Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (49 page)

S
HANNON
: “Until that time I was very naïve. I was very scared of people. I didn’t go out. I wore no makeup, glasses. I had this big secret to hide. I was from the wrong side of the tracks. Then I started noticing something going on in the studios. People kept going to the bathroom in groups. And I wasn’t invited. I felt very left out and abandoned, which was plugging into my childhood issues ‘cause I came from a one-parent home. So I started putting two and two together, and I finally kind of weaseled my way in at one point, and I saw that this was important. I needed to be a part of it really badly, ’cause my life was about getting to the other side of the tracks.

“So I transformed myself. I took off my glasses, borrowed an outfit from Bill Blass, bought some cocaine, hired a limo, and I went to Studio 54. And this was my coming-out party. Everyone was like, Tara? Wow! I had cocaine, and I was very popular. Suddenly I’m hanging out with the rich and famous. I get the rock star boyfriend, one of the first. Hamish Stuart from the Average White Band. Oh, he was so cool. I’d met him in Denver. And then, when I was in New York, I called him, and we got engaged.”

K
NUDSEN
: “Drugs were a really big part of fashion, especially at the top. I remember a shooting for
Vogue
. People at the studio said, ‘Take this powder. It’ll be good for the shot.’ Cocaine really ruled. It got crazy all over. Dark circles under my eyes became something of a trademark. Your weakness can become your strength once you find it.

“Even though we were all crazed, the work was still the focus. When people are in altered states, it’s all about the vision. We were a continuation of the sixties. You had to expand the borders. And you couldn’t have that look unless you could walk the plank. Style is perverse, always. Part of the glamour is the decadence, being able to swim in deep water.

“I did lots of jobs with Bill King. He hired me at the beginning and shaped my career. Bill was a bad boy, always waiting for something to break out. He’d turn on his big fans and wait to see what happened. He booked me with Jerry Hall, and she would flip her hair in my face to cover it in every picture. Each time she did it, I threw some confetti in the fan so it would blow right in her face. It stuck to her, and she’d have to run off the set and fix it. Bill liked that.”

S
HANNON
: “I switched to Elite in ’79 ’cause I wanted more of that editorial work. I liked that. I’d started to wake up a little bit. Monique Pillard called me. She wanted me. But I had signed a contract with Wilhelmina. So how do you get out of the contract? Monique called Johnny in. He says, ‘Tara, what you must do is tell her that it is like a love affair, it is over. Don’t say that you want more editorial, don’t say you want the room painted pink, ‘cause they’ll say OK. Just say it’s time.’ And I said those things to Wilhelmina, and she gave me the contract, and I walked out. John wasn’t an issue. He likes the younger girls. I had no use for John, really. I wasn’t dumb enough to fall prey to his magnificence.”

K
NUDSEN
: “There was a lot of laughing. Everything was fun. Location trips were like going to camp. You could get away with even more. You ran the risk of being sent home on the next plane, but that’s what editorial work was about. In St.-Barth we’d open the hotel bars after they’d closed, mix drinks, and wake people up. One time we were on the beach, rolling joints and drinking all night, and the next thing we knew, the sun came up, and we were right in front of the client’s room, trying to hide the bottles! On hot days we’d jump in the water with the client’s clothes on, and they’d freak out. One time I was doing a photo in a boat, and I rocked it till it sank. The client gave me such hard time! Then he used the picture for a double spread.”

S
HANNON
: “Excuse me—you put a fourteen-year-old on Wall Street, unchaperoned, what do you think they’re going to do? This is a bunch of big unchaperoned babies getting away with murder. Nobody put any boundaries up. The fallacy that models are stupid I think comes from their being fifteen years old. It’s your job when you’re fifteen to be stupid. You’re putting these children in these adult situations and then making fun of them? Oh, please don’t get me started. I saw a girl faint twice at a booking. She hadn’t eaten in days ’cause she was trying to lose the baby fat.”

K
NUDSEN
: “I met Janice Dickinson on a shoot at Mike Reinhardt’s house in the Hamptons. She was wild, but it’s funny, her reputation was all that people focused on, and there was a very nice, exposed child inside.

