Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (56 page)

Turlington soon left her San Francisco agency. Like many top models who emerged in the eighties, she realized early on that she would have to run her own career. “I always thought Jimmy Grimme was small-time,” she says. “I mean, they have classes in his office to show how to do runway walking, and he used to say, ‘Walk as if you had a coin between your buns,’ and he’d do the old walk that was so ridiculously dramatic. He acted like he knew it all, and I
knew that being in San Francisco, which isn’t the fashion capital of the world, he couldn’t.”

She’d met Gary Loftus, an American who’d worked at London’s Models One and Askew agencies before returning to San Francisco to open one of his own. “All the girls were with him,” Christy says, “and he was a really nice guy.” So she switched agencies; under her sweetness was steel. “I did it mostly to piss Jimmy Grimme off,” she says. “I hardly worked in San Francisco, so it really didn’t make a difference. And he was such a little snot. He complained to Eileen, but it was out of her hands.”

After modeling her way through her sophomore year in high school, Christy, sixteen, arrived in New York in summer 1985, moved into the Ford town house, and began making the rounds of magazines and photographers. On her last day in New York the model editor at
Vogue
saw her, liked her, and sent her to Arthur Elgort.

“It was July,” Kevyn Aucoin recalls. “A zillion degrees and no air conditioning. Girls sweating their makeup off before I could get it on. Christy was a real trouper. Excited, into it, and very sweet. I get very concerned about girls that young doing this shit. This business is full of people who’ll blow wind up your skirts and two weeks later don’t know you. But I could tell instantly—I mean, I hoped—she’d keep her sanity and get whatever she wanted.”

“It was very glamorous,” Christy says. “Arthur was shooting Cheryl Tiegs in this big, beautiful studio. They were drinking champagne, opera music was on, and he took a roll of film on me. I went downstairs and called my booker. She said I was already booked for a week. I was so excited.
Vogue
was a big deal. That made it legitimate.”

Christy went back to school in August, but
Vogue
kept calling. In October she was back in France to shoot the collections. She arrived at the Hôtel Crillon in Paris, where Polly Mellen, who was doubling as editor and chaperone, was staying, only to learn she’d arrived a week too early. “So I sat around for about five days,” she recalls. The fashion editor of French
Vogue
took her shopping. “And then we flew to Cannes to shoot with Dennis Piel, but I basically sat in a hotel room eating the whole time” because the team on the shoot seemed to prefer the two other models. Finally,
on
her last day in the south of France, Turlington got a chance to work. “And they were the two great pictures of the whole series,” she says.

The photographs appeared in December. Her school friends were blase. “I hung around with punk rock kids at home, wore black all the time, this totally antifashion thing,” she says. “What I was doing was totally ridiculous to my
friends.” But it was incredibly exciting to her. “I was so naïve.” Christy moans. “I sent family Christmas cards to the editors I’d worked with. Like they were my new friends.”

It would be another year before Christy’s parents allowed her to move to New York on her own, but she was already a working model. She transferred to a professional school that would accommodate her frequent absences as she became a regular commuter between San Francisco and New York, always staying at Eileen Ford’s notoriously strict house-cum-model-dormitory. Ford insisted that Turlington stay until she turned eighteen. She still promoted herself as a paragon of virtue. “Who’s to teach these children values if we don’t?” she asked.

Christy sneaked out. “I was wired in that house,” she boasts. “I’d go out all the time, to Palladium, Area. I’d hide a T-shirt downstairs so that if Eileen woke up, I’d be able to say I couldn’t sleep and I’d gone downstairs to get a glass of milk. I knew every stair that creaked. I used to smoke and drink beer and champagne in my room.”

In December 1986 she quit school and moved into a loft in New York’s SoHo. It shared an entrance with one occupied by Eileen Ford’s daughter, Katie. “I had a suitcase of clothes, I got a little kitten, and Katie put a bed in my room,” Christy says. “That was all I had.” A few weeks later her parents arrived with sheets and a TV.

