Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (57 page)

New York’s clubland years had begun and were to shape fashion, photography, and modeling for the next two decades. “The scene was very flamboy
ant,” says Deborah Marquit, a Parsons classmate who also got a job at
WWD
. “Everyone came to work crazy from the night before. All they talked about was sex with men.” Gabriel Rotello, a musician and night life impresario, met Meisel and Company at the Ninth Circle, a Village gay bar. Rotello, who went on to share a summer house with Richard Sohl, Meisel’s best friend from grade school, followed the group’s exploits for a decade. At first Sohl was the star. He was the beautiful piano player in the Patti Smith Group. Smith would introduce him onstage as “Richard D.N.V. Sohl.” The initials stood for Death in Venice.

“The whole thing was gay,” Rotello says. “Richard would entertain us with stories of them coming into the city from Queens in junior high and going to gay bars. They both had real wild streaks, wanting to be where the action was. You’d hear peals of laughter; that was Richard. Steven was very reticent, obviously very talented, very enigmatic. I thought he manufactured his eccentricities as he might an illustration. For effect.”

Meisel and Sohl shared a conspiratorial streak. They would whisper in a private language and call each other names—Sissy Meisel and Tanta Ricky. “If you didn’t know the codes, you wouldn’t know what they were talking about,” Rotello says. “Together I found them a little scary.” Teri Toye was scarier. Meisel met her at a party at Rotello’s loft, jumping on his old sofa and breaking it. “Teri Toye was totally fabulously insane, screamingly funny, and out of control,” Rotello says. “Holly Golightly in drag.” Born in Hollywood on an early sixties New Year’s Eve (“No one ever believes me,” she grouses), Teri was adopted and spent a spoiled, sheltered youth in Des Moines, Iowa. Her pale, freckled face is still open as the plains, when it’s not closed behind shades. “I was never
really
a boy,” she insists, “except for the one obvious thing, and that’s the only thing I ever changed. I didn’t change my sex. My sex changed me.”

In 1979 Teri moved to New York to study fashion design. The first year she registered as a boy, the second as a girl. “I think they were a little confused,” she says. Soon she visited school only to model for illustration classes taught two nights a week by Meisel. The pair made quite a statement. Teri’s lank blond image complemented Meisel’s smoldering Cleopatra pose. They made a pretty Odd Squad.

“We would get together at Sprouse’s for four or five days,” Teri recalls, “design clothes, have them made, put them on, and take pictures of ourselves. Then we’d wear them out at night with our friends.” They became fixtures on the after-hours scene, often in club bathrooms. “We
love
bathrooms,” Teri
laughs. They would go to the Mudd Club in their pajamas and bragged of flooding the bathroom, “riding” the toilets in a motorcycle fantasy. They began sporting long, lank Dynel wigs and all-black clothes and dressed their friends in Day-Glo neon to stand out from their own in crowd.

The times were wilder than Meisel. Though many people around him were drinking and drugging and having sex obliviously, says Rotello, “Meisel always seemed a little too dignified to be caught with his pants down.” He had the same boyfriend for years and studiously kept his private life private, while all about him were flaunting theirs. More recently, with his safe sex posters and an interview in the
Advocate
, Meisel opened up a bit. He said he’s always photographed “more effeminate-looking men, more masculine-looking women, and drag queens” in hopes of “teaching that there’s a wide variety of people…. There’s absolutely a queer sensibility to my work … but there’s also a sense of humor … a sarcasm and a fuck you attitude as well as a serious beauty.”

Meisel’s photographic career began inauspiciously. One night Spina took him to a party for Bette Midler. Meisel borrowed an old Exakta camera and took a picture of the singer that ran in
WWD
. He then took a class in photography. His parents bought him a camera.

Meisel met Valerie “Joe” Cates, an aspiring model from Park Avenue, in a vintage clothing store in 1979. He followed her, asked to photograph her, then asked the same of her sister, Phoebe, a top teenage model at
Seventeen
. “He was the first man we’d met with really long hair who was into dressing us up,” Phoebe recalls. “He was different and really playful. Our first grown-up friend.” Through the Cates sisters Meisel got work shooting test photographs of young models and an assignment from
Seventeen
. He also worked for the
SoHo Weekly News
. Fashion editor Annie Flanders gave him his first cover assignment and a story on plastic clothes. Joe and Phoebe Cates modeled.

