IT was about the time that Naomi Campbell wanted to scratch my eyes out (or so a trade glossy informed me) that it became clear to me that she was no ordinary model. It was 1996, and I had written an article for The New York Times Magazine about the English-born model of Jamaican (and also Chinese) ancestry, enumerating her eccentricities and recounting a few of the seemingly numberless stories about the nutty behavior of this gorgeous, magnetic and nearly pathologically petulant young woman with serious anger-management issues.
