Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (41 page)

Lano agreed, but then, says Casablancas, he tried to exempt Marie from the deal. “Gérald wasn’t the owner, but he was the heart of the agency,” Casablancas says. “I hated his guts. But I said that he had to be in the deal, so François finally accepted. I came to the States to look into the possibility of doing this agency, and the day I arrived I got a phone call from Eileen Ford. She always used to call me at eight o’clock in the morning. She knows I hate being woken up early. She says to me, ‘Gérald was in the Bahamas, and he gave us a little phone call and told us that you were coming to look at the possibility of opening an agency, and I just wanted to tell you his message: The deal’s off.’” Because of what she’d learned about his plans, Ford added, Bruce and Wilhelmina Cooper would be joining them at a dinner they had planned for Casablancas that night at ‘21.’

At the dinner “they all started accusing me of opening this agency,” Casablancas says. He shot back that Eileen Ford was trying to “screw up my scouting” in Scandinavia, “and if she’s going to do that, I’m going to come to America. I don’t want to come to America. But I will not take this shit any longer from Eileen.” The dinner degenerated into a shouting match. Wilhelmina threatened to destroy Casablancas. “She took off on him in a way that embarrassed us,” confirms Jerry Ford. “We told him we had no intention of opening in Europe, but that if he opened here, we’d be sure none of our models went to him in Paris again.”

Then came the rumor that the Fords were setting up one of their models, a Swede named Karin Mossberg, in a Paris agency. Mossberg insists she opened alone, “just me,” financed with her savings and aided by all the friends she’d met as a model. “People trusted me,” she says. “I went to Sweden to the agencies. I picked six girls, and I started in my living room.” Mossberg says she booked no Ford models for a year, but to this day the competition thinks she did. “Eileen put all her girls in Karins,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. Adds German agent Dorothy Parker: “Everyone knew it was Ford’s agency, financed by Ford, totally Ford, with Ford models.”

“We really tried to talk her out of it,” Eileen Ford insists. “We were working with Elite. It just rocked the boat.”

Regardless, Casablancas decided he “was going to watch Eileen,” he says. “I had a spy in New York who found out when she was going to Scandi
navia.” He followed just behind her and learned “that she was selling her new stallion, Karin Mossberg, who was opening an agency in Paris. She did exactly what she’d promised not to do at that dinner. She said I was a playboy, that all I wanted to do was date girls, that I introduced them to disgusting—one day it was Arabs, the next day it was Jews from New York. Every place I went it was someone different, Lebanese, Iranians. She denied it, but she was asking people to work with Karin and not with me. This was stabbing me in the heart. So I said, ‘OK, fuck this.’ I had a meeting with my partners and asked them to put up money to open in New York.”

“We had to do it very quickly,” says Alain Kittler. “Secrecy had to be absolute. We wanted some kind of blitzkrieg operation.” They gathered $20,000 in seed money and a $300,000 credit line. “From that moment on I was devious,” Casablancas says, not without a touch of pride. Early in 1977 he set up trips to New York as he always had, arranging to meet models at Wilhelmina and Ford. He was giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine. The only agent he confided in was Stewart Cowley. “John told me he was opening here,” Cowley recalls. “He said he wasn’t going to fuck around with me, but he was going to kill Eileen and Wilhelmina.” He even briefly considered opening in Cowley’s offices, but there wasn’t enough room.

“I was told by my attorneys that I couldn’t solicit people,” Casablancas explains, “so I came to New York, visiting and pretending everything was fine, and in the meantime I was looking for offices and I had my friend [photographer] Alain Walch, spreading the rumor and giving me information. Alain made a report on every single booker in New York.” He singled out Monique Pillard. “He said she is probably the best booker in town, but she has a vile mouth,” Casablancas remembers. “She still laughs about that.”

The daughter of hairdressers from Nice, Pillard met Eileen Ford in the late sixties in the Revlon beauty salon that Pillard ran in midtown Manhattan. Impressed with her energy, Ford offered her a job as a booker. Pillard says of Ford, “She’s a tough cookie, a very shrewd businesswoman. I’m still thankful for the things she taught me.”

But as the rumors spread that Casablancas was coming, Ford got suspicious. “I was getting too strong, so she tried to put the fear in me,” Pillard says. “She made me feel small, like an object on a table. She had me in her office every day, telling me no one liked me. She’d beaten me so regularly and mercilessly I had no confidence. Then, when she heard John was coming, she told me to take the summer off with full pay. I didn’t understand. Later on I realized she wanted me out of the way.”

