Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (36 page)

Riccardo Gay on the prowl in the 1970s
Riccardo Gay, photographer unknown, courtesy Jérôme Bonnouvrier

Casablancas was intrigued by de Nointel. “I don’t think there was anybody who understood the business and who lived it as intensely as Jacques,” he says. “He was a rep, and he had every good photographer in Paris.” Among them were Demarchelier, Gilles Ben Simon (as he was then known), Alex Chatelain, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen, and Arthur Elgort. Another was Mike Reinhardt, the grandson of Max Reinhardt, the German filmmaker. In the early sixties Mike was a lawyer, married to a German model named Bernadette, who’d been discovered by Eileen Ford and placed with Dorian Leigh. In 1965 Jerry Ford suggested Reinhardt go to work for Leigh, “straightening out her tangled affairs,” Ford says. “We agreed to pay her fifteen hundred dollars per month to pay Mike.”

With his salary guaranteed by the Fords, Reinhardt arrived at Leigh’s agency. “Dorian was obviously erratic and drinking,” he says. “I was between a rock and a hard place. I really loved Dorian, but she resented any intervention. So I ended up a booker and a sort of pseudoaccountant.” He stayed two years. “All these incredible girls around me!” he exclaims. “I was blown away. I met a model, fell in love, and had an affair with her. The situation destroyed my marriage.” But though he’d lost a wife, he’d gained an agent in Jacques de Nointel, who met him at Dorian’s and convinced him he could be a photographer.

John Casablancas listened to de Nointel also. “He started telling me about the industry,” Casablancas says. “And everything he told me was true, but I didn’t believe a word. He said he didn’t think there was room for one more agency; it would end up a big catalog agency like Paris Planning and Models International. He felt that what was needed was an agency that concentrated on stars. He described what Elite was going to be all about. But I didn’t listen to him. I did Élysées 3 instead.”

Casablancas introduced his agency with a double-page spread in
Passport
, an annual publication for models. The ad promised models “a new concept of cooperation … cash payments … free preparation of dossier, financing of composites, free juridical service, permanent door-to-door bookings.” For clients, Élysées 3 offered “efficiency in booking … precision of tariff … always on schedule … open Saturday.”

De Nointel predicted Élysées 3 would die within a year. “John had a lot of ideas, but the first year he knew nothing,” de Nointel says. “He learned from his mistakes.” De Nointel tried to help out. He sent Casablancas to his friend Stewart Cowley’s agency, for example, but Barbara Stone didn’t want to work with him. Neither did the Fords. “He was a friend of Mike’s, and I thought he
was a nice young guy, and we wanted to work with him,” says Jerry Ford. “But he took a long time getting a handle on things. We told him very frankly that we wanted to do business with him but we wouldn’t until he was established.”

De Nointel quickly saw what Casablancas brought to the model trade. “John introduced sex,” he says. “Don Juan, Casanova, their whole life put together is not equal to one year of John! John can look at a girl, and in five minutes the girl takes her underwear off. I could tell stories! He’s a hell of a successful man. He introduced the truth against the lies of the good mommy Eileen. I was going out with a girl, and Eileen said, ‘Don’t spend the weekend with Jacques. I have to introduce you to somebody.’ And she introduced her to a millionaire, and she married him. It was a better deal than going out with a jerk like me! But
still
!”

Casablancas’s first move was to fly to Copenhagen for its ready-to-wear shows with Gunnar Larsen. He went from stand to stand at the trade fair, introducing himself to models and, by the end of his visit, had a dozen girls ready to return to Paris with him. Among them were several stars from Copenhagen Models, one of the largest agencies in Scandinavia. Its owner, Trice Tomsen, then an ally of Eileen Ford’s, woke up one morning and over coffee and Danish pastries, saw a photograph by Larsen in the newspaper, showing the girls and Casablancas over a caption that said they were going to Paris to join Élysées 3. Furious, Tomsen got them all back, but “she was so pissed off with me she didn’t even want to hear my name for two years,” Casablancas says, laughing.

