NEW YORK, NY.- She was 18, new to New York, a tenderfoot in an industry said to eat its young. But Beverly Johnson was not short on brass.

She had been quick in the early 1970s to sign with the formidable model agent Eileen Ford — and just as swift, at 19, to inform her, “I want to be on the cover of American Vogue.” When Ford asked her curtly, “Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?,” Johnson was as curt with a comeback, murmuring, audibly enough, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”

Johnson revisits that moment in “In Vogue,” her one-woman show set to open in Manhattan on Sunday. The play, largely derived from her 2015 memoir, “Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All,” and written with playwright Josh Ravetch, is by turns an upbeat and cautionary account of her adventures — and hairy misadventures — in the fashion world.

Onstage, she tells of defying expectations and defecting to a competing modeling agency, despite the warnings of peers that such a move would amount to professional ruin.

Within six months, she had secured her grail, arriving in August 1974 on the cover of American Vogue. The first Black model to achieve that distinction, she proved as fresh-faced and girl-next-door approachable to a mainstream audience as Cheryl Tiegs, Lauren Hutton or any of that era’s golden girls.

Her 75-minute monologue, delivered from a bar stool on a bare stage, highlights her emergence as a supermodel, long before that concept became a cultural touchstone. When, in an interview in the mid-1970s, radio personality Jack O’Brien called her the biggest Black model in the business, Johnson shot back: “I’m the biggest model. Period.”

For sure, she was audacious, known to her peers, as she says onstage, as “the model with the big mouth.” “A woman who tells Eileen Ford, ‘I’m going to the competition’? — I don’t know a man who would have been so bold,” Ravetch said.

Not much has changed. Loose-limbed and preternaturally radiant, Johnson, 71, moved about elastically in her midtown hotel suite during a recent interview. She looked fit in a Sergio Hudson catsuit. She talked fast. Her objective now, she said, is what it has always been: “to get to the front of the line.”

A law student at Northeastern University in Boston in the late 1960s, she made a detour into the highly competitive business of modeling and has not looked back. Would she have made a good lawyer? “Oh, I would have been a great one,” she said without missing a beat.

Yet, she asserts, there is an alternate Beverly Johnson. “I’ve been nonconfrontational and painfully shy my whole life,” she said. Sheltered as a girl, unmindful of some rules — and perhaps a bit entitled — she careered around town without a driver’s license or a tear sheet; she used her image on the cover of TV Guide in lieu of a proper ID.

“She didn’t know the mechanics of the world,” Ravetch said. “But, not knowing stuff, she didn’t understand ‘impossible.’”

She was brashly optimistic in what she calls “the good old days,” thrilled to rub shoulders with Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and Liza Minnelli at Halston’s fabled glass-and-steel Upper East Side town house.

At the same time, she blindly courted trouble. Johnson freely imbibed the mood enhancers of the hour — caviar, Champagne and cocaine. She made questionable romantic choices, not least her marriage to Danny Sims, a music impresario who brought reggae to the United States. Johnson lost custody of their daughter, Anansa, for years.

As terrifying was her encounter in the mid-1980s with Bill Cosby, who, she said much later, tried to drug her. (In 2016, he dropped a defamation suit against her.)

For decades, Johnson kept mum about the incident, fearing she would never be believed and certain that such a claim would damage her professionally. “I knew at the time that I couldn’t say anything until I had the leverage to speak out,” she said.

Until then, little had fazed her. Growing up in middle-class Buffalo, New York, the daughter of an electrician and a nurse, she was a perfectionist. “I was the kid that ironed her clothes ahead of time for the whole week of school,” she said of a habit that prompted her sisters, Joanne and Sheilah, to affectionately tease her.

“They called me the alien,” Johnson recalled. “‘There she goes again,’ they would snark, ‘the girl from outer space.’”

So what. “In my family, we all had to make the grade,” she said. Although she rarely defied her father, when she told him of her plan to model in New York, he stormed that her choice was akin to prostitution.

But on arriving in New York, she thrived in the face of myriad challenges, not least the racism common in the industry. In a 2023 documentary about African American model Donyale Luna, Johnson noted that by photographing women of color for their pages, magazines risked losing many of their advertisers.

Less obvious were the nagging model rivalries. As her fame grew, Johnson fretted that younger Black models, Iman in particular, would eclipse her, a prospect that fueled her already mounting anxiety.

Nor did it help that she and her peers often resorted to cocaine to curb their food cravings. Drugs were an occupational hazard, Johnson said: “As a model, you had to be a hanger. You could be 90 pounds and chiseled to the bone, and they worshipped you for it. You could not get too thin.”

Inevitably, perhaps, she developed the body dysmorphia that plagues her to this day. “I’ve been in therapy for it my whole life,” she said. “Right now, I think I’m fat.”

In her stage monologue, as in her memoir, she recalls that she came to rue her two marriages, especially her 1977 union with Sims, whose infidelities and threatened violence sent her into a tailspin of depression — and more drugs. She sought help from her sister Sheilah, a therapist and school guidance counselor, who, Johnson related in the interview, asked her bluntly: “Will you die if you stay in this relationship? Will you actually physically die?”

“And I thought, ‘Yes, I will die,’” an epiphany that spurred her to divorce Sims in 1979. Anansa, a toddler at the time, was sent to live with her father, returning to her mother only in her teens.

Johnson was linked over the years with tennis star Arthur Ashe, boxer Mike Tyson and actor Chris Noth. About a dozen years ago, she settled in Palm Springs, California, with Brian Maillian, a financier, who accompanied her to New York and whom she introduced as her fiance.

Maillian, who has helped Johnson build a beauty business, has encouraged her activism. “We come from the same mold and the same sort of family history,” he said.

Johnson has used her accrued clout to combat the racism she finds pervasive in the modeling industry.

“It’s wonderful to see a Black girl on the cover of a magazine,” she said. “But this is a trillion-dollar industry.” From the boardroom to the sales floor of a high-end store, she said, “people of color don’t participate.”

Her zeal, she said, is rooted in the moment in 2014 when she brought her accusation against Cosby.

Going public with her story in Vanity Fair “was a defining moment for me,” Johnson said. “I was no longer just a ‘face.’ I had a voice.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.