Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Zoli had grown close to a former Wagner model, Bennie Chavez, who’d become a stockbroker. In 1970 Zoli and Chavez decided to open their own agency. “He took half my male models,” says Wagner, who sold what remained of his agency, and, after failing as a singer, moved to Los Angeles, where he’s been a makeup artist in a department store ever since.

  That October Zoli announced his arrival with a poster shot by Richard Avedon of the agency’s twenty models, all in the nude. “It opened doors,” Zoli deadpanned. He started trading men with Francois Lano in Paris and claimed $100,000 in bookings his first year. “It was OK, but it was not enough,” says Vickie Pribble, who’d joined the agency.

  In 1972 Chavez and Zoli decided to expand and bought a town house. They installed the agency on the lower two floors and lived upstairs, each on a separate floor, with a shared living floor in between. The agency’s new home became a social center. “There was never a dull moment,” says Bennie Chavez. Their parties attracted Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, David Bowie, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Sue Mengers, Robert Altman, Lauren Hutton, Woody Allen, and David Geffen. “At one point, Genevieve Waite chased Mick Jagger up the stairs,” Bob Colacello wrote about one party. “Her hair was soaking wet and his jacket had tomato juice all over it.”

  “All those guys were there for girls,” says one of Zoli’s bookers. “It was voluntary, but the girls would fall at their feet, of course. It was all about who was gonna get who. The girls were into it. Going to bed with lots of people was what sophisticated people were doing. It was the beginning of the days of cocaine, champagne, and airplanes. Gays really came to the forefront. You had straight men trying to make people think they were gay. It became fashionable for girls to be gay. Everything was wide open, fun, and accepting.” And Zoli and his fashionable cabal were in the lead.

  Zoli in the 1970s

  Zoli, photographer unknown, courtesy Lydia Rendessy Oliver

  By 1975 Zoli had earned the sobriquet Svengali of the Strange. Bruce Cooper called the agency Zoli’s zoo. But Cooper may have been a little jealous; Zoli’s weirdos were bringing in several million dollars in bookings a year. “It created a whirlwind,” says former Zoli model David Rosenzweig. “Zoli selected people for how they behaved as well as how they looked. People wanted to meet Zoli’s models. Willie was like Ford was like Stewart. Zoli was like nothing else.”

  Although she was introduced as “the most powerful woman in the modeling world” when she appeared on the ABC network’s Dick Cavett Show in January 1971, Eileen Ford was obviously not invulnerable to the upheavals of the age.

  The first guest on the show was Carolyn Kenmore, a model who’d written an autobiography. She told of being pressured by men for sex because “so many models are promiscuous.” Ford was the next guest, but she never got to talk about her book, Secrets of the Model’s World. Wearing a long blood-colored dress that covered her to the neck, a knotted strand of pearls, and her hair in a bun that was almost as tight as her expression, she looked like a Victorian scold as she came onto the set, sputtering at Kenmore.

  “At the risk of being rude, it’s a lot of hogwash,” she said of the model’s tale. “I’m really … I’m enraged. If I had to run a business in which girls went to some filthy little office and some little pig of a guy tried to proposition them, how could I go home at night and face my children? I represent 125 girls, none of whom … I’m sorry. I’m not sore. I’m outraged. It doesn’t happen at the Ford Agency and it needn’t happen in our business…. It doesn’t happen with professional models. In the first place, they cost too much by the hour. You can get a lot of girls to do a lot of things for a lot less than you can get a model.”

  Hoots of derision rose from the audience, leaving Ford with her mouth open and a finger in midair. Kenmore protested, saying a Ford model had sent her to just such a man. Ford said she “eliminated” and “censored” such “mangy types,” sending her models only to the likes of Avedon, Penn, and Bill Helburn, who “would faint dead at such a suggestion.”

  “Oh, come on, Eileen,” Kenmore spit back. “That’s ridiculous. They’re all men.” The audience burst into applause.

  The confrontation continued as Cavett asked questions. Can a model survive without Eileen Ford? “Lots of models are not with us,” Ford said. “We get a lot more of the cream of the work.”

  “You have such a controlled voice when you’re angry,” Cavett said a bit later.

  “I’m not angry now,” Ford replied.

  “But it sounds exactly like it did when you were,” Cavett replied, breaking for a commercial.

  A moment later the writer Gwen Davis joined the group on Cavett’s stage. “It’s a really warm kind of communication going on here,” she observed.

  “I guess there is a certain tension in the air,” Cavett admitted.

  “In the air, in the green room, on-stage.” Davis laughed. Looking at Ford, she said it frightened her that “this lovely lady … would go to Europe and pick up four or five faces like broodmares, only not for breeding purposes…. It’s a great deal like pimping, except the girls don’t get to have any fun…. It’s a very sad premise that a girl should be put on display to make other ladies feel that they can never look that good, but must try. But enough about the flesh business.”

  Stroking her neck, Ford replied, “I never worry about fat people worrying about thin people—”

  “That’s very constructive,” Davis interrupted.

  “—because slender people bury the dead,” Ford concluded.

  Later Charlotte Curtis, the women’s page editor of The New York Times, joined the panel. “Models are used as agents of sales,” she said, “and I think to use humans in this way is unfortunate.”

  Ford was ready with a reply. “I just have to ask you this, Miss Curtis, and as you’re a client of mine, I realize I’m treading on very thin ice and all of you have rapier wits and I’m sort of a square. I understand all that. But why do you have models in The New York Times if you think they’re exploiting women?”

  “Our job is to report the news,” Curtis replied weakly, drawing derisive laughs from the crowd. “When we report Seventh Avenue, we photograph the clothes as they are shown.” Attempting to rally, she concluded that fashion is like war. “We must report atrocities, if you will.”

