Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (52 page)

What is clear is that in the late seventies Paris Planning began having serious problems. “I was head of the agency, but I was not controlling the finances,” Lano says. Dollé took care of all that.

“François trusted Jean-Pierre,” says Servane Cherouat, the veteran booker, who’d come out of retirement to do paper work for Paris Planning’s foreign models. “It was a love story and a money story. François and Jean-Pierre began to fight. They fought for a year.” Paris Planning had broken in two. “But François Lano did not accept this,” says Cherouat.

Stéphane Lanson had gone to work for Jérôme Bonnouvrier, who’d opened his own agency, Glamour, after his aunt closed Catherine Harlé. By 1980, though, Lanson and Bonnouvrier were at odds. So when Lano approached Lanson to return to Paris Planning, he was interested. “So my bookers and I arrived the second time at Paris Planning with about a hundred sixty star male models, but I didn’t know that Francois had a problem with Jean-Pierre,” Lanson says. “François was one of the most wonderful men in this business, but he was a huge spender, making parties, playing backgammon, playing gin rummy, and [he was] a drinker, a big drinker. That’s why he took me at Paris Planning, to run the agency. He was never there!”

Within weeks Lanson realized there were “two Paris Plannings in the same building,” he says. “Paris Planning girls on the second floor with Gérald
Marie and Paris Planning François Lano for men on the fifth floor with me.” Then Lano—who’d never paid attention to his Swiss accounts—took a trip to Switzerland to see how much money he’d accumulated in the decade since Models S.A. had opened. “I was told a number,” Lano says. “It was very little, but what could I say? I never received an accounting. I had no way to discover the truth.” Where did the money go? “To Models S.A.,” Lano says. “Probably they paid the commissions to Jean-Pierre in cash.”

Jean-Marie de Gueldre, the lawyer who’d helped set up Models S.A. in 1970 and later invested in several real estate ventures with Dollé, insists that the real problem wasn’t the location of Paris Planning’s profits but rather Lano’s irresponsibility. “François is cultivated, intelligent, and funny,” de Gueldre says, “but he doesn’t care about money. He loves to spend it, and that is a problem. He took Gérald Marie into his agency and Gérald Marie is a kind of crocodile, and that is a big problem. Gérald Marie was very efficient. He looked after the girls, he fucked the girls, and the problem is that the girls belong to their bookers. Gérald saw that François was arriving at noon and leaving at four and taking money from the company. If you are in the office eight hours every day, seeing that, you’ll think, ‘I don’t need him.’ Gérald was saying to Dolle, ‘We should have our own agency’ Dollé was in the middle.”

Models S.A.’s Swiss owners would finance agency vouchers for half the commission. “When an agency needs money, [Models S.A.] asks for a percentage of the company,” explains Jérôme Bonnouvrier’s ex-wife Giselle. “They didn’t steal the company. But when François Lano needed money, they took advantage of him, took the company from him, and fired him.”

Dollé and Marie had united against Lano. “Dollé said his time was over,” reports Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Dollé felt safe with Gérald Marie,” who replaced Lano as the company’s
gérant
(managing director). “Gérald wanted shares in the company,” says Lano. “I refused, and probably at that time Jean-Pierre and Gérald banded together against me. Jean-Pierre was created by me. Gérald Marie existed because of me. They threatened to leave. I told them the door was open. They proposed to pay me for the company, and I refused. I felt that even if they left, I was still François Lano, and I would have a hundred people knocking at my door, proposing what I wanted. I was really wrong.”

Finally Marie and Dollé brought Lano an offer that he couldn’t refuse: Carlo Cabassi wanted to buy into Paris Planning. Models S.A. helped broker the deal. “They were all in it together,” Lano says. “They said, ‘If you don’t agree, Gérald Marie will leave and empty the agency’”

In September 1981 Marie and Dollé moved the women’s division to new space on the fashionable Faubourg St.-Honoré, while Lano, Lanson, and the male models remained in the original Paris Planning offices. Lano’s splinter agency struggled along for eighteen months before going bankrupt in fall 1982.

François Lano finally left the modeling business. “I was trusting, and I was disappointed,” he says. “I don’t know if I regret it, though, because if I was not naïve, I wouldn’t have seen the color of the sky and the sun. If the color of money was fantastically beautiful, maybe I would like it, too, but it’s not attractive to me. Money in the bank didn’t make me happy. I ended up with nothing. But I can say that I’ve kept my ideas, and no one can steal them.”