Flanders knew that her friend Frances Grill, a photographer’s agent, was looking for new blood. Meisel went to see her. She was impressed. “He knew every single bit of information about every photographer, every model.” She sent a carousel of his slides to Kezia Keeble, an ambitious stylist who’d once worked for Diana Vreeland and was looking for a way into fashion’s pantheon. Keeble had just been hired to create covers for Condé Nast’s
Self
magazine. Meisel had never worked in a studio, and he didn’t want to leave his
WWD
job. “He was really insecure,” Grill says.

He had reason. An assistant—who was “promised tons of work by Kezia Keeble to show Steven how to do it”—would set the lights and the camera,
says someone who watched them work. “Kezia didn’t know the front of the camera from the back. She wanted a photographer she could mold. He was her boy. He would tape Avedon spreads to the floor of the studio and say, ‘Light it this way,’ and, ‘Pose that way’ All he would do was push the button.” Christopher Baker, another assistant, says that all Meisel owned was one Nikon and one 105 mm lens. “He didn’t care. It was weird,” Baker says. “He was, like, chosen.”

Meisel shot half a dozen
Self
covers, helping turn the new magazine into a million-selling success. He was also working regularly for
Mademoiselle
and its Italian equivalent,
Lei
, and, every once in a while, for
Vogue
. He fitted into his new milieu well. Models loved him; he’d have his makeup done before theirs. “He would speak to the models in sign language, put his hand a certain way, throw his neck, and expect her to imitate him,” says Andrea Robinson, who worked at
Vogue
. He wore kohl makeup and a little dirndl skirt over his pants.

John Duka—then Kezia Keeble’s summer housemate and soon to be her husband and partner in a PR firm—dubbed Meisel a new Avedon in his influential fashion column, “Notes on Fashion,” in
The New York Times
. Meisel quit his
WWD
job. The next step was to make a splash, and he did with a little help from his friends. In January 1983 Sprouse asked him to photograph some clothes he’d been making for a fashion show Keeble was doing. Though they were still sewing on the edge of the runway, the show was a success. “I knew I was looking at a gold mine,” Keeble declared. Bendel, Bloomingdale’s, and Bergdorf Goodman bought. Odd was in.

The first time Kezia Keeble ever saw Teri Toye, dressed in a demure Black Watch plaid jumper, turtleneck and stockings, ponytail, and flats (“indeed, an odd way for a transsexual to dress”), she knew she’d encountered someone extraordinary. Toye had become a model that fall, when Sprouse held his first fashion show. Frances Grill, who’d stopped repping and opened an idiosyncratic model agency called Click, soon signed Toye up. When the Fashion Group—an organization of women in fashion—asked Keeble and Duka to produce its spring 1984 showing of American fashion, Keeble recalled the group’s show of ten years before, starring socialite Baby Jane Holzer—Tom Wolfe’s Girl of the Year—and decided it was Teri Toye’s time. “Outrage makes Teri
the
person,” Keeble said, because “people love to buy what they hate. They resist, but resistance causes persistence. What’s most amusing is she’s becoming Girl of the Year just because I said so.”

A press blitz followed. But when it got to be too much, Toye failed her Svengali and escaped to Key West with Way Bandy, the made-up make-up man who
could have been the Odd Squad’s godfather. One friend referred to what followed as “their little
Peyton Place
.” Another called it “a lover’s spat.” Meisel’s odd little squad fell apart. His agent called Toye “boring and sad.” Toye put it all down to a “high school girls’ fight.” Frances Grill, who lost touch with Meisel at the time, put it down to boredom. “Steven is fashion,” she says. “As fast as you think you’ve got it, it changes. That’s how Steven is. He moves on.”

Following the breakup of the Odd Squad, Meisel was seen far less in public, but his career took off. He quickly left
Mademoiselle
behind. Briefly he championed a Dutch-Japanese model named Ariane, who was dating a musician who lived in his building. He shot her in an influential makeup spread for Italian
Vogue
. “I didn’t look like a girl,” she says. “I didn’t look like a boy I looked like this rock and roll thing.”

