Real-life ‘Rio’ model Marcie Hunt in 1981 (left) and 2023 (right)

In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, fashion model Marcie Hunt was known in the industry as “the smile.” But it took until 2024 for her to find out, along with the rest of Planet Earth, that she was the “cherry ice cream smile” — i.e., the face of Duran Duran’s iconic, Patrick Nagel-illustrated Rio album cover.

Hunt was as shocked as anyone else was last week, when Nagel historians Monica Moynihan and Mark Walker jointly announced on Instagram that a vivid image captured by Francois Lamy for a glossy Angelo Tarlazzi editorial spread had inspired one of the most recognizable and decade-defining album covers of all time. Not even the Duran Duran members themselves or the late Nagel’s technical art assistant, Barry Hahn, knew that that page, from the February 1981 issue of French Vogue, was the tear sheet consulted by Hahn’s former boss for Rio.

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“I was amazed!” Hunt tells me over Zoom from her home in Northern California, still flashing that broad, dazzling grin. “I didn’t know Patrick Nagel’s art was based on real people, and so at the time I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful album, lovely illustration,’ but I really didn’t think about it being me. Plus, there were other models at that time that were being questioned about whether it was them or not; I think they were looking at Carol Alt. … But now, I’m looking at the cover — the angle, the shape of the mouth — and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh. It’s me.’”

Hunt can only speculate, since Nagel died in 1984, why — of all the magazines and fashion layouts that Nagel could have referenced when he was commissioned by Duran Duran to create the art for their breakthrough sophomore LP — he gravitated to her photo. “There was a lot of energy in that picture, in the smile and the eyes, and Duran Duran are a big-energy group,” she muses. “There was this kind of glamour and adventure and fun, and I think something about the look in the eyes and this big smile was attractive. I don’t know why it was different from other models, but really, there weren’t as many big smiles going on at that time.”

Hunt makes an interesting point. Most high-fashion editorials feature supermodels looking cool, surly, and unapproachable — smizing, perhaps, but not smiling — yet almost every vintage magazine cover featuring Hunt is totally toothy. “I actually have a fair amount of photos where I was pouty or sexy or whatever you want to call it: ‘Why does she look angry?’ or ‘What’s her deal there?’” she laughs. “But then I met Grace Coddington from English Vogue. I was walking out a door — I was just starting to work for French Vogue and I didn’t know who Grace was at the time — and I just gave her a big smile. And she decided that they hadn’t had a smile on [the cover of] English Vogue for forever. And so, that’s how that began: me doing so many of those covers with the big smile. It was all right place, right time.”

Hunt, who grew up in Saratoga, Calif., began modeling in 1974 in New York, after Victor Bruce Cooper, co-founder of the Wilhelmina Models agency, “came out to San Francisco to look for new faces. And at that time, it was just the ‘classic face,’ just kind of a classic look, and that’s what they thought I had.” Hunt actually lived with Victor and his wife/business partner, former Dutch model Wilhelmina Cooper, in New York City for six months before she got the opportunity to work in Paris. She was 21 — “old,” by industry standards, to be launching a modeling career — but that turned out to be an advantage for her.

“There are so many models that start when they’re 16, 17, 18. But because I went to college for a while and I studied French after high school, I was older. And I think it really helped me, because I was able to have my head on my shoulders and just be a little more solid in terms of knowing what I was getting into. There were a lot of models that were really young that would go to the nightclubs every night, and pretty soon they wouldn’t look that great — we didn’t have airbrushing like they do now, so when you were in front of the camera, you had better look good!” explains Hunt, who spoke “almost fluent French” by the time she hit the Paris scene. She then adds with a flash of that smile and a laugh: “So, I would go to nightclubs on the days when I wasn’t working.”

Hunt’s relative maturity and more sophisticated look also made her a perfect muse for both Nagel and Duran Duran, who always respectively depicted strong, full-grown women in their illustrations and music videos. “I was slender — not starved,” says Hunt (who reveals that while she never underwent extensive dental work like veneers or braces to achieve her signature smile, she did have to get “a number of fillings” due to her fondness for her mother’s home-baked sugary desserts). “I did have a few times when I did runway shows, like when Valentino would measure my hips and say, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, your hips are too broad.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do have hips!’ They wanted two- or three-inches-smaller hips, a more boyish look in the sense of the body. And I think it is a shame that later on it did take on that aspect, because for many young models, they were really starving themselves. And being anorexic is not a positive thing.”

