Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (29 page)

“They were wild times,” says booker Jane Halleran. “The models were very much a part of it. They were stars. But we were all so stoned it’s hard to think of stories. It was so heady. It was one big dance. We would go to Le Club and Arthur, and then to the airport and Paris and Castel, and then to the airport and London and the Ad Lib, and then back to New York.”

Constance Stumin, a teenager from Ohio, joined Ford in 1966 and found herself in the deep end of modeling’s pool. On one of her first go-sees an advertising man invited her out for dinner and then back to his apartment. “He came out of his bedroom in red satin underwear and popped an amy [an amyl nitrate Spansule] under my nose,” she recalls. “He put
Lord of the Flies
on the TV and asked me to lie on the bed. I didn’t know how to behave. Finally I asked him for money for a cab. He threw my shoes over the balcony.” Dressing quickly as the executive sniffed more poppers, Stumin grabbed a pair of his ruby cuff links and bolted. “I sold the cuff links and paid the rent,” she says. A year later she was tossed out of the Ford agency “for lewd dancing at Le Club,” she says. “Eileen was furious and said I’d never work in this town again.”

As the fashion and music worlds blended, the drugs of the sixties infiltrated fashion. The alcohol and pills that did in Anne Saint Marie gave way to even more dangerous highs, and models, young outriders on the cutting edge, tried them all. In October 1969, in upstate New York, a model named Eva Gshopf fell out of a tree and died. “There’s no question she was on everything,” Eileen Ford says. Then, in February 1971, a German model named Agneta Frieberg, apparently high on LSD, jumped out a hotel window in Paris and died as well. French authorities asked Ford if the girl could have been involved with a revolutionary group. “I don’t think she ever thought that deeply,” Ford replied.

Drug taking wasn’t limited to models. “I was taking lots of uppers, staying up most of the night,” Schatzberg says. “I didn’t know pills were a drug. They kept you functioning.” In 1969 Schatzberg made his first film, based on the life of Anne Saint Marie. Faye Dunaway, whom he dated, starred as a model named Lou in
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
. “I really always loved that character,” Dunaway later said. “She spent all her life trying to get to the place where it would be wonderful, and she got to that place and she hates it. It was the underbelly of the American dream … all the beauty and the glamour.”

Schatzberg dropped out of fashion in one piece. Others weren’t so lucky. Bert Stern, inspired by Irving Penn, started taking pictures in 1953. By 1959 he was shooting for
Glamour
, Condé Nast’s farm team for future
Vogue
photographers. Bob Richardson, a Long Island native, graduated from art school around the same time and became a window designer for Bloomingdale’s. Then he started taking pictures and eventually became assistant to Carmen Dell’Orefice’s husband, Richard Heimann. Early on Richardson photographed a model named Nena von Schlebrugge (who was briefly married to LSD guru Timothy Leary and later had a daughter, actress Uma Thurman), lying on a couch crying while talking on the phone to her psychiatrist. The photos that resulted led to better work.

Both Stern and Richardson were girl-crazy. “Women were everything to me,” Stern says. “You did anything to get over them or under them and get the picture. I wasn’t booking models to sleep with them, but I did find women the best thing there was. And let’s be honest, everything went in the sixties.” Richardson felt the same way. “I hated fashion,” he says, “but I liked photographing women.”

The two were driven and ambitious. For ten years Stern lived his dreams and photographed them. He was shooting the best models, earning as much as $500,000 a year, and spending it all. “
Blow-Up
was a simple photographer,” Stern says. “I became a thing.” He owned a town house, an eleven-room condominium with a swimming pool, a schoolhouse he converted into a studio where thirty-eight employees toiled, and a second, secret studio where he could hide from them. “Work was fun,” he says. “Fun was work. I’d rent a yacht and go off and shoot pictures.”

