Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (46 page)

Richard Avedon had no time for it. When a model yawned on his set, he threw her out. When hairdresser Harry King smoked a joint in Avedon’s bathroom, he was banished. But for every fashion professional who hated the new drug scene, there were five more indulging in it. “Behavior absolutely changed; shoots became insane,” King says. “People were on time, and then they weren’t. Girls would show up two, three hours late or not at all. Sometimes they’d be in another country. I remember eight of us in the toilet at Albert Watson’s studio, and he thought we were doing hair and makeup. Albert was lovely but
very
straight.”

Photographers moved in the fast lane, though. Bill King and Barry McKinley were there. “Everybody kissed King’s butt because he had so much business,” says Dan Deely, “but he was strung out from the very beginning, short-tempered, moody, volatile, brittle. His was the first studio where I heard about drugs.” There was also sex. “Stuff I couldn’t even dream up!” says a model who worked with him. “Stuff he wanted hairdressers to do to him, and if they didn’t, he wouldn’t work with them again!”

Hairdresser Harry King stayed close to his friend photographer Bill King even after their romance ended. And he watched as the photographer’s craziness spiraled. Bill King would go to the Anvil and dance on the bar in a leather jacket, boots, and nothing else. He got models—male and female—stoned and then took pictures of them—the nastier the better. He gave one model Quaaludes and then took pictures as his assistant and another man performed oral sex on her. “He was kind, sweet, lovely and a great photographer,” King says, “but Bill did too many drugs and got off on people’s misfortunes.”

New Zealand—born Barry McKinley, who died in 1992, was best known in public as a men’s fashion photographer. In private, Deely says, McKinley was dealing drugs, got arrested several times, and was threatened with deportation. “We wrote letters supporting him,” Deely says. “But he’d turn on you in a minute. He was evil, miserable, bitter, and very talented. You had to deal with arrogant, egotistical assholes.”

McKinley got so wild he even attacked a model physically. “I had a half day catalog job booked with him,” says Rosie Vela. “But when I got there, he told
me he was shooting an ad that would run all over the country.” Vela told McKinley she’d have to call Eileen Ford and tell her the job had changed. He started screaming, “You whore! You bitch! You want more money?” Vela thinks McKinley was high on cocaine. “I saw Barry do blow all the time at work,” she says.

As the art director and McKinley’s assistants joined in the abuse, Vela retreated toward the elevator. “He grabs me just before the door closes and swings me out and starts to slap me and hit me,” she says. When she ran from the building, she thinks the photographer and crew threw rocks at her. Finally she was rescued by a friend and went home. “And guess what happened?” she asks. “Eileen Ford called and said, ‘You left a booking? You’re fired.’ And she hung up the phone. I called back and spoke to Jerry, and he calmed her down. The next day Barry sent me flowers, saying he’d love to work with me again.”

Peter Strongwater started shooting catalog jobs in the early seventies. “It wasn’t so much an art as a mechanical production,” he says. “The girls were the worst. You didn’t get the stars. It was drudgery. You just did it according to the layouts the client tacked to the wall.” Strongwater’s first big job was an ad for the Wool Bureau, which sent him to Australia in 1972 with a new model named Lisa Taylor. “By the time we hit Australia, we were
very
good friends,” he says, cocking an eyebrow. Not only that, but the pictures turned out well, too, and Strongwater’s career took off. “I was very naïve until that point,” he says. “I believed in
Reefer Madness
. If you took drugs, you were doomed. Unfortunately I found out that wasn’t true.”

The years 1978 to 1982 were “a zenith,” Strongwater continues. “We couldn’t get through a shoot without a major amount of drugs. People dropped coke on the table; they smoked joints. It was accepted. It was heaven. If you were bored, you called for a go-see. We fucked a lot, took a lot of drugs, and worked a lot. I’m sure the agencies knew about it. I was less than circumspect. But I never had one agent say a model couldn’t come here because this was an unhealthy place to be.” Finally Strongwater “realized drugs were damaging me,” he says. “I moved away, went into rehab, and came back in ’87. The party was still going on, but I wasn’t part of it anymore. People say, ‘Are you sad?’ No. I had the time of my life.”