Despite her va-va-voom figure — and the fact that she inspired Nagel, who was the in-house illustrator for girly mag Playboy — Hunt never did any racier modeling, like lingerie or cheesecake shoots. She only has one tiny regret about that. “It’s fine for other models to do this — I am not judging at all, of course — but Helmut Newton used to do an annual book where it would be nude, and he did ask me if I would like to do that. And at the time I said, ‘Helmut, how about if I’m behind the camera and you can be in front of the camera?’ And he just sort of looked aghast. And as I recall, I don’t think I ever worked with him again. I felt kind of bad afterwards,” she giggles.

Interestingly, Hunt never crossed paths with Duran Duran back in the day, even though the band members often partied with, made music videos with, or even dated and married models. But she does recall a couple of funny celebrity-circuit encounters. “In Tatler magazine, there was an interview about me, about Jack Nicholson following me across the seas, which wasn’t exactly true,” she laughs. “I met Jack in London while I was working for Tatler, and then he said, ‘Hey, you should come to a party.’ He gave me a call at 3 in the morning and was asking if ‘Marie’ was there. … It was at night, probably from wherever he was partying.” Hunt, who was at that time seriously dating the Frenchman who would become her first husband, turned the actor down, saying, “‘Hey, I’m monogamous. I’m living with somebody. I’m sure you’re very interesting, but I’m not interested in that way.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s never bothered me before!’ And this was in Tatler magazine.”

Later, Hunt had another interesting moment with Nicholson’s famous philanderer pal, Warren Beatty. “That was at a nightclub party. There was going to be a ‘model of the evening’ that Warren Beatty would spend time with, let’s put it that way. I want to say this the right way,” she chuckles. “So, we’re out on the dance floor, and Warren looks over to me and he whispers, ‘You’re not my type — but you’re Jack’s type.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know!’ Because that incident had already happened in London when Jack called me.”

Marcie with her own recent art prints, Napa 2024

By the mid-‘80s, Hunt had tired of such adventures; she was also separating from her French husband, so she “wanted to move back to California and start a new life, a different life.” But, she stresses, “I loved modeling. I loved the traveling and meeting all these super-creative, zany people. I treated it as a business, but also just loved the creativity involved in it. … I was always just creating myself in the photos. That’s how I saw it, and that’s what I really enjoyed the most.”

Hunt met her second/current husband, Tom Dinkel, in 1992, and in 2006 they co-founded the Dos Lagos Vineyards winery in Napa — which brings new meaning to the Rio-era lyric “mouth is alive with juices like wine” from “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which the couple actually danced to at their wedding. (A longtime Duranie, Hunt cites “Reach Up for the Sunrise,” “Notorious,” and “Ordinary World” as her other favorite Duran tracks.) She also continued to tap into her creativity, becoming a painter and designing the labels for Dos Lagos’s wine bottles. (She’s fan of Nagel’s artwork as well, saying, “I love the pop art that Patrick did. It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, it’s sexy.”)

Marcie Hunt and her husband, Tom Dinkel, dancing to “Hungry Like the Wolf” at their wedding in the ’90s

After she retired from modeling, Hunt became a “very private person,” and until very recently hadn’t posted on her personal Instagram account since 2021. (She logged back on last week, after her identity as the real-life Rio went viral.) However, Hunt is enjoying her newfound, completely unexpected fame. “I just thought this was such a beautiful thing, and the [fans’] energy is so incredible. I feel so honored really to be linked with Duran Duran and all the fans, of which I include myself,” she says.

Hunt reveals that the band has been in touch “through their management group” and gave a “brief hello,” and she’s hoping that when she and Dinkel are vacationing in Europe this summer, their travels will coincide with Duran Duran’s tour itinerary and they’ll be able to meet up in person. “I mean, that would be fantastic,” she marvels. When pressed to name her favorite Duran member, she gigglingly confesses “probably Simon,” but she is thrilled at the prospect of meeting the entire group that unwittingly immortalized her as the Mona Lisa of the new wave era.

“I am just so honored by everything, by being connected with the band and its members, and I hope for even more of that in the future as well,” says Hunt. “It’s just been so much fun, and I feel so blessed.”

Marcie Hunt speaking via Zoom, with her own artwork behind her, in 2024

In the words of Simon Le Bon: Hey now, woo, look at that!

Forty-two years after decade-defining Playboy illustrator Patrick Nagel was commissioned by Duran Duran to create one of the most iconic album covers of all time for Rio, the Mona Lisa of the new wave era has at long last been found.

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The big reveal was announced by Monica Moynihan, a Nagel historian and art broker who runs the definitive Patrick Nagel Arts website and Instagram. The cover girl’s identity was actually uncovered by another Instagrammer, @nagel_angel, aka Nagel expert Mark Walker, who Moynihan said “deserves all the credit” and “spent $$$ and countless hours” in a hungry-like-the-wolf quest to hunt down the original lady with the cherry ice cream smile.