Then came Christy Turlington. “I always wanted to work with Steven,” she says. But
Vogue’s
editors told her he liked only big, strong girls. “I kept asking,” she says, “becoming a little baby,” and finally a go-see was arranged. “So I met him one day, and he was very nice but didn’t seem to pay much attention.” It wasn’t until six months later, in 1986, that she finally worked with him for British
Vogue
. “I came an hour late, by subway, got off at the wrong stop—a disaster story,” she says. “But I worked with him for four days, and we had so much fun.” It was the first sitting where the team of Meisel, hairdresser Oribe Canales, and makeup man François Nars came together. Henceforth they worked together all the time. And over the course of the next several years they created a three-headed monster known as the Trinity: Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista, the three models who came to epitomize fashion.

The second figure in the Trinity was hardly
haute
when she arrived in New York that April to do her very first shoot—for British
Elle
. Naomi Campbell was discovered in 1985 by former model Beth Boldt, who’d opened an agency called Synchro in London. She spotted the fourteen-year-old Campbell buying tap shoes near her office in London’s Covent Garden. “She was wearing a little school uniform,” Boldt recalls. “I took her first tests, and she was
sooo
sweet, like sugar. Everyone who met her wanted to hug her.” Some might say they hugged the sweetness right out of her.

A theater and dance student from Streatham, England, and daughter of a dancer who’d traveled the world in sequins and plumes, Campbell was already show biz bound when she signed up for a modeling course at Boldt’s instigation. A few short months later she was on her way to America for
Elle
, where a pretty new black face was always welcome. “A girl from New York let them down, and Naomi got the booking,” says Boldt.

That summer Ford “traded” Turlington to London for a week in exchange for a Synchro model. “I met Naomi the day I got there,” Christy says. “We had lunch, and she was in high school uniform, hanging out at the agency. She was really cute. She’s still sweet, but she’s a completely different human being now.”

They hung out together and saw each other again a few months later, when they both landed at the Paris nightclub Les Bains at 4
A.M.
Campbell had been taken up by Azzedine Alaïa, a diminutive Tunisian-born designer in Paris. Models loved his sexy clothes as much as he loved models. “He was way ahead of all of them,” says John Casablancas. “He created the fashion show as a social event, and he got every single superstar in the business to come for free.” He also let them stay in his house and referred to them as his daughters. “Naomi says I am like her mother,” he explains. “I keep an eye on her. Cities are dangerous for young girls. There is too much temptation. Everything is easy, and at that age they never think anything can happen to them. For models it goes very fast.”

It did for Campbell. Christy recalls, “I kind of felt protective over her, and I was only a year older. I also wanted the company. So she moved in with me.” Christy soon introduced Campbell to Meisel. “Because Naomi lived with me, we all hung out a lot,” Christy says. “So Naomi got in really quickly.”

The final member of the Trinity, the most dedicated model of the three, is Linda Evangelista. Though she’s been dubbed Evilangelista by wags at Elite, she’s also the most accomplished model of her time. “I know what and where I would be if I wasn’t modeling,” she once said. “I thank God every day for my looks.”

Born in 1965 to an Italian Roman Catholic family in St. Catharines, Ontario, she was the daughter, niece, and sister of General Motors auto plant workers. Her mother enrolled her in dance and self-improvement classes starting at age seven. She became a model as a teenager, working in local stores for $8 an hour. “Even when she was thirteen, I knew she’d be good at it,” her mother said.

Like Steven Meisel, Linda “was always obsessed with fashion—with the magazines, the models and the poses,” she’s said. She signed with an agency in Toronto and in 1981, at sixteen, entered a Miss Teen Niagara contest in Niagara Falls. An Elite scout was in the audience. Not long afterward she arrived in New York to test. But not much happened.

Determined to succeed, or at least not to return to Ontario, Evangelista packed her bags for Paris in 1984. Her father gave her a year to make it. “I thought I was good,” she’s said, but she was “doing mediocre jobs for $650.”
She was her own harshest critic. “I didn’t really have myself so together,” she’s recalled. “I still had baby fat and the hair was a problem.”

“Actually, she worked very well,” says Francesca Magugliani, who watched her progress at Elite Paris. “She was doing covers right away for
Figaro Madame
and
Dépêche Mode
.” Then, Francesca recalls, Evangelista had a booking in Spain with Gérald Marie’s photographer friend André Rau. “She did a lot of jobs with Rau,” Francesca says. Upon her return Elite got a letter saying she was switching agencies. “André took her to Paris Planning,” Francesca says. “I called John, and he said, ‘Don’t give her her book.’ So she leaves, never calls for her book, never calls for her money. And that’s when she started her superstar career.”