Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (66 page)

In 1989 Ford executive Joe Hunter brought Dieter Esch to meet Jerry Ford. Ford admits that the price he asked—$20 million—was “far beyond what our earnings should command on a multiple basis.” Then, late in 1992, Esch returned. A condition of Esch’s new offer “was us and the children out,” Jerry Ford says. “I thought that was OK.” Eileen and Jerry Ford expressed their willingness to sell to him despite his past and the fact that their daughter Katie actually wanted to stay.

Esch’s intelligence-gathering operation had served him well. He’d learned that Katie and Bill Ford’s inevitable progress to the agency’s throne was a bone in Hunter’s throat and and that of the women’s division head, Marion Smith. It couldn’t have been easy for Katie either. She couldn’t make deals on her own. When she tried to hire Beth Boldt to run a board at Ford New York while she was in Paris, “Joe and Marion were threatened,” says Boldt. “They flipped.”

Clever Esch insisted on dealing with each of Ford’s shareholders separately. Hunter and Smith met him in mid-November. Esch said his deal with the family was set and he wanted the duo to stay and run the company. “I was a little bit surprised, knowing his background, that he’d gotten as far as he did
with the Ford family,” says Smith. She was also unnerved by Esch’s hard sell. “Dieter needs to rule the world,” she says. “I wondered what would happen to anyone who got in his way.”

Hunter found Esch’s ideas interesting. “Taking the model business global is the ultimate concept,” he says. “Really expanding and being every place was what I always wanted to do. We thought about it. Then we sat down with Jerry and talked alternatives. It forced the issue.” When it emerged that none of them trusted Esch, says Katie, “we discussed it, and we all liked the idea of running Ford together.” With that, they spurned Esch’s offer.

In May 1993 Ford announced a restructuring. Jerry and Eileen would no longer run the business. Smith, Hunter, and Katie Ford were named to a three-headed presidency. They soon absorbed Clip, one of the best small agencies in Paris, and its director, Jean-Michel Pradwilov, after Clip’s backer, Jean-Pierre Dollé of Paris Planning, died late in 1994.

“Dieter Esch made us sit down and outline our future,” says Katie Ford. “Ford is a very strong name. We’ve opened offices in Arizona and Argentina. We feel those are emerging markets. We also want to expand based on what a strong name Ford is. We’ve talked about licensing the name on all kinds of products, about opening a beauty division for hair and makeup. There are ways to expand when a business matures, which this business is doing. In hindsight it’s amazing we hadn’t sat down and discussed it.”

John Casablancas, too, was initially taken with Esch’s offer for his agency. “It’s a very simple story,” he said at the time. “We are service providers. We don’t have solid assets or inventory. The fact is, we have a business that is very fragile. Look at the Fords. Their business was worth much more ten years ago than it is now. That will happen to us, too, unless we become a more structured corporation. So the dream is to sell.”

The deal was to work like this: A new Swiss company was to be formed. Esch would contribute Wilhelmina. Investors he had gathered would pay for Ford and Elite. Esch would run the holding company while the model managers managed the models. “We figured he would probably make a good profit by overvaluing Wilhelmina, but that’s normal,” Casablancas added, laughing.

The Esch juggernaut first faltered in March 1993, when the Ford deal fell through. Elite stayed interested through the spring, but once the Fords dropped out, it was less inviting to potential investors. Other factors also worked against Esch—among them his reputation and the fact that his holding company would be a Swiss entity controlled by a foreign national.
Finally, on June 4, Casablancas sent a fax to all his partners, clients, models, and friends, acknowledging the talks with Esch but reporting that the deal was dead.

As with Ford, the end of the deal proved to be a boon to Elite. “It was a very amusing exercise,” says Casablancas. “It caused an extraordinary soul-searching and introspection. We scrutinized every element of the company. There are lots of possibilities. After twenty-five years it rekindled my interest. And I’m sure Alain Kittler, who loves deals, has acquired a taste for mergers and acquisitions and sales and so on.”

