Sarah Hartshorne answers our lingering questions about her memoir You Wanna Be on Top?, which recounts her experience as the only plus-size contestant on America’s Next Top Model cycle nine.
Photo: The CW
Sarah Hartshorne was a Boston University sophomore when she heard that America’s Next Top Model was holding a casting call for its upcoming season at the nearby Prudential Center. With the encouragement of a few friends, she auditioned, was accepted to cycle (as the series refers to its seasons) nine, and packed her bags to spend a summer soaking in the glamorous world of fashion. Instead, she allegedly spent two months being psychologically tortured by the show’s producers.
In the years since ANTM’s heyday, the perception of the show has morphed from trashy but harmless to actively malicious. TikTok reactions to the patently insane things Tyra Banks said and did — including casual body-shaming, screaming her head off at a contestant, and pretending to faint during a taping — regularly go viral. Over 24 cycles, the show humiliated hundreds of young, naïve women (and, briefly, men) in the name of entertainment. Millions more watched the show on TV and internalized its attitudes.
Hartshorne, now a writer, stand-up comic, and new mom, reveals in her new book, You Wanna Be on Top?, that the behind-the-scenes experience was even more harrowing than it looked on TV. She recounts the ways producers allegedly manipulated contestants into compliance, including not allowing them to talk to each other when cameras weren’t rolling. (Hartshorne writes that she and her co-stars would gossip in a closet, where the cameras could only film from six feet away.) But the strongest impression left by the book — besides the conviction that all of these girls deserved hazard pay — is just how trippy it is to see yourself flattened into a TV character with no agency. Here, Hartshorne answers the biggest questions we had after reading.
Throughout the book, Hartshorne explicitly describes the show as a cult, especially in the ways producers allegedly used isolation and outright lies to detach contestants from reality.
I read Amanda Montell’s book, Cultish, and it really opened my eyes to how producers used tactics similar to cult leaders. When I talk to people from other cycles, there will be subtle differences in how they manipulated the girls. A lot of the contestants I talked to were underage at the time, but they still found themselves in situations where alcohol was made available to them in technically legal ways, like on international trips. That did not happen in our cycle. I think that’s because they were trying different tactics to manipulate us. As a result, there are certain things that are unique to people who participated in my cycle. The cruise ship was a clusterfuck experience. The passengers screamed at us everywhere we went. Other cycles had similarly weird and surreal experiences, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Before cycle nine, ANTM contestants chain-smoked on camera. After the first elimination, Tyra informed the contestants that, for the first time, they would not be allowed to smoke. She said it was a bad influence for the young girls watching, but viewers suspected there were other factors at play.
Maybe it was just to keep us on edge and make us cranky. It definitely worked. I had a conversation with someone from the cycle before us and they were like, “I bet they had you stop smoking because we would use it to get away from filming.” When the girls were on set and went to smoke together, it was much harder to keep them quiet. I think it was a tactic to remove a card in our hand. Being able to go ask for a smoke break was a tool we had, and they wanted to take that away.
Production had told us to bring enough cigarettes for the whole shoot, so we had to go cold turkey with a carton of cigarettes staring us in the face every day. They didn’t take them away, so we had cigarettes and were not allowed to smoke them. I thought about sneaking one in the bathroom because it was the only room with a window, but I wasn’t brave enough.
After weeks of being told she needed to smile more and show her personality, cycle-nine contestant Ebony Morgan chose to take herself out of the competition, telling Tyra, “I no longer want to be here,” when she was in the bottom two during an elimination. Hartshorne describes how Ebony, who told her on the cruise ship that she planned was to get the villain edit, left the show on her own terms, but a producer told Hartshorne she was allegedly forced her to stay in a hotel room alone until shooting for the season concluded.
I love that Ebony tried to be the mean girl and was just too nice. That’s so endearing and so indicative of who she is as a person — at least as I understood her from the limited time I got to spend with her. It was jarring to see her try to do what she wanted instead of what the producers wanted her to do. I think the show was making her become someone she felt like she wasn’t. She tried to take her destiny into her own hands, and as a result, she basically ended up in very fancy solitary confinement for almost two months. They didn’t even let her hug us. They told her she had to walk right off. That, to me, solidified that there was a desire to punish her. One of the producers said that in so many words: She wanted to go home, and so they punished her. He said that he understood it was torture for her.
Former English model Twiggy was considered a kinder figure than the brash, often cruel Janice Dickinson, whom she replaced on the judges’ panel in cycle five. But Twiggy’s comments, though softer-pitched, were still cutting. Hartshorne describes the judge casually telling her that she takes good photos but “in person, you’re quite plain,” and saying that her dress made her look like a ham.