  The single-minded extravagance Diana Vreeland championed was out of fashion. “She was going too far,” says an editor who worked for her. She was “too flamboyant, too over-the-top. You were beginning to feel restraint. It was time to move on, and she couldn’t make the change.” Alex Liberman decided Vreeland had to go.

  Called back from a sitting in California, Vreeland’s assistant, Grace Mirabella, was handed the daunting task of updating Vogue for an era of antifashion and women’s liberation. After brief stints at Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, Mirabella had arrived at Vogue in 1951 and risen from a job checking store credits for captions to become Vreeland’s assistant. As the sixties ended, Mirabella had seen Liberman grow irritated with Vreeland. The clothes Vreeland showed often didn’t even exist in stores. “She wasn’t interested in deadlines,” says Mirabella. “And women weren’t buying fashion magazines. Circulation was plummeting. Vogue had nothing to do with anything going on in the world—zero—it was all icing and no content.”

  A new age had dawned. Polly Mellen sums up the change at Vogue: “I went home one day, and the next, Diana’s red office, the leopard rug, her Rigaud candles, her scent, her being were gone. The walls were beige.”

  Mirabella and Liberman retooled the magazine for the new, natural-look working woman. “My Vogue was more accessible,” Mirabella says. “I have a conviction. Women aren’t inanimate objects you hang clothes on. You don’t have to make fools of them.” The wisdom of Liberman’s choice is spelled out in circulation numbers. Until her time Vogue had held only a slight lead on Bazaar. Under Mirabella, circulation rose from 400,000 in 1971 to 1,245,000 in 1987.

  Richard Avedon stayed
on, but a little sadly. “The period Diana was there was the last time I could express myself honestly in fashion photography,” he says. The exotic models were gone, replaced by wholesome Lauren Hutton and healthy Patti Hansen. “It went from complicated and intelligent beauty to the girl next door who’d moved away,” Avedon says. “It was the beginning of fashion at its lowest common denominator, the pandering to mass appeal.”

  APOLLONIA VAN RAVENSTEIN * LOUISE DESPOINTES * GUNILLA LINDBLAD * SHELLEY SMITH

  The era of Vreelandian extravagance was over. The revolution she’d led broadened the audience for fashion and fashion pictures exponentially, but now the market for creativity was shrinking. What had been primarily an artistic exchange became an overtly commercial one. Magazines and advertisers were worrying about selling dresses now, not about creating great photographs for a fashion elite. So as the sixties ended, fashion photography changed once again. In Europe photographers like Jeanloup Sieff, Guy Bourdin, and Helmut Newton, who’d all started before Blow-Up and survived it, were in their heyday, shooting dark pictures as unforgiving as they were unforgettable, full of the violence and sex, the Thanatos and Eros, that suffused life in the late sixties and early seventies. But these individualistic, often uncontrollable photographers were edged, imperceptibly, out to the fringes by a new breed of compliant lensmen who only pushed the pay envelope.

  New photographers—especially Mike Reinhardt, Gilles Bensimon, Patrick Demarchelier, Alex Chatelain, John Stember, and Arthur Elgort—were emerging in Paris as the leaders of what became known as the French Mob, specialists in 35 mm street photography, happy snaps that simply denied society’s downbeat mood. Though none of them alone was as influential as Avedon, Dahl-Wolfe, or Penn, together their impact was tremendous. New model agencies soon sprang up to serve them. Sympathetic gay men like François Lano and motherly figures like Eileen Ford, Dorian Leigh, Catherine Harlé, and Wilhelmina found themselves losing models to heterosexual male agents.

  There was more work, so there were more models, but as their numbers increased, they lost the singularity that made the swans of couture seem so fascinating and irreplaceable. And the new models weren’t liberated women, either, even though they earned more, traveled more, and lived more freely. The genie of sex was out of the bottle. Models were touchable now. And the new breed of photographers and agents liked to have a feel for the merchandise. The good news was that “because they were interested in girls, their pictures were warmer,” says onetime photographer’s agent Jacques de Nointel. But more than ever, models were paper faces, commodities to be bought and sold until the next face came along. If they were infantilized before, they now stood to be traumatized as well.

  As the seventies began, the center of photographic gravity shifted to Europe, where it was easier for aspirants to break into the business. They poured into Paris from all over the world, all with different stories told in a babble of languages. Shelley Smith came from America, Apollonia van Ravenstein from the Netherlands, Gunilla Lindblad from Sweden, Louise Despointes from the Caribbean. But despite their wildly varying looks and outlooks, they had one thing in common: They were citizens of the new Nation of Fashion.

  SMITH: “I grew up in a not great family, not a lot of self-esteem, and so for me to go into modeling was great, because I considered myself a real ugly duckling. I went to an all-girls’ school in Orange, New Jersey. I never had a date; I never dated until I was in college. I wore braces. I was tall and skinny.”

  RAVENSTEIN: “My brother Theo always looked at the magazines, back home, which was in the south of Holland. I think it was probably 1968, and we saw pictures of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. I was almost fifteen, and we were trying to find a way to get out of Holland and go into the world, so he said, ‘Plo’—which is my nickname; Plonja is my middle name—‘you can do it,’ and I said, ‘Well, all right.’ He made an appointment with the agent in Amsterdam, and the following week I was in Spain for a Dutch pattern magazine.”

  DESPOINTES: “I came from Martinique. I was from a very protected and privileged family. My father had plantations. Then I took a secret trip to New York. We were staying in the French Embassy in Washington, and two of us, me and another young girl, got on a Greyhound bus, totally petrified, and came to New York. It was 1969. I was eighteen and a half. We were walking down the street, and Jerry Ford and some TV guy spotted me and said, ‘Are you looking for the Ford agency?’ I thought, Let’s go see what this is, and the minute we walked in it was ