Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (68 page)

The image of City was set by its first star, Juliette. “The way she looked was so different,” Despointes says. “She had a profile like Elvis Presley, but she was blond and had fine bones. And she didn’t want to be a model. She didn’t give a damn. She had a lot of character. She wouldn’t sell herself. She’d do the opposite, and it made people want her even more.” Next came Felicitas, a girl photographer David Hamilton found on a nudist beach. “She’s weird enough to be your type,” he told Despointes.

“I was concerned about them,” she says, “and not just as models. Who would they
be
?” Over the years she launched the careers of Cecilia Chancellor, Laeticia, Claudia, Carla Bruni, Lara Harris, Suzanne Lanza, Kristin McEnemey, Marie-Sophie, and Vanessa Duve. “I put out a type of girl that didn’t exist,” she says. “It was my taste, and it became the standard. Most agents don’t work as an artist. They go with the flow or their dicks, not the sensibility of the street.”

City was established by the early eighties. “I felt like I was on a big spiral,” Despointes says. “Every girl was knocking on our door, but we didn’t want them. We wanted to find our own. I didn’t realize I was successful. But then all the photographers started coming to the agency. We got Christie Brinkley and Kim Alexis, girls from big agencies, because I felt I had nothing to lose.”

Like Martin, Despointes’s gods were creativity and personality. Unfortunately she treated business as a lesser deity, so there were problems. “Everyone was attacking me,” Despointes says. “Eileen Ford and John Casablancas were trying to take my models. I had to go everywhere with them. It was that bad.” Clients thought City’s girls had an attitude problem. “They fought with everyone,” Despointes says. “My girls were threatening, smart. People thought they were impossible and didn’t know how to handle them. I told my girls, ‘Make them respect you. Don’t be a phony or an asshole. If they pull a switch on you, fuck it, walk out.’ Then I’d raise hell, and they’d get mad at
me
!”

Happy models gave great word of mouth. “I would defend the girl,” says Despointes. “I wasn’t selling a carpet.” When Despointes pulled a model off a set in Italy because she’d been lied to about money, the client told the girl Despointes was crazy. “They said my girls were impossible and I was spoiling
the business,” she says. “They wanted me out, dead. I told them
they
were going nowhere. At the time they didn’t want to hear what I had to say. Now they all want smart girls.”

In 1983 Despointes opened a City desk at Wilhelmina in New York. “I thought it would be interesting to have a base there,” she says. “But they couldn’t understand our concept, and things turned sour.” In March 1984 Despointes disappeared from Wilhelmina and resurfaced with a new agency. Its name was Name.

“We knocked everyone’s socks off,” says Sara Foley-Anderson, who quit her job at Wilhelmina to join. “What was so amazing about Louise was that she encouraged girls to be more than models. They weren’t just something to mold.”

But after an abortive attempt to open City in Miami, Despointes veered off course. “I didn’t want more, but I was caught in a spiral. More models. More employees.” The employees she’d left in charge in Paris resented the time she spent in New York. “It became uncontrollable,” she says. “It didn’t suit my personality anymore, but I couldn’t detach.” Instead she started taking drugs. “I took a lot of drugs,” she says. “I was a heroin addict for three years when I had Name. I wanted out, but I didn’t know it yet.” Modeling had claimed another victim.

Despointes’s account of how she lost City and Name is a confusing swirl. Sometime in the late eighties, she says, she got a call from one of her employees in Paris telling her City was bankrupt. She believes money was stolen—a lot of money—but she was “totally confused,” she admits.

Finally, in 1991, her financiers at Models S.A. in Switzerland took over, and Despointes left the business. “I was so caught up with money and lawyers.” She sighs. “It was suicide. Name was stolen from me. It’s a very long story, like a soap opera. I’d quit drugs, but I was dying, trying to work and run a lawsuit with five lawyers, and nobody could make any sense out of what was going on. All I could do was quit, good-bye. I left all my money in the company. Every girl was paid. I walked away, abandoned everything I owned. But I wanted to get out.” She smiles. “And anyway, everything I had to do was done.”

Besides Eileen Ford, the only agent Despointes says she respects is Frances Grill, the founder of Click. The daughter of a longshoreman, Brooklynite Grill worked in the coat room of the Village Gate nightclub in New York’s Greenwich Village before becoming an agent for photographers Jeanloup Sieff, Frank Horvath, Oliviero Toscani, Fabrizio Ferri, and Barry McKinley. In
1980, when her marriage to a Swedish menswear designer broke up, she went to work for an agency called Ten. A year later, when it went out of business, Grill inherited several of its male models and opened a place of her own with $30, 000 raised mortgaging her house. She named it Click in tribute to “my photographers,” she says.

