From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
Carole Black's beauty role model? Tina Turner. "She's age-defying," says the Cincinnati native. Black is burnin' along pretty well herself. The energetic 57-year-old, who divides her time between a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan and a house in Beverly Hills, is the CEO and president of Lifetime TV, the female-oriented channel that she has built into basic cable's No. 1 network since taking the helm in '99. Divorced and the mother of a grown son, Black was raised by her Armenian grandparents after her parents split up when she was a baby. Her grandmother, she says, "made me feel I could do everything in life." Annie Potts, who stars in the Lifetime drama Any Day Now, sees the results. "Carole's very smart about what she does," says Potts, "and it seems like it's effortless." But the 5'3½" Black admits to doing a few dumb things for beauty. There was the time she tweezed her eyebrows too thin "and looked surprised for about six months," she says. "And when I was about 25, I saw an ad for these pants that you attach to a vacuum cleaner to suck off weight. All they did was make me perspire. What was I thinking?"