Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (50 page)

“Elite turned out to be a bit of a dud. You couldn’t get away with it anymore. In the mid-eighties the new girls pulled everything back and became more commercial. They showed up on time. They smiled at the client. We’d pumped the rates up, but when the money got to a certain point, they wanted more professionalism, and the creative side was cut back. There were less nervous breakdowns for the editors, I guess.

“I started traveling to Hawaii and California and Australia, and I studied acting for a couple of years. I’d commute to New York for special jobs. Elite just sort of fizzled out for me because I wasn’t in New York. I also started learning to shoot films, and that took me to Australia and Bali. Somehow a rumor started in New York that I’d died, and my booker at Elite repeated it!
That didn’t seem very good to me, so around 1987 I went back to Ford, speaking only to Jerry, because every time Eileen saw me, she would throw up her hands. My father wasn’t happy that I went back with her. But I’d always felt bad about leaving. And I really liked my booker, Rusty Zeddis. She handled all the brats. She really worked with us. She sincerely cared. Talking to her was very grounding. She’d make you feel professional even when you weren’t.”

S
HANNON
: “I go to L.A. I’m going to be an actress. I didn’t have a clue. And I get out there, and I pretty much hit my bottom, you know, drinking and drugging. And then I get sober, and then everything took on a new priority. I went back to New York, and I started finding another way of living, a whole other way.”

K
NUDSEN
: “I moved to Malibu, California, fell in love, started surfing, started doing ads for More cigarettes, Clairol, Revlon. Before that I’d always been an editorial hound. I liked the creative side of the business. I made plenty of money, but if I’d done more commercial work, I could’ve made even more.

“In 1993 I was starting to get antsy. Everyone told me to call Bryan Bantry. He was starting to book people from my time for jobs where they wanted more mature models. He says, ‘As bad as she was, that’s how good she is now.’”

A
fter the Number One scandal singed Rome’s playboy scene, the
dolce vita
moved to Milan. For the next decade the northern Italian city became a nursery school for neophyte models. Beginners could spend a few months there and fill their portfolios with tear sheets—precious pages torn from magazines that showed how well they worked. With those they could move on to New York and Paris, where careers were made. No one made money in Milan. “Everybody cheats with money in Milan,” says Giorgio Repossi, a photographer’s agent. If any was made, the agents kept it. Milan was like the deep end of a swimming pool. The model business threw girls in to see if they’d learn to swim. “Milan never made a girl,” says Jacques de Nointel. “Milan ruined girls.”

The agents of ruination were a new generation of playboys, who flocked to Riccardo Gay and Giorgio Piazzi. Count Umberto Caproni di Taliedo’s father was one of the pioneers of Italian aviation, building medium-range bombers for the Italian Air Force during World War I and then branching out into tanks, submarines, and other armaments.

Born in 1940, Umberto Caproni studied business administration in Paris and worked in Japan before returning to Europe in the late sixties. There he entered Playboy World, the domain of men like John Casablancas’s friend Bob Zagury; Gunther Sachs, an ex-husband of Brigitte Bardot’s; Rodolfo Parisi, an aristocrat from Trieste who owned Italy’s largest transport company and reputedly had an inch-long penis; Franco Rappetti, a Roman “who could speak to a girl in the lobby of the Plaza in Paris and have her in his room half an hour later,” says Caproni; and Gigi Rizzi, “who also had a story with Bardot.” To a man, they were tan, handsome lady-killers.

“I realized that the majority of beautiful girls were models,” Caproni says, and he dedicated his life to their pursuit. “There were only fifty models then. They all knew each other; they stayed at the best hotels, used the best suitcases. But they weren’t easy girls. You would introduce yourself to them and send roses for weeks. Eventually you would have an affair.”

Caproni kept peacocks and hunted with falcons, and he and his friends had a similarly sporting approach to sexual conquest. “Everybody had his chance,” Caproni says, “and we gave the girls the possibility to choose. If things are too easy, you don’t enjoy them.” But he wasn’t above stocking his forest with bait for his fellow Milanese birds of prey. “Models were single and free, and I decided that if I had to live in Milano, which is not the most beautiful place in the world, I’d have some beautiful people around, so I decided to start a modeling agency.” In 1970 he opened Model Ring in Milan with Beppe Piroddi, another playboy pal.

A few years later Piroddi and Caproni sold out to Riccardo Gay, but Caproni stayed a presence on the scene. “I knew everybody,” says Caproni. “I was very friendly with Eileen Ford, John Casablancas.” Indeed, Caproni and his friends came in handy when young American models grew homesick for their families and boyfriends. “Very famous agents in New York used to give Caproni’s address to all the new girls coming to Milan and tell them, ‘He will take care you,’” says Marcella Galdi, then a Riccardo Gay booker. “He was considered a gentleman.”