Back in Milan, their investments in the modeling business were paying off for the playboys—in more ways than money. “The number of girls went to the thousands, and they were no longer just nice, educated girls, but girls from all kinds of backgrounds, mainly discovered in large discotheques,” observes Umberto Caproni. Once his generation of playboys had ruled the town. Now a new group of players was taking over Milan’s night life. They were known as
figli di papà
(Daddy’s boys). “Kids,” says Roberto Lanzotti, “so fucking rich.”

It had long been a game. Now it was a war. “It became industrial and aggressive,” says Massimo Tabak. “You must have a good atmosphere at a table,” says Caproni. “Otherwise the girls get bored, and if the girls are bored, nobody wins anything. Who has the most beautiful girls, the happiest people? Whose table was more interesting and more fashionable? In my table I try to always have good-looking people, which was not the same with Cabassi, I must say.”

Cabassi’s new status as an agency owner had changed the rules. “Having a big share in Riccardo Gay’s agency, he could have the girls go to his house without going to the clubs first,” says Caproni. And when Cabassi and his friends did go out, things sometimes turned nasty. One night Cabassi arrived at a fashionable club with a blonde on his arm and was greeted by a regular who said to no one in particular, “Some things are reserved for those with money.” Cabassi beat the man up and tossed him onto the street.

What caused this radical shift in behavior was an important shift in fashionable society’s intoxicant of choice. Champagne was no longer the favored fuel. “Suddenly drugs are fashion,” says Giorgio Repossi. “Coke is fashion.” And with that,
Milano per bene
—the city’s good boys—became known as
Milano per male
. An ignoble spirit was loose in the world of models.

The first casualty was Giorgio Piazzi’s reputation. Of all the agents in Milan, his had been the best. But then Piazzi discovered America—and more. “Giorgio discovered too much,” says Giuliana Ducret, who’d worked for him since 1972.

Piazzi moved to New York at the end of the seventies. “He went to America because he found this beautiful girl and married her,” says his brother, Giuseppe. “He was going back and forth for two years.” He bought Hinchingham, a 314-acre 1774 estate on the Chesapeake Bay shore in Maryland and, early in 1982, opened something called the Model Workshop there. For $3,500 (sometimes billed against prospective earnings), girls got to spend a week there, working with flown-in photographers and stylists to develop their looks and their books. He was supposed to be recruiting for Fashion. “An absolute joke,” John Casablancas said.

“He had an idea that for whatever reason didn’t work out,” says Giuseppe. “Maybe it was too early.”

“Giorgio was still the owner [of Fashion Model], but he was living [in New York],” says Ducret. He left his second wife, a model named Jan Stephens, and took up with another model, who became his third wife. He’d first seen her four years before when she signed with Ford at age sixteen. They got reacquainted when she came to Hinchingham to gussy up her portfolio. Though he and his second wife were embroiled in a bitter divorce, the younger girl seemed to give Piazzi a new lease on life. He was profiled by
People
magazine. “I am going to be the new starmaker,” he vowed.

In spring 1982 Giorgio Piazzi appeared in Milan, scooped up several bookers, and took them to Maryland. That’s where Ducret realized that Piazzi had developed a taste for cocaine. “My husband came for two weeks, and one night, he said, ‘Giulie, I’m much younger and I’m always tired, and they are always so alive!’ I said, ‘You never hear when they go behind the tree and go
sniiiiiifff
?’”

On that same trip Ducret came to New York for Piazzi’s fortieth birthday party, where Debbie Dickinson jumped out of a cake in a bikini. Beforehand they’d stopped at Piazzi’s suite at the Hotel Tudor, a depressing six-hundred-room establishment near the United Nations that rented tiny staff rooms to aspiring models at cut rates. As many as thirty girls as young as fifteen lived there at any time.

Arriving at the Tudor, Ducret “started laughing, and I never stopped,” she says. “It was the image of the playboy suite: bad taste, but rich, mirrors all over, huge bathroom and someone poking a spoonful of cocaine under your nose.
It’s the first and only time that I had cocaine, and I went
HACHOO
! and the whole thing went flying.”