“She was flouncing around the office, never at her desk, fighting with Rusty, making speeches about ‘What I have to do,’” Jerry Ford recalls. “We suspected she was going with John.”

In February Casablancas sent a telegram to Eileen Ford, asking her to set up go-sees for him in early March. He signed it, “Love John.” Elite Model Management Corporation was incorporated on March 22. A month later comptroller Jo Zagami and Pillard both gave notice to Ford. At the same time Casablancas sent a telex, fessing up to what he was doing.

“When we closed our deal with Monique Pillard, we went to Rumpelmayer’s because I was staying at the St. Moritz,” Casablancas recalls. “Who comes behind? There was Roy Cohn with [Ford executive] Joey Hunter. They were obviously waiting for us. I thought Monique was going to die!”

“Eileen and Jerry wanted [Cohn] for that suit,” says Richard Talmadge, the lawyer who handled most of Ford’s other legal affairs. “He said he could stop Casablancas from opening in New York. I disagreed.”

“Paranoia was rampant,” says Gillis MacGil, the owner of Mannequin. And now, with characters like Cohn thrown into the mix, “it was starting to get exciting,” says Gara Morse, who was then a young booker at Wilhelmina. “We’d started hearing stirrings, but the Coopers felt safe. They thought John was only hitting Ford.” Still, they sent memos to the staff, warning them to keep close tabs on their models.

Then, the first week in May, Wilhelmina’s Maarit Halinen became the first model to join Elite New York. “Wilhelmina was not doing a great job with her.” Casablancas sneers. “She was becoming a catalog queen.”

A week later—three weeks before Elite’s offices even opened—the Fords sued Casablancas for $7.5 million for violating the “fiduciary trust” they felt he owed them. “We were really hurt emotionally,” says Eileen Ford. Adds Jerry: “We were under siege. We had to do something.”

“The lawsuit was the mistake of [Eileen Ford’s] life,” says Alain Kittler. “From one day to the other we were known; people thought we were rich and powerful when we were neither, because we were attacked for seven million dollars. So we made the breakthrough in two months, but I tell you it was a gamble.” By July Elite was the talk of the town. That month journalist Anthony Haden-Guest published a story in
New York
magazine called “Model Wars.” In the most famous passage he described how Eileen Ford had sent Pillard and Zagami Bibles with passages about Judas Iscariot (“And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, ‘Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.” Mark 14:18) underlined in red ink.

Ford confirms that she sent Pillard a Bible. “I’d do it all over again, too,” she says.

Haden-Guest quoted Janice Dickinson boasting about running around Elite’s offices in the nude; described the arrival of immigration men at Elite’s offices, looking to deport Casablancas (who was an American citizen) and chief booker Christine Lindgren (whose papers were in order), and took readers into a summit conference at Bruce and Wilhelmina Cooper’s house, where François Lano, Gérald Marie “de Castelbajac,” and several other agents and photographers held a “council of war” to plot against Casablancas.

Aftershocks continued for months. Wilhelmina filed suit against Elite, too, for $4 million. Ford and Willie were allied against Casablancas; they declared war on two fronts: in the courts and in fashion industry gossip. “They tried to demonize John,” says Alain Kittler, “but people were amused or excited. After all, he wasn’t doing anything abnormal.”

In Haden-Guest’s article Bruce Cooper bluntly called Casablancas a pimp. “I didn’t expect the violence,” says Casablancas. “It was a constant climate of terror. [Eileen] told people that we had orgies every Thursday in the agency. I wasn’t living a life of orgies. I had some parties that were, by American standards, very wild. You go to a wedding in America, and people just get silently drunk at their tables and throw up in the toilet. You go to a wedding in France, and usually someone will stand on a table and lift their skirt up or do something a little bit sexual, because that’s the nature of that society. My nature was more French. But I mean, it was a nightmare.”

The Americans decided—and still believe—that any Frenchman with a camera was working for Casablancas. “What do you do when a bunch of photographers tell your models to leave you?” Eileen Ford asks. Monique Pillard says Ford called photographers and told them they’d have no more Ford models if they ever booked girls from Elite. “When I arrived in New York, she’d invite me to dinner parties,” says Patrick Demarchelier. “She never talked to me after John came to New York.” Adds Jacques Malignon: “Willie told me she’d send me back to my country because I was involved with John. Everyone thought there was a connection, and John very smartly didn’t deny it.”