I think it’s the accent. I really do. She sounds so nice and her face looks so nice that in the moment, I really thought she was being nice. When I was standing in front of her, it took me so long to realize, Wait, what did you just say to me? It was only, I think, when she called me a ham that I was like, I can’t spin that. That’s not nice. But even then, I was still so polite to her face. I think I even said “thank you,” which just made it worse. My great-grandmother could do that too. She would insult you and you wouldn’t realize it for days afterwards. She had a southern accent, so it’s the same “nice lady with an accent” vibe.
Twiggy is also someone that is deeply entrenched in the fashion world and has been for the majority of her life. I think that type of feedback is normal to her. I talk a little bit in the book about how, for me, there was this very positive sense of disconnecting from my body. I was like, “This is not who I am. This is my job.” You have to not take comments about your body personally to be a model.
If the show is a cult, there have to be girls willing to drink the Kool-Aid. Hartshorne’s descriptions of how eventual winner Saleisha, who now goes by Sal, played the game made it seem like she believed in the show more than some of the other contestants. Hartshorne isn’t sure that’s exactly it.
I don’t know if Sal was necessarily a true believer in Top Model. I think she was a true believer in herself and in her ability to model. I think that was really unwavering, and she worked very hard to keep it that way, to keep that confidence in the face of a lot of efforts to unsteady us. Everything the producers did was to keep us off our equilibrium. And that, I think, was a very centering thing for her: “I am a model.” Part of that came from the fact that she had modeled before the show. She’d worked as a professional model for years. I also think she is a very grounded, centered person who has a strong belief in herself.
In the book, Hartshorne describes eating nothing but beans and cheese while in the house.
Producers did not talk to us about what we were eating beyond taking our orders and making sure food was available to us if we were out of the house. I talked to people from other cycles and they were all like, “Yeah, a bunch of people had eating disorders on my cycle, for sure,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s so funny, because none of the girls on my cycle had an eating disorder.” Then I got diagnosed with mine. I realized I was so fixated and obsessed with what I was eating, I never would have noticed if any of the other girls were too.
Throughout the book, Hartshorne alternates between he, she, and they pronouns for the show’s runway coach and occasional judge, Miss J Alexander, who is almost exclusively referred to as “she” on the show.
I fought a couple people on that, and I hope that it was the right decision. If he feels otherwise, I hope that I can talk to him about that. I saw a video that she posted on Instagram where a couple Top Model contestants were talking about how they weren’t sure what pronouns to use for them. There was a clip of one contestant saying, “I don’t know. They just transcend gender.” And Miss J’s caption was, “That’s about it,” or, “That’s about right,” or something like that, essentially saying, “This feels like what I want.” So I thought, Okay, that seems like the clearest indicator I can get about what pronouns they prefer. If that’s changed, in future editions of the book, I’d be happy to change it. In interviews, he has said “he” is fine; she has also said “she” is fine. So I think it would have been okay to stick to one pronoun. But I know a lot of my gender-fluid friends have said, “I’m ‘she/they,’ which means everyone says ‘she’ and no one uses ‘they,’ but that’s an important part of who I am.” I understand that if you are gender-fluid, any pronoun is okay, but why not honor the complexity there?
In a chapter titled “The Closet,” Hartshorne discusses coming to terms with her queerness while on the show. When her close friend in the house, Jenah, mentioned she was bisexual, the feelings Hartshorne had been suppressing for most of her life clicked into place, and she said, “Huh, I am too.” They were literally sitting in a closet at the time because they could talk without the cameras getting too close. A camera was still there, about six feet away, but the moment didn’t make it to air.
I came out to Jenah, and on-camera, and to myself all at once. It felt like such a huge moment at the time. But the thing about being in the ANTM house is that it really skewed my sense of time, my sense of what mattered, my sense of what was happening. Everything that happened in the house already felt so far away; it felt like a whole other world, a whole other person. I didn’t really care what made it onto air. I was surprised, though. I was always surprised. I never knew what they were gonna find interesting. I was like, Okay, that’s the moment that made it? I guess I don’t know what makes good TV. Now I realize I just didn’t have the zoomed-out perspective the producers had, for better and for worse.
“Surreal” is the word I kept using because I suddenly had this thing in my life that everyone who met me wanted to talk about. But I didn’t know how to talk about it because I hadn’t processed it. I couldn’t take it in. I could only see what was in front of me. I just had to trust the producers. I was like, I don’t know what your perspective is, but I know you can see further ahead than I can. There was this feeling of blind trust, which in retrospect I might have tried to do differently.
Hartshorne describes reentering the outside world in the immediate aftermath of the show and feeling “like when you visit a street where you used to live that went on changing and growing without you there.”
