Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (59 page)

She’d already hired a lawyer to try to loosen the ties that bound her to Calvin Klein. Everyone knew it wasn’t working out. But suddenly the designer agreed, and her contract was renegotiated. Her agency was delighted. “You don’t want to stop the momentum of building a star,” says Katie Ford. But it took some time for her to get back up to speed. She visited Evangelista and Meisel on an Italian
Vogue
shoot, “one of their most beautiful series with lingerie and corsets,” she says. “They stuck me in a picture, and I was so uncomfortable. I was so unused to being photographed. My steam was very low, photographically.”

In Christy’s absence, Evangelista had become Meisel’s muse. “They worked together all the time, and he did beautiful pictures of her,” Turlington says. “I think Linda had been really monumental in his career, changing him as a photographer and being an inspiration. They did a really incredible variety of things that year when they started working together a lot.”

But now Turlington was back. And just as she’d helped Evangelista, says Gérald Marie, his wife returned the favor. “The relationship they had together was like two fingers, the same hand,” he says. “Linda took Christy by the hand to all the designers. Linda engaged her with Peter Lindbergh at
the time, put her back together with Steven Meisel. To all these [people], Linda was very hot.”

So was Naomi Campbell. After arriving in New York under Turlington’s tutelage, she and Evangelista had become friends, often meeting at Meisel’s studio. Naomi also became a darling on the city’s scene—stage-managed by Meisel. “Yes, there was a strategy that had to do with getting noticed,” he said. “It was simply a question of publicity.” It started coming after December 1987, when she met heavyweight champion Mike Tyson at a party at designer Fernando Sanchez’s apartment. Various versions of their meeting have the sexually hypercharged Tyson virtually molesting her before guests pulled him away. Told she was only a baby, he replied, “I’m a baby, too.” Around then, Campbell approached a reporter at Azzedine Alaïa’s house in Paris, rubbed against him, and asked, “When you gonna write a story about me?”

By the time Turlington was freed from her bondage at Calvin Klein, Campbell had emerged as a star, with covers of both French and British
Vogue
behind her. So suddenly, instead of one muse, Meisel had three in residence at the all-white Park Avenue studio he dubbed the Clinic. “We re-make people,” he once said of the place. “We make them beautiful.” In 1988 he began photographing Turlington, Campbell, and Evangelista together because “he thought it would be a neat look,” says a stylist. “Steven made them the Trinity by booking them together. He does such great work, and he’s so charismatic he kind of possessed them. Being in Steven’s studio is like being with the cool kids in the lunchroom in high school. Christy got into it for a while, but it never suited her. She was like Cinderella with her two stepsisters. It was a phase. A naughty phase.”

Just as he had with Teri Toye and Stephen Sprouse, Meisel turned the models, his stylists, and friendly editors like
Vogue
’s Carlene Cerf into the in-est in crowd in fashion. His power shed light on how fragile a grasp most fashion editors had on their trade. “That guy could say a piece of crap was fashionable, and we’d all go
Yes
!” says an editor at
Vogue
.

Meisel’s control was absolute. “I don’t think he liked any of our boyfriends,” Christy says. “Linda he couldn’t help because she got married before we met her. But as far as what I did and Naomi did, he was very protective.” All-consuming is more like it. “They became a cult,” says Polly Mellen. “They moved together, went out together.” They even began to be booked together.

In 1988, when Ford Models abruptly ended its relationship with Karins, Turlington signed up with Elite in Paris, at Evangelista’s instigation. Naomi
Campbell had been with Elite Paris ever since Beth Boldt discovered her. Now Gérald Marie began aggressively packaging Christy and Naomi with his wife. “It started just because they were girlfriends,” Marie says. “But it was really nice to promote them together, sell them together, put in the client’s brains some ideas about them being together. If you want those two, why not take number three? They gained three hundred percent out of this pact.”

“That first season after I went back to work, he booked us for all the shows,” Turlington says. “We’d never done shows before in Paris, so he somehow built some hype around Linda and I. There’s not that many girls who look good together. We complement each other. Naomi’s a very good friend of mine and Linda’s, so somehow that all happened.”

