Avalon Lifeguard to Supermodel: The Remarkable Story of the Ageless Bruce Hulse
It’s the late 1960s in Avalon. The town is covered in cute beach cottages, the sunscreen of choice is baby oil. The days are hot, the nights … probably even steamier. Murray Wolf is the young captain of the lifeguards, a group of all-American athletic guys (no girls yet) who worked hard and played harder. Two hundred dollars could buy them a share in a beach shack for the whole summer.
And Bruce Hulse was ready to enter the scene.
Raised in Narberth, Pa., along with his three sisters, Hulse was a straight-A high school student and standout athlete in basketball and track, when he visited his buddies Jimmy Shoemaker and Billy Glenn, who were working as lifeguards on the Avalon Beach Patrol.
“I remember they had a place in Stone Harbor. The screens had been kicked out, there were beer cans all over the floor,” Hulse says. “It smelled like stale beer, and there were people flopping all over the place. And I thought, ‘This is heaven.’”
That glimpse of “heaven” turned out to be the spark for a fascinating journey that would take him from the beaches of Avalon to a globe-trotting career as one of the most successful male models of his generation, featured on the world’s most famous runways and the glossiest magazine covers.
And while it might be tempting to stereotype a handsome lifeguard-turned-model, as a certain type of “Ken doll” prototype, Hulse’s life story quickly dispels that notion. From his Ivy League education as a Buddhist and Hindu studies major at Cornell, to his time as a professional basketball player in Sweden, to the longevity of his 40-year career in a field known for stars who flame out as quickly as they ascend, Bruce Hulse is a singular figure.
The Beach Patrol
But long before all the glamour and world travel, Hulse set his sights on being an Avalon lifeguard. “I had to wait ’til after my freshman year at Cornell to try out for the lifeguards because in high school I’d been playing basketball in the summers and trying to get recruited,” he explains.
Hulse knew the running portion of the lifeguard test would be a breeze. The challenge, though, would be the swim. Even though he was an avid surfer, Hulse wasn’t a trained or competitive swimmer, unlike most of the guys trying out. But, exhibiting a trait that surely played a role in his lifelong success, he was not easily deterred.
“During my freshman year at Cornell, in between classes and playing basketball and running track, I would take my lunch hour and go up and swim in the pool,” he recalls.
When the tryouts arrived, Hulse was nervous … and tenacious.
“I’d already put down my share on this little shack of a place, that later became known as ‘The Sweat Box,’” he says. “There were like 80 guys trying out for 20 open spots and we had to do this half-mile swim. It was freezing cold, and the whistle goes off. I go running into the water and I think, ’Oh, my God!’ I wanted to immediately turn around. It was so cold you had to keep your head out of the water, the swells were big, and you couldn’t see where the other swimmers were. And I’m thinking, ‘I already paid for my summer rent!’ So, I just gutted it out and went for it. I ended up in 17th place and then the run was easy. So, then I got hired and I was the rookie for Jimmy Shoemaker, Jimmy Bonner, and Billy Glenn. And that was the start of my life as a guard.”
It would be a life he fully embraced.
“I loved the job,” he says. “I loved the races and the rescues, but also just living with a bunch of lifeguards and sharing meals. We’d always train in the morning, and we’d have to run like a mile down the beach and there’d be 70 of us running along. Some of the guys would be reeking of beer and telling stories as we ran, and then people would be diving into the water and swimming to the flag. Those were just memorable times.”
Hulse would stay on the beach patrol for 10 summers while he finished his bachelor’s degree at Cornell and earned a master’s degree in psychology at West Chester University. He spent eight of those summers on his beloved surf beach.
“On that surf beach, I knew all the families, and the moms back then would bring their kids down in the morning and leave them and say, ‘Watch for my kid,’” he recalls. “Then, you’d have little kids who were mascots and you’d be teaching them how to surf and surf dash and all that good stuff.”
And during all those years of “surfer dude” fun and shenanigans, there was a lot more going on both above and below the surface.