“It becomes a duel. As bad as you are, that’s how good you can be at your job, and that fascinates people. How can this girl get away with this? We all behaved like superbrats. Sometimes I do things just for shock. People don’t get that it’s a joke. You just do it to get a reaction. We were all young, and that’s how we dealt with our situation. It’s a big risk to put yourself out there.”

S
HANNON
: “Oh, Janice. She’s like a flame, and you’re the moth. You’ve got to go to her, and you get burned, you can’t help it. I would seriously say that she has a chemical imbalance, and that if she got medication, it would really help her. I mean in the most loving way I say that. But she’s fucking brilliant. She’s a brilliant model, the best ever, I think. She will be talked about for as long as modeling exists. She was good to me. She really would teach the girls, man. Here’s how you do it, you just tell those guys to fuck off.
Grrrrrr
.”

K
NUDSEN
: “Gia was my best girlfriend. She was just beautiful. When she was first starting out, we did a job in the south of France with Helmut Newton. He said, ‘Throw on the red lips and the bad eyes!’ Helmut had Gia and I be girls, and the two other models were dressed as guys. One of them was Swedish, and she’d been a real bitch to me when I was starting out. So Gia sent roses to her room with lipstick all over the card, and then she called and said, ‘Let’s have some fun.’ The girl broke out in a rash. Gia and I were like lion cubs having fun. We got a reputation because we didn’t hide anything. We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties. So many! We were both constantly on trips, which I think saved my life, because you don’t do drugs when you travel. Except when I traveled with Gia. We brought a whole medicine kit.

“Gia was the peak. She pushed the borders right to death.”

S
HANNON
: “Men never gave me anything. I made my own money. I never dated a guy for money, I never dated a guy for drugs, I had my own, you know. I always had my own coke. I didn’t accept it. It was part of my obscure feminism.”

K
NUDSEN
: “I always knew how to deal with men. I never understood professional affairs, even though photographers have always done that and a few girls work the couch better than they do. But somebody always gets hurt. I mean, who’s working who?

“But I didn’t know what a hustler was. I was very open and ready to be used. After I got my own apartment, I always had people living with me, tapping my bank accounts, using my drug dealers. You’re making thousands and thousands of dollars, and you’re constantly working and being flattered, and you’re not emotionally mature, and you almost feel that you need to strike a kind of balance.

“When I was eighteen, a guy almost killed me. He called himself Dean Avedon, but that wasn’t really his name. He was a bastard. He nearly tore my
heart out. It got so crazy the police came to my door and he was behind me with a knife at my back. I said everything was OK, and they believed me. I was winking at them, but they went away, and then the guy tortured me for hours and hours. I started thinking of the scene in
Lawrence of Arabia
where Peter O’Toole is tortured. So I said, ‘I know you’re going to kill me, but can I have one last wish? Can I watch this movie?’

“He said yes, and it saved my life. Lawrence is riding through the desert and the guy fell asleep. I snuck out. All I had was my coat. I borrowed five dollars from the doorman and went to Bill King. He ran a bath, cleaned my wounds, and called Jerry Ford. The Fords had a house in Connecticut then, and Jerry took me there for a couple of days. A few days later the guy came back. Where do you think he’d been? In Milan, picking up another girl! He ended up working for a model agency. He died a couple years ago.

“After that I didn’t want to stay in my apartment anymore, and I moved into a new flat. But I was nowhere! I was definitely on the skids. My career was going a little bit down. I owed drug dealers money. I was surrounded by rock and rollers who were feeding me substances, and my ego was getting out of hand. I was breaking down from too much stress, too much work, too much drugs, too much everything. That Christmas was the first when I didn’t go back to Denmark. I called my father, but I kept it real brief.”

S
HANNON
: “I was a real isolator. And when I got into my drug bit, I isolated even more. When I was in Paris, my favorite thing to do was go to the Maison du Caviar on Place de la Madeleine and sit there and write and drink champagne and have different caviars and smoke cigarettes, day after day after day. I was tired, man. I was working thirty shows a week. It was rough. Iman would be vibrating, hung over, coked out. They all were at one point or another. You’d get there on a Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday you’re doing all the shows, you’re not eating, you’re all right, though. Thursday things start getting a little hairy, you’re getting tired, you start bursting into tears. Thursday night, time for the vultures with the cocaine. You’re so tired. You’re really lonely, and you know—
boom
!