Watching Gérald Marie from the sidelines, John Casablancas felt a new respect for his former enemy. “Gérald positions a girl, makes her understand what her star quality is all about, maintains the prices, the pressure; he does not get intimidated; he’ll lose a big booking; he’ll select photographers really intelligently; he does a tremendous job,” Casablancas says. “There was also the social scene. He not only had the talent and the understanding, but he was married to Linda, so he was a player. I’m an agent, but I don’t go behind the scenes the way he did. So I think this gave him an extraordinary position.”

Graciously Marie says it was his photographer friends who sent the supermodels into orbit. “The photographers who pushed the most and created the models are Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh,” he says. “But the models got so enormous in answer to the sudden need of the time. Actresses started to hide themselves, and people needed something else in their mouths. So, next story came the models. We were right there at that moment.”

Naomi Campbell’s affair with Mike Tyson survived his marriage and divorce from actress Robin Givens. When she appeared at ringside at one of his fights in February 1989, their semisecret relationship went public and increased her renown immeasurably. That September she became the first black woman ever to grace the cover of the all-important September
Vogue
. Three months later she and Tyson finally admitted their affair in the same magazine. “She has a great body and she’s scared of nothing,” the boxer said. “That’s why I like her.”

In January 1990 the cover of British
Vogue
featured Turlington, Campbell, Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz. So impressed was pop singer George Michael that he cast them all in his next music video, “Freedom.” It was filmed in August 1990. Evangelista had just bleached her hair almost
white. “I spend all my free time coloring my hair,” she said later. Her constantly changing coif became big news.

Publicity seemed to come naturally to the Trinity. Campbell got more when, hard on the heels of her breakup with Mike Tyson, she began seeing Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. Christy and Linda got into the swing of things in April 1990, when they went to the Roxy, a New York disco, and were photographed straddling each other in a giant swing suspended over the dance floor. Needless to say, rumors they were lovers followed.

All the action didn’t do much for Evangelista’s marriage to Marie. They saw each other only five to ten days a month, “and that is a good month,” Marie said. But there were compensations. “I like the traveling,” Linda said, “the money … seeing myself in magazines. And I
love
clothes.” Marie was having a good time, too. He convinced designers, beginning with Gianni Versace in Milan, that it was worth paying double, triple, even ten times more than ever before, to put gaggles of top editorial models on their runways. They were paid back in international publicity. Versace, whose design antennae are particularly attuned to the new, “liked what he saw,” says Polly Mellen. “They affected his designing. Then they moved from Versace to Chanel.”

Finally, they were everywhere—or at least seemed to be. Versace’s exclusive bookings—paying extra to be the only designer a girl worked for in Milan—started it. “Then all the other designers said, ‘I’ll match that. I’ll pay you the same thing, and you don’t have to be exclusive,’” Turlington recalls. “The designers said, ‘You can do ten shows if we all approve of the other designers, and you can all be paid the same amount of money.’ It got bigger and bigger because they were outbidding themselves. Every year I thought, I can’t make more than this, but every year I almost doubled my income. It’s supply and demand, like sports. The best of the sports people will be paid any amount.”

Runway by runway, atelier by atelier, magazine by magazine, the Trinity conquered. Whole issues of the various
Vogues
seemed to be dedicated to their worship. “I
never
thought that models could take so much space in the world and in people’s impressions,” Marie avers. “But we followed the movement when we started to smell and feel that people were asking more about the girls. We saw that if you put a photographic model on the runway, they started to get really famous right away, because they get photographed by three hundred people at the same time, and some designers understood right away. Then we started to ask the magazines to name the girls. Then we worked to make the models a little more famous, to introduce them a better way, to produce their careers, to insist on certain things to do, certain things to avoid. I
was not the only one. People catch on fast. If I ask the magazines to put the name of the girl on the cover, the agent next door, he’s not stupid, he’s going to ask for the same thing. That helped.”

From her privileged perch at
Vogue
, Polly Mellen saw the Trinity blossom—and then watched fame go to their heads. “They were always together,” she says. “It was a clique and a tight one, believe me. Occasionally they would talk to other people, but basically they talked to themselves. They’d consult on bookings. One would say to the other, ‘You’re past working with
him
.’ They were able to pick and choose what they wanted to do. The more they asked for, the more they got.” First a short list of supermodel-ready lensmen: Demarchelier, Meisel, Elgort, Lindbergh. Then the Concorde, then cars and drivers, personal chefs, and the best suites at the best hotels.

“They could write their own tickets,” says Mellen. “And they knew it.”

Back at the Anne Klein shoot, late in 1991, Turlington is eating rice and broccoli from an aluminum tin while simultaneously getting a pedicure and leafing through a pile of old magazine clippings. Right on top are two stories about her famous friendship with Evangelista and Campbell. Those pieces caused Christy endless grief, thanks to tactless comments, mostly made by Evangelista, about the unprecedented sums the three models earned and their feelings about the world of fashion. “We don’t vogue—we are vogue,” Linda told
People
. To
Vogue
, she revealed, “We have this expression, Christy and I: We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”

“I’d
never
say that,” Christy gripes, dropping her fork into the Chinese food. And though she truly believes Evangelista didn’t mean to appear crass, after those stories came out, Christy had a nightmare about them. “I was on the Arsenio show,” she says, “covering Linda and Naomi’s mouths with my hand!”

That $10,000 quote, more than anything, began the backlash against the Trinity. Soon everyone was taking shots at them. Even
ArtForum
described supermodels as “totally packaged commodities,” “live cash,” and “professional surrogates for the frustrated emulative instincts of the mass pecuniarily deprived.” It was later said that Evangelista’s words had been taken out of context. But insensitivity was a leitmotif of the Trinity. Not long afterward Linda was approached by France’s
Nouvel Observateur
for an interview on modeling and asked $10,000 plus a 20 percent service fee. The paper replied by telling readers how many Somalis could be fed for that sum.

On another occasion Evangelista defended the price of her services. “Before supermodels, there was one price for everyone. I don’t think a new
girl should get the same,” she said. “That’s why Gérald introduced the new price. If you wanted me, there was no way ’round.” In another interview she announced that “I have become bigger than the product.” Campbell’s antics at fashion shows, including refusals to share the runway with other black models, didn’t win her many friends either. The shows had always run behind schedule, but when “the late” Naomi Campbell was added to the mix, editors and buyers could count on an extra half hour’s delay. “I won’t use her,” said designer Todd Oldham. “We have a No-Assholes clause.”

The Trinity’s disdain worked as a pose on the runway, but when the girls were quoted in cold type, they came off like spoiled little snots. “The girls you speak of,” says one of America’s most renowned fashion editors, “are rude because everybody coddles them. We do what we need to get what we want, but it’s
beyond
. I was at a party where a waiter grazed Linda’s arm, and she screamed, ‘You
burned
me!’”

“They became very powerful and not nice about it,” another top model says. “They were very snobby and cold and shut people out. We had to deal with the disgusting influx of negative attention to models that they generated.”

“I have to beg, borrow, lie, and steal to get them,” says a top model editor. “You have to have the right photographer, the right makeup, and a ninety-nine percent cover guarantee. And we booked them all when they were starting, when they were no good.” Besides disenchanting their old friends, the Trinity was also courting overexposure. Fickle fashion people were already tiring of this latter-day Terrible Trio when a
People
article appeared, chronicling a bitchy night on the town with Meisel and the models. “Naomi and Linda really wanted to do it,” Christy says. “I didn’t at all. But they made me do it. It was really tacky and horrible, and I was so embarrassed. It pissed my mom off. And they didn’t even quote the worst things that were said that night.”

Turlington knows that a model’s public image is a fragile thing. “People don’t want to like you,” she says. “You’re young and beautiful and successful. They think you don’t have a skill. So when things go well for you, they aren’t happy. That’s just human nature.” She knew not to rub people’s faces in her success. But her friends didn’t. And now, Christy was seeing the downside of her in-crowd.