Until his arrival Scandinavia had been Eileen Ford’s personal fiefdom. “There were one or two agents in Göteborg [Sweden] who would keep girls for Eileen,” says Monique Corey, who worked on Ford’s new faces board. “Eileen would bring them home and get them ready like fruit on a window until they were ripe enough. She went to Scandinavia every three months to pick up blondes. She had the market cornered. The clients all wanted that look.” Casablancas was poaching on her turf.

Back in Paris, Casablancas took over de Nointel’s photographer’s agency. Championed by
Dépêche Mode
, his French Mob photographers stood in opposition to the generation that immediately preceded them: Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Barry Lategan, and Just Jaeckin. “We called them the telephoto brigade. They threw everything out of focus in the background,” says Lategan, whose carefully lit, controlled photographs for British
Vogue
were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Steve Hiett, a British photographer who moved to Paris at the time, also disdained the French Mob’s approach. “Every
one was shooting long lens, the same time of the day, the same blond girl,” he says. “It was all interchangeable.” But the new wave of photographers were well trained. Jacques Malignon, Bensimon, and Demarchelier all had worked for older photographers like Just Jaeckin, who shot fashion in the late sixties before turning to film. “They learned the basics of technique with us,” he says. “Then they left and said they’d do the same work for less money. It was a disaster for us.”

The new photographers had disasters, too. In those days they kept their samples in huge wood-covered portfolios. In July 1970 Casablancas dumped the books into his Porsche Carrera, drove to Germany, and spent four days pitching the photographers to advertising agencies there. He got back to Paris at 2:00
A.M.
“I was so exhausted, I didn’t want to carry the books,” he remembers. “Each one weighed about thirty pounds! So I shut them in the car, and someone with a knife cut open the top and stole them. I was hoping I’d get them back. They had no value. But I didn’t get them. I never had the guts to tell the photographers, so I just resigned and sold the business for twenty thousand francs. Elgort never forgave me.”

The buyer was Patrick Demarchelier’s half brother, Gérald Dearing, who worked for the photo agency. “John quickly found out he couldn’t mix photographers and models,” Dearing says. Despite the offhand manner in which he disposed of them, most of the photographers stayed friends with Casablancas. The French Mob was a tight little mutual-support group. “In the beginning, when Mike Reinhardt was still a director of Dorian, all of the top models would do tests with him,” recalls de Nointel. “Mike would call Patrick, and say, ‘Patrick, I can’t do this light, come and help me.’”

“I was hanging around with the young assistants,” says Reinhardt. “Newton and Bourdin were the big guys. We were just starting. There was Pierre Houlès, my best friend, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen, Patrick, Duc, who was Bourdin’s assistant. Alex was just back from New York. A couple of us had apprenticed with New York photographers. We’d assist each other when we did tests. Duc went with me on my first job. I was separated, living in a hotel, barely scraping by. I got a trip to Algeria from a magazine. Then it started rather quickly.”

Photography was
almost
everything to Reinhardt. Models were the rest. “After Bernadette left me, two weeks later the other girl leaves, and I’m left with my pants down and nobody,” Reinhardt says. For a while he played the field. “There’s a mercenary thing going on,” he says. “Even with girlfriends, there was a commercial side to the relationship. We used each other. The male
psyche always wants to be the exception. I always said, ‘Would you be with me if I was the garbage man?’ But it’s convenient. You travel together; you have the same sense of humor. It’s a given that you end up with a model. I was unfortunately neurotic enough to fall in love, but I couldn’t be completely faithful.” Not when there were models around who would sleep with a young, sympathetic, and attractive photographer in exchange for work.

Patrick Demarchelier had a model girlfriend, too, of course—an American named Bonnie Lysohir, whose brother assisted Arthur Elgort. Of all the photographers, Demarchelier was the closest to Casablancas. Everybody loved Demarchelier. Some suggest that his gravel mumble was the key to his success. Nobody could understand a word he was saying. He also had an appealing modesty. “Now young photographers want to be like Avedon,” he says. “When I was young, I didn’t have a goal like that. You didn’t project yourself.”

