Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (58 page)

Evangelista had been having an affair with Rau. “She was the only girl he ever loved,” a friend of Rau’s says. “He was two years with her. Gérald Marie stole this girl from him. After her he never recovered.”

Marie met Evangelista at his apartment in Paris. “She came with a friend, and we looked at each other, and in the same moment, boom!” he recalls. “She was with Elite. She was not an important model. I was still at Paris Planning, and she came to work there.” Christine Bolster was at Paris Planning, too. And she wasn’t Marie’s only girlfriend. “Gérald was going out with Linda, with one of my models, with a top booker,
and
with Christine,” said a competing agency owner. “There were at least four, and he said to each of them, ‘I love you, I’m going to marry you.’”

The next month, when Marie opened Elite Plus, Evangelista switched back, and Marie began making her a star. “Gérald made her career,” says Francesca. “Linda was madly in love with him.” He introduced her to his close friend photographer Peter Lindbergh. “I brought Peter to my place for dinner, and I told him, ‘I bet you when you start working with her, you’re not gonna stop,’” Marie remembers. “One month after, he booked Linda, and for one year and a half he never stopped booking Linda. He was the king of Italian
Vogue
, of
Marie Claire
; he was putting her everywhere.”

Their new alliance proved a boon to both Linda and Gérald. “Elite was never that hot,” says a Paris competitor. “With Linda it got really, really hot. Gérald was using Linda to meet all the photographers, imposing himself in the studios, all the luncheons. I think she’s really a cold fish. But she’s really clever at keeping relationships with photographers.” After a few months Marie and Evangelista came to New York. “We did a list of who we should see, and the first day she went to see Steven [Meisel],” Marie says. Evangelista was the perfect appurtenance for the peculiar photographer. Her desire to make great
pictures transcended all else, and as time went by, she proved willing to be bent and shaped to Meisel’s every whim. “She had a tremendous desire for success,” says Marie. “And she is somebody who knew really quickly to correct what imperfections she had by moving differently, finding the angle for the light. She is no more or less beautiful than many other women, but she wants it really bad.”

By the end of 1986 Gérald Marie had “started speaking about marriage,” Linda said. “I never ever thought he would get married. So I said, ‘Well, put the ring on my finger and then we’ll talk about it.’ And he did. When I was on my way back here for Christmas, we had a dinner. He put the ring on my finger and I went into shock.”

In spring 1987 Christy Turlington returned from a location trip in Russia and went straight into a session with Evangelista and Meisel. “I was helping him,” Christy says. “He’d be looking for girls all the time. I got him to work with Naomi. Now Linda arrived. She was a little bit wary of me, because she knew we were all a team and good friends. I never had anything in common with her in the beginning. We were around her a few times, and she was nice; but I found she was a little competitive.” As it happened, the only pictures that ran from their first shoot together were of Evangelista. Her success with Meisel proved a perfect wedding present. Marie and Evangelista were married in July 1987 at St. Alfred’s Catholic Church, in Evangelista’s hometown.

Things began to happen fast for the Trinity after that. Their success was due, in no small part, to a shakeup at Condé Nast.
Vogue
was in a crisis, a result of the success of the upstart
Elle
, just launched in America. In June 1988 S.I. Newhouse, Jr., and creative director Alex Liberman decided they had to do something. In a stunning coup they fired
Vogue
’s editor, Grace Mirabella, and replaced her with Anna Wintour.

Wintour’s career in fashion began in her hometown of London in 1970, when she went to work for Hearst’s British
Harper’s Bazaar
(now called
Harper’s & Queen
). Moving to New York in 1975, she joined American
Bazaar
under Anthony Mazzola but didn’t last long. “Tony felt the sittings I was doing weren’t right for the American market,” Wintour says. “And he was probably right.” She went on to
Penthouse
publisher Bob Guccione’s women’s magazine,
Viva
, and
New York
magazine. She spurned Condé Nast’s early approaches, although she met with Mirabella. “Grace asked what job she wanted,” says an editor who heard of their encounter.

“Grace, of course I want your job,” Wintour replied.