“People would drink, do a hit, and go on the runway. I never would do that. And then sure enough, as the years went by, I started going on the runway a little stoned. Just a glass of champagne to loosen up. And then one time I nearly fell over on the runway, I was so drunk.

“I have a good rep, but I went through a really rough time. At one point I’d been around the world in nineteen days or something. You get off a plane
and nobody meets you; you go to a hotel where you don’t know anybody; you go to a booking where you don’t know anybody. Everybody wants, everyone’s got a vested interest, and then while everyone else goes home to sleep, you’re on another plane. And you’ve got a husband who’s an asshole on top of it, who’s destroying you psychically, and nobody says, ‘What would be good for you?’ Nobody ever says, ‘Take a vacation, you’re looking like you could use a little moral support,
something
.’”

K
NUDSEN
: “I’d been with Ford for three or four years when Jerry and Eileen called me in and said they wanted me to go into detox. When you’re doing it, that’s the last thing you want to hear, so I said no. I was being an asshole. Then Eileen heard a rumor that I was going to Elite, and she called my parents and started a family feud. She said I was doing a lot of drugs, it was a matter of days before I died, and I needed my family. They didn’t know Eileen is cuckoo. My mother had a nervous breakdown! But my father said he’d just spoken to me, that I’d been talking about new management, and he had the feeling this was a trick. She just wanted to send me home because if she couldn’t have me, then Johnny couldn’t either.

“I was growing up. I wanted to get a grip on my business. And I had to clean up to prove that my parents were right to stand behind me. I went to Elite. At my first meeting with Casablancas, we were talking about my percentage. Monique Pillard was standing behind me, making signs, trying to send him messages. I didn’t want them to talk over my head, so I made them turn the lights out. The first thing I did was get totally straight because I didn’t want them telling me what to do. I wanted to make it clear who worked for who. I wanted to understand everything that was happening to me.”

S
HANNON
: “I made it to the fucking top, and there was nothing there. Nobody was home. I started going out with Tony Peck after I broke up with Hamish. He’d seen me on
The Merv Griffin Show
. So now Tony starts teaching me how to do cocaine, like I didn’t know. And this man can do cocaine, holy moley! I’m going out to dinner with Gregory Peck’s friends, Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore, Jimmy Stewart, Billy Wilder. Gregory was a great guy, a very humble guy. I knew that I didn’t like Tony, but I was digging hanging out with all these people that all the other girls were wanting to be with. That was the surprising thing for me. I got to the other side of the tracks, and I looked at these people, and they had no values, and it was bizarre. I started seeing stars, rich people, how they treated their wives. I started hearing the gossip.
How this producer’s wife was a hooker, and I just got very disillusioned. Everything that I had worked for was all a sham. I was like a deer. I ran away to Paris. And I broke up with Tony on the phone.”

K
NUDSEN
: “It was healthy to make the change. Monique lifted my career back up. A lot was happening. I moved in with a guy in the rock and roll business, and I hired his business manager. He wouldn’t allow me to do anything. I stopped doing coke and started a whole new thing. That’s when I found out how messed up everything was. For a long time I wouldn’t open my mail unless it was from Denmark. I had boxes of official letters from the IRS. I owed them so much money!”

S
HANNON
: “I lost a lot of money, I don’t know where it went. I don’t know what I did with it. I remember taking it out, but that’s about it. I took a lot of limos for a while, and I did pay for my own cocaine. And I was so generous. I spent a fortune. I was never a big money-maker. But I made millions and I spent millions.

“Luckily I saved a lot. I could have saved a lot more.”

K
NUDSEN
: “Even after I cleaned up, I still had a ‘bad reputation.’ But really, it was just pranks. When Carol Alt came into the business, she was a real bitch. She changed really fast, and now she’s supercool and we’re really good friends, but at first, she was very religious. We went on a trip to Barbados together where there were only a certain number of rooms. I didn’t want to share, but I had to. So I went out and got stoned, came back and put a sheet over my head and burst into the room going, ‘Wooooo, it’s the Antichrist!’ I wanted them to separate us.