So there were dinners and dancing and invitations to weekends at Caproni’s splendid villa near Lake Como. “We have the largest collection of pre-1920 airplanes in the world,” he says. “I would show them the collection, the house, which has some fifty bedrooms, the rare trees we have here, the rare animals. I would try to make them feel like they were getting out a bit. I was not trying to poison them or do anything wrong to their morals. The agents would only benefit from the fact that the girls were going out with me.”

Giorgio Repossi, an advertising manager at a magazine called
Linea Italiana
, was part of Caproni’s circle. “We were living in a dream come true,” he says. “It was really provincial. The dream of every Italian guy is a beautiful American model in your bed. It was total immersion. For ten years I was going to bed at four, five in the morning and waking up at nine.” Like Caproni, Repossi says he and his friends were providing a valuable service. “The only way to survive someplace is to go with somebody rich,” he says. “It doesn’t mean the models are whores. It doesn’t mean the agency knows what they do.”

But the agencies knew. Indeed, they oiled this mechanism for keeping models happy in Milan. “They used the playboys to hold on to the models,” says Jerry Ford. Girls from Paris or New York would find boyfriends and not want to go back to their original agents. “We would spend weekends at the Caproni villa, and we would see who was arriving from New York,” Repossi says. “Piazzi or Riccardo would say, ‘Why don’t you go pick her up?’” Caproni and friends would then drive to the nearby international airport in his Rolls-Royce. “When a girl arrives, she is met by somebody who speaks English and tells her what Milan is like, the money, how to make phone calls, how to take taxis,” Caproni says. “And then somebody says, ‘Listen, we have organized a party tonight, so that you can meet a lot of people in Milano and not feel like a stranger.’ So the agency would be very happy. They would say, ‘Can you please organize a dinner, a party?’ And of course, it was also interesting for us.”

Some of the men merely wanted to be seen with pretty girls. “We’d get them to buy us dinner and dump ’em afterwards,” says model Beth Boldt, who’d come from Paris to Milan. “I was a really rotten model,” she says. “I missed appointments. My ambition was pretty low: to party and meet cute guys.” When there were no cute ones, rich ones would do. “I stayed at the Grand Hotel, and all the old men came every night, and if you were a model, you could have dinner. We were never pressed for sex. There were times I felt we were taking advantage of them.”

Massimo Tabak, a young fur manufacturer, was short and plump but also funny and charming; he was in the fashion business, so he didn’t mind shopping, and he had both money and free time. “So it was not difficult for me to spoil the girls,” he says. “It was a pioneer time, wild and intense. We had girls getting two dozen invitations each night, forty people at a table at dinner, flowers, food sent to their hotel rooms. Once I came into the room of a girlfriend, and I swear to God, I thought it was a jungle.”

Prime prey in this jungle were girls who weren’t going to make it big. “Milan is a crash course in the shitty part of the business,” says Serene Cicora, who modeled there at the time. “These girls come to Milano without a penny,” says photographer Fabrizio Ferri. “They’re treated terribly; they shoot with terrible assistants; their books are looked at in a rush. They sit in a residence day and night, get very depressed, and then the agency calls and says they’re being sent back to New York. That night she returns to her hotel, and there are fifty red roses at the desk and a playboy waiting outside with a Rolls-Royce, saying, ‘I’ll take care of the hotel bill.’”

“They’d wait until a girl was so frustrated, she’d take the offer,” says Bitten Knudsen. “The weak calves in the herd buy into it. But Italian boys can’t give up their mothers, so there’s no room for real girls; there’s only room for mischief. It’s primitive. It’s like they’re angry at women.”

“When you’re sixteen, you look up to those guys, and they’re gods to you,” says Gaby Wagner, who joined Fashion Model in the mid-seventies. “I think those people were helping the girls,” says Tiziana Casali, who ran the Hotel Arena—known as the Fuck Palace—before becoming an agent. “They were trying to make their lives better. When they came back from their weekends or their evenings, they would never tell me, ‘They forced me to take cocaine.’ It was ‘There was cocaine. We had a great time.’ They knew what was going on, and they were happy to have it.”

Until the early seventies Italian
Vogue
had been the dominant Italian fashion magazine. Its photographers, particularly Alfa Castaldi and Gianpaolo Barbieri, were considered the best in the country and were tied up with exclusive deals.
Vogue
’s preeminent position was enhanced by the ready-to-wear revolution. “The fabric companies all invested a lot of money,” Barbieri says. “The magazines were full of advertising pages.
Vogue
was like a telephone book.”

In 1974 Peppone della Schiava bought the right to publish an Italian edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
and went into competition. In 1976 Honduran-born Lizette Kattan, a former model, became the magazine’s fashion director. Kattan convinced della Schiava that the way to compete with
Vogue
was to open an office in New York, recruit the best models and photographers, and shoot pictures there. Kattan knew Eileen Ford well. Della Schiava forged an alliance with Elite, which gave him first dibs on its models. Kattan “found Iman, Juli Foster, so many girls,” della Schiava says. “I would come to New York and look at a thousand girls.”

