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Modeling and All That Came After

UNFAZED Léon Bing, as she was in the '60s, shot by Dennis Hopper.Credit...Dennis Hopper

I FIRST met Léon Bing in Pasadena, in 1998, while working on an article about Rudi Gernreich, the California revolutionary who had shocked the world with his topless bathing suit. Ms. Bing, a model in the 1960s, had not worn the famous suit; that distinction belonged to Peggy Moffitt, who also saw herself as the keeper of Gernreich’s legacy.

Ms. Bing, on the other hand, had moved on, writing a widely admired book, “Do or Die,” in 1991, about gang life in South Central Los Angeles and two other books that dealt with failed public trust toward children.

So we arranged to meet at a restaurant in Pasadena, where she lives in a small apartment. Then nearly 60, she was still striking, exotically so, with cheekbones that looked like sharp objects wedged in a black bob.

Nobody trying to conjure Los Angeles in the mellow, surfer-girl ’60s would think of Léon Bing. Even her name sounds hard-boiled.

“Léon is like a Howard Hawks woman,” said a friend, Julie Kirgo, a writer. “She could probably light a cigarette in a thunderstorm.”

True to type, she is also a lady.

No sooner had we ordered our meal than a wave of nausea hit me. I spent the rest of the evening back at her apartment throwing up — not far, I managed to note, from a painting by Ed Ruscha, a former lover of Ms. Bing’s. She seemed unfazed by the interruption. I had a feeling she was used to this kind of thing.

Ms. Bing’s own life would make a book, her friends told her more than once, and finally, somewhat reluctantly, she decided to write her memoir. “Swans and Pistols” (Bloomsbury) has just come out. If its subtitle, “Modeling, Motherhood, and Making It in the Me Generation,” sounds a bit too upbeat, it is. The book, like Ms. Bing’s life, presents a deep — and at times deeply troubling — fascination with danger. Wearing swanky clothes is really the least of it.

“Modeling now seems to be the Annapurna of careers,” Ms. Bing said recently by telephone. “I thought modeling was just a great job. I didn’t have to do any office work. It was a great ticket.” To an interesting experience maybe — the book is loaded with accounts of the men Ms. Bing dated and rejected, from the studio executive John Calley to Warren Beatty — but she didn’t actually see her looks as a steppingstone. Maybe she had too much taste for that.

Indeed, time and again, you feel the extraordinary effects of family and education. Ms. Bing, an avid reader, was raised in a Jewish household in Oakland, where her grandfather, a piano salesman named Léon M. Lang, set high standards and also provided Ms. Bing’s indomitable, beloved, high-stepping mother, Estelle Lang, with a sense of security that endured through five husbands. Mr. Lang, himself a lapsed Catholic, paid for his granddaughter’s convent school education.

So, as Ms. Bing said, “Modeling just gave me another kind of confidence, beyond what I had from my family.”

Today it’s assumed that models and other beautiful creatures will manage to secure themselves financially, with the usual reality show or clothing line. “And Léon just never thinks that way,” said John Steppling, a screenwriter and theatrical teacher, who has known Ms. Bing for 30 years. Another friend, the writer Dinah Kirgo (sister of Julie) said, “She’s almost made her life more difficult by the choices she’s made.”

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MEMOIRIST Léon Bing, in her Pasadena apartment, where an Ed Ruscha painting hangs on the wall.Credit...Ann Johansson for The New York Times

Well, she became a freelance journalist, for one thing. In 1985, at the urging of a neighbor, a writer named Larry DuBois, Ms. Bing hauled herself down to the boardwalk in Venice to interview some homeless teenagers squatting in a building nearby. She had brains, she didn’t take a lot of guff and she wasn’t inhibited by what she didn’t know. To her, the homeless youths, like the gang members she met later, were no different than most American teenagers. “They just wanted to tell me how they felt,” she said.

Still, the segue to published author (the Venice piece ran in LA Weekly and helped get Ms. Bing a New York agent) was surprising in one respect. She had just ended a live-in relationship with a major cocaine dealer named Lou (called Nick in the book). She insisted she was addicted more to the lifestyle — the two-inch stacks of bills Nick would give her to buy fancy French sheets — than to the actual drug.

Maybe, but the question that haunts the book remains: What was a nice Jewish girl from Oakland doing with a guy like that?

It is difficult to explain someone like Ms. Bing. The problem is partly a contemporary one. We’re not used to a dame like her, a woman who possesses both modesty and a sharp tongue, who goes from accommodating girlfriend of a dealer to accomplished writer. She fits more readily in a different era — the ’20s or ’40s — and yet here she is.

“She’s a very American character in a way,” said Julie Kirgo, who grew up in Hollywood, where her father was a screenwriter. “Léon is very out there, and she’s also a lady. It’s a fantastic mixture. And I think that was part of the character of the L.A. of the ’70s and ’80s. The atmosphere was free and open.”

But part of the problem in understanding what motivates Ms. Bing is with the book itself. Though coolly not a kiss-and-tell — she likes being elusive, on the edges — the book nonetheless omits certain details and, more critically, avoids making judgments that might help explain her choices.

Some of the details of her upbringing are deliberately hazed over, like the identity of her father, whom Estelle divorced when Ms. Bing was 3 and whom she never saw or spoke to again. Avoidance seems to be a Lang tradition. Maybe it was just good manners, but, Ms. Bing said, “They didn’t believe in analyzing the past.”

One learns far more about the smartly turned out Estelle, and therefore about her independent-minded daughter. A figure in the Auntie Mame mold, Estelle cast off husbands like hats. Checking her watch as No. 3 skedaddled, she said to her daughter: “Good, that’s done. O.K., honey, if you get a move on, we can have dinner and make the early show at the Sherman.”

Apparently one husband was enough for Ms. Bing. In the ’50s, while modeling in New York, she met a nice-looking television director named Mack Bing, and they had a daughter, Lisa. After returning to Los Angeles, and a divorce, Ms. Bing and Lisa moved into a Spanish-style apartment building in West Hollywood. Ms. Bing was hanging out with Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. There was a cloud of pot smoke. Doors were open.

“There was an understanding of what it was like to not have much money, and people opened their homes to those who were coming along,” said the musician Keith Allison, best known for playing with the group Paul Revere and the Raiders. He met Ms. Bing in 1971, when he was staying in Don Johnson’s house. “Sunday afternoon was poker games or lawn parties. Ringo lived up in the hills. You’d bop around to wherever you got invitations.”

You can’t help feeling, though, that Ms. Bing, for all her smarts, was wasting her time. The real work was waiting to be done. It’s entirely possible that Lou/Nick was a sweetheart, despite the kilos of Peruvian cocaine he was moving. And it was, as Lisa Bing — who lives in Boston, where she works as a sign-language translator — tenderly acknowledged, a different time, when it was easy to think “that coke wasn’t robbing anyone’s soul.” She said she never believed her mother put her in danger.

But at some point you have to say, “Oh, come on ...”

“Léon could glamorize him and make him out to be the modern equivalent of a bootlegger,” Julie Kirgo said. “But have you ever seen a gangster who looked like Warren Beatty?” She added: “There’s not a moral judgment in Léon. She would no more judge her mistake than she would anyone else’s.”

That may be a problem for some readers of “Swans and Pistols.” And while it doesn’t serve as a justification (nor is one being offered), in all likelihood she could not have gained the trust of the gang members she sought out in South Central if she had been prepared to judge their horrible acts. Almost 20 years later, “Do or Die” is still in print.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Modeling And All That Came After. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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