Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (61 page)

S
hortly after Elite Models opened in New York in 1977, Jeanette Christjansen arrived to join her boyfriend, John Casablancas. “It was a critical period for me,” she says. “I was turning thirty. In America nobody knew me. My career was over.” A new generation of models—Esme, Nancy Donahue, Kim Alexis, Kelly Emberg, Carol Alt—had arrived via an Elite recruitment blitz in America’s small local agencies and model schools. Though she worked here successfully for six months, that fall Christjansen got pregnant. “It was a very nice way for me to quit,” she says.

Julian Casablancas was born the next summer, and John and Jeanette finally got married late that year at New York’s City Hall. But his first wife—Elite—was demanding all his time. “America just took us over,” Christjansen says. “The business became his life, and there was nothing left.” Casablancas was doing one-nighters in cities around the world. “I was so happy being a mother,” says Jeanette. “It was no fun to join him, so I didn’t. When I look back, maybe I should have.” Until that time Casablancas had been relatively discreet about his extramarital activities. “He was unfaithful to poor Jeanette from the word go, but she had no idea,” says April Ducksbury. It was an open secret in his agencies, though. “I knew he was sleeping with underage girls, but not big models,” says Elite booker Monique Corey. “John always screwed around, always, the younger the better. I worried that he’d get in trouble with a mother, but it never fazed me. I’m French.”

“Take the whole Elite head sheet,” says Francesca Magugliani. “There were three nos and five yeses.” The affairs never lasted long. “When you reach eighteen, you start thinking and become intelligent,” says Francesca. “The day the girl matured and had a mind of her own, it was finished. John wants adulation.
They’d start talking back to him. In my opinion, John was afraid they’d find out he’s a terribly insecure man, loyal only to himself, born to have fun. When a girl starts questioning what you’re doing, it becomes itchy. He’s afraid of a woman. So he withdrew from them and made the affairs end. John has never left; he makes the girl leave.”

Nearing forty, Casablancas was still a magnetic charmer. “I’ve seen girls scratch at his door,” says photographer Guy Le Baube. “Modeling brings out the worst in girls. But John was very careful. He’s not mercantile.” Many found no fault in his behavior. “OK, he goes out with young girls, but it’s not dirty,” says a woman who owns one of the larger agencies in Paris. “Young girls say yes. I never heard he forced a girl.” And unlike many other men in modeling, Casablancas, by all accounts, never took drugs or offered them.

But then Casablancas made what many perceive as the biggest mistake of his life. He began getting serious about the girls he was sleeping with. And where once they were the children of sophisticated Europeans, now they were Americans, descendants of Puritans. In 1982 Casablancas was thirty-nine when he began courting a barely postpubescent girl from the South. “She was thirteen or fourteen, a baby when she met John,” says Francesca.

Casablancas had dinner one night with photographer John Stember and Gunilla Lindblad’s husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen. Stember was just back from a trip for
Vogue
in Florida. “John had been selling him a new girl who was about thirteen,” Zachariasen says. “He was extremely involved in this girl for some reason.” Stember was telling Casablancas about the horrors of the trip—lost luggage, bad weather, bad moods—when Casablancas interrupted. “What about my young girl?” he demanded.

Finally, Stember admitted that he’d never even shot her. “John was banging his fist on the table,” Zachariasen says. “‘Why didn’t you use this girl?’ Stember said, ‘Because she was brand-new and she was stiff, and the others were broken in.’ John said, ‘My God, what did this poor girl do the whole time?’” “Don’t worry,” Stember replied. “She went to the beach every day. She bought a pail and a spade, and she made sand castles!”

By 1985 the southern girl was gone. “She was very intelligent,” says Francesca. “Then she grew up. She looked at John, and he wasn’t an idol anymore.” The brown-haired, brown-eyed woman—who remained with Elite for many years and is now married and a mother—confirms her affair with Casablancas. “It happened,” she says. “It was a nice part of my life, but I’d prefer it to be unpublished.”

She was gone, but Casablancas had a new source of temptation. That year Elite launched an international competition modeled after Steward Cowley’s failed Model of the Year pageant and the Ford agency’s Face of the ’80s contest, which quickly became an internationally televised event.

Promotional literature for the Look of the Year contest boasted that Elite models had been featured on 60 percent of major magazine covers in the preceding eighteen months, more than all the other New York agencies combined, and that the Elite Group of ten agencies had booked $22 million in business the preceding year. The John Casablancas Career Centers—franchised modeling schools coowned by Kittler and the Casablancas brothers—had also taken off after a rocky start that cost Casablancas and Kittler at least a million dollars. Now fourteen schools had opened, and thirteen more were planned.

Stephanie Seymour, who’d just turned fifteen, was an entrant from San Diego in California’s semifinal for the first Look of the Year. Casablancas chose her as the local winner. But he really preferred her mother. “Stephanie was a charmer, a puppy dog, a pony with long legs,” Casablancas says. “But she was such a baby that there was no way. If I looked at anybody with interest, it was her mom! I was not having any affair with the mother, but she would not have had to ask me twice for me to say yes.”

In November one hundred aspiring models from America and thirty from other countries competed for Elite contracts guaranteeing as much as $200,000 a year at the finals in Acapulco, Mexico. Up against Cindy Crawford, among others, Seymour appeared in a tank T-shirt, suspenders, and a Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairdo. She placed in the top fifteen but didn’t win a contract and returned to school. Throughout her freshman year in high school, she wrote to Casablancas. “The kid was delightful,” he says. “She charmed everybody. She would send little letters to everyone at the agency, and when you’d open the letter, little silver stars fell out.” He responded, urging her to come to New York and join Elite. Seymour’s mother finally convinced her husband in June 1984. “The mother of this model should have kept her daughter out of the way,” says April Ducksbury. “But she wanted her daughter to be a model.”

