Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (65 page)

Eileen and Jerry Ford with their children Katie
(left)
, Bill, and Lacey Ford in 1984
The Ford family by Dan Brinzac,
New York Post

Katie had earned an M.B.A. and worked for a television syndicator and a management consultant before deciding that Ford Models “looked pretty good to her,” her father says. But she was far younger and less experienced than Joe Hunter and Marion Smith, the agency’s two top executives. After marrying André Balazs, a wealthy young entrepreneur in 1985, Katie Ford proved her mettle by opening branches of her family’s business in the late eighties in São Paolo, Brazil, and Miami’s South Beach, a new frontier for fashion photography. It became clear that “the future of representation is that you will have to service people all over the world,” Jerry Ford says. “Katie is going to be one of the key figures in that process.” In 1989 she took a brief break to have a daughter. Early in 1991 she was back in the trenches.

The agencies the Fords had allied themselves with in Paris were not working out. “We were not getting cooperation,” says Jerry Ford. “They’re concerned with their own market, and they know models [want to] come to America, so they were afraid.” They were also afraid that Ford was using them as stalking horses for a Ford office in Paris. “Rumors were flying that we were going to open,” says Iris Minier. “I told Eileen we had no choice. They finally decided to do it.”

“Billy was always after us to open in France,” says Eileen, but finally Paris was Katie’s idea. “We’d lost one model too many,” she says. “It was time to get on a plane.” So Katie left her husband in America, where he was building a hotel empire, flew to France with their baby daughter, and spent two months living in Minier’s apartment, plotting and planning. “Word got out,” says Minier. “People were panicked.” One night Minier’s phone rang. “Look over your shoulder,” a voice warned.

The day Ford opened on the rue Rivoli in March 1991, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell joined up. Elle MacPherson, Rachel Williams, Shalom Harlow, Basia, and Amber Valletta followed. Finally, Ford seemed to have entered the modern age. From Paris the agency began sending scouts into Eastern Europe. By 1992 Ford was even holding semifinals for its model search contest (renamed Supermodel of the World) in Croatia. That same year Ford released a hard-cover promotional book as lavish as any Elite had ever produced. More astonishing, it included photographs by Giovanni Gastel of bare-breasted Ford models. Why did they do it? In an interview at the time Gastel said he wanted to portray the women of the millennium, “fractionalized and magnificently different.” Eileen Ford’s explanation was somewhat less poetic. “Honey, there’s a recession out there,” she said at the time. Later she admitted that Katie did the book without telling her.

Elite had long been the financial innovator in modeling, raising both commissions and service fees from 10 to 20 percent. Now Elite seemed hidebound as it insisted it would pay only 5 percent commissions to schools and small agencies that discovered new models, while Ford raised the bounty to as much as 25 percent.

The most visible symbol of the newest-fangled spirit of competition were scooters or castors—free-lance scouts who scour the world for pretty girls. They ply a thriving trade—particularly in Paris, selling models back and forth between agencies, like so much meat. Paid scouts had scoured Scandinavia for years, working for the Fords, Elite, and also magazines like
Playboy
and its French offshoot,
Lui
. “That’s how it started,” says Jean-Luc Brunel. “Then Claude Haddad sent guys in discos, trying to bring those girls. Dominique Galas was one of them. They go in the streets; they bug every single girl in town.” Every agency, too. “You see them downstairs,” says Ford’s Iris Minier. “They stand near magazines and castings. They’d sell their grandmothers for a buck. They say, ‘Show me your book. This is shit. We can do better.’”

The most aggressive such company, competitors say, is Paris-based Metropolitan Models, formed in 1986 by the trio of ex-model and Euro-Planning
rabatteur
Dominique Galas, a clothing manufacturer named Michel Levaton, and a booker, Aileen Souliers. The next year Metropolitan got its big break when Galas and Levaton spotted Claudia Schiffer, seventeen, a high school student from Rheinberg, Germany, dancing with friends in a Düsseldorf disco. “You look really good,” Levaton told her. “Do you want to be a model?” Schiffer brushed him off. “You know how the French are,” she says with a little giggle. “I kept dancing. He kept trying to speak to me. I told him to stop bothering me. So he went to talk with my friends.”

Finally, hoping to scare him off, she gave Levaton her parents’ phone number. He called the next day, invited them for lunch, and they had “a long, long, long talk,” Schiffer recalls. With their blessing she began spending weekends and school holidays in Paris. Before she finished school, she’d won a Revlon ad and a cover of
Elle
. “I was convinced,” Schiffer says.

Her stardom was cinched when she met a model turned photographer, Ellen von Unwerth, who saw in her clean, healthy German face an echo of Brigitte Bardot. After shooting Schiffer as Bardot for
Lei
, an Italian magazine, she offered the model to a big client, Guess, the giant jeans maker. Von Unwerth’s Guess ads starring Schiffer gave modeling its newest superstar. In 1990 Souliers and Levaton moved to New York and opened a branch of Metropolitan there. In 1993, when Schiffer inked a $6 million contract with Revlon
and
became the latest favorite of her countryman Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, Metropolitan’s hood ornament was the world’s highest-paid model, earning about $10 million a year. In effect, Schiffer
is
Metropolitan.

