Susie Steller
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"No question. She was so thin, you could see where the skin was on the side of the fingernails. She had all those huge baggy clothes that almost seemed like they belonged on a teenager."
One of her family's favorite clients, who worked for IBM as a programmer, traveled the globe to teach seminars around the world. She shared time traveling with her daughter, who was only 16 at the time, and later, when she was 17.
Steller wasn't always thin. After all, she was born in the great state of Maine. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she later lived in Detroit with her husband and eight children, and she has said that she was sent to a well-known medical school when she was just 10. She was born with all the signs of being the kind of girl that was told to dress from head to toe.
Unsurprisingly, Steller says that she and her daughter were very close throughout childhood. When she married at 19, she still thought about walking her 2 ½ miles to the train station to meet her mother, but finally moved away that spring.
She made her debut in her first modeling ads, and that proved to be a very successful career.
"She got three jobs. Each job was interesting for her--from being in a commercial, painting a commercial. Very rewarding. But she liked modeling. She made her own shoes at an Italian shoe company. And she went to all those photo studios and got that big brown bushy sideburn.
"I'd pick her up on the way home and put her on the floor and tell her, 'There's Dad. Sit down.' She was so skinny, you could see where the skin was on the side of the fingernails. She had all those huge baggy clothes that almost seemed like they belonged on a teenager."
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Steller, now 42, was born in Cambridge to wealthy Scottish parents. A beautiful girl from a solidly religious Protestant background, Steller loved Catholic mass as she went through college. "Everyone in my family was regular Catholics, but my mother did a few prayers every day in church."
At a very young age, her family moved to London.