Just as Esch was forming his master plan, his inspiration, Mark McCormack, was having a similar idea. The sports agent had owned two model agencies for more than a dozen years, but he’d never made anything of them. Indeed, they were the only stain on his reputation for keen business acumen.

McCormack had retained his interest in modeling even after his brief representation of Jean Shrimpton ended. He’d met Veruschka through Shrimpton and tried to set up endorsement deals for her, including the ill-fated Veruschka Vodka. Then he picked up an English model named Maudie James. “She was still an active model,” McCormack recalls, “and she wanted traditional bookings.” McCormack’s International Management Group had more than thirty agents, but they were “totally indifferent to modeling,” he says. So he backed a London agency.

McCormack also attempted to start a New York agency, Legends, with partners who were ex-models and agency executives, but after a promising start in 1981 it foundered. Nonetheless, it limped on for years, until McCormack installed Chuck Bennett, an IMG agent, early in 1992. Bennett believed the model agency was being wasted. “Instead of being an eight-hundred-pound gorilla who wasn’t sitting anywhere, we needed to become a credible player, and that required a credible reorganization,” he says. Bennett changed the staff, divested all the agency’s models, hired scouts around the world, and started rebuilding from scratch. He also dropped the name Legends and made the agency part of IMG. The London office that had operated for years under the name of its founder, ex-model Laraine Ashton, was similarly renamed.

Top models began signing up. Niki Taylor was one of the first. Liv Tyler arrived not long after her agency, Spectrum, blew up. In September 1993 Lauren Hutton walked in the door, followed by Carol Alt. They’d smelled the promise in IMG’s pitch. “The structure we already have is such that if you’re Lauren Hutton, you’ll be able to exploit what you are throughout the world,”
Bennett says. “Arnold Palmer, Rod Laver, and Jackie Stewart are all still with IMG,” he adds, referring to three aging sports stalwarts in the agency’s stable. “I don’t think that happens in the modeling business. We have seventy-five people in an office in Tokyo, not some booker in blue jeans in New York, wondering how to find the right guy at Dentsu advertising. Dieter and John can open modeling agencies. We have sixty-two offices dedicated to helping models make money beyond modeling—in publishing, events, television. They don’t have the money or the expertise to do that. We can exploit their names, reputations, and excellence around the world.” Bennett plans to open IMG Models offices in major markets, buying existing agencies when possible. “We really believe models have arrived,” he says.

Looking around, you’d have to agree. The early nineties have seen Aaron Spelling’s
Models, Inc
. join such nonfiction shows as
Fashion Television, House of Style
, and
Style with Elsa Klensch
on television; Australian swimsuit star Elle MacPherson’s appearance in the film
Sirens;
the publication of
Top Model
, a new magazine from the publishers of
Elle;
the release of calendars by Kathy Ireland, MacPherson, Claudia Schiffer, and Niki Taylor; and near-daily round-the-world coverage of such important news as the status of Cindy Crawford’s thing with Richard Gere (terminal), Elaine Irwin and John Mellencamp (holding steady), and Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield (heading for the altar).

Strangely, just as the modeling business was poised to get bigger, models got smaller. The waifs, as the new generation was called, seemed like both a reaction to the excesses of the supermodels and a perfect reflection of a time of diminished expectations—in fashion and life. “The movement happened because we needed a change,” says Polly Mellen, who’d moved from
Vogue
to a new beauty magazine,
Allure
. And just as in the sixties the signs of changing times first appeared in England.

Sarah Doukas was a teenager, working in an antiques market on London’s King’s Road in 1972, when someone took her picture and sent her to an agency. For three years she modeled and sold antiques in London and Paris, before changing careers and managing a punk rock band, The Criminals, at the end of the seventies, when punk rock swept England. A few years later she met and married an American musician, the lead singer of a band called Earthquake. They moved to San Francisco, where they had a child and lived until 1982.

