Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (28 page)

“I became Dick’s great model after all the big couture girls died. Being with Dick was like being with another kid in the playground.
Vogue
would put out these huge tables with two hundred pairs of shoes and another table just piled with jewelry.
Vogue
was a huge, serious operation, but the studio was a wonderland of make-believe. Dick and I would plow through all these things and dress me up and tell each other stories. He would demonstrate little things past girls did with his own body, and he cross-pollinated all the girls. He would show me a foot movement of Shrimpton’s, and I’d do it my way. He’d show Twiggy something of Veruschka’s. And I’ve since seen Stephanie Seymour in a pose that I discovered.

“What was funny was that
Bazaar
and
Vogue
worked together. Dick Avedon and Hiro shared a studio on Fifty-eighth Street, just around the corner from Bloomingdale’s, and
Bazaar
was on one side with Hiro, and Dick was on the other side for
Vogue
, and they had a common reception room. In those days the editors lived and died for fashion, and they would grab you physically if you tried to talk to a model from
Bazaar
. It was all this huge drama and fits, yelling and screaming and carrying on. It was high fashion. It was fabulous. There was even a fan club of fashion students outside. We didn’t know it then, but Steven Meisel was the head cheerleader.

“Once I was in
Vogue
, that was that. I was off the junior board. The same month I came out on my first
Vogue
cover, November 1966, I had a
Mademoiselle
cover, which was a first. What did Ford have to do with it? All Ford did was take me on. They were a billing and booking service. And they charged ten percent, but it was well worth it.

“I was twenty-two by then, so I was late getting started. I learned in the dressing rooms from the giant Germans. I would be sitting with Astrid Herrene, Brigitta Klercker, or Brigitte Bauer, or Veruschka, and I would watch them. We didn’t have makeup men. Those girls were all artists at doing makeup. I was constantly inventing and reinventing myself in makeup. I learned the hard way. If they had makeup men, they were leftovers from the fifties. They’d do a job, you’d think you looked horrible. Then you’d wait for the ad to come out, and you wouldn’t be in it!

“I was continually awestruck. I was constantly seeing things that I had never seen before, like that red room. But I never lost my goal. I was in it for the money. I always tried to remember that, and I always tried to remember, when money started rolling in, that most people made in a month what I made in a week. Now, of course, I make it in a minute.

“I had six jobs every day. Six photographers, six sets of hair and makeup, and ten suits from the ad agency who just wanted to see the models. Ten, twenty different people, five of whom were touching you. It’s a big mental strain. I remember this one photographer, one of the most extraordinary lames I’ve ever met. He didn’t know what he was doing. To make his pictures printable, barely, I had to tell him how to move his lights. I did the whole thing according to what I had been taught by the greats, but without telling him, of course, because photographers had this attitude. The worse they were, the less you could suggest to them. You had to do it without them knowing. I became a master at making them think it was their idea. So after going through all these hoops so we could get the picture, I remember him sitting behind his big eight-by-ten camera, saying, ‘No wonder Penn is Penn! He gets to work with models like you!’ He really was indignant, this guy. I never saw him again, and neither did anyone else.

“I had done five, six
Vogue
covers before I did catalogs. I had to learn. It took me months. They would cut the dresses apart on you and straight-pin them back on you, stuffed with toilet paper. They had giant eight-by-ten cameras, and you had to stand there with your face alive, but not moving for twenty minutes, in a walking position! If you moved anything, the dress would fall apart.

“
Vogue
models were making around five hundred, six hundred dollars a week, maybe they’d get a four-hundred-dollar booking for some ad that was snobby enough for them, and they’d go out and buy an eight-hundred-dollar dress! I remember giving lectures in the dressing room about saving your money, about making money, about taxes. They hadn’t heard about
taxes. We were in a fifty-three percent tax bracket. Before I bought anything, I would think to myself; ‘Ten percent to the agency, fifty-three percent to the government.’

“I worked solid for the first year, and at the end of the year Williamson said, ‘OK, guess what? I think it’s time to go to Africa.’ And that’s what we did. Bob gave me great advice. There’s so much stress and strain, and you can be gasping for air so hard in this business that if you don’t just take off and forget it completely and rest and sleep, you lose your real face, you lose your spirit, you lose everything. Your smiles become fake. You’re so tired you have nothing to smile about. After the first two or three years I got to the position where I would be two months on, two months off. Bob was wonderful about making sure that happened. And for about sixteen years, every year we went to Africa, we went to South America, we went to Asia. I don’t think I would have made it without him.

