Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (54 page)

“That was a time of life that hurt Riccardo very much,” says Pucci Albanese. “He’s very, very Catholic now.”

Paris Planning Faubourg St.-Honoré outlived François Lano’s Paris Planning agency—but not by much. Its partners were fighting even before Cabassi quit. The ubiquitous lawyer Jean-Marie de Gueldre says Dollé found himself in the middle of a conflict between Marie and Cabassi. The problem? “Cabassi invests and Gérald spends,” de Gueldre says. “So after two years they decided to separate.”

Cabassi sold his share in Paris Planning for a reported $300,000 to a woman identified as Joan Forbach, about whom little else is known by those few who are even willing to talk about her. “She never got the papers we call a
statut
in France, which proves who the partners are in a firm,” says Servane Cherouat. When she realized, she telephoned Jérôme Bonnouvrier, “hysterical,” and claiming her money had been stolen, he says. Finally, after six months of fighting with Gérald Marie, she put her stake in the agency up for sale and began writing accusatory letters “to everyone in Paris, even the president of France,” says Paris Planning’s lawyer, de Gueldre. “I got phone calls from my bank administrators, telling me that she said I was the king of sex and drugs.” She also apparently alleged that model agencies in Paris were systematically avoiding taxes through their Swiss agencies.

“It was a very troubled time,” says Bonnouvrier. Dollé and Marie “were fighting over everything,” he adds. “Gérald was taking more and more power, and he started to do the same thing François Lano did,” says Gaby Wagner, then a Paris Planning model. “He started taking the Concorde, went on vacation, had houses on the company, invited people.” Finally Dollé “didn’t want to work there anymore,” says Cherouat. He started yet another agency but kept his share of Paris Planning.

Luckily John Casablancas’s old school chum Alan Clore wanted in. He bought into Paris Planning, but it turned out to be an empty shell. “Clore bought an agency that was not worth anything,” says Giselle Bonnouvrier.

In summer 1985 rumors were rife that Gérald Marie was about to start his own agency. He came to New York and talked to Monique Pillard and a top
booker at Wilhelmina about opening a New York office. Then came a surprising offer. Ever since John Casablancas had moved to New York in 1977, Elite’s Paris operation had suffered. “The heart, the soul of Elite had left,” says Francesca Magugliani. “By 1983 there was nobody running the place.”

Two years later Paris Planning had surpassed Elite in profitability. “Gérald had very few models; but they were very good, and he asked any price he wanted,” says Francesca. “He had no expenses. His structure was very good; he had very good bookers who he paid a hell of a lot of money, all young, ambitious. Alain Kittler got drift of this.”

Seeking to shore up their Paris operation, John Casablancas’s principal partner soon found himself in the surprising position of talking to their sworn enemy. Kittler and Marie first met on Ibiza, an island off Spain where Elite’s backer owned property. “We started talking about this business,” Kittler says. “I saw that we had the same idea on the management and general direction, and so we met again in Paris, in September, and I officially asked [for] Gérald[’s hand] in marriage sometime in October.” Kittler offered Marie an equity stake in Elite.

Initially Casablancas was outraged. “I knew too much about the guy that I didn’t like,” he says. “But he was a good agent. So we had some lengthy conversations, and I told Gérald that there were two things that I would not accept from him as a partner. A lot of girls were complaining that he was rough, that he wasn’t nice, that he used his position.” Somehow, Casablancas’s objections were overcome.

One night during the negotiation Casablancas called Elite’s office on the Champs-Élysées from New York to talk with Francesca Magugliani. “At the end of the conversation he said, ‘How would you feel about working with Gérald?’ I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Why?’ He said, ‘I was just asking.’” Francesca remembered the time that Elite New York’s Monique Pillard had received Gérald Marie in her office. “John was furious,” says Francesca. “He said, ‘If models see Gérald in Monique’s office, they could think we have something to do with him. He’s a sleaze. He beats up girls. He rapes them. He takes coke.’ That was one year before!”

Early in 1986 Gérald Marie became a one-third partner and director of a restructured and recapitalized Elite Paris, relocated in large new offices on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Francesca wasn’t the only one upset by Marie’s arrival. “We nearly had a nervous breakdown,” says April Ducksbury of London’s Models One. “Gérald had the most horrible reputation—just a ruthless little barbarian. John had the ideas, the creativity, the charisma. John gave the glam
our to the whole thing. Gérald was a poor imitation and not a nice person. We wouldn’t want to send our models there. We knew that we couldn’t work with him. But John knew that he was another John.”