I’ve watched my cycle technically twice. I watched it when it came out — for the most part. I actually didn’t keep watching after I was eliminated. I was usually watching with friends, so I was mostly watching them watch me. I spent a lot more time staring at them than I did at the screen. And I would cover my eyes when I was on-camera. When I was writing the book, I was like, I’m going to have to watch this. At first, I could only do one episode at a time, and it would take me three hours. I would have to pause because memories would pop up and I would have to write them down. The first time I saw the house on-camera, they did a drone shot from above, and I was like, Wow, wait, there’s fully another wing. We were only in half of the house. We knew there was an area where the producers went that we couldn’t get to, but I had no idea how big it was.
As Hartshorne recounts, the Top Model contract allegedly included a nondisclosure agreement that carried a $5 million fine if violated. Hartshorne recounts a meeting with production where she says the show’s lawyers threatened to sue the contestants, their parents, and their future children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren if they talked about the show.
I really hope I don’t owe Tyra Banks $5 million. I don’t think I do, because a lot of the contract expired five years after the final episode of the show aired in 2018. My publishers had a great legal team and they got all the details right. And also, I think people have been a lot more critical of NDAs since that show aired. I’m hoping they don’t sue me.
I really want to say that I became brave because attitudes around the show changed or because attitudes around NDAs changed. But if I’m honest, I’m just a compulsive oversharer. My whole life, ever since I learned how to talk, I was like, Cool, I’m never going to stop doing this. The story was going to come out of me some way or another. I just got super lucky that an amazing literary agent slid into my DMs and was like, “Do you want to put it into a book instead of just the internet?” And I was like, “Yes, thank you so much. I would love that.”
Hartshorne doesn’t spend the entire book bashing the show. Top Model convinced her and others who have been marginalized by the fashion industry that they could be good at modeling, too. “Tyra Banks set out to change the fashion industry,” Hartshortne writes, “and she did it.”
I think a cultural phenomenon as big as America’s Next Top Model forces us to hold seemingly conflicting truths at the same time, and it can be difficult. The fact is that the show did positive things for representation in the fashion world. It made people into models and public figures who would not have otherwise been given that platform. Different body types, different gender orientations, different skin colors. I think for sure Tyra has made the fashion world more diverse, and that is undeniably a good thing.
Hartshorne ends her book by contemplating what she’d say to Tyra now. Her complicated feelings about her time on the show — the good, the bad, and the ugly — are summed up in the last line: “Thank you. Pay me.”
Everyone deserves to be paid for their labor and their time and their stories. I think it’s easy to write off that idea, or to trivialize it because we look at reality TV as something frivolous, which it is. At the same time, the people who make that TV are still human beings deserving of a workplace that abides by basic safety and compensation rules. If unionizing means that people get paid for their labor, then I’m for it.
I talked to a few people about their experiences on different reality shows. When I first set out to write the book, I had this idea that it was going to be about all of reality television. I didn’t really realize how much of a story I had to tell. I wanted to interview people from Drag Race, from Great British Bake Off, from The Circle. I did interview some people from The Circle, and they got a much more reasonable stipend than we did and did not have to use it to pay for their own food, which they also had brought to them much more regularly. We had to get food for the week, which in normal life is perfectly reasonable, but on a reality show where you don’t know what’s going to happen and when, there were weeks when we would barely eat the food in the fridge. Then there were weeks where we had to rely on it for all our meals. We were very young and we didn’t necessarily have the life skills to know how to meal-plan and grocery shop. That experience does seem to hopefully be in the past.
Hartshorne gave birth to her first child while writing the book. Of her now-3-year-old daughter, she writes, “She’s so beautiful and people comment on it all the time. But I say ‘inside and out.’”
I want to say that I would be open to it and would just give her all the advice that I could. But I think realistically, I would be nervous and scared and disappointed. And I hope that we have the kind of relationship where she could be okay with that, and I could be okay with that, and we could just be like, “Mom’s uncomfortable. Mom’s nervous.” I hope she doesn’t feel like she needs to fix it and we can just let that discomfort exist.
The biggest thing for me is to encourage her to want to have some creative control over her life. Modeling is great, but you are the least creative person on set. You sit there and watch the photographer and the stylists and the makeup artists do all this amazing creation and all you have is your body. There is some creativity in modeling, but you’re taking direction and following someone else’s creative vision. I hope she can at least want more creative agency than that.
What I really want is for her not to care what she looks like. That would be my dream, for it to not be the most important thing in her life. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be reality stars.
Cycle nine filmed the final auditions for the season on a cruise ship, presumably as part of a brand deal with Royal Caribbean. The other passengers had no idea they would be the backdrop for a TV shoot, and were visibly angry about their vacation being interrupted.