When
Fortune
magazine did a story on the model war, a reporter told Alex Chatelain that Ford had accused him of owning a piece of Elite. “I got mad and arranged a lunch with the Fords,” he says. “She started crying, asking why I didn’t book her girls. I told her, ‘Get modern.’ John’s girls were different.”

Model Barbara Minty became one of John’s girls. Gunilla Lindblad joined immediately, too. Ford sent a letter to her. “She said, ‘We believed you were
part of this family, and we feel very betrayed and hurt that you gave us not a word of explanation,’ which was true,” says her photographer husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen. “We should have been courteous. We hadn’t been correct. But Eileen had made some huge mistakes, too. When we had our son, for instance, she said, ‘What a disaster! I have a doctor. Get rid of it right away!’ Like, go to the loo and then go back to work!” Casablancas was different. “John loved the girls,” Zachariasen says. “He saw that the girls had talent and that they were personalities, and he decided he would give them a status. Eileen did not love the girls. For Eileen, they were cattle.”

On June 29, 1977, the Fords’ request for a preliminary injunction against Elite was denied. Ford’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, was on the attack when he deposed Casablancas a year later, accusing him of lying and then, late in the day, bringing up Elite’s association with two Swiss companies, Fashions and Models and Sococom-Inmod, that billed and paid models for work outside France. “Isn’t it a fact that these arrangements … were done for the purpose of evading French tax laws?” Cohn demanded. Twisting and turning, Casablancas insisted that wasn’t true. Though he admitted that models were paid outside France, he claimed he knew very little about the process.

“You are just not going to give me a direct answer, are you?” Cohn said.

“I’m giving you the answer I know,” Casablancas replied.

Elite fought back in a document submitted to the court in August, in which its lawyer, Ira Levinson, charged that New York’s existing agencies were engaged in a monopolistic conspiracy to fix prices and commissions. Levinson was referring to actions taken by several agents in the early seventies, when they changed their corporate names (removing the word “agency”), returned their employment agency licenses to New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs, asserted that they were managers and not employment agents, and raised commissions. In 1972 the department subpoenaed Ford’s records, and the following year it scheduled a hearing to investigate Wilhelmina. “The principals of the major modeling agencies … agreed among themselves to raise commissions,” Levinson charged, claiming to have interviewed a witness who was present at the agents’ meeting where the decision was made. (Stewart Cowley confirms that the agents did make the move in concert. “No such conversation ever took place,” insists Jerry Ford.)

The legal actions went on for several years. But after the Fords lost their case against Pillard in arbitration in 1979, they dropped the other actions, for reasons they won’t explain. Even without a legal resolution, it was already clear
that Elite was the model war winner. Stars were banging down its doors, bringing with them bookings that paid the rent, the legal fees, and champagne bills.

“Eileen controlled the industry, and then she didn’t anymore,” says Monique Pillard. “They’d ask me, ‘Who’s your PR?’ I’d say, ‘Eileen Ford.’ Models kept leaving, one after another.” What really lured them? Money was part of it, certainly. And so was John’s knack for promotion and publicity. In January 1978 he bound all his models’ composite cards into an oversize folder with detachable wall posters. It was a sensation. He’d already removed prices from all his promotional materials—making all rates negotiable—and announced he’d increased the day rate for stars to $1,500.

Meanwhile, Jerry Ford was working to win models “reuse” payments for photographs, a more important change in the long run. “Rates were going up anyway,” he says. “It just came a little faster. The increased traffic between Paris and New York widened the market for top-notch models [and] created the world-class superstars. John would take credit for that. We felt we were laying the basis for that all along. There’s no question that they created a great agency, but we’re still here. We replaced the models who were purloined and slugged it out as well as we knew how.”

Harry Conover, Jr., jokes that John Casablancas is his father’s reincarnation. But Casablancas is more: He invented a new way of marketing models. “He was a ruthless womanizer, and the girls loved it,” says
Vogue
fashion editor Polly Mellen. “He took a sleepy backwater business run by a dowager empress and turned it into Hollywood,” says photographer Peter Strongwater. “He was the first to use sexy pictures, naked bodies,” says booker Monique Corey. “You’d never seen that before.” “He made the girls known,” says Maarit Halinen. “People started to get interested. They wanted to know, ‘Who is this guy?’ Everyone was talking.”