Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (35 page)

“I didn’t do drugs, but I saw them, and I kind of felt out of it in a way. I remember Bill King. He had this studio on lower Fifth Avenue, and he had a studio on one side, and on the other side he had an office or another room,
and if he really liked you, he’d invite you to the office, and I know now it was to do drugs, and he invited me in there, and I realized that it was to do drugs, but I just didn’t want to do it.

“A very famous model—I can’t name this person, it’s too destructive—was in the men’s room of a disco, shooting nude pictures of various modes of sexual contact with a bunch of men. I had a really good friend who was a lawyer, and the pictures came to him. Well, what happened was that Bill King had taken the pictures, and Bill King’s assistant stole the pictures, and Bill King went to this friend of mine who was an attorney to try to recoup them, because it was obviously potentially scandalous.

“Bill got a real kick out of pictures of people going wild. He’d spray water, and he’d put a fan on full force, and every picture was wildly energetic, and he got his kicks almost out of exhausting you. It wasn’t the picture; it was watching you get exhausted. It all had some strange overtones. I think the drugs were a way to control the models.

“Bill was gay like crazy. There was some pathology there with women, but I have to say that I never did that stuff with him and he was always wonderful with me. I have half a dozen
Bazaar
covers with him, and he was terrific.

“But I was pretty bored with modeling. Your mind never really had to be there. It’s probably better not to be too smart if you’re a model. You’re going to get tired of it a lot faster. Or you get to be too independent, and you have your own ideas about things and want to make your own image rather than accept what’s dealt to you. So at the end of the seventies I came out to L.A. to do a television series called
The Associates
. I kept doing television series that didn’t last. Then I had a tragedy in my life. Four and half years ago I got pregnant, but about a week before he was due, I had an ultrasound scan, and the doctor said there was something terribly wrong. I was rushed to the hospital, and gave birth to my son by cesarean, and he had an extremely rare genetic disease, and he survived only for three days. He wasn’t here very long, but he just absolutely turned my life around. I was in therapy, and the therapist kept saying to me, ‘You should be a therapist,’ and I went back to school and I started studying psychology.

“Originally I wanted to work with people who had losses. But my husband and I started trying to get pregnant right away, and I began experiencing infertility, which was shocking to me, because a year earlier I had gotten pregnant right off the bat. I started to think that I could help people who were infertile. I woke up one night and said ‘egg donors.’ And that expanded into
a surrogacy program, which I run with my husband. I get calls from Australia, Germany, from people who want me to help them get babies! Now I have the greatest job in the world!

“So much opportunity ended in so much tragedy in modeling. I think the world has to build these images of beautiful people. We fantasize that if you look perfect on the outside, your life must run perfectly on the inside. But I always saw beauty as a mask and a trap. I mean, I see this now. I certainly didn’t see this when I was twenty. You’re revered and rewarded for being beautiful on the outside, and nobody wants to know too much more than that. And when that beauty starts to fade, where do you go with your life?”

J
eanette Christjansen had just been named Miss Denmark when she came to Paris on a visit at Christmas 1967 and met a long-haired Danish photographer named Gunnar Larsen. He had a bad reputation. He took lousy photographs. But he had a great eye for girls. So when Jeanette went back to Denmark, Larsen sent her a letter, a thousand francs, and an invitation to work in Paris early the next year, shooting couture press photographs. He put her up in the Hôtel d’Argout, a tiny little place near the open markets at Les Halles.

Also at the D’Argout that week was a public relations man who worked for Trabeco, a nearby architecture firm. He’d just left his wife, and he was staying at the hotel while he looked for a new apartment. A news junkie, he would watch the broadcast every night in the reception area. And every night Larsen would stalk by with the blond, booted, miniskirted Christjansen in tow. “I fell in love at first instant,” she says of the night she first set eyes on John Casablancas.

He wasn’t uninterested. But as he puts it, he couldn’t just walk up to Larsen and say, “Excuse me, sir, could you leave?”

Finally, one night at two, the hotel doorman told Casablancas that the blonde wasn’t Larsen’s girlfriend; she was his model. “I’m going to call her in the morning,” the love-struck Casablancas decided. “But she has asked for a taxi to the airport in the morning,” the doorman warned him. Rushing to his room, John dialed Jeanette’s room and woke her up. He was a salesman at heart. He could talk for hours if he had to to get what he wanted. Minutes later Jeanette was dressing for a rendezvous at the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon. She decided Casablancas was devastatingly handsome and extremely
well educated. He also spoke several languages. He was quite a catch. The trick was to catch him.