“I had started meditating and doing yoga in high school,” he says. “In fact, I had a bunch of lifeguards, and we were all into meditation, and a vegetarian diet, and the whole thing.”
The Catwalk
No doubt, that grounded energy would serve him well, as other parts of Hulse’s life began to take off. After playing pro basketball in Sweden (he was recruited by a scout while playing in the Sea Isle City summer league), he was in graduate school when a girlfriend from New York suggested he try modeling.
He was skeptical. “I had no idea; it’s something I’d never thought about. My sisters had Seventeen magazine, but I never looked at that,” he says.
And yet, no surprise, he was up for the challenge. “I said, ‘What do I have to do?’”
While he was quickly turned away by the four big modeling agencies in New York, one encounter during that time would turn out to be fateful. “There was one really nice lady at Wilhelmina named Martha, and she’d asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was thinking about getting my Ph.D. and that in the summer I was a lifeguard,” Hulse recalls.
Martha – who would eventually become Hulse’s agent – didn’t forget that conversation. And she called him about a month later to say that a photographer named Bruce Weber was looking for models for a lifeguard shoot in Hawaii. So, Bruce Hulse went to meet Bruce Weber.
“I go to this little studio on 27th Street on the west side of New York and I knock on the door, and he opens it,” recalls Hulse. “And Bruce Weber’s this big, friendly guy with a big laugh, and he looks at me and says, ‘Oh my God, I love your nose.’ And I’m like, ‘What the hell?! My nose?’”
But starting with that meeting, these two gregarious, “chatty” guys would strike up a rapport that would lead to decades of success and collaboration. As a photographer, Bruce Weber is credited with revolutionizing the way that men were perceived in the fashion world and as models, creating an idealized image of male beauty, fitness, and lifestyle. Serendipitously, Bruce Hulse would turn out to be an ideal muse.
So, buoyed by a few connections, Hulse didn’t let the initial rejections stop his exploration of the modeling world. And slowly he started making headway, first by “basically being the only guy in town,” when French Men’s Vogue needed a model around Christmastime … then as a runway model in Berlin … then in ads for a French department store. “It’s weird how it just sort of took off,” he says.
The Last Summer
Before long, Hulse was scoring shoots with famous photographers from Switzerland to Santorini and spreads in GQ magazine, and big ads for famous designers. And yet, by May of that first year in modeling, he took a pause and said, “I’m going to go down and have my last summer at the beach,” he says. “I went down to have my last hurrah of lifeguarding.”
And where did the budding supermodel live that summer? “In the lifeguard shack with my buddies,” he says. “Where else would I stay?”
Yet, Bruce Hulse still brought a little bit of his new career to the Jersey Shore.
“I’d told Bruce Weber a bunch of stories about the lifeguards and that they would make a great story for GQ,” he says. “So, at the beginning of the summer, Bruce came down to Avalon in a limo with the people from GQ and did this big story on the Avalon lifeguards. They even used Murray Wolf in some of the pictures. There’s this incredible picture of us all standing there with the oars and Murray, and it hung in the beach house for years and years.”
The Shooting Steady Star
As that summer closed the chapter on Bruce Hulse’s decade as an Avalon lifeguard, it opened the floodgates for one of the most successful careers in male modeling history. He was one of the most recognizable faces from the 1980s and 1990s modeling era, gracing the covers of magazines, starring in iconic ads for Calvin Klein and Levi’s, and working with some of the biggest names in the industry from photographers Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and Peter Lindbergh to models Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson, and Paulina Porizkova.
Even more remarkable, he’s maintained a steady, successful career in this tumultuous industry for more than four decades. He cites his versatility for part of that success. “I’ve had a range where I never got stuck,” he explains. “I would go from a coffee advertisement to a Versace shoot to something for Walmart or Buick or American Express.”