Italian
Bazaar
thrived. Della Schiava offered complete freedom, plane tickets, and endless expense accounts to photographers. These proved to be pretty lures. Soon Arthur Elgort, Patrick Demarchelier, Jacques Malignon, Alex Chatelain, Chris von Wangenheim, François Lamy, and virtually every other top photographer of the day was working for him. Kattan also gave beginners like Herb Ritts and Steven Meisel some of their earliest assignments.

“They could do whatever they wanted,” says Kattan. “We treated them like gods; we gave them champagne all night, phone calls all over the world—because we knew it was a way to get things done and fast.” It was the same for models. “I had power because I was the editor and the publisher,” says
della Schiava. “If I saw a girl I liked, I brought her over, and she’d get incredible treatment.”

As the competition between the magazines heated up, neophyte models poured into Milan, in a quest for the editorial tear sheets that were their passports to success. “At that time it was very beautiful because the girl arrived in Milano with maybe two Polaroids, and one week later we had her in Italian
Vogue
,’ says booker Marcella Galdi. “The American magazines were very conservative then. To shoot for
Vogue, Linea, Bazaar Italia
meant you had total freedom. Italy was the only place where all these photographers had great creativity and light supervision. It was kind of a royal cult, you know?”

As time went on, Milan’s playboys split into two not entirely distinct factions, one orbiting Giorgio Piazzi, the other, Riccardo Gay. “Piazzi didn’t like the girls going out with bad people,” says Giorgio Repossi, who was part of the Fashion Model clique with Count Caproni. “He gave dinners and invited the nicer guys.”

Though Simone d’Aillencourt had been run out of Milan, Gay and Piazzi weren’t the only agents in town. “Every two weeks there was a new agency open,” says Jacques de Nointel. And it was the same from Barcelona to Kyoto. Every booker with a hold on a couple of girls would henceforth be tempted to change agencies or let another backer into the business. “It became like a pyramid,” says Servane Cherouat, a booker since 1957 who now heads a models’ union that is the bane of Parisian agencies. “Every booker wants an agency, so nobody can trust an agency.”

In 1973 Gloria and Valerie Askew, two sisters who’d operated a small agency in London since 1966, took over a troubled Milan agency. Three years later Beatrice Traissac, who’d run Fashion Model for several years, quit to open an agency of her own. Although she’d worked primarily with Fashion before opening her own shop, Gloria Askew had close ties with Riccardo Gay. One of her models, Sue Nadkani, married Gay’s friend Pucci Albanese. Gay, too, married an Askew model. Domestic life seemed to agree with the agent. He settled down and had a child and stopped running around. But Gloria Askew says she and Beatrice were thorns in the side of the male-run Gay and Fashion agencies because “we weren’t interested in prostituting our girls” with Milan’s playboys.

Gay was close with many of them, particularly Carlo Cabassi, who became a partner in Gay’s firm in the mid-seventies. “Whenever the agents needed money, they asked a playboy,” says Gloria Askew. Cabassi’s family had made its fortune in the construction business before the war and moved into real estate
afterward. An older brother, Giuseppe, was religious, successful, and tied in with the ruling Christian Democrats. Carlo, who was known as Piccolo—or Little—Carlo, was the family’s black sheep. Although he had real estate holdings of his own, he wasn’t involved with Gruppo Cabassi. He was far more interested in cover girls. The first time Peter Strongwater went to Milan in the mid-seventies, he went to a party at Cabassi’s villa outside Milan. Gloria Askew calls the place Fuckingham Palace. “Each model got a hat check as they arrived,” Strongwater recalls. “After lunch they raffled off pages of Italian
Bazaar
.”

In 1977 Gloria Askew flew to England to have a child. When she returned, she found she had a new partner, Piccolo Carlo. Askew Milano had metamorphosed into Askew International at a new address. “Cabassi was thinking, probably, if you own an agency, it’s an easy way to get girls,” says Giorgio Repossi. Cabassi was hardly the first wealthy man to open a date farm, but he would be—briefly—the most successful. Askew went along at first, taking Cabassi to New York and introducing him to Wilhelmina. But then, Askew says, Cabassi brought in another partner. “They have quite good girls, but for money, they have nothing,” says Roberto Lanzotti, who owned a fur company. “I said to my friend Cabassi, ‘Let’s put money in the business; we’ll work for fun.’ He’s rich, you see. He doesn’t care. I take care of the accounting part-time. Six months later we find out it’s a complete disaster. We decided to close. We got back our money.”

“Cabassi wasn’t a bad guy, but he got corrupted,” says Gloria Askew. “The model business attracts thieves and robbers and playboys. They wanted to control the agency. If I’d wanted to be a brothel keeper, I would have kept a brothel. I told the models too much. They never felt intimidated when I was around. They felt they could stay home with me and not go to restaurants and weekends. I wouldn’t let them go unless I went along. So Cabassi hated me. He said, ‘Models don’t need mothers.’” Finally Lanzotti told Askew she wasn’t welcome anymore and changed the agency’s name back to Team.