Casablancas was a child of once-wealthy refugees from the Spanish Civil War. His grandfather, who’d owned textile factories outside Barcelona, was a tinkerer who’d invented the Casablancas high draft system—a modern method for transforming cotton balls into thread—and owned the patent. “We would have been a very, very rich family had not the Civil War brought down everything,” Casablancas says. Wealthy antifascists, the Casablancas family was disenfranchised by that conflict pitting fascists against anticapitalists. John’s future father and his mother, who’d briefly been a model in Barcelona, were on a beach holiday when that city was overtaken by anarchists. Grabbing their eldest and then only son, Fernando, they crossed into France just before Spain’s borders were closed.

Their factories were ruined, but luckily they had investments outside Spain, and as they moved about the world, seeking safe haven, they opened new plants in Manchester, Lille, and Bombay. Next stop was Rio de Janeiro, where John’s sister, Sylvia, was born. Then came New York, where John joined the family in December 1942. Home was a large house in Forest Hills, Queens, but John was a jet set kid. He received holy communion in Mexico City and grew up resort hopping from Lake Placid to Palm Beach. Finally his family moved to the Riviera. John describes them as “nomads.”

“My life was a dream,” he says. “I always think of those people who say there’s life after life and that if you’re very good in one life, you get a marvelous life in the next turn. I must have been so perfect the life before.”

At eight John was sent to Le Rosey, the exclusive Swiss school where the children of kings and princes of industry are educated. Among his classmates were Egon von Fürstenberg; Alfredo Beracasa, scion of Venezuelan bankers and industrialists; Alan Clore, the son of one of England’s richest men; and Alain Kittler, whose family owned a textile design business, Anatolie St. Fiacre.

Though he was raised as a member of the elite, “we were poor by all the standards,” Casablancas says of himself and Kittler, who became his best friend and later his business partner. “Our parents were very regular people with very average fortunes. My father spent money for the last fifteen years of his life without making any money. He was not productive, and he continued living like a king. Which I think was exactly the right thing. He earned his money. Why shouldn’t he spend it?”

By the time John was finishing school, his sister, Sylvia, had become a star of international society. For five years in the late fifties and early sixties she was the Aga Khan’s girlfriend. “Together with the princess Soraya, Sylvia was the number one jet set person in Europe,” John says. “On the front page of every magazine and every newspaper. She had a knack for scandal. She was very beautiful and very explosive. The press decided that we were Mexican because my sister had a Mexican passport. So she was the Mexican heiress. And I remember a big article that said my father owned as many oil wells as he owned cattle heads. And we said, ‘That’s the first time they write the truth; he has not any of either.’”

Jeanette Christjansen strikes a pose for Gianpaolo Barbieri
Jeanette Christjansen by Gianpaolo Barbieri

John Casablancas as a young wolf in the 1970s
John Casablancas, photographer unknown, © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

After Le Rosey, John attended several universities. “I used to fight with my father,” he says. “When I fought, I went to work. If I made peace, I went to college.” He transferred to a law school in Spain. “Then I would take my car and take off for two months and come back just before exam time and study day and night, drinking coffee,” he says. “Typical kind of thing that students do.” In between, he worked for Merrill Lynch in Cannes, Brussels, and Paris; for a PR company; and then, at age nineteen, for a real estate company in Barcelona, where he sold real estate to English investors with undeclared income.

Then he was offered a job in Brazil. A Le Rosey schoolmate’s mother had inherited a Coca-Cola franchise in the country’s northeast and thought her Brazilian managers were stealing. “At the age of twenty I went to Bahia, to become marketing manager for Coca-Cola,” Casablancas says. “I had no marketing knowledge, but I could be trusted. So I was there for three and a half years. Now I was a typical European, used to a lot of dating, a lot of fun with the girls. And here I am, in Bahia, which was very, very far from any civilization. The only girls were prostitutes or society girls surrounded with chaperones and impossible to date unless you were marrying them.” So he called his girlfriend in France and invited her to join him in Bahia. But her father laid down the law: not unless they got married. “So I said, ‘OK, fine,’” John says. “So I married her. And you know, it was too early.”

According to Casablancas, he left Brazil because of “a
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
very comedy-tragedy type of circumstance within the Coca-Cola factories.” Luckily his wife’s family helped him find a PR job in Paris. “I start working there, and of course, the moment I get back to Paris, my marriage starts falling apart because I’ve got in me still so much desire to party,” he says. “I’m not mature enough to settle down. The only thing that tempered this was that I didn’t have any money.”