Born in Normandy in 1944, Demarchelier worked in a photo shop, learning to print and retouch photos, before he moved in 1964 to Paris. There he worked in a lab, and then for a head shot photographer who gave him a list of model schools in Paris. Patrick started offering them his services. One, conveniently located next door to Paris Planning, set him up with a little studio, where he tested thirty girls a month, helping them pull their portfolios together. After a year he won a job assisting Hans Feurer. Then he hooked up with de Nointel and started shooting on his own for
Marie France
and
Elle
. Unlike his peers, he didn’t settle down with any model for long.

“Those guys wanted to get married,” he says. “I had a lot of girlfriends. I loved the girls, yeah, it was true.” Demarchelier’s girlfriends were “all tops,” says Gérald Dearing. “He had a good nose for girls. He always found them before the others did. He was a tremendous asset to John.”

Alex Chatelain wasn’t as lucky in love as Demarchelier and Reinhardt. A struggling painter in New York, Chatelain shared an apartment with a friend who worked for
Vogue
. “We were both like rabbits,” he says, “going out model fucking. That’s basically how I got into the business.” Through a model, he got jobs assisting
Bazaar
’s Jimmy Moore, Roger Prigent, and then Hiro, who’d just begun shooting on his own after assisting Richard Avedon. Chatelain ended up printing Avedon’s pictures for $60 a week. “I slept on the couch at the studio, and they never knew it,” he claims.

In 1967 Chatelain won a grant and went to Paris. He met Reinhardt and Demarchelier at a party Dorian Leigh hosted at Jacques Chambrun’s house. “We’d run into each other at the lab,” Chatelain says. “Eileen Ford would
come and take everyone to Coupole for dinner.” They all made fun of Ford behind her back. “She was patronizing, always quoting from the Bible, holier than thou,” according to Chatelain. “American photographers accepted her as an institution. We could see through her behavior. We refused to let her control everything. She’d say, ‘Sit next to me,’ at Coupole, and I’d fart to the utter joy of my friends.”

After Guy Bourdin fought with French
Vogue
and left, Alex Chatelain won a job there, “so I was the one they all looked up to,” he says. But Reinhardt was the ringleader. “Everyone congregated around Mike,” Chatelain adds. “There was always a box full of grass in his refrigerator. He cooked marvelously, had great taste and a beautiful place full of sun and light and pretty girls. Then came the revolution of May 1968. We’d meet at Mike’s house on Avenue President Kennedy and piss on the police from the roof.”

But it wasn’t all fun and games for Casablancas and his crew. A group of French legislators, some of whom had models as girlfriends, responded to their frequent complaints just as Casablancas had to his girlfriend Jeanette’s. Their response was a new law governing model agencies. Henceforth models in France would be considered salaried workers, and agents would be required to insure that they were over eighteen years old and held valid working permits. Not only that, but the agents, as employers, would have to pay a
charge sociale
similar to America’s Social Security tax, which effectively doubled the cost of hiring a model. After taxes, commissions, and social charges were deducted, a FF10,000 job would net a model only FF2,000.

“John arrived at that time,” says Francois Lano. “He was really unlucky.” And to make matters worse, almost immediately, Élysées 3 was hit with a major defection. The bookers all left and took most of the models with them to Models International. Panicked, Casablancas called his sympathetic friend Riccardo Gay, who promptly dispatched one of his best multilingual bookers, Brigitte Grosjean, to Élysées 3.

Thanks to Gay, Casablancas hung on. “I went through so much shit, and I never complained,” he says. “Every time I had a good model, she was stolen away from me. Eileen Ford contributed to that.” She and Jerry arrived at Élysées 3 in a chauffeured car one day, looked the place over, and agreed to start trading models with the new company in exchange for a 3 percent commission. But Casablancas says they were double-dealing him. “They would meet my models in my agency and advise them to go to Paris Planning and Models International,” he charges. “Everyone was playing marionettes with everyone else. They wanted to see if they could muzzle me.”