Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (70 page)

It wasn’t all bad news for Ford. They’d snagged Elite’s Kristin McMenamy, the face of 1995. Fashion’s
Pulp Fiction
(in contrast to its
Forrest Gump
, Claudia Schiffer), McMenamy had blossomed from oddity to great beauty after briefly taking off work to have a child. The newly multicultural Ford also attracted Irina Pantaeva from Women, Beverly Peele from Elite, Laeticia Herrera and Fabienne from IMG, and signed former MTV VJ and Revlon model, Duff. Ford also got rid of the prima donna Naomi Campbell, who’d joined the agency amidst great hoopla in 1993. At the time, Elite’s Casablancas spat at her back, saying she was “a spoiled selfish brat and a mercenary” who “needs a slap.” Now, with Campbell back in the fold, a newly charming Casablancas cooed, “She’s matured.”

Simultaneous with Marion Smith’s departure, there were a few defections from Ford. Several bookers and models Jerry Hall (Mrs. Mick Jagger) and Rachel Hunter (Mrs. Rod Stewart) left, although as Katie Ford pointed out, neither was exactly a working model. “I’m getting the agency in tune with the times,” an unbowed Ford told me. “Several employees were unable to adjust. It’s a whole new Ford.” Ford probably also got some pleasure from the news a few days later that Naomi Campbell had left Elite—again—for Women, the agency of Kate Moss and Elle Macpherson.

Other models made news, too, and not just for changing agencies. Rachel Williams, for instance, did it by changing her sexual preferences. Again and again. The model who once made a shimmery silver dress into an object of teenage lust in an Absolut vodka ad made headlines, announcing her pregnancy by her former boyfriend, model-loving restaurateur Eric Goode (owner of the Bowery Bar) not long after declaring her love for a woman, British musician Alice Temple. Further confusing matters, Williams posed naked for
Penthouse
. Which—when you think about it—was really no stranger than MAC Cosmetics choosing the black transvestite RuPaul as their spokesmodel. Modeling is finally getting more diverse, and in so doing, helping encourage more tolerance of diversity in society. But this is only the latest manifestation of the process begun by the mad-bad Beylorussian brunette Janice Dickinson almost a quarter century ago.

As she has throughout her career, “model” model Christy Turlington stands head and shoulders above the pack, an example of how much better the rest of
her business can be. And not just in pictures. Right from the start, when she arrived in Paris with her mother, while the similarly teenaged Stephanie Seymour was there in the company of John Casablancas, Turlington has had her head screwed on right. And in a display of loyalty rare in the modern modeling world, she has never left Ford since the day she started modeling in New York.

In April 1995, however, Christy did shock the modeling and fashion worlds by announcing she was quitting the international catwalks that helped propel her into the supermodel pantheon. After several weeks of speculation as to her reasons for leaving—the most publicized one had it that she’d gotten fat—Turlington finally issued an explanation. Describing the shows as overhyped, the still-thin supermodel said she’d had enough of an atmosphere that “encourages fashion people to become critical, mean, and vicious.”

Christy has even taken out the belly button ring she had implanted a few seasons back. She’s hardly given up modeling. In fall 1995, Turlington appeared in ads for Max Mara, renewed and expanded her contracts with Calvin Klein and Maybelline, and signed a new deal with Japan’s Shisheido Cosmetics. But she seems to be that rare model who can discern a difference between real life and that rare, glittery two-dimensional facsimile called fashion.

“I have chosen to remove myself from all that,” Christy Turlington said. “You have to try and maintain some mystery, or people get bored.”

May 1989: Marie Anderson Boyd, the vice president of the Chicago office of fashion modeling’s largest agency, Elite, is sunbathing, listening to Springsteen on her Walkman during a break in a meeting of the company’s corporate elite in Ibiza, where the firm’s owners—Alain Kittler, Gérald Marie, and John Casablancas—all have summer homes. When the tape ends, the vacuum fills with the sound of Marie, Casablancas, and two of the company’s top women executives, Lisa Herzog and Trudi Tapscott, having a vicious argument.

“We are men,” snaps Marie. “We have our needs.”

“C’mon Trudi, Lisa, relax,” says an unruffled Casablancas.

This is disgusting. I’m outta here
, thinks Anderson Boyd, who knows they are talking about sex with young girls. She will soon quit the agency.

January 2000: John Casablancas sat in his office, surrounded by raw wood, brown leather, and Southwestern textiles, a tape recorder running by his side. He didn’t entirely trust me. He was still a little angry over this book. But something had changed. Casablancas, now nearly sixty, who initiated this chat, said he agreed with a lot of what I’d said on television a few nights earlier, during an interview about a BBC documentary that had just rocked the modeling business: hidden-camera footage of a drug sale to a teenager by a staffer at another agency; pimping of models in Milan; agency executives expressing racist views and pedophilic desires.