He left his wife and met Jeanette. But after their late date she went back to Denmark. “She was supposed to call me, and I was supposed to call her; but
we didn’t, and about three months later, walking in the streets of Paris, again just by chance, I bumped into her,” Casablancas says. She’d returned to Paris to work with Larsen. She started dating Casablancas, who’d moved into an apartment on the rue de Seine with Alain Kittler. “I didn’t want to get married at nineteen, and I didn’t worry that he wasn’t divorced,” Christjansen says. But six months later his wife got pregnant. “I wanted to leave him, but he said he had no intention of going back to her,” Jeanette says. “He wasn’t exactly sorry. I either had to accept it or leave. I thought I’d stick it out and see what happens.”

Though John had dated “four or five models” before Jeanette, he says, “the idea that I would be involved with their world never came to my mind.” But he was looking for a career, and somehow the one he found, selling glue and construction materials, just wasn’t as appealing as their friend Larsen’s suggestion that he open a model agency. Casablancas had learned a bit about modeling from Jeanette. Though she’d quickly become one of Catherine Harlé’s top earners, she had problems with the agency. “I didn’t think they were taking good care of me,” she says. “They were an old-time agency with thousands of girls, sending me on go-sees right and left. I did garbage jobs. Then John got his idea.”

In 1969 Casablancas took an office in the American Chamber of Commerce’s building on Avenue George V and opened a small agency with a handful of shareholders, Gunnar Larsen among them. “It was a decision of sheer ignorance,” he says. “I knew nothing. But my thinking was not to do this because there’s a lot of pretty girls. That’s a rich man’s thinking. I was a poor guy.” He named his business Élysées 3—after his new telephone number and in homage to New York’s Plaza Five.

Though it was years before Casablancas made his presence felt on an international level, modeling was never the same. No longer would the business be run exclusively by the women and homosexual men like François Lano. With Casablancas, a new generation entered modeling. Raised on the new values of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they were the children of
Blow-Up
, and their arrival on the scene was explosive.

“I brought a very different eye to modeling,” Casablancas says. “In those days it was a feminine activity. I was really the first total heterosexual agent in Paris. I knew a lot of models, I had met a few photographers, and I had been around, you know. I went into this with one premise: finding beautiful girls and marketing them. Getting girls was the easy part. By the time we opened the agency, I had a pretty good impression of what was missing in modeling. I did my homework. Every model I ever spoke to complained about their
agency. Little did I know that models always complained. Had I known that, maybe I would not have gone into the business.”

While John was setting up Élysées 3, Jeanette kept modeling, flying to Hamburg, Munich, and Milan on jobs. In the latter city she was represented by Riccardo Gay (pronounced
guy
). Gay started his career as a journalist at Milan’s newspaper
Corriere della Sera
and, in the mid-sixties, became the model scout at a new magazine called
Amica
. Modeling was a new business in Milan. Colette Gambier, a friend of Catherine Harlé’s, had opened the first agency there in 1962. Four years later Giorgio Piazzi, who’d modeled in London and New York, opened shop, too, starting out booking his friends on a public telephone in a bar in Milan’s Brera district. He called his company Fashion Model. The next year the competition heightened. Gay’s sister, Lucetta, who worked at Giorgio Piazzi’s Fashion Model, is said to have made off with a client list. “I started an agency for fun with my sister,” Gay says. “I was the first in Europe to use vouchers. This was quite a big shock.”

Colette Gambier knew Gay from his days at
Amica
. “Before he had his agency, he went to nightclubs,” she says. “When I booked models to
Amica
, Riccardo would take them out and show them off. He’d thought a long time about this. I had no time for nightclubs. I never presented girls to men. Then the times changed. The girls preferred Riccardo. He was worldly; he introduced them to princes; he took the girls for weekends in castles. He immediately knew how to profit from his position. I called him a matrimonial agent and not a model agent. And he would say bad things about me. It was a war, and he quickly won it.”

Gay started booking models from Paris, Jeanette Christjansen among them. She was flying to Milan when two Frenchmen tried to pick her up on the airplane. One was photographer Patrick Demarchelier; the other, his agent, Jacques de Nointel. De Nointel made his living on the fringes of modeling. “He is a hunting dog,” says a photographer who knows him well. “He steals girls from one agency and presents them to another.” He tried it with Christa Fiedler, among many others. “He was always between the agencies, trying to tell one model to go to the other agency and being paid for that,” she says.

Now Christjansen was in his sights. “I said, ‘Hey, you’re so beautiful, how come you’re not working with magazines?’” de Nointel recalls. “She said, ‘I’m with an agency that doesn’t give me magazines, but my boyfriend is opening an agency.’ And I said, ‘Your boyfriend, I hope he’s gay, because have you ever heard of an alcoholic opening a bar?’ And she says, ‘I want you to meet this guy.’ So John came to see me.”