“Clearly, they hired Gérald to replace John, and John was brilliant with that,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “He didn’t interfere. That was the comeback of Elite in Paris.”

There was some sensitivity surrounding Marie’s arrival, however. “To mix all the employees, all the models, everything all of a sudden, that might be dangerous,” Kittler admits. So Marie was given his own division, dubbed Elite Plus, and quartered in a room of its own. Its assets consisted of all of the models and several bookers from Paris Planning-Faubourg St.-Honoré. To raise the money to buy his stake in Elite, “Gerald sold a shell to Alan Clore: the name Paris Planning and the space,” says John Casablancas. “But the company was totally empty, gutted by Gérald,” says Olivier Bertrand, a onetime garment executive who briefly tried to resurrect it. In the six months that followed, Clore lost FF 2 million. “Clore wanted girls,” Bertrand continues, “and that’s part of the reason the girls left. God knows what else was happening.” When Bertrand forced the issue, Clore shut the company down.

With a financial settlement, Bertrand opened Success, now the top men’s agency in Paris. Indeed, all the children of Paris Planning (and of Elite, Harlé, Models International, and Euro-Planning) were opening agencies of their own. Henceforth they would spring up like mushrooms after a rain. Of the pioneers of modeling, only Eileen and Jerry Ford remained, and more and more they were seen as anachronisms—still powerful but irrelevant. The past was dead. Few models knew or cared who Dorian Leigh or Lisa Fonssagrives were. Says booker Marcella Galdi, who left Riccardo Gay and opened her own agency, too: “Certain moments, when it’s finished, it’s finished.”

G
érald Marie had conquered Paris. It was his town now—not John Casablancas’s. His reputation as a sexual athlete had, by all accounts, also surpassed the prodigious legend of Elite’s founder. By the early eighties Marie was no longer just bouncing from model to model in a manner that stunned even the jaded bed-hoppers of Paris; now he also always had a model to call his own. If before, he’d alluded to work in exchange for sexual favors, by his last days at Paris Planning he’d upped the ante. He promised his girlfriends he’d make them stars. And he did it, too.

Casablancas had long been a proponent of the theory that models were raw stones that needed work to become glittering diamonds. “European men are important abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male chauvinists,” he’d said. “That attitude … gives the model an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable quality.” But in Casablancas’s day that service was provided by the playboys who surrounded the agents. By the time Gérald Marie joined Elite, the sexual polishing process was more often conducted in-house. “He’s a good lay, I’m sure of that,” says François Lano. “I’ve heard it from all of them.”

Marie says his first serious romance was with the Australian-born model named Lisa Rutledge. They lived together for five years and had a daughter, but domestic life did not domesticate him. “Gérald wanted to fuck the girls,” says Jacques Silberstein. “His way was, if you want to work, fuck me.” Some models left Paris Planning for Fabienne Martin’s agency FAM, claiming that “if they were not having sex with him, he wouldn’t take care of them,” Martin says. “I don’t know whether it was true or not. Some girls could say that
because they’re not good enough, or they’re not doing well, or they just say [it] because he’s a flirt.”

Two internal Elite memos dated June 3, 1986, indicate that similar rumors quickly became a concern to Marie’s new partners at Elite. The first, from Trudi Tapscott, head of Elite’s new faces division in New York, to Casablancas, detailed charges leveled against Marie. Carré Otis (who later gained fame when she married and broke up with actor Mickey Rourke) said she was “sick of Gérald and all the drugs and all the women,” and charged that he would call her “at all hours of the night [4:00
A.M.
],” asking her to come see him.

“It wasn’t only Carré Otis; everybody was complaining,” says an Elite executive. Casablancas sent Tapscott’s memo on to Alain Kittler and Marie. In a cover note he expressed astonishment at this “very disturbing turn of events,” “a very nasty business and exactly the type of thing we do not need to have at Elite…. This type of rumor must cease at once,” he concluded, “and I ask Gérald to be extremely cautious in the future.”

But Marie wasn’t being careful. Indeed, by American legal standards, he was committing statutory rape on a regular basis at that time. Just before he made the move to Elite, Lisa Rutledge was out of Marie’s life—out of Paris altogether, in fact—and Christine Bolster, a California blonde, was in. Rutledge moved to New York in 1985. “I just left,” she says. “It was a mutual decision. Our relationship was over.”