Grill had spotted a void in the model market. “Eileen Ford had given dignity to modeling,” Grill said at the time, “but after all these years in the business, she represents a stereotype of what beauty is about.” Wilhelmina had just died, Zoli was dying, and Elite “has grown so large, models feel a bit at loose ends,” Grill observed. “Photographers crave new images. The images on the market, though beautiful, didn’t reflect where fashion was going.” Grill thought men were where fashion was going and determined to sell them, not as props, but as “beings in their own right.”

Bruce Weber, who’d just emerged as the greatest photographer of men since Hoyningen-Huene, shot Click’s first head sheet. In the age of AIDS Weber’s homoerotic fascination with heterosexual athletes changed men’s fashion photography forever, banishing the rugged, often gay male models of the old school to the sidelines in favor of fresh faces found by Weber on beaches and college playing fields. One of those discoveries, surfer Buzzy Kerbox, put Click on the map when the agency negotiated an exclusive contract for him with designer and advertising innovator Ralph Lauren. Click really took off in 1982, though, when Isabella Rossellini, the half-Swedish daughter of director Roberto Rossellini and actress Ingrid Bergman, asked Grill for a home-cooked Swedish Christmas dinner. That night Grill suggested to the twenty-nine-year-old Italian television interviewer that she could make a fortune as a model. A $2 million contract with Lancôme and six magazine covers followed in a few months.

Grill had a knack for publicity. As
Vanity Fair
later put it, Click’s specialty was “quirky models who didn’t exactly fit.” Her models were the wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong weight, the wrong color. Wrong was right. After Attila, a long-haired hunk who was part of the Steven Meisel-Teri Toye clique, got a Calvin Klein ad, he insured his hair with Lloyd’s of London. Grill also signed up transsexual Toye and bald Jenny O.

Rossellini was the first of a series of all-star models to join Click. By mid-1983 Grill had signed the bullfighter Dominguin’s daughter Paola, Isabelle (daughter of Group Captain Peter) Townshend, Linn (daughter of Liv) Ullman, Tahnee (daughter of Raquel) Welch, Robbie (daughter of Tommy) Chong, Chris (son of Peter) Lawford, and Cecelia (daughter of Gregory)
Peck. She’d also proved that unlike the huge Elite and Ford battleships, her modeling speedboat could turn on a dime. That same year she rode the cutting edge with eccentric models like the wan midwesterner Bonnie Berman, Elisabetta Ramella, who refused to cut her long, thick, curly hair, and Talisa Soto, one of the first Hispanic modeling stars. “I wanted to expand the conception of what was beautiful,” she said. “America is not only made up of blond-haired, blue-eyed girls.” Of course, if you wanted classic looks, Click had them, too. Grill booked Elle MacPherson, the Australian beauty who went on to marry Gilles Bensimon, finally injecting some sex into the image of the droll French photographer with coke-bottle eyeglasses. And every week there was a new Bruce Weber discovery, carpenters, farm boys, clammers, volleyball players, swimmers. With Weber’s help, Click gave birth to buff.

Grill was turned down the first few times she tried to join IMMA, New York’s society of model managers, formed at the time that the agents returned their employment agency contracts. After those rebuffs Grill refused to join, cementing her status as a renegade. Dedicated to the idea of maintaining a model boutique for contrarian tastes, she carved out a niche for herself where she would reign, essentially unchallenged for years. Only in the nineties would more American boutiques pop up, and only a few matched Click’s sophistication.

The model business remains, as it has always been, a seething morass of beauty and money, grace and envy, sensuality and lust, yearning and backstabbing, glamour, greed, and glory beyond measure. Models are richer and more independent. Elite and Ford are still fighting each other. New agencies come and go, and the story is always the same. A booker has left another agency with a couple of models. The hooker’s backer is—surprise!—a rich man. “I know a billion rich, powerful men who’d give me money to open an agency and let me stay in the red just to have the chance to be a nebbish with a tall, beautiful woman sitting next to him,” says ex-model Serene Cicora, now a booker with Mary Webb Davis in Los Angeles.