Claudia Schiffer, Metropolitan’s ornament, in the early 1990s
Claudia Schiffer by Dana Fineman/Sygma

The upstart Metropolitan’s success with Schiffer didn’t make the agency many friends in modeling. “If Claudia quits tomorrow, what do they have?” one competitor snipes. But Metropolitan has been aggressive in recruiting models from other agencies. In 1988, competitors charge, it was Levaton who circulated copies of the
60 Minutes
show throughout the modeling business. Levaton says he wasn’t the only aggressor. “I was not the one who started this thing,” he snaps. “When we went to New York, the competition was very rude, trying to steal our girls, calling them and saying I was not going to come back to Paris.” So in 1993 Levaton returned and “hired scouts all over,” he growls. “We have to protect ourselves.”

Bill Weinberg and Fran Rothschild had run Wilhelmina jointly since its namesake’s death in 1980. But by 1988 they’d come to loathe each other. Rothschild didn’t get along with Weinberg’s wife, who’d begun to play a role in the agency. “Fran’s hatred was disproportionate,” says men’s division head Dan Deely. “But Bill had a very lazy attitude.” At first that was fine for the staff, which could do what it wanted in the absence of leadership. Then Deely left, and Weinberg had a quarrel with the women’s division head, Faith Kates. Soon after, Deely saw her out to dinner one night with a distinctive-looking Italian—Fashion Model’s owner, Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio.

Early in 1989 the Next agency was opened by Kates, with three other Wilhelmina staffers, and thirteen of its models. A friendly client had called in the books of all the models Kates wanted, so they would be out of Wilhelmina’s hands when she opened. “She called me up one day and said she’d been offered a business,” says Jan Kaplan Planit, who worked with her at Wilhelmina and became vice-president of Next. “She said she had backers. She wouldn’t say who.”

For public consumption Next belonged to Kates. Behind the scenes people knew better. It simply wasn’t a good time to reveal who her backers were. “After the
60 Minutes
thing, Faith opened,” says Jean-Luc Brunel. “When she opened, I took an option to buy. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” He was still trading models with Ford when one model threatened to leave the agency. Brunel claims, “Eileen said, ‘If she goes to Next, then I will never speak with you in my life.’ I was not going to give up my business because it suited her. I switched twenty-six girls in one day, and that really made Next.”

A few months after Next opened, Brunel exercised his option to buy a piece of it through the holding company that owns Karins. At the same time the company that owns Milan’s Fashion Model invested in Next as well. Fashion Model kept working with Ford for several years. That may explain why Fashion’s owner, Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio, denies his interest in Next.

But with agencies in New York, Miami, Milan, and Paris, the Next-Karins-Fashion axis took third place in world modeling, after Elite and Ford.

Suddenly networks were chic. Everybody had to have one. Indeed, as Kates, Brunel, and Sant’Ambrogio formed theirs, Wilhelmina also began to expand around the world. Back in March 1989 Fran Rothschild had tried to sell the agency to an investment group. Weinberg refused. Then he showed up with a buyer, a German businessman named Dieter Esch. Rothschild was inclined to hate him on sight. But “the more I spent time with him the more I liked him,” Rothschild said. “He was exciting. He had wild ideas.” In September 1989 Esch bought 95 percent of Willie’s stock.

The son of a welder from Weingarten, Germany, Esch was a newcomer to modeling. As a young man he sold heavy construction equipment in Canada. In the seventies he returned to Germany, where he founded IBH, a conglomerate that gobbled up troubled machine makers until it was stymied by recession in 1982. The next year IBH’s debts led to an investigation of a private bank in Frankfurt, Germany, which had lent IBH about $245 million—$200 million more than the bank had. Esch was blamed for setting off the second worst banking crisis in Germany since World War II and sending half a dozen bankers and executives—himself among them—to jail. Convicted of negligence and making false declarations to the government, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. After he admitted he’d defrauded an investor of about $50 million and delayed the announcement of IBH’s bankruptcy, his sentence was increased to six and a half years.

Jeremy Foster-Fell first met Dieter Esch through a mutual friend. “He said a very close colleague was looking to buy an agency, and would I meet with him?” Foster-Fell recalls. Learning Esch’s plan, he introduced the ex-convict to the owners of agencies big and small, including Wilhelmina. Esch had nerve. He immediately offered to buy Ford and Wilhelmina. But it was no sale—at least not yet.

Esch soon lowered his sights and began approaching the owners of small agencies. He disarmed them by introducing himself with an article about the time he’d spent in jail. Some of them, lured by the scent of big money, went so far as to open their books for him. Esch thinks they didn’t know what they
were giving him. “P and Ls, trial balances, statements, accounts receivable,” he says. “When I went through my learning phase, I realized I was probably the only person with an overview of the entire situation. I know exactly what the salary structure is, what the commission structure is, what volume is.”

Finally Esch found a live one: Sue Charney, the former Ford VP. Charney had opened a small agency called Faces, backed by the well-known financier Asher Edelman’s brother, John. He wanted out. “Dieter sold me a bill of goods,” says Charney. “I gave him credibility in this business.” Esch closed his deal to buy Faces in June 1989, paying for little more than accounts receivable. Before the final contracts were prepared, he was hunting for more agencies to buy, and within a few months he landed Wilhelmina.

In 1990 Esch bought Jérôme Bonnouvrier’s bankrupt agency in Paris and changed its name to Wilhelmina-Glamour. He also bought Oz, a hair, makeup, photography, and styling agency, and Trouble, a “body” agency in Los Angeles that booked well-developed models for neocheesecake jobs. But his biggest deal was yet to come. Working with an international mergers and acquisitions firm, Esch entered new negotiations to buy Ford for a reported price of about $15 million
and
the much larger Elite network for about $25 million up front and $5 million later. He had a plan to create a holding company to own and operate all three companies and rule the world of modeling.