Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (51 page)

Askew refused to leave, and finally, she alleges, she was poisoned at a dinner with her partners. “For some reason I was the only one that got very very ill the next day,” she says. “My sister flew me back to London, and I was put in hospital. My husband nearly killed Lanzotti. They had a huge fight in the office, and Cabassi and Lanzotti walked out. I never went back to Milan after that. I couldn’t condone a business that supplied drugs to girls and girls to playboys who wanted to fuck them. I couldn’t fight them. So I moved to Japan.”

As Askew recovered from salmonella in the summer of 1977, the fashion world converged on Italy’s capital for its
alta moda
collections. The model wars followed. Agencies all over Europe were being forced to choose sides.

London’s Models One was at the center of the action. It had maintained ties with both Ford and Elite. “When John went to open New York, we didn’t even know,” says coowner April Ducksbury. “Eileen sent me a furious telex. I just tossed it aside and said, ‘God, Eileen is so paranoiac.’ Then I got a call. Ford was suing him. Roy Cohn was their lawyer. I felt weak at the knees with fright.”

A few weeks later Ducksbury and her partner, Jose Fonseca, headed to Rome. “We used to do that every year,” Ducksbury says. “It was the big gathering of all the model agencies, a lovely four or five days to talk and see each other in wonderful weather.” The Fords dominated the shows with a huge entourage and a long wine-soaked lunch every day on the terrace of their suite on the twelfth floor of the Parco dei Principi Hotel. “John had his smaller entourage at the Grand Hotel di Roma, and we’d jump from one to the other, trying to be very tactful about it,” Ducksbury says.

But tact was passé. On the last night of the shows Riccardo Gay and his counterparts at the Fashion Model agency traditionally gave a big dinner. Attempting to be diplomatic, they’d set things up so that Casablancas could sit with his friend Gay, and the Fords with their allies from Fashion. Ducksbury and Fonseca had been out with the Fords every night, so they’d agreed to join Casablancas.

“But John and his group didn’t turn up,” says Ducksbury. “We’re waiting and waiting and waiting.” Casablancas had decided to make an entrance. He’d gone to the studio where
Vogue
was shooting, to bring all the photographers and models with him. “Finally John and his lot walk in,” Ducksbury says. They took their table, models spilling onto the floor, laughing and making a scene.

“Eileen was furious,” Ducksbury continues. “And John was frightened. It was like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” When she and Fonseca made their move to join the Elite table, the Fords were “stone-faced, looking at us like death,” she says. “We sat down with John, and the Fords walked out, and then it was a wonderful party.”

Casablancas was doing everything he could to make life miserable for the Fords. “I’d reserved a room at the Parco dei Principi, which was her hotel,” he says. “When I arrived, a manager says, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t give you a room.
I’ll be honest with you. It’s because Mrs. Ford has been in this hotel for years.’ So I called Riccardo and asked him how many girls we had staying in the Principi. There were about twenty. I told him to cancel everything. The manager had to go to Eileen and say, ‘We couldn’t do anything. He had a reservation.’”

In 1975 fourteen top Italian design houses, which had previously held their fashion shows in Florence, broke ranks and moved to Milan. Milanese show models booked their own work at first and were a caste apart from photographic models and their agencies. Within a few years that changed and led to Jerry Hall, Iman, Marie Helvin, and Pat Cleveland stalking the runways. In 1976 Tiziana Casali left the Hotel Arena and cofounded Why Not?, the first agency in Milan dedicated to runway modeling. “The designers were paying very little,” she says. “For shows and fittings, fifty dollars! We raised the price immediately to two hundred, and the designers freaked out.” Little did they know how good they had it.

That same year Guy Héron, a French actor who’d lived with an Elite model, formed a runway models’ cooperative in Paris. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he named it Cosa Nostra—“our thing”—and offered to work for the models who owned it with him. He signed up
cabine
girls from Dior, Saint Laurent, and Givenchy, including many of the black Americans who’d first come to Paris to work at Versailles. He also visited America and offered its agents 5 percent commission instead of the prevailing 2 percent share, “and by God, he paid it,” says Gillis MacGil. “The girls who went with him would come back with a lot of money. They actually gave you detailed accountings. Unusual, to say the least.”