Richardson chose a different, confrontational path. “I only had time for ideas,” he says. “I became too involved in creating a style. My trouble was, I didn’t want to be famous. Anyone can become famous. I wanted to be great.” That led to constant arguments with the editors he worked for and a reputation that scared off advertising clients. “I always cause a scandal wherever I
go,” he says boastfully. “My photographs were so weird. I fought with all the editors I worked with. They were so old-fashioned and out of step.” Then he met a kindred spirit.

Donna Mitchell grew up in northern Manhattan and began modeling when she was fifteen. When she expressed the desire to do photo work, she was sent to Eileen Ford, who told her she was too short, needed a nose job, and should probably have her back teeth extracted in order to emphasize her jawline. “We’re talking fifteen and a half!” Mitchell remembers. “I fled in tears.”

By 1964 Mitchell had appeared in
Brides
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
. A year later she met Melvin Sokolsky. “I picked models people thought were odd,” Sokolsky says. “I saw this incredible face at a shoot with six girls, and I put a one hundred-fifty millimeter lens on my camera and started to pan, watching her. She had a Madonna’s face with inner intelligence, and she was clocking everything around her.” Sokolsky sent her to editor Gwen Randolph at
Bazaar
, where she showed up in a ratty raccoon coat held closed with a safety pin. “You’re putting me on,” Randolph told the photographer. But he insisted, and soon they went to Paris to shoot the collections. “Donna could take the gestures of the street and turn them into the highest form of elegance,” Sokolsky raves. “She had the knowledge of the world in her little face.”

Sokolsky, too, had a vision, and Mitchell played right into it. “My models were more than props,” he says. “I drew from who they were, how they gestured, what they feared.” He wanted to chronicle his times. “I was systematically breaking down the social decorum of gesture,” he says, “from women who sat on the couch with their purses to women who sat on the floor. It was about class. Poor people live six to a bedroom. That brings an intimacy to the fore that rich people are afraid to address.” Sokolsky consciously played against the then-prevailing stiff couture style in
Bazaar
. He shot Mitchell sitting with her legs spread. “It was the gesture of the time,” he says. “Louise Dahl-Wolfe called me a vulgarian.”
Bazaar
’s editor Nancy White accused him of “saying ‘fuck you’ in sign language,” he adds.

By the early seventies Sokolsky had had enough. “I was so busy making money I trapped myself. Some photographers can keep taking the same picture over and over, but if you’re shooting people flying over Paris in bubbles or in burnt-out buildings, like I was, it gets harder and harder to come up with something new. Finally I was sick and tired of being told how to take pictures, and I just backed away. I saw what was coming. I saw the freedom being taken away by retards and monkeys. I didn’t want to face it.” He retired from fashion photography and with his partner, Jordan Kalfus, Jean Shrimpton’s ex, formed a company to make TV commercials.

Donna Mitchell photographed by Bob Richardson in the late 1960s
Donna Mitchell by Bob Richardson, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

Donna Mitchell moved on, too. “I made it clear I wanted to work for photographers, not magazines,” she said. “I’d turn down a booking unless it was with a photographer I wanted to work for. It wasn’t about just having my photograph taken. I liked to develop ideas, as opposed to being someone who jobbed in. That was my greatest pleasure. My ambition was to do the best photograph with each photographer.” She began a long collaboration with Bob Richardson, whose ambitions and ideas coincided with hers.

Richardson first saw Mitchell in one of Sokolsky’s
Bazaar
photos. He asked to book her and was told that Nancy White didn’t like her. “They said she looked drugged and beaten,” Richardson recalls. “I thought she looked like a fallen angel. We became a team and caused one scandal after another. Everyone else was doing frozen little images like Avedon’s. I was doing nudity, sex, and violence. We ignored the editors because they were just in the way. One time in Paris we locked an editor into the dressing room because she just wouldn’t shut up. It was my way or no way. I was way ahead of them, and I knew they’d never catch up. It was not my job to educate them. I didn’t have time for that.” In 1966, fleeing the restrictive atmosphere in America, Richardson left
Bazaar
, and he and Mitchell went to Europe. But the fuel that was driving them, as well as Bert Stern, soon caused all their careers to crash.