“Poor Lisa was a fantastic girl,” says Servane Cherouat. “Gérald Marie was really a very bad man. I saw Gérald ask a girl to take a line [of cocaine]. All the people at Paris Planning with Gérald smoked joints and laughed at me because I didn’t want this. One day I saw a terrible girl, awful, and Gérald said, ‘Make a three-year contract at thirty thousand francs a month.’ Eight days later he said, ‘Cancel it.’ I told him to discuss it with her father. Gérald Marie took girls on only to go to bed with them. Christine Bolster was fifteen.
Fifteen!
”

In fact, she was only fourteen when she came to Paris and began sleeping with Gérald Marie. She ended up living with him for six years, before another model, Linda Evangelista, did to her what she’d done to Lisa Rutledge.

“She is very happy!” Marie says when asked about Bolster. “She is very happily married, she has two kids, and she’s very balanced, very organized. She’s a woman with a lot of charm and a lot of temper. She told me at the time she was modeling because I was a model agent. She was never crazy about modeling. She was only doing the pictures she liked to do with Peter Lindbergh and people like that. I was with Christine for a long time until I met Linda. That was when it stopped. The day we quit being together she quit the business; she went back to California.”

Christine Bolster photographed by Jake Crain
Christine Bolster by Jake Crain, courtesy Christine Davi

Some of that turns out to be true. Bolster is, indeed, married—to actor Robert Davi, best known for his portrayals of craggy-faced villains in films like
Die Hard
and
License to Kill
—and the mother of two children. They live in a suburban house near Los Angeles. And Christine Davi does indeed seem very happy. At least, until Gérald Marie’s name is mentioned. Then her face clouds, and her voluptuous yet stick-thin frame tenses visibly.

“I stick pins into a voodoo doll of him,” she whispers, launching into the tale of what can hardly be called their romance.

“I was fourteen and a half when I started modeling. We lived in Palo Alto. I was riding my bicycle one day, and I got pulled over by this white Jaguar. I thought, Oh, God, another schmuck, but this guy was a talent scout at a place called American Models. They were a little shady, but that’s nothing that shocks anybody anymore. They were having a contest. The prize was to go to Paris. I ended up winning, and that was the last I heard of them. Five days later I was on the plane to Paris with a list of agencies, by myself. I left California for three months, but I didn’t go home again for a year and a half.

“The first agency on my list was Paris Planning, and they took me, right away. François Lano had just exited. It was all just sort of settling itself. Gérald took me. It was like, ‘Here’s your
Plan de Paris
, and your list of go-sees,’ and I still had my luggage. At first I shared an apartment with two other models, one who did OK for herself and another, I forget what her name was, who was there for three weeks and then she was gone. Disappeared.

“I had long hair, and Gérald sent me to cut it. My first job was with Italian
Vogue
. I’d been there three days. I go to Italy, I come back, I have go-sees the following day, a job the next, and it progressed. It was so sudden; it happened so fast. Overnight I was in incredible demand. I was overwhelmed. A few days before, I’d been riding my bicycle to school!

“Then suddenly I found myself moving into an apartment in Les Halles that Gérald Marie paid for. It all started about two weeks after I got there, at the agency actually. I was very surprised. You kind of get a feeling when someone’s interested and you’re interested. So I was waiting for him to ask me to dinner, but I went into his office one day after work, and he just jumped on me. I was so shocked. There was no way that he was going to get turned down. It was like I had no choice!

“I knew what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t like the naïve girl from Podunk that came in and got drugged at a party and sold to the Arabs! I had my reasons, you know? Because things were going so well, and he believed in me, and that’s really important when you’re young, to have someone really have confidence in you. I was smart. I knew that ultimately I was not going to be with this guy. But I didn’t know how powerful he was, and so it was a little more serious and involved than I ever expected it to be. But I walked into it because he was an agent, because he could get me what I wanted.

“At first it was a mistress kind of a thing because he was still living on rue Boissière with Lisa [Rutledge] when I met him. Lisa was working and doing well. It was very sudden. It was like, a decision he made, and then she was just gone. He sent her home. They had already had their daughter. I don’t know if they were married. There are some things that I couldn’t get ahold of and I didn’t care about at that point. Later on I would have been a little more interested in that.

