Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (33 page)

A new age had dawned. Polly Mellen sums up the change at
Vogue:
“I went home one day, and the next, Diana’s red office, the leopard rug, her Rigaud candles, her scent, her being were gone. The walls were beige.”

Mirabella and Liberman retooled the magazine for the new, natural-look working woman. “My
Vogue
was more accessible,” Mirabella says. “I have a conviction. Women aren’t inanimate objects you hang clothes on. You don’t have to make fools of them.” The wisdom of Liberman’s choice is spelled out in circulation numbers. Until her time
Vogue
had held only a slight lead on
Bazaar
. Under Mirabella, circulation rose from 400,000 in 1971 to 1,245,000 in 1987.

Richard Avedon stayed on, but a little sadly. “The period Diana was there was the last time I could express myself honestly in fashion photography,” he says. The exotic models were gone, replaced by wholesome Lauren Hutton and healthy Patti Hansen. “It went from complicated and intelligent beauty to the girl next door who’d moved away,” Avedon says. “It was the beginning of fashion at its lowest common denominator, the pandering to mass appeal.”

T
he era of Vreelandian extravagance was over. The revolution she’d led broadened the audience for fashion and fashion pictures exponentially, but now the market for creativity was shrinking. What had been primarily an artistic exchange became an overtly commercial one. Magazines and advertisers were worrying about selling dresses now, not about creating great photographs for a fashion elite. So as the sixties ended, fashion photography changed once again. In Europe photographers like Jeanloup Sieff, Guy Bourdin, and Helmut Newton, who’d all started before
Blow-Up
and survived it, were in their heyday, shooting dark pictures as unforgiving as they were unforgettable, full of the violence and sex, the Thanatos and Eros, that suffused life in the late sixties and early seventies. But these individualistic, often uncontrollable photographers were edged, imperceptibly, out to the fringes by a new breed of compliant lensmen who only pushed the pay envelope.

New photographers—especially Mike Reinhardt, Gilles Bensimon, Patrick Demarchelier, Alex Chatelain, John Stember, and Arthur Elgort—were emerging in Paris as the leaders of what became known as the French Mob, specialists in 35 mm street photography, happy snaps that simply denied society’s downbeat mood. Though none of them alone was as influential as Avedon, Dahl-Wolfe, or Penn, together their impact was tremendous. New model agencies soon sprang up to serve them. Sympathetic gay men like François Lano and motherly figures like Eileen Ford, Dorian
Leigh, Catherine Harlé, and Wilhelmina found themselves losing models to heterosexual male agents.

There was more work, so there were more models, but as their numbers increased, they lost the singularity that made the swans of couture seem so fascinating and irreplaceable. And the new models weren’t liberated women, either, even though they earned more, traveled more, and lived more freely. The genie of sex was out of the bottle. Models were touchable now. And the new breed of photographers and agents liked to have a feel for the merchandise. The good news was that “because they were interested in girls, their pictures were warmer,” says onetime photographer’s agent Jacques de Nointel. But more than ever, models were paper faces, commodities to be bought and sold until the next face came along. If they were infantilized before, they now stood to be traumatized as well.

As the seventies began, the center of photographic gravity shifted to Europe, where it was easier for aspirants to break into the business. They poured into Paris from all over the world, all with different stories told in a babble of languages. Shelley Smith came from America, Apollonia van Ravenstein from the Netherlands, Gunilla Lindblad from Sweden, Louise Despointes from the Caribbean. But despite their wildly varying looks and outlooks, they had one thing in common: They were citizens of the new Nation of Fashion.

S
MITH
: “I grew up in a not great family, not a lot of self-esteem, and so for me to go into modeling was great, because I considered myself a real ugly duckling. I went to an all-girls’ school in Orange, New Jersey. I never had a date; I never dated until I was in college. I wore braces. I was tall and skinny.”

R
AVENSTEIN
: “My brother Theo always looked at the magazines, back home, which was in the south of Holland. I think it was probably 1968, and we saw pictures of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. I was almost fifteen, and we were trying to find a way to get out of Holland and go into the world, so he said, ‘Plo’—which is my nickname; Plonja is my middle name—‘you can do it,’ and I said, ‘Well, all right.’ He made an appointment with the agent in Amsterdam, and the following week I was in Spain for a Dutch pattern magazine.”

D
ESPOINTES
: “I came from Martinique. I was from a very protected and privileged family. My father had plantations. Then I took a secret trip to New York. We were staying in the French Embassy in Washington, and two of us, me and another young girl, got on a Greyhound bus, totally petrified, and came to New York. It was 1969. I was eighteen and a half. We were walking down the street, and Jerry Ford and some TV guy spotted me and said, ‘Are you looking for the Ford agency?’ I thought, Let’s go see what this is, and the minute we walked in it was ‘Go in that room! Get undressed! Pluck your eyebrows!’ I was fascinated.

