How the girl who was called ugly became the sexiest woman alive

People would say she was so ugly.

For the life of me, I never ever saw her that way.

She was slim and trim, thick hair, a bit of a native pretty look to her eyes, never needed makeup and could sing like angels calling from heaven.

Very different from the start
On January 19, 1943, a baby girl was born in Port Arthur, Texas. Her parents were everyday working folks and perfectly normal. Her mother, Dorothy, worked at a local college, and her father, Seth, was an engineer at Texaco.

The family was deeply religious and sought a quiet, God-centered life. But it quickly became clear that their daughter was different from other kids. She demanded more attention and had a unique spark that set her apart.

From an early age, it was obvious she was drawn to unconventional people and determined to carve her own path.

The artist grew up in a deeply segregated town, at a time when integration was fiercely debated — this was the era of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. They and their friends stood out as the town’s intellectual liberals, curious about the world and eager to understand the African-American experience. They devoured beatnik literature, soaked in jazz, and listened closely to folk blues.

She became Port Arthur’s first female beatnik, frizzed her hair by drying it in the oven, skipped wearing a bra, and developed her own unmistakable cackle of a laugh… a friend once remembered her asking, “Was it irritation enough?”

The star discovered a love for singing in high school, especially blues and folk music. But those years were far from easy. She faced relentless bullying and was socially ostracized.

As a teenager, she struggled with weight and severe acne, leaving her face scarred. The scarring was so pronounced that she eventually underwent procedures to improve her appearance.

As one classmate recalled, according to Alice Echols’ biography:

“She’d been cute, and all of a sudden she was ugly.”

Her younger sister Laura described her skin as “a never-ending series of painful bright red pimples.”

“Ugliest man on campus”
The future star enrolled at a local college before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin.

At campus, she went barefoot when she felt like it, wore Levi’s to class because they were more comfortable, and carried her autoharp with her everywhere she went so that if the urge to break into song struck, it would be handy.

“She ran with a tight group who hung out with books and ideas,” her younger sister, Laura, recalled in a documentary.

In 1962, while at UT Austin, the future icon nearly “won” a campus contest for the “ugliest man on campus.” Whether she entered as a joke or nominated herself remains unclear, but friends who were there that year agree it humiliated her.

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