Teigen’s parents met in Korat, Thai-
land. Her father, Ron Teigen, was an
American electrician of Norwegian
descent. Her mother was unmarried
but had a young daughter, Teigen’s half-
sister Tina. Ron brought them home to
the trailer he rented from his dad. After
Teigen was born in Delta, Utah, the fam-
ily moved to Snohomish, Washington,
where her parents ran a tavern called
Porky’s. (Her dad’s recipe for tartar sauce
is in Teigen’s first cookbook, Cravings.)
Regulars at the bar gave Teigen’s mother
the now-famous nickname Pepper Thai,
because she ate spicy peppers in the back.
Teigen was a cheerleader and, despite not
being religious, a part of the Christian
group Young Life. “We’d sing ‘Brown
Eyed Girl’ and eat free pizza. I loved it,”
she says. She was holding hands in the
mall with her mother well into her teens.
When Teigen was 15, Pepper started
returning to Thailand regularly to care
for her 59-year-old father, who had lung
cancer. Eventually he choked to death in
front of her. Three months later, Pepper’s
mother fell off a train in a freak accident.
Teigen’s mother returned once more to
Thailand, refusing for months to come
out of her room. Eventually she got work
for a Thai family, teaching their children
English. She remembers her daughters
not wanting to talk to her on the phone.
She tried to show Teigen she loved her by
sending her noodles in the mail.
Pepper is crying as she tells the story.
Teigen, who’s enormously protective of
her mother, is lying on her back and star-
ing at the ceiling. Legend has just come
home from another day at the studio. He
sits next to Teigen quietly and pulls her
legs onto his lap.
“I never knew what depression is,”
says Pepper. “Sometimes I thought about
killing myself because I know that my
girls are mad at me.”
Teigen’s father tried to cheer up his
daughter by moving them before her
junior year to Huntington Beach. Teigen
dyed her hair jet black and shaved her
eyebrows. She got two retail jobs, one of
them at a surf shop. When a cameraman
wandered in and asked to shoot some
bikini pictures of her, Dad insisted on
accompanying her to the beach, where he
pitched in by holding the light reflectors.
Through clients at the surf shop, Teigen
went on to land her first campaign with
Billabong. The cameraman liked her vibe
and showed her picture to John Legend,
who’d hired him to direct the 2007 video
for his single “Stereo.” Two months after
the memorable shoot, the 27-year-old
Grammy winner sang “Happy Birthday”
into the newly 21-year-old’s voicemail.
They started dating casually. Teigen
scoured gossip blogs for intel or red-
carpet pictures of Legend with former
girlfriends like model Jessica White. “He
was kind of known at the time for either
being in the closet or a modelizer,” she
says. “I used to go on the websites and it
was always either how I was his beard, or
how he paid his past serious girlfriends,
or how he was with some new model. Oh
my god, I would read everything.”“It got serious pretty quickly,” says
Legend. “She just entertained the hell
out of me, texting me. What people
respond to in her tweets today was the
same energy in those texts. I didn’t know
that I wanted someone funny until I was
actually with someone funny.”
At the time, Teigen worked half the
year in Miami. She slept in the living room
of an apartment she shared with six other
models, doing dispiriting jobs for South
American clients, like being the random
girl on the cellphone background. They
partied “super-hard.” They made noth-
ing. “I had no credit cards, I didn’t have a
bank account, and it just didn’t occur toCOSTUME PARTY
Teigen with her mother, Pepper,
in the children’s playroom.Teigen’s gown by Adam Lippes; earrings by
BULGARI High Jewelry. Pepper’s
clothing by Tory Burch; shoes by Manolo
Blahnik. Miles’s shorts by Rachel Riley.DECEMBER 2019 71