I had been cast as an enemy of Elite even before I wrote
Model
. “I am Linda Evangelista’s husband, Paris is my town. If you write another word about me or my wife, you’ll never take another step here,” Gérald Marie said to me the
night we first met at a party in Paris. Bob Zagury, an Elite investor, invited me for lunch at Brasserie Lipp, but showed up only for coffee and to say, “If you harm Elite, Elite will harm you.” Casablancas threatened to sue to stop the book when it was first published.

But that is not what this meeting with Casablancas was about.

During the next half hour, he tacitly admitted to bad behavior (before his second marriage and the birth of his third and fourth children); called on Elite—and his industry—to clean itself up with strict, sensible standards; and distanced himself from his partners. He even vowed that if Elite did not shape up, he would sell his shares in the company he founded in 1971.

Hearing this unlikely hero break the fashion world’s code of
omertà
took my breath away. Sure, it was a pre-emptive strike against the airing of the BBC program in America (though, in fact, it never was shown, after Elite argued—both in court and in the media—that it was selectively edited). But it is nonetheless fact that there is a fashion cabal that promotes itself and protects its members, especially those with big advertising budgets and those (such as model managers) deemed essential to the fashion process. When
Model
was published in France, an editor of a fashion magazine there told my publisher she would not mention it in her pages because Elite models were more important to her than acknowledging what was in the book. (After the BBC program aired, the same magazine ran an editorial professing to be shocked at the goings-on and demanding that things change.)

But now Casablancas wanted to speak out. He told me he thought it was time to clean up, and that he had sent a fax to his competitors the previous month, challenging everyone to do it together lest they each sink alone in the mire.

His proposed code of ethics was simple, though he admitted that some ideas would be hard to implement. The code would ban models from working regularly until they were sixteen; ban international travel without parental chaperones until age seventeen; institute a listing system for agencies “known for lenient attitudes toward drugs, drinking, and sexual promiscuity”; mandate the immediate termination of any agency employee who had sex with underage models or was involved in the use or sale of drugs; and require the immediate assignment of models with drug problems to rehabilitation programs, backed up by an agreement among agencies not to take on models who would rather switch managers than fight their addictions. “I find that repulsive, and I’ve done it; I’ve taken advantage of that type of situation,” Casablancas admitted. “Because if you don’t, someone else will.”

He also wanted to institute a blacklist of clients known to use drugs, and ban models under seventeen from appearing nude in photography or on catwalks. The fax also included several mea culpas: references to “improper statements” made on the BBC program, to “everybody’s past failure, including ours,” and to “our share of mistakes,” before concluding: “It is the commitment of Elite’s new team to enter the new millennium as an example for the whole industry.”

Nothing to argue with there, is there? And indeed, some of his competitors agreed to talk. But Casablancas never was easy to talk to—he is charming, feisty, egotistical, charismatic, and sarcastic in equal measure. His fax was laced with sarcasm: “We all know that none of your managers, directors, bookers, models, clients, etc., indulge in the use of any drugs, take young models to the nightclubs where drugs are easily available, send underage models to Milan or to Paris, drink, or use improper language.” So his industry colleagues resented him and, ultimately, resisted him.

So did his partner, Marie, who briefly hunkered down, publicly “resigning” while continuing to run Elite Europe from his apartment. Then Marie began attacking. His charges against the BBC’s reporter, Donal MacIntyre, of manipulating both him and the footage, could not be dismissed.

And Casablancas still needed Marie—not least because he hoped to inch his way out of the business and drift into semiretirement. Though Casablancas and Marie had always had a combative relationship, Casablancas had swallowed hard and admitted he’d eventually come to respect Marie’s skills as a model manager. “Like him or not, and I’ve never been a friend of his, he is excellent,” Casablancas told me.

Then Marie decided, with Kittler’s approval, to reinstate himself. Casablancas objected. “I say you can’t do that, because however biased the report, I cannot condone a pattern in Gérald’s conduct that is not acceptable by American standards,” he explained. In response, Marie threatened to walk out entirely, which would have devastated Elite. Realizing that Elite was in trouble either way, Casablancas began thinking about walking away himself.

To make Casablancas’s exit possible, Elite USA named a new management team. But the new president, a former Ford executive named Massimo Redaelli, wanted a guarantee that Marie would not return. He didn’t get it. Twenty days after his new title was announced, Redaelli resigned and Marie returned.

For a brief period, Casablancas was confident about the new Elite. Marie appeared repentant. “We’ve come to an acceptable compromise,” Casablancas told me. He added a caveat—“down the line, you never know”—but said he
thought that Marie finally understood that “he’s got to separate his private life from his professional life. He has reached that stage of maturity. I won’t say he will never have another model girlfriend, but he already was changing before the BBC exposé. His life used to be only the business. Little by little that has been changing. And I think the argument [that followed the TV show] has sensitized him.” In any case, Elite’s owners had decided that Marie’s presence was still necessary. “Wanting Gérald out is stupid,” Casablancas said.

I couldn’t decide if he really believed this.

So, were Redaelli’s concerns baseless, I asked? Had Elite made it a condition of Marie’s continuing involvement that his behavior must change? “No,” Casablancas replied. “But Gérald will have little to do with the models, nothing to do with the young models. He will be careful. He’s smart. With this happening, what mother will send her daughter to him? They come now with a shopping list and discuss conditions.”