Matthew Rich came to New York in 1977 and fell in with the Halston crowd at Studio 54. “It was my idea of heaven,” says the public relations consultant, who asks to be described as “one of the survivors.” Rich longed for a male model he’d seen in
GQ
magazine named Joe Macdonald. They soon met at Studio, “and we ended up necking in the balcony,” Rich says. They
also sniffed coke, “and my heart was already going a mile a minute. That was it. We became almost live-in lovers.”

They hung out with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Calvin Klein, and Halston—“all my godheads,” Rich says. “Andy drew Joe, drew his penis.” Macdonald became interested in art and started collecting photographs. But that and his growing taste for cocaine diverted him from his trade. “He alienated people,” says Rich. “He was temperamental.”

Macdonald bounced between Zoli and Ford. “Don’t call me anymore if you’re going to send me on bullshit,” he’d yell at his booker. Macdonald was the first male supermodel, and many opportunities were available to him—in play as well as work. “After three years he decided to sleep with every man who ever lived,” Rich says. People started whispering to Rich that “Mary,” as Macdonald was known, was hanging out at gay bathhouses. Rich and he broke up. Within two years Macdonald was dead of AIDS.

Rich went to work for Studio 54’s PR man and got a close-up view of the action there. “The big models were all there with their tops off—male and female—demigods. They were a draw, so they were protected,” Rich says. “Steve [Rubell] protected the people he liked. Aspiring models may have gotten a little used.”

Everyone was using drugs. “It got to the point where if you wanted to fuck a model, you had to have coke or Quaaludes,” says Alex Chatelain. “I’d fuck girls at Studio 54. To have a ’lude made it quite easy. But I wasn’t a club person, and I didn’t like drugs, so I didn’t do it that much.” One night Matthew Rich watched a model spy a rolled-up $100 bill between some cushions on a sofa in Studio’s celebrities-only basement. “She unrolled it, snorted it, licked it, and then threw it on the ground, having gotten what she wanted,” Rich says. “I snapped it up and bought more dust.”

The snorting, like the hustling busboys downstairs, who serviced the mostly gay Studio in crowd, were kept an inside secret for many years—even from insiders.
Vogue
’s Polly Mellen saw what was going on in the club’s balcony, though. “Two boys going at it, two girls, a girl and a boy. I saw every stage of something going on, and that scared me.” It was the same at Halston’s house. “
Heavy
drugs,” says Mellen. “I came, I saw, I left.”

When Kay Mitchell first met freckle-faced sixteen-year-old Patti Hansen at a Wilhelmina party in 1973, “she was very shy,” the booker says. “You couldn’t get her to talk, but there was something in her pictures.” Mitchell sent her to
Seventeen
, and Hansen spent the next two years “leaping and running and jumping” for the young women’s magazine. Then
Glamour
booked her and gave her a new look. “She was the epitome of the healthy teenager,” Mitchell says. “The product people all jumped on board and she just took off.” Hansen dropped out of school and moved into 300 East Thirty-fourth Street, the same building where Bruce Cooper later stashed his girlfriend.

Patti Hansen photographed by Charles Tracy for Calvin Klein Jeans
Patti Hansen by Charles Tracy, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

In the summer of 1974 Hansen went to Europe, where she signed with Elite. “She’s basically fearless,” Mitchell says, “and that part of her personality gave her the impetus to forge ahead. She did intense, strong pictures there, came back to America, we sent them to
Vogue
and they saw a whole different person.” In 1976 Hansen became one of the magazine’s stars. In 1978 she appeared on the cover of
Esquire
, representing “The Year of the Lusty Woman.”

Hansen’s model friend Shaun Casey played ingenue parts longer. She lived in New York with her fiancé, real estate heir Martin Raynes, and caught the last good days of El Morocco and Le Club. It wasn’t until 1977 that she went to Paris and grew up. Hairdresser John Sahag cut her hair off and bleached the gamin’s cap that remained white. Paris Planning’s Gérald Marie took one look at her and decided to make her a star. Helmut Newton put her on the cover of French
Vogue
. Six weeks later she returned to America. “My bookings were off the charts,” she says. “I had five a day to choose from.”

