiving, Savage-McGuire learned that after 79 chemo infusions, the regimen was no longer working. She decided to stop the therapy. When Porizkova learned this, she contacted Todd McGuire and asked what his wife’s dream vacation would be. He told her, “sun and surf, a beach with huts.”
The next month, the two couples flew down to Jamaica in mid-December, staying at a resort that fulfilled Savage-McGuire’s wishes.
“We were just four friends bonding and recalling lives well lived,” Porizkova said. “In the past, we have spoken about death and fear. In Jamaica, we left that aside.”
Said Todd McGuire: “They don’t make us feel small or insignificant because we’re just a couple of country bumpkins from southeast Ohio.”
Indeed, his wife said, “It felt like we’d known them for a really long time.”
Porizkova added: “It always feels like there is a clock ticking with Mistie. But then there’s a clock ticking in general. Meeting Mistie reminded me - don’t waste time on things that are not important.”
There was a second photo taken on that fourth day of vacation. It was also taken by Greenstein, an avid photographer, with his Hasselblad XPan. This time, the subject was his friends from Ohio, holding each other in the golden hour. That image, framed, arrived in Ohio in time for Christmas. Its unboxing by Savage-McGuire was a tearful moment, shared, naturally, on Instagram.
Savage-McGuire says she still pinches herself over the close friendship.
“Paulina has shown me so many things that I had never seen before, like Jamaica. This was probably the closest I will ever get to a dream - dream friendship, dream vacation, dream everything. My life is still beautiful, in spite of everything.”
The couples don’t yet have plans to see each other in person again but don’t rule it out. Savage-McGuire’s health is stable but uncertain. But they will always have that embrace - and everything that led to it. Porizkova shared the photo on Instagram and was flooded with heartfelt comments.
“She is the perfect person to hug,” Porizkova said of Savage-McGuire.
McGuire feels the same way of her much taller friend. “She hugs likes she means it. I hug like I mean it,” McGuire said of that moment. “I didn’t want to let go. I don’t want to let her go.”
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.