In the late 1950s a new breed of physician had appeared on New York’s East Side, the Doctors Feelgood. The most famous were Max Jacobson and Robert Freymann. Jacobson had fled Germany in 1936 and set up a practice in New York. By the fifties he’d become the city’s top celebrity doctor, known for giving energizing “miracle tissue regenerator” shots that were actually laced with amphetamines. His patients included Eddie Fisher, Truman Capote, Emilio Pucci, Tennessee Williams, Cecil B. De Mille, and John and Jacqueline Kennedy, who started taking his shots during JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960. By 1961 they were so addicted to his “vitamins” that they chartered an Air France jet to fly Jacobson to Paris, where Kennedy was meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Jacobson was so involved with Kennedy that he was included in the family pictures in
John F. Kennedy: A Family Album
by photographer Mark Shaw. After Shaw died in 1969 of acute and chronic amphetamine poisoning while under Jacobson’s care, the government raided the doctor’s office. Six years later his license to practice medicine was revoked after he had been found guilty of fraud and forty-eight counts of unprofessional conduct. While Freymann’s case was not as well publicized, he, too, was
suspected of improperly dispensing amphetamines in the early seventies. Never formally charged, he eventually retired and died in the late eighties.

But in the sixties Freymann’s and Jacobson’s patients were still flying high on the good doctors’ magic “vitamin” shots. Bob Richardson was already familiar with drugs. He was getting stoned with a model one day when she offered him his first vitamin shot. He soon became one of Jacobson’s star patients. “I was a drug addict,” he admits. “It forced my mind to go faster. Jacobson taught me how to mainline and gave me a set of works.”

Both Mitchell and Richardson continued working separately after 1969. But they found their reputations preceded them wherever they went. “I was young and naïve,” says Mitchell. “You could say stupid; that would be even more appropriate. I started taking amphetamine pills because I was always tired and depressed and my personal life was very sick and disturbed. I was very wrapped up in the world of fashion and photography, and when you’re that caught up in it, you lose track of what’s real. To be a really good model, you have to be extremely self-involved. There’s also a strong element of masochism in it: the loss of self to another. I was very lucky to get out of it.”

Meanwhile, Bob Richardson got married, had a son, left his wife, and took up with a model turned actress, Anjelica Huston. But he was finding inspiration harder to come by. “I stopped showing up, or if I did, I’d be really stoned,” he says. “From working for everyone I went to working for no one. You had to be very special and understanding to work with me.” After several brief comebacks fizzled, he moved to California and drifted for ten years. “I was dead,” he says. “Everyone thought I was dead, which was what I wanted them to think. It’s how you keep a legend going.”

Bert Stern’s experience was similar. His secretary introduced him to Dr. Robert Freymann. At first he believed that Freymann’s shots were just vitamins. “Then I began to figure out there was something else in them,” Stern says. “That spike gave me the energy to shoot all day and all night. It was chemical and magical.”

In 1969 Stern’s wife, ballerina Allegra Kent, left him after warning he was killing himself. “The American dream became a nightmare,” Stern says. “The sixties ended. I wasn’t going to stay on the high wire without her. It was all done for her in a sense. I just stopped. I had to get my head back together. I had to get my life back together.”

The new atmosphere had its good points. Alongside the breakdown of standards of professionalism and behavior came a breakdown of the strict rules
defining beauty. Wilhelmina needed to differentiate her agency. So when she opened her doors, she began promoting buxom models like herself, calling them a reflection of the national trend toward freedom and honesty that had recently seen women abandon bras and girdles. “Women snicker at the elongated, ironing board figures seen in the glossy magazines,” Bruce Cooper told a reporter. “The concave-chested gal will never entirely disappear, but her influence is negligible.” Eileen Ford disagreed. “I still say that models should be thin,” she insisted, although she admitted that “today’s models are more individual in their looks.”