“I worked steadily for ten years. I started when I was twenty-two, and I signed my Revlon contract in 1974, when I was thirty-two. That was when Catfish Hunter came around. He signed a three-point-seven-five-million-dollar contract with the Yankees, and that started me thinking. I asked Williamson how to do it. Most of these things were my ideas, but I didn’t know how to go about setting them in motion. Williamson set them all up. He knew nothing about the modeling business, but he’s extremely intelligent and had enormous common sense.

“Williamson told me to call Eileen and have her tell all my photographers—Dick, Penn, everybody—that I wouldn’t work for the day rate anymore. I wanted a contract. Dick got it instantly. He thought it was a great idea. He decided I should try for an exclusive contract, so I’d work only for Revlon
and
I’d get more money. So he started talking to Revlon and became a coconspirator in this. We did tests together that we showed [Revlon owner] Charles Revson. Revson hated me. Revlon used me my first year in the business but never again for ten years, even though I was the biggest star around. I had the gap in my teeth; I was short and sort of funny-faced. I wasn’t a Revlon swan.

“Dick was very smart politically. He told Revson he had an idea, he wanted to give Ultima Two its own look, but he wanted a free hand. We did tests together, and he showed them to Revson, and Revson didn’t recognize me. He said, ‘Who is that?’ Dick said, ‘Lauren.’ I got a contract for three years. It was designed by Bob Williamson, and it became the basis of every contract that followed.

“For the next eight years I worked for Revlon twenty days a year. Otherwise I was off making movies and traveling. I didn’t really care about modeling anymore. I was making five movies a year and making much more money than I had modeling. But the movies I was making weren’t the movies I was watching. And except for a handful, they became less and less enjoyable, and I learned less and less making them. So I was creatively unfulfilled. And I rarely modeled anymore. The jobs dried up after I hit forty. Finally I stopped looking at fashion magazines altogether. They hurt my feelings. I was getting older and older, and the girls were getting younger and younger.

“Then two things happened at once. I was in Yugoslavia making my last movie when Jerry Ford called about the Barneys ad and I said no. He called five times, and I kept saying no. He insisted, and Steven Meisel took the pictures. I’d been spending a lot of time alone. One Sunday I was sitting in an Indian restaurant, reading the
Times
, and there was this full-page ad of this beautiful woman—not a girl—and I didn’t recognize that it was me. Then I did, and I felt like I’d been punched in the heart. Meisel was the first photographer I’d worked with in years who didn’t try to shoot me as if I were a young girl. After that I got stopped by women on the street who said, ‘Thank you, we’ve been invisible for a decade.’

“Then my leg got broken in an accident, and for four months I was in bed, and I was on crutches for five months after that. Everything stopped. I was by myself—no radio, no TV—in a fishing cottage in Montauk, Long Island. I dreamed, I thought, and I read. Bob would come on weekends and bring groceries. I realized that my life had gone out of control, and I hadn’t liked it in a long time. The distractions in New York are limitless, and for years I’d gone out every night and never faced myself. My best movie,
American Gigolo
, was made when I was thirty-eight, and I started to study acting at thirty-nine. The parts were getting worse and worse while I was getting better and better. My creative energy was eating me alive.

“By your mid-40s, if you haven’t resolved your childhood problems, quiet desperation takes over, and in my case it wasn’t so quiet. Nothing was ever cemented down for me. My life had had too many extremes. I had made Bob responsible for so much of my life I no longer felt I owned it. We drifted in different directions. So I sat down and decided to face myself. I changed a lot.

“The Barneys ads had made me understand that it wasn’t just me who’d been hurt by fashion ads. I understood it was a historical, societal problem and that if I quit movies and went full tilt back into modeling, I could be of use
and
keep the wolf from the door. Until then nobody was interested in us. This was
a historical fact for hundreds of years: As soon as they were out of eggs, women were out of business. Those pictures showed you could be good-looking and sexually attractive after forty. I finally understood that it wasn’t just me who’d become invisible in the eighties. It was my whole generation, and none of us liked it very much, and we did not want to go quiet into that good night.