Earthquake had disbanded, and Doukas needed a job. A photographer friend sent her to Laraine Ashton. In six years there she rose from junior assistant to running the place, booking models like Jerry Hall and David Bailey’s then wife Marie Helvin. Then, with the help of the rock band U2’s lawyer, she put together a business plan for her own agency and began seeking backers, including Virgin Records tycoon Richard Branson, whose brother was one of her friends. In 1987 he agreed to give her interest-free loans until the agency, which she called Storm, got on its feet.

Working out of her bedroom, she recruited two bookers and began searching for girls. She found many of them on the street. “Wherever I was going, I was looking,” she says. “I found a great girl outside a garage in Battersby, in her school uniform.” Another discovery had pink and green hair. Clearly Doukas had a different kind of eye.

Once she’d gathered seven girls, she took their test photographs on a trip to Paris, Milan, and Japan. “So things progressed,” says her younger brother, Simon Chambers, who joined the company, computerized its accounts, and acted—he laughs—as “a reluctant babe magnet.” Fashion editors soon came sniffing around. Harriet Jagger of British
Elle
lived a street away, “and she would walk by on her way to work and come in and see who I had new, nearly every day,” Sarah says.

Sarah and Simon were on their way home from a scouting trip to Los Angeles and New York in 1988 when Sarah spotted a scrawny fourteen-year-old at Kennedy Airport. Kate Moss, a schoolgirl from Croydon, and her travel agent father had been waiting three days for standby seats back to England, where they were expected at a wedding. Kate’s father was arguing with people at the counter when Doukas spotted them. Luckily they made the flight. “As soon as the seat belt sign switched off, we rushed over,” Sarah says.

Kate’s father had seen Doukas on television and knew she was legitimate. The next day Kate’s skeptical mother agreed to accompany her to Storm. “She thought it was major con,” Kate recalled.

“I didn’t think I was going to change the face of modeling,” Doukas says. “But I’d found this amazing-looking girl. She came into the office, and she did a job immediately.” Doukas called all the magazines and faxed photographs of Moss to everyone she knew. “Nobody was interested,” she says. Moss was only five feet seven inches. Her career started slowly. “She was in school, and I don’t ever agree with taking anybody out of school,” Doukas says. “We worked on the holidays and stuttered along for a year. But she wasn’t greatly interested in school, and then she left, and then we started. Every day I said, ‘I’m going to make you a star.’ I didn’t know I was going to make her a superstar.”

Kate Moss photographed (as Anna Wintour?) by Peter Lindbergh for
Harper’s Bazaar

Late in 1989 a young photographer named Corinne Day spotted a Polaroid of Moss and booked her for a shoot for the trend-setting English youth-cult magazine
The Face
. It was looking for a face to represent the magazine, and Kate’s clicked. Her first appearance was in March. Her first cover was in May.

Though she worked successfully for the next two years, Moss’s real break came in 1992, when she returned to America to shoot a cover for
Harper’s Bazaar
. Earlier that year Hearst Magazines in New York had poached Elizabeth Tilberis, who’d succeeded Anna Wintour as editor of British
Vogue
, and installed her as the American fashion magazine’s new editor in chief. For a quarter century Condé Nast had been the American magazine king of fashion, and its longtime rival, Hearst, had seemed rudderless. Hiring Tilberis was a bold move in Hearst’s quest to restore itself to glossy glory.

It would be an uphill battle. Through the early eighties
Bazaar
had registered consistent gains, more than doubling ad pages between 1977 and 1984. But in 1985 ad pages started falling, and revenue was flat. The downward trend continued, and by decade’s end there were constant rumors in bitchy fashion circles that
Bazaar
editor Anthony Mazzola’s days were numbered.

Elizabeth Tilberis had joined British
Vogue
during the reign of Wintour’s predecessor, Bea Miller. When Miller retired, Wintour “made changes, of course,” Tilberis says. “Excellent changes. It wasn’t the same as Bea’s magazine. We did less whimsy. We did a lot of running on the street.” Much as she approved, Tilberis almost went to work for Ralph Lauren in 1987, saying she was tired of traveling. She stayed in London after Wintour quit, she says, because “you don’t get offered the editorship of
Vogue
too often in life.”