And it turns out that in an alternate ’80s universe, Rio might have been dancing on the sand while wearing eyeglasses, creating a different sort of pretty view.

Walker, who’d been “buying a lot of various fashion magazines from the era that Pat might have purchased: Everything from European versions of Vogue, to Linea Italiana to American magazines like GQ, Glamour, and U.S. Vogue,” tracked down the album cover’s original source image — a multi-page editorial spread for Angelo Tarlazzi in the February 1981 issue of Vogue Paris. “I saw that smile. I saw those eyes, those eyes that I’d stared at hundreds of times by this point in my life, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’ve been entranced by this magical woman for over 40 years. I knew it was her,” Walker posted on his own Instagram account.

Another fan, Sarah Bastos, responded to a post by Moynihan asking for help identifying the mystery woman, saying she recognized the porcelain-skinned, raven-haired beauty as fashion model Marcie Hunt (who can be seen on different ’80s magazine covers below). Nagel’s technical art assistant, Barry Hahn, then confirmed to Walker that the stunning Tarlazzi photograph of Hunt — wearing a paisley blouse, graphic cat-eye spectacles, and a wide-brimmed fedora not unlike Duran bassist John Taylor’s, but still instantly identifiable thanks to her inviting, toothy grin — was indeed the tear sheet used by his former boss. Hahn told Walker, “Great catch.”

According to Annie Zaleski’s 33 ½ book about the Rio album, Duran Duran’s co-manager in the early ’80s, Paul Berrow, was intrigued by Nagel’s sharp, stylized work while flipping through an issue of Playboy, so he commissioned the artist to do create two covers for what would become the Birmingham band’s breakthrough LP. One option, of a woman languidly reclining with a yellow blossom pinned in her hair, was eventually used for the “My Own Way” single art. But, as Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes told Zaleski, it was “love at first sight” when the band members saw the second, stronger image of a bare-shouldered bombshell alluringly staring down the camera lens, shining and really showing all she can. “We all said instantly: ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the cover,’” recalled Rhodes.

Renowned graphic designer Malcolm Garrett, known for his striking, minimalist album art for the Human League, Culture Club, and especially the Buzzcocks, then added design elements and typefaces to evoke the vintage vacation vibes of 1950s cigar boxes. “We all looked back and smiled at the girl,” Rhodes told Zaleski of the end result. “It just seemed to represent everything we wanted at that point. It was uplifting. It was fun. It was modern, and colorful, and bright, and optimistic, but with something in it that you just didn’t know what was going on.”

The artwork similarly captivated music fans of the early-MTV generation, conveying the aspirational album’s promises of champagne-fueled, jet-setting, yacht-hopping adventures. That was a theme that of course carried over into Duran Duran’s tropical music videos from the album, in which Nagel’s glamour girls seemed to spring to three-dimensional life. Part of the Rio era’s appeal for the band’s largely female fanbase was undoubtedly its pro-woman imagery. Duran Duran’s music video castings — the sassy Bond heroine who captured drummer Roger Taylor in a fishing net in “Rio,” the tigress who tussled with Le Bon in “Hungry Like the Wolf” — always depicted strong, self-assured women, which was a welcome contrast from the usual video vixens that starred in other exploitative clips of the time.

“The women [in our videos] were manipulating us! In ‘Rio’ or ‘Hungry Like the Wolf,’ we’re chasing them. They’re the ones with the power,” John Taylor explained to me in a 2022 interview celebrating the “exotic, erotic” album’s 40th anniversary. “They’re on the pedestal — as it should be.”

As for why it took more than four decades for the real Rio to be identified, Nagel, who conducted very few interviews during his brief lifetime, died less than two years after the Rio album’s release, at age 38, in perhaps the most ’80s way possible (he suffered a heart attack after participating in a celebrity “aerobathon”). Hunt retired from modeling and now leads a much more reclusive life. According to her Instagram, which was last updated in 2021 and describes her as a “former top model in Paris,” she and her husband of three decades have owned and operated the Dos Lagos Vineyards winery in Napa for the past 12 years — which brings new meaning to the Rio-era Duran lyric “mouth is alive, with juices like wine.”

Duran Duran were apparently just as surprised as anyone by this news, stating Monday via Instagram: “WOW!… We suspect the model and maybe the band Duran Duran had no idea Nagel was influenced and used this image to create the cover of their musical masterpiece, Rio. He certainly changed many things, most specifically removing her glasses, but he obviously loved her smile. And that smile has been an iconic piece of Duran Duran history for decades.”

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