“Ever since the feminist revolt women have gone into every profession except what may be the most important one. They’d had absolutely no control over the physical image of women. Most photographers only shoot girls, and when they see a woman, they don’t know what to do. So I started calling every editor I knew. British and German
Vogue
got it first and did wonderful stories about me and that idea. After that there was no stopping us. I spent the next two years talking and working. I found you
could
change your life. It’s a tall order, but it can be done. I also met Luca Babini, a wonderful Italian photographer who liked women, and we fell in love.

“I’ve never been prouder of anything in my life than I have been of these last three years. Models are the physical mirror of femininity. They
should
come in all sizes, shapes, and ages, and now they do. If my two careers mean anything, it’s that. I found a way not just to get what I wanted out of it—to educate myself and see the world—but also to be of use to everybody else. I think maybe I helped make what seemed to be the most superficial profession into one that’s important.”

“T
he sixties were about personalities,” Diana Vreeland wrote in her autobiography,
D. V
. “It was the first time when mannequins
became
personalities … these girls invented
themselves
. Naturally, as an editor, I was there to help them along.”

Richard Avedon had just finished photographing and editing the entire April 1965 issue of
Bazaar
—with Jean Shrimpton on the cover—by himself and, after twenty years, was renegotiating his contract. “I felt they should treat me well, and they were very rough about it,” he says. Nonetheless, he shook hands with Hearst on a new ten-year deal.

“Your contract should be ending,” Vreeland said when she called him that night. He said he’d just made a new deal. She countered, “Will you at least hear what we have to say?” Two days later Avedon met with Alexander Liberman. Condé Nast’s president, Iva Patcévitch, flew in from Europe to clinch the deal, and within days Avedon signed and collected an unprecedented million-dollar advance. “Then I vomited for about two weeks without stopping,” he says. “I learned everything at
Bazaar
, and now I was going to ‘the enemy camp.’”

The loss of Avedon marked the end of
Bazaar
’s creative preeminence. Under Vreeland,
Vogue
rose inexorably and “took first place,” Alexander Liberman says. Within months fashion stylist Polly Mellen joined
Vogue
, too, and found herself at the red-hot center of the decade. Exotic was the new norm.
Vogue
became home to Edie and Andy, Courrèges and the Kinks. Irving Penn shot faucets dripping Harry Winston diamonds. Bert Stern shot Marilyn Monroe in the nude. Where just a moment before, “clothes were totally structured, you wore a hat and gloves and smoked, and it was all about
gesture,” says Polly Mellen. Suddenly fashion loosened up. “The flower children, the new culture, were coming forward,” she adds. “It was all parties, drugs, and madness, and the girls who chose to be part of it were the girls who were booked. Everything became more eccentric, more strange.”

Exotic-looking society girls like Ingrid Boulting, Penelope Tree, and Marisa Berenson became stars of the moment, thanks to another Vreeland innovation: She published their names in the magazine. Berenson, the daughter of a diplomat and granddaughter of the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, was born in New York and raised in Europe. She started modeling in 1964 as “a young, up-and-coming debutante” studying decorating in London, she says. Her first photographs were taken by David Bailey for British
Vogue
. “From then on I worked for
Vogue
practically every day of my life,” Berenson says. “My career literally took off.” She worked with every great photographer of her time, including Avedon, Newton, Stern, Jimmy Moore, Sokolsky, Beaton, and Henry Clarke. “I was a cover girl,” she says. “I was lucky. I didn’t find myself beautiful. I was a baby, the child of
Vogue
.” Berenson modeled until 1970, when she met Luchino Visconti, who cast her in his film
Death in Venice
and launched her on a new career as an actress.

Filmmaker Roy Boulting’s daughter, Ingrid, left her broken home at sixteen for London and became a reluctant model with English Boy. She was rediscovered by Polly Mellen just after her arrival at
Vogue
. Boulting was visiting the magazine with Marisa Berenson’s sister, Berry, a photographer, when Mellen saw her and screamed down a corridor, “
You!
” The next day Boulting was shooting pre-Raphaelite photographs with Richard Avedon.

“It was so bizarre,” she says. “Those shots had such impact that everyone wanted to work with me.” She escaped to Belgium to act in a play, but Eileen Ford followed and begged her to come back. She posed for several years more, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I’d sit there and stare at these beautiful girls and think, What am I doing here?” she says. “I made a commitment to Ford to be available more, but I could only take so much. My heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t money-oriented. Eileen would have parties, and there’d be producers. I went to a couple, but they were lonely experiences. There was no intimacy. And I had the feeling I was invited for reasons other than my presence.” Finally Boulting quit and returned to her first love, acting.