Finally, in 1983, Liberman lured Wintour to
Vogue
with the new—and purposefully vague—title of Creative Director and a mandate to use her elbows. Liberman says he felt “an absolute certitude I needed this presence. In my innocence I thought she could collaborate with Grace and enrich the magazine. I’m not sure the relationship was the way it should have been.”

Both Wintour and Mirabella felt frustrated. “Things worked differently then,” Wintour says diplomatically. “Grace picked the clothes. There was one point of view. It’s not how we do it now.” Wintour got out in January 1986, when Beatrix Miller, the longtime editor of British
Vogue
, decided to retire. Her new appointment was controversial. Under Miller, British
Vogue
was a whimsical, eccentric magazine, much admired by the fashion crowd, but not terribly realistic. “It was a rare animal,” says Liz Tilberis, who started at the magazine after placing second in a 1969
Vogue
talent contest. Wintour changed it, trading idiosyncrasy for rational uniformity, quirkiness for speed, the strangely erotic for the straightforwardly sexy. Suddenly the magazine looked just like Wintour, in her short skirts, high heels, bobbed hair, and dark glasses.

During Wintour’s first months on the job, unhappiness spilled into the pages of the feisty British press. For a supposedly civil people the British gave Wintour an extraordinarily hard time. They nicknamed her Nuclear Wintour, the Wintour of Our Discontent, and Desperate Dan, for, as the
Evening Standard
put it, “her habit of crashing through editorships as though they were brick walls, leaving behind a ragged hole and a whiff of Chanel.” By April 1987 speculation was fierce that Wintour’s chill reception in London was about to send her scurrying back to America. Pregnant again and often alone in a long-distance marriage, she began discussions with American
Elle
.

“I was having a hard time,” she admits. “It wasn’t a secret.”

Si Newhouse flew to London to see her—and keep her—by offering the editorship of another Condé Nast magazine,
House & Garden
. But Wintour’s eight-month attempt to remake the magazine (renamed
HG
) into a cross-disciplinary journal of style quickly ran into trouble. Things got so bad it was widely believed that Condé Nast operators were fielding an avalanche of subscription cancellations. “It was a horrible time,” Wintour says. “I thought I was doing an interesting magazine.” Meanwhile events outside Condé Nast were conspiring to take it away from her.

As Wintour crossed the Atlantic,
Vogue
still ruled the roost, but things were changing. It was the year of
Elle
. The slick, gorgeously printed Paris-born magazine was growing fast, and suddenly people were noticing it. In 1987
Vogue
’s advertising revenues hit $79.5 million.
Bazaar
—still in a holding pattern under editor Anthony Mazzola—earned $32.5 million.
Elle
, at $39 million, was gaining fast and outselling
Bazaar
. Hearst seemed not to notice, but Condé Nast did. “There was a slight tremor,” Liberman says. “People looked at
Elle
carefully. There was something unconventional and a little new about its approach. It’s quite possible we learned certain lessons.”

Lesson number one? “It seemed a change at the top was necessary,” Newhouse says. “We had a magazine that needed attention.”

As far back as 1986 Liberman had let Grace Mirabella know that something was amiss. But he did it with “words I didn’t quite understand,” she says. “I’m the first to see nothing coming. Even a bus.” Si Newhouse admits that Mirabella’s firing two years later was badly handled. “Alex and I made the decision to change,” he says, and somehow it leaked to Liz Smith, who promptly broadcast the news. “The way it was handled was graceless—without making a pun,” Newhouse continues. “So, fine. But it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision.” Within two days Rupert Murdoch got in touch with Mirabella. A few months later he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a new magazine bearing her name.

Wintour’s first revamped issue of
Vogue
appeared that fall. Linda Evangelista got a makeover at precisely the same moment. In October 1988 Peter Lindbergh convinced her to let Parisian hairstylist Julian D’Is cut off her hair—just as Gérald Marie’s previous charges Shaun Casey and Christine Bolster had done before her. “I was terrified,” Evangelista said. “I cried through the whole thing.” She was canceled from more than a dozen runway shows as a result, but she had the last laugh. “Between December and March I appeared on every
Vogue
cover—British, French, Italian, and American,” she later boasted.