After testing in New York, Stephanie went to Europe and was booked to shoot the
alta moda
in Rome for Italian
Bazaar
. “I sent her a note saying, ‘We’ll go to the ball, save a dance for me,’” Casablancas says. At the Rome shows Casablancas posed for a picture with her. As she leaned against him, she told
him it was her sixteenth birthday. He was thunderstruck by the change in her. “By that time her physique had changed. She was not anymore a little girl; she was this young woman. Her body was extraordinary—she was long and thin, and the shapes were where they had to be—and her face was gorgeous, with this innocent little-child voice.”

The next fall the child’s body was back in school, but her mind was on modeling. Then she and her mother went to Acapulco as Casablancas’s guest at the second Look of the Year contest. Casablancas’s attentions had the desired effect. Stephanie transferred to professional school in New York and moved into a model apartment—next door to John, Jeanette, and Julian Casablancas.

The next January at the collections in Rome, Stephanie was booked into one of Italian
Harper’s Bazaar
’s model rooms, but she didn’t sleep there. “I saw Stephanie Seymour take her suitcases and move them into John’s bedroom,” says Francesca, whose room was across the hall from John’s. “And that I will never forget. I’m not saying John didn’t entice her. But he’d never slept with her. And then Peppone made a stink because he didn’t want to pay for Stephanie’s room.” Casablancas insisted that she had to keep the room for the sake of appearances.

After Rome Seymour went to Paris, where she worked for the rest of the summer. Back in New York the affair continued. “Stephanie would come over and play with Julian; they were about the same age anyway,” says Francesca, only half-jokingly. “Jeanette would cook dinner for them.” Some of Elite’s bookers were outraged. “She was living with John, and her mother thought it was the greatest thing in the world,” says one. “Stephanie was a little kid. I found it shameful.”

Casablancas was walking a fine line. “He was crazy, madly in love,” Francesca says. He says his marriage was failing. “We were beginning to have problems. I was losing interest. I’m dating Stephanie on the side. Jeanette knew about it because I’d spoken with her. Obviously she could see it; she’s not a dummy.”

Jeanette Casablancas says she
was
in the dark, but she wasn’t for long. Seymour shared an apartment with another contestant from the 1983 Look of the Year contest, Hunter Reno, whose aunt Janet later became the attorney general of the United States. In midsummer Hunter Reno busted John and Stephanie.

Reno “was living at the model apartment with Stephanie and two other girls,” Francesca recalls. Casablancas was at Alain Kittler’s house in Ibiza with Seymour when he got a call from Elite’s lawyer. “The night before, Hunter Reno had come over and told Jeanette everything,” Francesca says. “Details, dates, everything.” Though she’d had her suspicions, Seymour was the first girl Jeanette ever
knew
about. She sent Casablancas a telegram and told him their marriage was over. He wanted to come back to New York and talk about it. She said no. “I think I would have strangled him,” she says. They didn’t see each other again for months. Then Jeanette asked for a divorce.

Stephanie Seymour photographed by Marco Glaviano

Despite it all, almost a decade later Christjansen has kind words for her ex. “I don’t feel he left me for a young girl,” she says. “Maybe he went through his menopause. Men get funny at forty, and girls were serving themselves up on silver platters to him. He didn’t want to leave; but he did things, and when I found out, I just went crazy. I didn’t even let him explain. I told him, ‘If you want to do this, do it a hundred percent.’ Sometimes I wonder, Should I have reacted differently? I care a lot about John. I couldn’t accept him as a husband, but as a person, I still respect him very much. In a way it’s courageous. John lives the moment. He’s always had a good heart.”

Though Stephanie’s mother knew about the relationship, her father didn’t. So at Thanksgiving Casablancas flew to San Diego to meet him. “After dinner, he said, ‘OK, ladies, you go to sleep,’ and him and I, we got drunk together,” Casablancas recalls. “We talked all night, and by the end of the night he said, ‘I think that you really love my daughter. I think that you’re taking a lot of risks, but if you want to see her and she wants to see you, I’m not gonna stand in the middle.’”

“[John] is a brainwasher,” Seymour later told an interviewer. “He convinced my father that he loved me more than anybody in this world, and my father gave his consent…. My dad just didn’t even want him to leave.” On their return John and Stephanie moved into a luxury apartment on Fifty-seventh Street.

The next summer—just after the breakup of his marriage and his affair with Stephanie, now seventeen, made gossip columns—Casablancas arrived at a party in St.-Tropez, at the villa of Régine, the nightclub owner. Lauren Hutton, in the south of France filming a miniseries, was at a table with several other Americans when the tanned, beaming Casablancas strolled past, Seymour under one arm and an equally young girl under the other. “Who’s she, the mother’s helper?” Hutton cracked.

Apparently unaware that she wasn’t a fan, Casablancas later approached Hutton. She sneeringly addressed him as “Jimmy Morocco” and told Stephanie and the other model, “Run for your lives.” Casablancas says that only Bob Zagury’s intervention kept him from punching Hutton. “I thought she was a dyke, so I felt like treating her like a man,” Casablancas says. “Bob said, ‘She’s not worth it, just leave,’ and I left. But I was ready to break her rabbit teeth, I was so angry.”