Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (45 page)

Surviving the recession at the start of the seventies, Wilhelmina became the hottest shop in town, working with several agents in each European city, holding its own model conventions, and signing up models like Patti Hansen, a Staten Island teenager who’d been discovered at a hot dog stand, Shaun Casey (who became an Estée Lauder contract face), Pam Dawber, who went on to television fame as Mork’s Mindy, Juli Foster, who was discovered waitressing, and Gia Carangi, a Philadelphia teenager whose wild ways and sultry looks made her a favorite of photographers from Francesco Scavullo to Chris von Wangenheim, who specialized in pictures that captured the madness of the disco era.

With the money those stars earned (variously estimated at $5 million in 1977 and $11 million in 1978), Willie and Bruce Cooper bought a two-story Tudor mansion with swimming pool, tennis court, and several outbuildings in Cos Cob, Connecticut, expanded their theatrical division (which represented models in television and film), and, in 1978, opened Wilhelmina West, an office in Los Angeles, in an attempt to hold on to models like Dawber, Jessica Lange, and Connie Sellecca when they went Hollywood.

“They were mature and adult and sophisticated and larger than life,” says Kay Mitchell, who started out as the agency’s receptionist and rose to
head the women’s division in 1975. “They were a very, very glamorous couple. Bruce helped Willie see what she could do. She was the voice. He wrote the script.”

Despite the pretty facade, Willie’s life was in turmoil. “Willie had a problem, the husband,” says Dan Deely, who opened Wilhelmina’s men’s division when he left Paul Wagner in 1968. “He drank at lunch and got in the way. He wasn’t interested in anything for very long, and he really had nothing to do. He’d write fluffy promotional pieces about the dreamworld of Wilhelmina and how you, too, can become a model. She was the presence, and I think that drove him crazy.”

Bill Weinberg came to Wilhelmina from Ford in 1970. A commercial agent and troubleshooter, he specialized in the kind of subfashion model who brought home the bacon but never saw the cover of
Vogue
. Eileen Ford looked down on his kind of model, but within two years of his arrival in 1966, Weinberg’s division was bringing in $500,000 a year. Weinberg enjoyed watching the Fords work. “Eileen was the artist, and Jerry was the mechanic,” he says. “People were afraid of her, and then Jerry would pacify them, so bridges were never burned.”

But working for Ford took its toll. “She really ran her ship with a reign of terror,” Weinberg says. “No one wanted to take Eileen on. I’d see her sit at a desk near the main board with people on each side of her who were there for different purposes. She’d be screaming at the person on her left and simultaneously charming to the person on her right. To turn it on and off like that is kind of amazing.”

After the Coopers approached Weinberg in 1970, Jerry Ford called him into his office one day and demanded he sign a contract. When he told Weinberg the document was not negotiable, the executive declined to sign it and asked, “Have I quit or did you fire me?” Two weeks later he got his answer in a letter from Ford dismissing him for breach of fiduciary trust.

As his job evolved at Wilhelmina, Weinberg acquired a small share of the agency and took over many of what had been Bruce Cooper’s duties. “Bringing me in solved a problem, but it diminished Bruce’s role,” says Weinberg. “He’d come in, go through the mail, pinch a couple of fannies, make a few jokes, corral a couple of models, go to lunch for a few hours, and come back with a snootful.” Willie started disappearing from the agency for days at a time “because she’d been roughed up,” Weinberg says. “A couple of times [Cooper] stood up and raved at Wilhelmina when people were around. When he got that way, there was no cooling him off.”

Melissa Cooper was eight years old when her brother, Jason, was born in 1974. A few days later the Coopers released a photograph of Willie and her newborn son. “They had to airbrush it,” Melissa says. “Bruce was with another woman when Jason was born.” When he came back, he gave Willie a black eye.

Melissa describes the world Jason came into at Cos Cob as something out of a bad movie. “There were parties every Sunday,” she says. “Food, booze, mounds of coke, people wasted all over. I never wanted to do cocaine because I’d seen how people acted. Nobody did anything in moderation. I saw sex in the open all the time, since I was little. It was my house. I always investigated. You couldn’t shock me as a child.”

Sometimes Jason and Melissa joined in the celebrations. “Jason doesn’t remember this, but he got drunk when he was two and fell into the pool.” Melissa knew to stay away from the substances her parents provided because she’d overdosed on her mother’s amphetamines when she was three. “I thought it was candy,” she says.