As Turlington was getting started as a model, the unprofessionals of Bitten Knudsen’s day were on their way out. “The girls are getting rich, so rich,” says fashion editor Polly Mellen, who recalls Kim Alexis casually saying that she was buying an $800,000 apartment. “Yeee gods!” says Mellen. “We’re getting into real stardom.”

In many ways Paulina Porizkova set the stage for Christy’s success. Paulina was born in 1965 in Prostejov, Czechoslovakia. Growing up, she never gave fashion a thought. “Are you kidding?” She laughs. “In Czechoslovakia?” But there was one fashion she wanted desperately: a Communist insignia. “I was dying to be a Pioneer,” she says. “Those are the ones wearing the little red scarves. You can’t become a Pioneer until fourth grade. I was in a pregroup. I was brainwashed. I was Red from my toes to my head.”

Her mother, a teenage secretary, and her father, a truck driver (who says Paulina was actually “kind of an anti-Communist, but a little punk, really”), split for Sweden on a motorbike during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, leaving Paulina with a grandmother. When the Czechs threatened to put the child up for adoption, her mother returned, disguised, to rescue her. But on her way to rescue Paulina, she was arrested for speeding, and her true identity was uncovered. Paulina’s mother spent the next six years in jail and under house arrest. Meanwhile in Sweden Paulina became a Cold War symbol. “Poor political little baby,” she says. “Pictures of me hugging my teddy bears saying, ‘I want to see my mummy and daddy.’”

Paulina Porizkova photographed by Marco Glaviano

Finally the Porizkovas were expelled from Czechoslovakia. “We were too famous to just bump off,” Paulina believes. “Our aunt and her husband took us to the border of Austria. There was this long, tall figure: my father, who I basically didn’t know. Unbelievable, you know?” Paulina’s voice quavers as her story continues. Her father no longer comes up. “I had an awful time because I was a famous political refugee,” she says. “I felt terribly sad and everybody told me how ugly I was and my mother was having a nervous breakdown.”

Together with a friend who dreamed of being a photographer, Paulina escaped into fantasy. “We copied Estée Lauder ads. We would put me in the foreground and a vase with some old flowers in it and shoot it with a Kodak Instamatic.” Her girlfriend sent their photos to a modeling school owner who took Paulina to Copenhagen to see John Casablancas. A month later, in 1980, she was an Elite model in Paris. “It was the biggest whack of freedom I ever got.” she says. She wore her
TOO DRUNK TO FUCK
T-shirt out dancing at night and got up every morning and worked. “When you’re fifteen, that’s not a problem,” she says.

Neither were the other perks that come to teenage models. “You’re going to have these old guys knocking down your door and offering you coke. I never … it just wasn’t my part of life.” Being a sex symbol was, though. “I didn’t care whether I was known as a face or a body or both,” she says. “I couldn’t care less as long as it gave me more work and more money. That was just fine with me.”

Janice Dickinson had broken the mold. Now Paulina became the first nonblond supermodel. She arrived on the scene just as
Elle
magazine—newly published in America—began regularly running spreads that featured a multiethnic cast. Advertisers like Benetton were starting to do the same. In 1986 Monique Pillard proposed to Paulina that she pose for a pinup calendar.

The Paulina calendar grew out of Pillard’s frustration with
Sports Illustrated’s
bathing suit issue. Editor Jule Campbell used a lot of Elite models, including Carol Alt, Kim Alexis, Christie Brinkley, and Paulina, but it wasn’t enough for Pillard. “I was always a little annoyed when Jule didn’t see potential and I did,” the agent says. In 1986 her close friend Marco Glaviano shot a
Paulina calendar. It sold 250,000 copies. The next year the pair released a second Paulina calendar and the first Elite Superstars Swimsuit Calendar. Pillard also started booking her models for tasteful nude spreads in
Playboy
shot by trusted photographers like Glaviano and Herb Ritts. The pictures they produced were far more comprehensible than the images of Patou pouf skirts then prevalent in fashion magazines. “Monique understands what the public wants,” says John Casablancas. “And so she produced this kind of populist, sexy, nonfashiony image. And she just touched the right chord. She absolutely deserves credit.” Supermodels were here to stay.