Casey signed with Estée Lauder and joined the scene at Studio 54. “It was champagne, coke, uppers, downers, poppers, all that,” she says. “Everybody was doing drugs at that point.” She married Roger Wilson, of New Orleans, whose father had coowned an oil services company. Both his parents had died when he was a teenager, leaving him with a fortune of several million dollars. Though he liked Studio 54, too, “we didn’t dive in headfirst,” Casey says. “I worked every day. I’d do bookings at night. I was into making money and putting it away.”

It went on like that until 1983, when Casey’s Lauder contract and her marriage both ended. Lauder, which had always stuck with its faces for years, had grown more fickle. It replaced Casey with Willow Bay, who gave way in a few years to the more international Paulina Porizkova. Casey’s husband, Roger Wilson, “didn’t want to be married,” Casey says. “He wanted to be a playboy.” Then, that August, Casey’s younger sister, Katie, who was also a model, died of a drug overdose. Overwhelmed, Casey drank, stayed out late, and canceled bookings. “I think I canceled one hundred forty with Lord & Taylor alone,” she says. “I wasn’t partying. I was an absolute mess. So I changed my life. I married a guy who didn’t drink, moved to Florida, got a contract with Burdine’s, had a baby, chose my friends wisely, did my work, and went home. If you had money, you could do anything, and if you weren’t grounded, you could drown so easily.”

Casey’s best friend, Patti Hansen, had a wilder reputation. “She didn’t really have boyfriends,” Kay Mitchell says. “She had hair and makeup guys who liked to hang out and party, and Patti was their star. Gay guys. One of them said to me, ‘I’m looking for a man like Hansen.’ I said, ‘So’s everybody.’ She was big and strong. A photographer once came on to her, and she flipped him over her shoulder and knocked him out.”

Hansen would also “pull her shirt off if no one in the agency was paying attention to her,” says a Wilhelmina booker. Ever the athlete, on a shoot with Peter Strongwater at Lake Mohonk, in upstate New York, “Patti dropped acid and went rowing,” Strongwater says. Sometime later she went to Mexico City for a catalog shoot with Jerry Hall and photographer Guy Le Baube. “We went to the plane with a bus and a mariachi band to welcome Patti and Jerry and Bryan Ferry,” Le Baube recalls. “Patti got off the plane wearing transparent plastic shorts with no underwear and spike heels. She was literally steaming and showing Mexico City she was a real redhead.”

Hansen was resilient. “She could drink a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and look perfectly normal,” says a photographer she got high with. “The key to Patti was her ability to absorb drugs without losing control. What would floor another person wouldn’t bother her. She never missed a booking. She was never out of control.”

In 1979 Hansen met her match in Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard. “He became part of her energy instead of her becoming part of his,” says Shaun Casey. “She pulled him up.” But not without worrying her friends first. After they were introduced by Jerry Hall, Hansen disappeared for several days. “She got very, very, very skinny,” says Kay Mitchell. “Her hours turned around. He stayed up all night and slept all day, and she did, too. But for me that behavior, whether it was cocaine or tossing back drinks, was the aberration. She saved one of the great rock stars of our time. She was goodness personified, and I’m really not putting a pretty face on it. Doing the job and making everyone else look good because she showed up was the norm for Patti Hansen.”

Not so for Gia Carangi, a bisexual drug addict whose brief rise, long fall, and final death from AIDS were the subject of a book,
Thing of Beauty
, that infuriated models, who say she was hardly representative. “Gia walked in and walked out,” says Mitchell, who booked her as well. “The difference between her and models like Patti or Shaun Casey is that they worked for years. They’d go anywhere and do anything for work.”

For a moment Gia was a star, though, working with all the best photographers. She and Joe Macdonald bought their coke from the same Colombian on Fiftieth Street. “Joe would go off to the baths after we scored,” Matthew Rich says. “Gia and I would go out. I loved my Gia. She was adorable and sweet and loved to get fucked up the ass with fingers, and that horrified me, so she talked about it more. We loved to spell our names out on a mirror in coke.” Gia would get mad because Matthew’s name was so much longer than hers.