The latest topic of conversation in modeling is the resurgence of drugs—particularly heroin—among a clique of models who, in macabre homage, reportedly call themselves Gia’s Girls, in honor of Gia Carangi, the bisexual addict who had a brief career in modeling and then died of AIDS. But self-hatred and destructive behavior, too, are nothing new in modeling.

The models of the moment are Elite’s Nadja Auermann, a German with a pneumatic body and white-blond hair, and Ford’s Bridget Hall, a sixteen-year-old Texan whose childhood has already ended in photographic studios and on
fashion runways, where she’ll be admired, inspected, and—most likely—tossed aside as soon as the next hot face comes along. “Except for rare smart ones like Lauren Hutton, they still feel totally unempowered,” says a former
Vogue
editor. “It’s a very aimless existence. What do they do all day except stand around and do what other people tell them? They come in and complain, ‘Nobody likes me for anything except my pretty face.’ You have to bite your tongue.”

There are people in the business who truly love models for themselves and not just for the money they earn. And at the head of the class are Eileen Ford, the Last Mother of Modeling, and the First Boyfriend, John Casablancas. One of them can’t wait to get out of the business. The other can’t imagine ever leaving. But don’t make any bets on which is which. In modeling, nothing is what it seems.

When he is in New York City (as opposed to his other homes, Southampton, Paris, and Ibiza), John Casablancas lives in a country house in the city, a duplex penthouse apartment on the roof of a building with a long reputation for housing models and other young transients. The apartment has an open kitchen and living room, off which is a carpeted “pillow room,” stocked with a huge television and several teddy bears. Books are everywhere, shelved, stacked, and stuck in corners, They include worn and well-read classics, bestsellers, books on fashion photography, and an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. There are also several antique globes, a stand-up piano, several bar trays, dozens of framed family photos, and two walls covered with photographs, mostly of beautiful women, some of them nude. One of them, wearing only a garter belt, is caught kissing Casablancas on the street.

It is midmorning, and Casablancas is having breakfast. He is dressed in black slacks and a blue cashmere polo. He sits on a turquoise suede sofa, where his third wife, Aline, delivers a cup of herbal tea, some toast, and a piece of tinfoil with John’s drugs for the day, an assortment of vitamins that he swallows, one at a time, over the course of the next half hour.

Casablancas, now fifty, met Aline Wermelinger (a virgin, a junior in high school) in 1992, at that year’s Look of the Year semifinals in her native Brazil. Discovered by an Elite scout in Brazil, the sixteen-year-old had traveled the hundred miles from her hometown, Cordeiro, to Rio de Janiero for the contest, and made it to the finals in New York despite the small flaw Casablancas spotted on her nose. She told the judges her favorite book was the Bible and God was her idol.

Casablancas says he didn’t really notice her at first. “And she didn’t pay the slightest attention to me,” he adds. “She had cute boyfriends. We were abso
lutely not attracted. I was older than her father by eleven months. She is a Baptist, she’s very observant of the rules of her church, and I’m the opposite.” They went out for dinner one night in New York nonetheless. “It was her birthday, and we toasted, and I gave her a little innocent kiss,” he says. “I think it kind of had an effect.” But after kissing him, Aline went back to flirting with younger men at the table. “So I left, and she went back to Brazil,” Casablancas says.

Not long afterward, though, he found himself talking about Aline on the phone with one of the directors of Elite in Brazil. “He said, ‘I think she would be happy to hear from you.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ but I gave her a call, and we started this thing by telephone, and then we arranged to meet.”

Casablancas, who counts Portuguese among the half dozen languages he speaks, arranged a booking for Aline in Miami, equidistant between New York and Rio. They started seeing each other there, “but we were not having an affair,” he points out. “We were just dating.” That December Casablancas went to Cordeiro and met Aline’s accountant father and her seamstress mother. “I saw her family and her house, and I asked for permission to marry her, and her father and mother looked at her and said, ‘You want to marry this old man?’” But her mother decided her suitor was a gentleman, and three months later a wedding ensued, one day after Rio’s renowned Carnival.

In what must be a first for him, Casablancas says that he and Aline didn’t go to bed together until after they married. “It’s the first time I got married in church,” he adds. “We decided to go the traditional route. It was a big gamble. But I loved the values that she brought.” Casablancas knew he was asking for trouble, marrying another teenager. Alain Kittler, for example, declined to attend, telling a mutual friend, “I went to number one and number two; why go to number three when there will probably be a number four?”