At first Cooper’s drinking was somewhat controlled. “In 1974 he was a charismatic, charming man,” says John Warren, who arrived from Ohio to join the agency as a model that year, becoming Pam Dawber’s boyfriend and a friend of all the Coopers. “Bruce had been around; he’d seen things; he was very bright. But he was also a master of self-sabotage. Being in her shadow was more than he could deal with. He hated being Mr. Wilhelmina.” Bruce’s drinking escalated along with the couple’s fortunes. “He never had a hangover; he never threw up,” says his daughter. “That was Bruce’s curse. If not for the drinking, he would have been so accomplished. He was incredible, articulate, but he couldn’t see anything through.”

By the late seventies Melissa and Jason had learned to stay out of their father’s way. Sometimes Melissa ran off into the woods. As Cooper’s drinking escalated and his behavior grew violent, Willie took to locking the children in a wing of the house. “There were bolts on both sides of the doors,” says Melissa. “He’d go on six-day binges, get totally looped, and mix up his wives and his children. We were all whores.” Just like his mother.

But Wilhelmina was a stand-by-your-man woman. So when there were disagreements in the agency, they were always between Fran Rothschild and Bill Weinberg on one side and Bruce on the other, with Wilhelmina behind him. “It made for bad blood,” says Dan Deely. “From 1978 to 1980 it escalated and escalated and never really ended.”

Finally Cooper’s exploits got to Wilhelmina. They’d met an aspiring model at a convention, and Bruce fell head over heels in love with her.
“Nobody could understand it,” says John Warren. “He had me meet her. I told him he was putting me in a strange situation.” Cooper also brought her to the agency to see the head of new models, Kay Mitchell, who considered herself Bruce’s protégée. When she refused to sign the girl up, Cooper went over her head to Weinberg. “I didn’t want to accept her either,” Weinberg says. “Bruce got somewhat insistent; but I knew he was having an affair with her, and I felt it would be unhealthy.”

Cooper set the girl up in an apartment at 300 East Thirty-fourth Street, a building full of models. Then he announced to Wilhelmina that he was leaving her, packed his car, and drove to New York. “He got to Manhattan and called [the girl] from a phone booth,” John Warren recalls. “And she said, ‘I can’t see you. I’m entertaining.’” Cooper checked into a hotel, thought things through, and “went back to Willie on hands and knees,” Warren says. She said she’d take him back if he promised to stop drinking and never see the girl again.

There was only one bright spot in Wilhelmina’s otherwise dismal existence. She’d formed a bond with one of her neighbors in Connecticut, a tall, striking Dutch-Austrian investment banker named Edward “Edo” von Saher, who commuted to New York with her. “We were aware of Edo, and we were glad,” says Dan Deely. “We didn’t talk about it.”

“I was a very good friend of hers,” von Saher says. “She was a very good friend of mine.” Their families were close, and von Saher became Willie’s adviser and confidant. “It was a very sad situation,” he says. “Her life was the business. Her husband was the business. She had nobody to talk to. Everybody needs a friend. If people can’t have friends, then something’s wrong. Bruce had a lot of good points, but he was sick. Willie stayed with him because of the children. She was breaking her butt, keeping things going, keeping the facade up. In spite of what was going on around her, she still got things done. Fran and Bill played an important part. The agency continued to be very profitable. As long as she was well, she could deal with it. But then she got a cough, and it wouldn’t go away.”

For weeks in the fall of 1979 Willie ignored it. After all, she’d been a chain smoker since she started modeling. Finally, von Saher made her see a doctor, who diagnosed pneumonia. It seemed to clear up, but then Willie relapsed and had exploratory surgery in January. Only then did her doctors discover she was suffering from inoperable lung cancer.

“Bruce was unglued,” says John Warren, who was with him that night. “His wife had crushed him, but by dying, she’d destroy his identity.” Warren
commuted to Cos Cob and took care of Melissa and Jason for the next six weeks. “Bruce wasn’t capable,” he says. “He’d get drunk and threaten to burn down the house.” Finally Warren took to doubling Cooper’s drinks so he would pass out sooner.

Early in February agency lawyer Charles Haydon drew up a codicil to Wilhelmina’s will. It put two thirds of her shares in Wilhelmina in trust for Jason and Melissa. “If Bruce could have voted their shares, he would’ve had a majority,” Haydon explains. “Willie was concerned about Bruce’s habits. He was shacking up with models all over the country. He put it on their credit card. That’s how she found out. Everyone was concerned about the children. Bruce was completely off the wall.” Haydon’s wife and von Saher were named trustees for the children.