The Tudor was owned by a friend of Piazzi’s, Steven Silverberg, who hoped that Piazzi would help him turn the hotel into a fashion hangout like Milan’s Arena or Grand hotels. Briefly it became a sort of New York annex of the Fuck Palace, with unshaved Italians hanging out trying to pick up young girls. In fall 1983 several agents and models familiar with the scene in the hotel gave interviews to a local newspaper, the
East Side Express
. The resulting story “Terror at the Model Arms,” quoted models telling of men entering their rooms with passkeys at all hours; of thefts and a rape; of a model who was beaten so often she earned the nickname Blond and Blue; of cocaine parties in Silverberg’s eight-room penthouse suite; and of a whole catalog of mind games played by Piazzi and Silverberg as a prelude to invitations to the Model Workshop.

“They would call you down to see your portfolio and rip you apart verbally,” said a twenty-one-year-old Foster-Fell model from the Midwest. “They’d say, ‘Don’t you know how to dress? Why do you sit with your mouth like that? You’re a fat slob. No one will book you.’ They were always doing coke down there.” And offering it to the girls. “I couldn’t believe the whole scene,” she concluded. “The hotel is depressing enough without them hassling you.”

The director of security at the hotel, an ex-cop, turned a blind eye to what was happening. “Any girl who mentions it is foolish,” he said. “If they don’t like it, they should leave. I don’t think girls should be allowed to be here at that age. They should be home with their parents. A high percentage of them aren’t even models. They don’t make a pimple on a model’s nose.”

Silverberg, today a real estate investor, denies that he ever took drugs, saw drugs, or had any business dealings with Piazzi. “I don’t have any memories of problems with any guests,” he says. “We stopped with models because they invited men and friends to the rooms. It didn’t work out.” Silverberg admits that some models got mad at Piazzi and adds that he had reason to be angry, too. “We thought we were going to get publicity from Giorgio staying in the hotel. We didn’t get any except bad publicity. I said, ‘That’s it. I don’t want you staying in the hotel.’

“Giorgio’s like a big kid,” says Silverberg. “He’s not a bad fellow. Maybe people thought he was drunk. Maybe he told people they couldn’t be models. Maybe he was rude. At the time I was single, I went out with girls. Maybe I made a wrong judgment trying to attract fashion people. Maybe you’d
assume I was flamboyant, but I was just trying to be a host. They were nice girls. If I spoke to anyone, I was more a concerned father figure.”

Hinchingham closed in 1984. The girls Piazzi trained weren’t loyal to him and went off to other agencies. He “lost everything,” says Giorgio Repossi. The prevailing wisdom was that he’d gone off the deep end too late in life. “He was destroyed,” says Repossi. “He lost his mind.” Piazzi also lost his agency in Milan. He’d brought in two partners, Paolo Roberti, an accountant, and Lorenzo Pedrini, an ex-model, beginning in 1980. They were backed by a clothing factory owner and real estate investor named Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio. The source of his funds was a mystery to modeling folk. “How he made money I don’t want to know, or if I know, I don’t want to say, OK?” says Ducret.

“The legend is that Piazzi was out eating and drinking, and he said, ‘I want to sell my company,’ and Sant’Ambrogio was there,” says Giorgio Repossi. Pucci Albanese confirms that. “Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio proposed to help,” he says. “He liked to be surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world. It’s not hard to understand his preferring them to carpenters and electricians.” According to his brother, Giuseppe, Piazzi left New York. “At this point adventure was his dream,” his brother says. “He went to the Caribbean and then on to Venezuela, the Amazon, and then he went back to Anguilla again.” There, having lost all his money in a failed gold mine, he became the chef in a restaurant owned by Silverberg (who’d sold the Tudor in 1987). The restaurant closed after Piazzi moved away. He now lives on St. Maarten, where he runs a small importing business. “Giorgio Piazzi never touched drugs until he got here,” says Jerry Ford. “He made a total mess of himself, but deep down he’s decent.”

With Piazzi gone, an era ended in Milan and the Cabassi/Gay clique came to dominate its modeling business. “Being a nice guy doesn’t make you a winner,” says Umberto Caproni. “The bad guys were getting ten times more results, not in quality but in quantity. I was getting nothing, but I don’t regret it. I’d had my chances, and I played fair. You cannot win them all.”

Naturally Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio had a model girlfriend. Donna Broome, whom he met in London in about 1979, was a full-bodied dark-haired girl who’d started modeling as a child. She moved to Milan in the early eighties. “When I first arrived, I went out with one guy, and soon I was getting calls day and night from people I never heard of,” Donna told a reporter years later. But when she hooked up with Sant’Ambrogio, she was
protected from that sort of thing. She worked regularly and had what passed for a settled existence.