Nonetheless, rumors were still flying that Casablancas was talking of selling his interest in Elite. Was that true, I wondered? “Maybe, maybe not. I’ll keep it if I’m happy with the lineup. If I’m going to be a major shareholder and be on the board of directors, I want to be happy with the whole operation. I don’t want to condone policies or people I don’t like.”

Had the documentary and the agency’s subsequent promise to clean up its act had a real, as opposed to cosmetic, impact? I didn’t think so, and neither did a former booker I know: “They’re just waiting until it blows over,” she’d told me just before I met with John.

Then again, maybe it won’t blow over this time. Until now, exposés have just been ammunition in what
New York
dubbed the “Model Wars” twenty years ago. When
60 Minutes
revealed similar exploits by Jean-Luc Brunel, whose Karins agency represented Ford models in Europe, and Claude Haddad, the man who discovered Jerry Hall, Elite executives gleefully screened the tape around the world. Although one agent thinks that “morals have changed, people have evolved, the business has changed, and people are disgusted,” he admitted that Elite competitors initially hooted down Casablancas’s reform proposals.

“It’s common knowledge, but it’s hard to admit what our business is,” the agent said of the BBC exposé. “It’s all true, and it’s not just Elite; it’s other agents, photographers, clients. But no one will come forward.” So they tell the physician to heal himself. “Who is John to send a letter like that?” the agent asked. “Clean your closet before you try to clean everyone else’s.”

My feeling was that it takes a sinner to stop a sin, and that was where John
Casablancas fit in. “It’s a question of time in life,” he said. “I’m not seeking redemption. I’m proud of the story of my life. I enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun. I made money. I had prestige. I’m comfortable with what it was—with its weaknesses.”

Yet Casablancas had decided to go out a crusader.

“It’s about time,” said Marie Anderson Boyd, when I told her of his manifesto. She chuckled before asking: “Is he still with that wife? Good for him.”

Nothing changed, of course, and John Casablancas did sell his shares in Elite and retire from the model business a few weeks after giving that interview. Then, in December 2000, Katie Ford, who’d effectively assumed control of Ford Models in the mid-’90s, slowly inching her parents to the sidelines, sold their business to Magnum Sports and Entertainment, Inc., a sports marketing agency that was trying to become an IMG-like entity, combining sports, entertainment, and fashion. Corporate IMG had become the newly dominant force in the modeling business, and in the wake of the retirements of the founding mother and fathers of modern modeling, Ford and Elite became just two more agencies, no longer the twin pillars of posing they once had been.

As always, agents and agencies came and went. Jerome Bonnouvrier formed a new one in New York, DNA, which quickly established itself as a quirky, Zoli-like boutique shop, run by his son David. Marilyn Gaulthier threw in her lot with Dieter Esch at Wilhelmina, working out of his offices. Donald Trump, the mogul and serial model-seducer, became the latest rich man to open his own model shop, hiring one of Elite’s top bookers away to run it. With the playing field leveled, Trump’s T Management and other little agencies like Woman seemed more important than they actually were. And although owners and bookers of Company, 1 Management, and NY Models made the papers, their every movement tracked by a new batch of model-centric gossip columns and Web sites, none of them attained the larger-than-life quality of the Fords, Wilhelmina, and Casablancas in their heyday.

In fact, a sea change had hit modeling in 1996, and a shrunken model business seemed to remain the same for the next seven years—which, appropriately enough, is the approximate length of a modeling “generation.” Though new faces still were dubbed supermodels before their test photographs were dry, in that time only one true new supermodel emerged, Brazil’s Gisele Bundchen, whose bodacious body and odd, long-nosed visage made her heir to the lucrative Cindy Crawford/Claudia Schiffer franchise, appealing to both men and
women, to both the commercial and the high-fashion markets. At the start of the millennium, she stood at the pinnacle of modeling—alone.

In fall 2002, at the New York fashion shows, other putative modeling “stars” like Sophie Dahl, Caroline Murphy, Carmen Kass, Karolina Kurkova, and the compelling Jacquetta Wheeler walked the runways but gave off none of the excitement that a short time before had attended every twitch of a supermodel hip. Indeed, the few runway walks taken that season by Naomi Campbell and Amber Valletta were palpably thrilling, a reminder of the days not so long past when Crawford (now married and having children with her pre—Richard Gere beau, bar owner Rande Gerber), Linda Evangelista (whose comeback attempt a year earlier fizzled), Schiffer, Stella Tennant and Kate Moss (both sidelined by pregnancy), and Christy Turlington (who still sometimes models but seems far more focused on a new career as a purveyor of yoga-inspired clothes and ayurvedic skin-care products) seemed to rule the fashion world.

Like Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
, those supermodels still seem big. It’s modeling that’s gotten smaller. But as with hemlines, which rise and fall like the tides, that’s an almost certain sign that the next supermodel era is almost at hand.

—Michael Gross
New York City, October 2002