“I stayed in rue Boissière after Lisa left. It was an incredible apartment, but it was costing him forty thousand francs a month, so he decided to get rid of it. Then we found a place on rue du Bac. It was an old apartment, with high ceilings, hardwood floors. He had a bathroom built for me there. It was a bedroom before, and its bathroom became the shower, with shower heads coming down from everywhere. The bathtub was in a box that had trees coming out of it. They built a big vanity out of small pieces of glass that took up the entire wall, all lit up.

“I got a Swiss bank account pretty fast. They wanted to make sure you were going to make money. They avoided taxes. I didn’t pay. They filtered all your money up through the agency and cleaned it. They were very careful about the girls they chose. They tried to act like they picked you to have [a Swiss account] because you were intelligent and it would be a wise thing to do. They really played this big game with their heads, which is what the Europeans are famous for anyway.

“I got completely screwed over. I never really had much money because it all went into this bank account. It was siphoned off and invested, and when I wanted to buy a house when I was seventeen, I suddenly couldn’t come up with the thirty-thousand-dollar deposit, and I said, ‘Well, where’s my money? I’ve supposedly got two hundred thousand dollars in Switzerland. Where is it?’ Gérald said it takes six months to get any money out of Switzerland. They were making interest on everybody’s money.

“I didn’t speak a word of French when I got there, but I picked it up very fast. When it has to do with your life, when it’s survival, you really pick it up. I always pretended that I couldn’t speak French, but I understood everything, which was great, because at these business dinners they would say things about you. Gérald had dinner with some very shady people, and I understood all the business dealings, and he didn’t know that I understood. What Gérald didn’t do! He had his fingers in everything you could imagine. Agents aren’t supposed to be clean, so it’s normal, but they do a lot of really sick things, the good ones.

“At first I felt really strong, and I was passionate for taking pictures. I loved taking photographs. I’d never gotten up at five in the morning before—and I couldn’t now if you paid me a million dollars—but I did, every day. I would do anything to get where I had to be. It was my life. I ate, slept, drank, breathed modeling—not to the extent that I was only living on water and lettuce, but I went to every single business dinner, every dinner Gérald had with editors and clients.

“He was like God; he gave birth to me. He decided that I was going to be ‘big shit.’ That’s what he used to call me. Big shit. And he did it. He was so sure of himself. He could sell anything to the client. I was so amazed. He would have the client begging him for a girl. He used to turn down jobs, and I would say, ‘But I wanted to do that,’ and he’d say, ‘Just wait, they’ll call back.’ And he’d ask them for some ridiculous amount of money, and they would call back and pay. I would tell him, ‘I want an Italian
Vogue
cover,’ and sure enough, the week after, I had it, which was the biggest thrill of my life. We were sort of helping each other, and we were both aware of that. He’s making me a star, and I’m making him a star. It went hand in hand.

“Suddenly there I was in the middle of it all! At a very wild time, too. Everybody was doing drugs. We were going straight from work to the night clubs. Gérald was thriving. He was starting to build up momentum. He’s an incredible agent, one of the best in the world as far as I’m concerned. I have a lot of respect for him—that way. But he was not very discreet. He used to do coke in his office, on his desk, with the windows open, right on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. He’d slide his credit card across his nose, and he’d go right out and meet clients like that. He would laugh, and he’d be wiping his nose. He’d do it on the table in La Coupole; he didn’t care. He was untouchable as far as he was concerned.

“It was nonstop. It was night and day and continuous. I would do two jobs a day. He worked me until I was almost dead, and then he would book me out
for two weeks and send me somewhere and make me rest. He had to keep his investment sound. I was run-down, and I was doing some drugs. Just cocaine; I never got into anything else.

“My parents came to Paris to meet Gérald. He flew them there, which was awkward, because my father looks like my younger boyfriend and Gérald looked ten times older. It was also very awkward because my father gets feelings about people, and he didn’t like Gérald right away! I was at this point still enamored of him. Gérald got them out of there as fast as he could. Gérald had asked me to marry him at one point, and I discussed it with my parents, and my father said, ‘No way. You can’t marry the guy. He’s a sleazebag.’ They talked me out of it, thank God. I never met his parents. I didn’t know if he even had parents. I never even talked to his mother on the phone, which is odd after five years!

“I would say we were happy and together for about two of the six years I was in Paris. Then it got very cold. We didn’t really have sex all that often or really wild sex. He was always too tired from running around, which always made me stop and think. And he did so much blow. There was a point when I stopped. I was still with him, but I’d had it. I liked having control over myself. It started to have control over me. It was there all the time. I don’t remember a day that I’d open my eyes that there wasn’t a plate on the mantelpiece.