Beyond the versatility, Hulse says “I think I’m a good people person. I was always friendly with everybody. A lot of times you can get booked for a client, but do they like you enough to bring you back? I also got to work with some great photographers in the beginning who did these kind of iconic pictures of me, and I became really good buddies with Bruce Weber and ended up working with him probably 50 times over the years.”
Hulse also credits his time on the Avalon Beach Patrol with helping him handle some of the demands of modeling and acting.
“In the modeling and acting world, when you’re on set, you’re often just sitting around doing nothing and then all of a sudden, it’s boom-boom, you’re in front of the camera and you have to be ready,” he says. “It’s a little like sitting on the guard stand. And the guards were also like a family, and we had a shared mission to protect people and win races, so you learned as a guard to deal with a lot of powerful, diverse personalities.”
Behind the Scenes
Hulse also kept engaged and busy behind the camera lens, working steadily as a successful photographer himself; writing a memoir, “Sex, Love & Fashion: A Memoir of a Male Model,” that was published in 2008; writing screenplays; continuing to study yoga, meditation, and martial arts; and becoming a dedicated family man.
“I’ve been married 30 years now, which gave me the stability to build a life,” he explains. “For a while, it’s fun to pull into a city and you’re out at the nightclub and all that, but it gets old quick. When I had kids, it became all about being a dad and a coach and all that great stuff.”
Today, Hulse lives outside of Los Angeles, with his wife, Katrina, also a successful model and actress, and he stays active keeping up with his son and daughter, both scholar-athletes in their 20s.
Professionally, his career continues to roll into a new phase.
“I started out like the young studly guy and then at some point, I got my first job where I’m the grandpa,” he laughs. “I started modeling at 28 and I’m 71 now, so there’s the whole progression from young photos to dad pictures, to the businessman, to Grandpa Jones.” In fact, he recently did an ad campaign with the johnnie-O brand where he plays, of all things, Santa Claus.
For those who knew him on the Avalon Beach Patrol, Hulse’s success is no surprise. “Bruce was one of the leaders of our patrol,” recalls 65-year captain, Murray Wolf. “He was a great runner and an excellent athlete.”
Hulse’s friend Mike Smith, part of the tight-knit community of guards from the ’70s, recalls their halcyon days in Avalon: “We raced together, and body surfed after work. Bruce was always a great guy. He was into meditation and all that, even back then. And he just had that look, like he was Superman.”
From Superman to Santa Claus, Bruce Hulse’s life thus far has been an incredible journey. And despite his experiences in some of the most exotic and beautiful locales on the planet, his time on the Avalon Beach Patrol still glows with the promise of a perfect sunrise.
“There were 70 guys patrolling those miles of beaches, and you worked out every day, and you partied at night,” Hulse says. “It was just a wonderful brotherhood of athletes and good guys, and I’m friends with a lot of those guys to this day. I really loved being a lifeguard.”
THE GATOR PIT
“Make sure you ask him about the Gator Pit,” Mike Smith was telling me before I spoke with Bruce Hulse. Turns out the Gator Pit was a rite of passage, a core component of Avalon lifeguard lore, and an earthy chapter in Hulse’s legendary life.
“We lived with a bunch of guys in what we called ‘The Sweat Box,’ and at the beginning of the summer, I would plant a garden,” explains Hulse. “We had a side yard where I planted stuff like tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers. And at the end of the summer, when the garden was done, we’d dig it out, fill it with water, put the speakers out, get a bunch of kegs and announce that we’re having a Gator Pit party. Of course, by later in the night people would be diving in the pit, thrashing around like alligators. That’s why we called it the Gator Pit.”
The dance would come next. Says Hulse: “Every summer, we’d have the Lifeguard’s Ball, and so you’d be out there dancing, in your suit, and it was the only time you’re dressed up during the summer. And the next thing you know, all the ‘gators’ would be diving down to the ground and just flopping around spasmodically like an alligator. And everybody would be doing The Gator.”
Both Hulse and Smith recall the Gator Pit with fond nostalgia. But Smith was also quick to note, “I always avoided getting pushed in.”