Willie died on the morning of March 1, 1980. She was forty years old. Cooper didn’t learn about the change in his wife’s will until after her funeral, when the Cooper family and about two dozen friends went back to Cos Cob. “We were all sitting on a screened porch, and [artist and Wilhelmina investor] Jan de Ruth took a walk with Bruce,” Weinberg says. “When he came back, he was berserk, purple.”

“Fucking cunt!” Cooper screamed. “I can’t believe she did this. Any of you who knew about this, I’ll get you! And if you think I’m going to that memorial service, you’re out of your minds!”

Wilhelmina was buried on a cold, clear morning. That night scores of models attended the memorial service, along with Cooper, who’d been convinced to appear, Norman Mailer, Calvin Klein, Jerry Ford, and John Casablancas. Riverside Chapel was so packed that the crowd overflowed into two adjoining rooms. But even as they remembered Wilhelmina, nobody could forget there was a model war going on. “I heard people were outside, trying to poach models,” says Dan Deely.

In the weeks after Wilhelmina’s death, fear gripped her agency. Cooper would arrive at the offices drunk and cursing. “I was glad Willie wasn’t around to see it,” Rothschild says. He wanted to fire her and Weinberg. “Bruce made a stand to run the company,” Deely says. “We prepared for the worst. If Bruce stayed, the company would be down the tubes within months.”

In July, after months of acrimony, an agreement was signed. Bruce resigned as an officer and director of Wilhelmina and sold his and his children’s shares back to the corporation in exchange for $16,666 a month plus interest for two years. He was also guaranteed a salary of $45,000 a year for two years, $20,000 a year for nine years after that, and full employee benefits, and he was
given the right to open Wilhelmina schools outside of a few major urban areas. Dorothy Haydon and von Saher resigned as trustees, and a bank was appointed in their stead. Weinberg and Rothschild took over the agency, and soon afterward Kay Mitchell quit, she says, “because obviously I was not going to be queen of the hop.”

Wilhelmina’s gross estate totaled $830,000. Cooper eventually got his hands on most of it. “The trustees at the bank didn’t do a damn thing,” von Saher says. “I thought I safeguarded the children’s money, but the law at times provides ways of piercing a trust.” With the proceeds of the sale of Jason’s and Melissa’s stock, Cooper bought three condominiums on a hundred acres in Colorado and moved there with the children. “He tried to be a good dad, but he was like a time bomb,” Melissa says.

Cooper remarried in 1984, to a former Revlon executive, Judith Duncanson. Dorian Leigh, back in America, but still cooking, catered their wedding. Not long afterward Duncanson ran into Eileen Ford in a restaurant. “You should have asked me before you married him,” the agent said. Judith called John Warren and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me he drinks?” After Bruce beat her with a baseball bat so seriously she was hospitalized, she had him arrested in 1988. He moved out, into a farm near their home in Cooperstown, New York, where he died from a heart attack in 1989. The family had his remains cremated, and the ashes were placed in a plastic urn. At the funeral Melissa kicked it, “for Willie,” she says. She also threw a vodka bottle and his favorite glass into his grave.

Bruce Cooper’s alcoholism and all the bad behavior that came with it were never acknowledged by modeling folk. But secret sipping, pill popping, and wife beating were as passé as the Ford agency’s quaint double standards. As the eighties began, it was in to let it all hang out. “People carried coke in their makeup bags, and they’d load up in the dressing room,” says one male model of the time. “If you were at Jim McMullen’s,” a restaurant owned by a former model, “and saw so-and-so going to the bathroom, you’d go, too.”

As the business and the money that came with it grew, “a lot of people wanted the same models and would tolerate anything to get them,” says a former model editor. “You couldn’t say, ‘Your hair’s not done? Go home.’ You were lucky to get them bathed.” It drove some old-times out of the sittings business. “The last one I remember with any clarity occurred downtown for
Vogue
,” says hairdresser Kenneth Battelle. “All this running into the john! They were so high, and it all had to be redone, and I said, ‘I’m not going back.’”

One day in the early eighties a Neal Barr shoot was stymied by a model who
couldn’t get
drugs. “The poor girl was on the phone with her supplier, he wasn’t coming through, and she was panicsville,” Barr says. “All I needed was one tight close-up, but she kept moving.” Barr finally secured her head with two-by-fours to get his shot. But just as he was ready to shoot, she started crying, destroying two hours of makeup.