Héron came along at just the right moment. At the end of the seventies European runway shows blossomed from intimate affairs that attracted several hundred journalists and retailers to full-blown productions staged for an audience of thousands. “It just went like this,” says runway agent Ellen Harth, snapping her fingers. “I don’t think the designers expected it to happen.” But virtually overnight, Italian designers like Mariuccia “Krizia” Mandelli, Missoni, Armani, and Versace became international stars. The public caught up over the next fifteen years, but already models were positioned to share in the bounty.

Héron began organizing group bookings, hiring chauffeur-driven cars to ferry his girls to fittings and shows. Best of all, he paid with tax-free cash. “I took seventy girls to Milan—Mounia, Kirat, Amalia, Jerry Hall, Inès de la
Fressange, Marie Helvin—and I was carrying in a bag hundreds of millions of lire,” Héron boasts.

“Cash was standard,” affirms a star model who went on Héron’s first trips and continued modeling in Milan through the early eighties. “We were paid fifty thousand dollars for twenty shows in ten days, and if that’s what they paid us, God knows what the agents were making.” Each season the system, and the models, grew more sophisticated. “We started asking for francs because the bills were larger,” the model says. “Lire are dinky little notes.” Even still, it was a lot of money to carry across borders. So the models sewed the bills into the hems of their clothes or stuffed them in their underwear. “We didn’t talk about it,” the model says. “We were horrified of audits.”

They were also scared of immigration officers. “I remember some Italian girls would get jealous and phone the police, and we’d all have to hide,” Jerry Hall says. Most models of the time have stories about running out the back doors of fashion shows while design assistants held the authorities at bay.

Italian agents tried to curtail Héron’s activities. “They sent the police,” he says, laughing. “The designers had to pay to set me free. Everyone was afraid of me. All the agencies were against me. All of John Casablancas’s friends had a meeting.” Then they struck back. “The Europeans swooped down and cajoled his models away,” says Gillis MacGil. Riccardo Gay and Roberto Lanzotti opened Collections, a fashion show division at Gay’s agency. Lanzotti used the same techniques as Héron and took many of his models. He booked a charter to fly them to Milan and had all the designers pool their money and pay a package price. When the designers balked at that, the controls on show model rates were lifted, and “the girls made
so much
money,” Lanzotti exclaims.

Not everything was sunshine and cash, though. A lot of business was being done in the shadows. “Girls were offered ten thousand dollars to go to bed with industrialists,” recalls Richard di Pietro, then a runway agent at Wilhelmina. “A lot of Arabs were storming Europe looking for beautiful young girls. A lot of girls made a lot of money
not
modeling.
And
making fifty thousand dollars in cash modeling and stuffing it wherever, even in their bodies. It was becoming totally disreputable.”

Then came trouble at Beatrice Traissac’s agency. Gay poached one of Traissac’s bookers, who’d previously worked for Askew. “Then they arranged for Beatrice’s backer to pull out,” Gloria Askew charges. Beatrice closed briefly, opened again, and then got a taste of Milan’s medicine. “Poor Beatrice,” says Zoli’s Vickie Pribble. “They threw bombs in her agency.” Who’s they? The
word “Mafia” is tossed around in answer to that question. “But you must understand,” says Stéphane Lanson. “In France, when we say someone is mafioso, it means they’re not clean, not that they’re Sicilian.” And many believe that the Mafia in Milanese modeling was really just the near monopoly of the two leading agencies. “Riccardo and Fashion,” says Dorothy Parker. “They burned Beatrice down. She had just opened. We went out to lunch, came back, and the agency was gone.”

In fact, there were rumors that everyone in Italy but the Vatican was involved in modeling. “There were so many crooks in Italy,” says Apollonia van Ravenstein. “I don’t know [if the agents had] Mafia connections. But we knew there were things going on. I don’t doubt the connections. I never saw them working, but I always felt that they were present. How else could all these models work there without permits, come in and out of the country, and never have the Italian IRS on their backs? Someone had to be paid off.”

Certainly organized crime has an interest in drugs, sex, cash, and pretty women. But so do government and big business. And there is one compelling argument against the idea that organized crime has infiltrated modeling in Milan. Roberto Lanzotti puts it best. “Mafia?” He snorts. “It’s ridiculous. It’s too small business for Mafia.”

Milan wasn’t the only place where the world of models had taken on a troubling aspect. One of the earliest signs that things were turning nasty came in 1977, when three teenage American aspiring models went to Elite in Paris.