Christy Turlington chose that moment to make herself scarce. In fall 1987 she met Roger Wilson—Shaun Casey’s ex-husband—at a party in Los Angeles. Before his marriage to Casey broke up, Wilson had decided to become an actor and debuted in
Porky’s
, a witless 1982 teen sex comedy that made a fortune. It kick-started his new career but also spelled the end of his marriage to Casey. “He says things didn’t work out because he had other things to do and she was used to having this young kid with a lot of money who was home all the time,” Turlington says. Wilson got a job on a television series. He dated model Kelly LeBrock. “Most of this stuff I found out afterwards,” Turlington says. “I thought he was a cute, sweet, normal guy when I met him.”

Around the same time Turlington did her first big-money job—for Calvin Klein. Bruce Weber was in the midst of shooting Klein’s faux-orgiastic Obsession perfume ads when Turlington flew in for two days. “The shoot was wild,” she recalls. “Tons of people. Guys and girls. The clothes would come off. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’” As the ladylike ads that resulted attest, Turlington kept her clothes on. She didn’t like the pictures. But Klein liked her. And during the fittings for his fashion show in spring 1988, he started questioning her closely about her ambition. Later that day Klein called her. “I have this really crazy idea,” he said. “I love you so much I would marry you, but I already got married. So I want you to be the girl for my new fragrance. Just do me a favor, don’t break me.”

Turlington starts hyperventilating remembering the moment. Eileen Ford tried to talk her out of it. But Turlington wanted to spend more time with her new beau, and being a contract model would allow her that. “I signed very quickly,” she says. “I didn’t have a lawyer. When I got home, Roger read the contract.”

“You’re screwed,” he said.

Though she was to be paid $3 million for eighty days’ work a year over four years, she was locked up. She couldn’t do interviews, editorial spreads, or any other advertising. At first that didn’t matter. The first month of her contract was a busy one. She shot photos with Irving Penn, began work with Richard Avedon on Eternity’s television commercials, and then headed to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot magazine ads with Weber. That’s when the problems started. Weber hadn’t been consulted on Klein’s choice of Turlington. “I think he should have had a voice in who the contract girl was,” she says.

Their first shoot together—inspired by Toni Frissell’s photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Todd, and their daughter—went well. At least Weber thought so. Surrounded by children, Turlington “let her ego go completely,” he says. “Most girls are afraid of not being the star.” By giving up center stage to the children, he concludes, “she was the star of the shooting.” Unfortunately few of the photos ever appeared. “Calvin never ran that many pictures,” Weber says. “You know how it is: You shoot eight dresses, but they really only plan to run two. Christy was used to seeing a lot of pictures of herself. She really felt frustrated, and through that frustration she lost interest.”

Between shoots Turlington moved in with Wilson in West Hollywood, enrolled in literature and writing classes at UCLA, and went stir-crazy. By fall she was ready for a change in her relationship with Calvin Klein. Reports at the time said she’d angered Klein by getting her hair cut without his permis
sion, but the real situation was considerably more complex. “I felt Bruce didn’t like me,” she says. “It would get real uncomfortable on the set. We’d be butting heads without speaking to each other. It was awkward. So I felt, fine, I’ll do my couple days work a year. But I did miss working—a lot.”

Watching from the sidelines while other models worked didn’t help her mood. She’d kept in touch through Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, whose rapid rise coincided with Christy’s departure from the scene. Evangelista had even taken Turlington’s place on jobs she’d been barred from doing. “The year that I disappeared is when a lot happened for Linda,” Christy says. “She did Barneys after I left. I was supposed to go on a trip for Bloomingdale’s to China with Cindy [Crawford], and Linda got my spot.” Despite their initial wariness, they’d become friends. And by mid-1989 Christy was staying in Linda’s New York apartment in the same building where Naomi lived. Visiting them on sets, Christy grew green with envy. “
Then
I got a haircut.”

Christy had just finished a long Calvin Klein job and was taking a few days off in Woodstock with Oribe. As she drove in an open jeep, her hair got tangled in the wind. “I figured they wouldn’t need me for a month or two, so I said, ‘Just cut it,’” she recalls. They made a video of the shearing, laughing and joking about how they were going to get sued. Then Klein’s minions called with a photo assignment. “Uh-oh,” Christy said.