The daughter of Ronald Tree, a British multimillionaire, and Marietta Peabody, the daughter of an Episcopal bishop, Penelope Tree was bred for great things. Her mother was a patrician activist who became the first woman delegate to the United Nations. Her half sister, Frances FitzGerald, became a
Pulitzer Prize—winning author for reporting on the war in Vietnam. A lank-haired five-foot-ten exotic with wide, painted eyes, Penelope first modeled at age thirteen for Diane Arbus. Her father told Arbus he’d sue her if she ever published the picture. At fifteen she was shot again by Guy Bourdin. This time Ronald Tree let the picture run in
Mademoiselle
.

At seventeen in 1967 Tree was “discovered” again by Diana Vreeland, who sent her to Richard Avedon. “She was gawky, hunched over, with stringy hair, absolutely not a beauty at all,” said Polly Mellen. “She looked like a gangly little urchin” in a black bell-bottomed outfit. Mellen was ready to toss her out of the studio, but Avedon saw something. “She’s perfect,” he said. “Don’t touch her.”

Back in London, Bailey was ready for a new adventure. He thought Tree looked like “an Egyptian Jiminy Cricket.” She soon moved into his house on Primrose Hill, where she entertained her lover by painting one room black and another purple, installing a UFO detector, and bringing home Black Panthers and a Tibetan monk. Their life between location trips was a nonstop party. “The house was full of hippies, looking at the ceiling and saying ‘
Great!
’” Bailey later recalled. “I’d be getting into my Rolls and there would be three of them in the back smoking joints that I had paid for and calling me a capitalist pig!”

The new decade was dark for Bailey. The floors of his house were covered with the droppings of his many dogs, and his sixty parrots gave him a disease called psittacosis. A homeless party guest moved in and lived there for two weeks before anyone noticed. Bailey spent his time watching television, eating apples, and drinking cans of Coke, tossing the empties over his shoulder onto the carpet. He and Tree broke up after seven years, in 1974. She dropped out of fashion and eventually made her way to Sydney, Australia, where she still lives. Bailey later said that although he found her fantastic, he “never quite came to terms with photographing her because Avedon got to her first.”

Avedon was by this time disenchanted with the superficial world of fashion. “The necessities of fashion magazines were no longer mine, no longer interesting,” he said. “The sixties saved me, in a sense, for a while. I was able to do something not completely embarrassing, sometimes quite successful…. Vreeland and I developed together an image of a new kind of woman. The sixties was like the twenties in its flamboyance, and in its extraordinary clothing.”

That flamboyance flowered in the new disco culture. In 1961 Oleg and Igor Cassini were among a group of swells who founded Le Club, a private restaurant and discotheque. “The Stork and El Morocco disappeared,” says Oleg. “Playboys disappeared. That time passed. The models became celebrities.
Model agents and photographers became the important guys. Going out with them was more important than dancing all night long with some schmuck. Le Club was the link between the world that existed and the galloping future.”

Like the Terrible Trio in London, American photographers were riding the new waves of fashion. A native of Forest Hills, Queens, Jerry Schatzberg started his career in his family’s fur business, but after a brief stint as a baby photographer he got a job as an assistant to fashion photographer Bill Helburn in 1954.

Helburn was a rake, “a great charmer,” Schatzberg says. “He had a lot of women. If we went on locations trips with three or four models, Bill would have one and I’d be with the others, talking, sometimes flirting.” Sunny Griffin remembers Helburn’s romantic approach well. “He’d walk into the dressing room, pat you on the back, and get your bra undone,” she says. “I never knew how he did it. When front-close bras came in,” she adds, laughing, “
he
was undone!”

In 1956 Schatzberg moved into Manhattan, started working for
Glamour
, and rented a studio on Park Avenue South. In 1958 Alexander Liberman moved him to
Vogue
. He liked to work with model Anne Saint Marie. She was a sensitive, artistic California girl, separated from her first husband. Schatzberg fell in love with her but kept his distance. “I was in awe,” he says. “If we had an affair, it was through the camera. Anytime I needed a favor, Anne worked for me. When I worked for
Vogue
, I’d save the worst clothes for her because she’d make them look like the best.”