“I was having lunch at Fouquet’s with these three girls when a very good friend of mine, a backgammon player, went past,” recalls Jacques de Nointel. “I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, they said they couldn’t have dinner with me on Saturday night because they’d accepted to go to a country house outside Paris with five or six guys they’d never seen before.”

What happened next became a legend in the world of models, in large part because the girls involved have never spoken out about what happened. They were taken to a country house about forty-six miles outside Paris that belonged to Serge Varsano, whose father, Maurice, founded Sucres et Denrées, the largest commodities trading firm in France. Serge was “a plump and boring fellow,” says an aristocrat who was part of the every-night crowd at Paris clubs like Privé, L’Aventure, and Élysées Matignon, and in St.-Tropez, where Varsano kept a powerful cigarette boat called Brown Sugar. Varsano’s friends included Patrick Gilles, a former lover of Brigitte Bardot’s, and several other sons of rich fathers with nothing but time and money on their hands.

“We were out every night,” the aristocrat recalls. “We were all very friendly with the model agents. They would appear with four girls and seat them at our tables. Every night was a meat market. The girls were like cattle, readily available. The agents made them understand that if they went with this or that guy, they would have work. The girls would fall in your lap. They wanted the bookings. They knew what was going on.” Unfortunately at Varsano’s that weekend they were in for a surprise.

Early the next morning Jacques de Nointel got a call from a gendarmerie near the country house. The girls were there. De Nointel called their Elite booker, Caroline Duby, at 6:00
A.M.
, and the two drove to the country to collect the models. “They told me they’d had drinks and dope, hashish or whatever,” Duby recalls, “and then the girls got real afraid.” They told de Nointel that the trouble started when Varsano joked about beating them up. “They ran to their bedroom and locked the door,” de Nointel says, “but they didn’t know there was another entrance through a cupboard.” When one of the men burst into the room, the girls locked themselves in the bathroom, then jumped out the window, causing one of them to twist her ankle severely. Fleeing, they were “found in the cold and brought to the gendarmerie,” de Nointel continues.

Back in Paris, de Nointel took the injured girl to the American Hospital. The next day Nancy Bounds, the owner of a modeling school in Omaha, Nebraska, and an official of a modeling convention the three girls had attended, arrived in Paris and checked into the Méridien Hôtel. “As I was going in, I heard a voice sing out, ‘Hi, Nancy Bounds,’” she recalls. The phone was ringing when she got to her room. “It was a crying girl,” she recalls. “She said that one of her friends had seen me going into the hotel. Then she told me what had happened. They’d gone to this man’s house outside Paris for dinner, played tennis, and gone swimming. Then a drunk gentleman came in their room and jumped on one of the girls, who was in bed. They got into a scuffle, and the guy hit her. Her jaw was knocked out of alignment, and she had a black eye. They ran into the bathroom, tied sheets together, went out the window, and walked through the woods to a small town. They sat outside the police station all night, and then someone came and took them back to Paris.”

Bounds decided to call a press conference. “I was calling the wire services,” she says. “The girls were calling me every half hour. They said someone showed up at the model apartment they were staying in and tried to scare them out of there. Then at seven
P.M.
they called again and told me to cancel
the press conference because they’d all gotten an assignment in Greece and were leaving that evening on a plane.”

In 1981 the Milan and Paris model scenes merged when Paris Planning’s Gérald Marie and Jean-Pierre Dollé reached out to put the touch on one of Milan’s playboys. “Carlo Cabassi was out to control the modeling business,” Gloria Askew charges. “He and Riccardo Gay bought Paris Planning and got rid of François Lano.”

In fact, François Lano’s good-bye to modeling was long and tortuous, and even the participants can’t agree about what happened. Lano says he sold only the agency’s name to Cabassi. Pucci Albanese says that Cabassi and Gay bought half the agency “at the international level,” in order to get exclusive rights to Paris Planning’s models in Italy. Paris Planning model Gaby Wagner says Gay was a partner, too. But Elite booker Francesca Magugliani says Gay didn’t have the money to buy anything, and Stéphane Lanson agrees that Gay had nothing to do with Cabassi’s investment in the Paris agency. Gérald Marie, who was in the center of the action and ultimately took over Paris Planning’s operations, neglects to mention Cabassi at all.