Apollonia van Ravenstein photographed by Bob McNamara
Apollonia van Ravenstein by Bob McNamara

Louise Despointes photographed by Serge Lutens for Christian Dior
Louise Despointes by Serge Lutens

“I joined Ford, but I was always in battles with Eileen. Now she’s the lady I respect the most. People hate Eileen because she wanted women to survive in a cutthroat business. But then we clashed right away. I had a strong mind, and I thought she was a dictator. She told me, ‘Do as I say!’ I said, ‘No, I’m me!’ I wanted to do interesting work. I didn’t want to blend in. She hated that.”

L
INDBLAD
: “I came to Paris in 1968. I was started by a woman in my town in Sweden named Kerstin Heintz. She was very respectable. She discovered many girls. She had me working for many Swedish magazines. She found me jobs, and she knew somebody in Paris who came to Sweden and he saw my book. I had a couple of tear sheets and some prints, and he liked what he saw. So he sent me to Paris, and I came to Paris Planning in 1968. It was during the student strikes. I thought it was very exciting. You had to walk to work, you’d arrive in a studio, and there was no electricity, nobody came! But I had a booking, so I said, ‘I’d better be there,’ and nobody else came, so I walked back home!

“The editors in France, most of them are horrible women. They’re jealous of the models. They all treat you like shit. They did it to all the new girls, American or Swedish. So you were not at all treated with respect here. In America I think they’re much nicer to you.”

D
ESPOINTES
: “We all went to Max’s Kansas City. Everyone was there. I had no idea what was what. Then I met my chance, [photographer] Guy Bourdin. His girlfriend was a stylist. She thought I was refreshing. Guy took me back to Paris to do the collections for French
Vogue
, telling them I was a top model in New York when I’d never worked, except with [photographer] Arthur Elgort for
American Girl
, an awful kids’ magazine. We were all starting, trying to make it.

Gunilla Lindblad photographed by her husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen
Gunilla Lindblad by Jean-Pierre Zachariasen

“When I got to French
Vogue
, they knew something was fishy. They told me I had to have an agent. I went to Paris Planning because it was the only agency I knew. There was a sweet boy there named Patrick Demarchelier. He liked to test little girls. He said, ‘I’ll give her a break.’ So they booked a test and said, ‘Good-bye, get out.’ I said, ‘I can’t go. I’m working.’ The booker said, ‘For who?’ ‘Guy Bourdin for French
Vogue
.’ I thought she would fall off her chair. Then François Lano came out, saying, ‘Ahhh, Louise,’ and I had a contract and champagne right away.”

S
MITH
: “I was working on the college board of Lord & Taylor department store in New York City, and Diana Vreeland came in and discovered me. She said, ‘You are beautiful, and you owe it to the world to smile!’ She put her finger into my face and said, ‘Come to my office.’ The model editor, Sarah Slavin, sent me to photographers and to Barbara Stone. It was still the era of false eyelashes and stuff like that. I remember my first big picture for
Vogue
. My eyelash was on totally wrong. I knew nothing about this, and I came into Stewart after I did the shooting, and Barbara Stone looked at me and said, ‘I hope you weren’t photographed looking like that!’ It was so much easier later on when Way Bandy and all those wonderful people started to do makeup.

“I remember going on tests. There were always come-ons from the photographers, just about every one of them. There was never somebody who just wanted to take pictures. There was always a power play. If you wanted to get a copy of your picture, you had to come over at six and they wanted to have a drink with you. You just wanted to wash your hands and get your picture and go. It was very intimidating.”

R
AVENSTEIN
: “I left Holland after a month and went to Milan. You’re thrown into this arena, thinking people love you for who you are. There was some emotional disappointment and a lot of learning about human nature. I didn’t really feel that people cared about what I was like. They had to love to be with me because I was a gorgeous young woman, and tall and beautiful, and a lot of fun. But I did feel an emptiness inside, and a certain sadness, because there was such untruth, it was such a fake. It’s very overwhelming and terribly exciting, and it can be profoundly empty at the same time. I didn’t understand people, I didn’t understand what they were after, the promises they made.”

D
ESPOINTES
: “Guy Bourdin trained me. He was like a father to me. He was a peasant from Normandy, so like a fox, he could see everything. He had a mind of his own. He made me have my own opinions. He sent me to museums to see paintings. At our first job he had a ballet barre, up off the ground, and I had to climb up on it in high heels. I had to do it a hundred fifty times for one shot. He wanted to see what I had in my belly. He called me Shirley MacLaine. He’d say, ‘Shirley MacLaine would not do that. She would stand on this bar until she died because she had to be the best.’ He liked perfection. You could think he was a sadist, but he wasn’t. People say it was misogyny, but it wasn’t. He was not nasty to people he cared for, but there were very few. He would make me walk through glass, but I understood that was his work, his vision.

Shelley Smith photographed by Bill King for the cover of
Harper’s Bazaar
Shelley Smith by Bill King, courtesy
Harper’s Bazaar

“For the first two years Guy forbade me to work with others. I was booked by [photographer] Sarah Moon for
Elle
, and I told Guy and he locked me in the studio. My booker called, and he answered with a handkerchief over the phone and pretended he was shooting. I was banned from
Elle
. But there was always something happening with Guy. It was always ‘
get the picture
.’ I was lucky. I worked with exceptional people. Most of them have disappeared.”