The next year—1987—Christy’s career went into overdrive. Though she worked with top names like Herb Ritts, Patrick Demarchelier, and Irving Penn, the real source of her new power was her collaboration with the photographer of the moment: Steven Meisel. Meisel looks like a Jewish Cherokee, with thick, straight hair cascading to his shoulders past dark eyes that seem to have been kohled. He has worn only black since leaving high school: black boots, jeans, turtleneck, trench coat, and a do-rag bandanna under a black rabbit hat with flying fur earflaps.

Meisel and a pack of powerful fashion friends have tried to resurrect the cult of the fashion photographer of the sixties, with Steven, Naomi, Christy, and Linda playing updates of Bailey, Twiggy, the Shrimp, and Penelope Tree. Meisel has also been compared to the earlier avatar Avedon, whom he’s worshiped since grade school. At first Meisel’s work was slavishly imitative of and less intellectual than Avedon’s. But Meisel’s ambitions have always been different. And his vision is more in tune with this mass-media era than with Avedon’s
temps perdu
of an image aristocracy.

“I am a reflection of my times,” Meisel has said. More precisely he reflects the paucity of originality in a fashion culture that now slavishly celebrates the past. Meisel plunders and adapts from fashion’s memory, not from its collective unconscious. He copies everyone from Horst to Bourdin and poses his models as actresses and mannequins of earlier times. His postmodern samplings are all of a piece with the fin de siècle rag picking that has given humanity the AT&T Building and rap music.

Meisel’s unoriginality is an open industry secret. He’s considered a sort of rephotographer. “He does a very good job of systematically making a story out of other photographers’ styles,” says Bert Stern, who once threatened legal action over photographs of Madonna that Meisel copied from Stern’s famous 1962 “last sitting” with Marilyn Monroe. In France Jacques
Bergaud, the owner of Pin-Up Studios, dismisses Meisel with the nickname Xerox.

Until he was about twenty-five, Meisel lived at home with his parents in Fresh Meadows, Queens—three blocks south of the Long Island Expressway. He was an indulged child who went with his mother to watch her get her hair done by Kenneth, and he started reading her fashion magazines in the fourth grade. They were his “escape mechanism,” he’s said. He even cut school—with his mother’s permission—to read them the day they were published. “I was obsessed with the magazines, absolutely,” Meisel says. “I was totally insane with it.” Cheerfully he admits that his interest was “a little peculiar.”

In the sixth grade he began using the names of known photographers to pester model agencies for composites. He had friends pose as messengers to get them. He collected them like baseball cards and recalls them with uncanny accuracy. “I had to know who the girls were. What their genius was,” he remembers. He lurked outside Richard Avedon’s studio in hopes of seeing models arrive. He cut school and hung out at boutiques. When Twiggy came to New York, he called her agency, put on a phony accent, said he had to change a lunch date with her and asked where she was. “Like fools, they [told me],” he says, smirking. Arriving at Melvin Sokolsky’s studio, he talked his way past Ali MacGraw and watched as Bert Stern filmed Sokolsky shooting the skinny cockney.

At the High School of Art and Design, Stevan (as he spelled his name) studied fashion illustration and was a member of the Chorus and the Senior Council of the class of 1971. He went on to Parsons School of Art but never graduated. “It was boring,” he says. After brief stints sketching for Halston and writing about fashion for
New York Rocker
, Meisel was hired as an illustrator by
Women’s Wear Daily
. “I adored him,” says his boss, James Spina. Meisel lived at home, “just like the Beaver in a garden apartment,” Spina, a neighbor, recalls. Meisel would drive Spina home in a Buick Scamp his father bought him to keep him off the subway. They went to concerts together and would pore through Meisel’s collection of old fashion magazines under the gaze of posters of Veruschka and Mott the Hoople.

Meisel was friends with two designers, Anna Sui, who went to Parsons with him, and Stephen Sprouse, whom Meisel met at a drag bar, the 82 Club, in 1974. Soft-spoken Sprouse, thirty-one, first drew clothes as an Indiana nine-year-old, met Norell and Geoffrey Beene at twelve, apprenticed with Blass, and dropped out of design school to work for Halston.