Even if Schatzberg had wanted more, that soon became impossible. Saint Marie got involved with another photographer named Tom Palumbo. Born in Italy, Palumbo had come to America after the war, studied art, and then become assistant to
Bazaar
photographer James Abbey, Jr. Palumbo started shooting and brought his work to Edward Steichen, who’d ended up as the curator of photography at Museum of Modern Art. Steichen sent Palumbo to Alexey Brodovitch, who put him to work for
Bazaar
.

When he met Saint Marie, she was fresh to New York, still living in Eileen and Jerry Ford’s town house. When Palumbo got an assignment to shoot California fashion, she was one of the models. A romance started on that trip, although “it wasn’t consummated because she was in the middle of a divorce and I was married also, to a model named Kate Johnson,” Palumbo says.

By 1960 they were both free, and they got married. Saint Marie had become a top model by then. After the couple had a son, Saint Marie tried to quit but found she couldn’t. She started seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed a barbiturate to put her to sleep at night and amphetamines to wake her up in the morning. She also drank. And she and Palumbo fought enough that people throughout their little world knew it. “He was totally unfaithful to her, chasing the likes of me,” says model Nancy Berg.

Anne Saint Marie photographed by Jerry Schatzberg in 1958
Anne Saint Marie by Jerry Schatzberg, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

While he doesn’t deny that his eye might have roved (“Nancy Berg was there, too,” he says), Palumbo insists that he and Saint Marie were very much in love. “We used to fight like hell and love like hell,” he says. “We were two immature kids. The marriage got strained.” And the strain showed. “He’d go and come back; she’d go and come back,” remembers Dorian Leigh. “He was dreadful to her. If a woman did it, it would be called ball-breaking. He criticized her in front of people. He’d say, ‘Here’s the great beauty!’ She was hysterical, in a
Streetcar Named Desire
kind of way. Everyone wanted to protect her.”

“She was crazy,” says photographer Roger Prigent. “She lived in a world of fantasy, completely dedicated to work, centered on modeling. She would beg to retake photographs. All those girls started to drink because of the pressure. It was too much too soon. They should have been salesgirls at Woolworth’s, and they made in one hour what the average girl made in a week.”

Finally, in 1961, at Eileen Ford’s suggestion Palumbo and Saint Marie saw a marriage counselor, who suggested they separate. Palumbo moved into his studio and didn’t see his wife again for three years. “Every now and then I got a call,” he says. “I didn’t always know where she was. She had my son. All I know is that she wound up in the hospital.”

In Palumbo’s absence, Jerry Schatzberg became Saint Marie’s confidant. “Tom was a prick,” Schatzberg says. But Palumbo wasn’t her only problem. She was getting older and couldn’t bear it. “It became an obsession to her,” according to Schatzberg. “When you’re on top, you’re a queen. Then they don’t need you anymore. She was taking pills, having a constant nervous breakdown. She’d say
Seventeen
magazine was going to use her. She was an absolute mess.”

Finally, broke and broken, Saint Marie was hospitalized. Photographer Karen Radkai took up a collection to pay her bills. Her recovery was slow. In 1964 Saint Marie and Palumbo got back together. Rumors flew that she had died, and neither of them tried to stop them. “She
had
died,” Palumbo says. “She died as their invention. She died as model. But we created another life for sixteen years. It was a pact we had.” Saint Marie finally did die—of lung cancer—in 1986.

Meanwhile, Jerry Schatzberg’s career had taken off. He fell in with London’s Terrible Trio when he went to Europe for
Glamour
and
Esquire
and
photographed the Beatles in London. “I was absolutely astounded,” he says. “There were all these men in the airport with long hair. Duffy took me to the Ad Lib. Bailey told me about the Rolling Stones. I introduced him to Catherine Deneuve.”

Back in New York, Schatzberg hosted the Terribles whenever they came to town, throwing parties in his studio, where Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Baby Jane Holzer mixed with models and photographers, glorying in their status as the new pop aristocracy. Schatzberg also frequented Le Club, growing friendly with its manager, Olivier Coquelin. Coquelin invited him to invest in a new club called Ondine. Within six months Richard Burton’s ex-wife, Sybil, and her boyfriend, Jordan Christopher, opened Arthur. Francesco Scavullo backed a club called Daisy. A photographer named Steve Horn was involved with another, the Sanctuary. New York’s first disco age was in full swing.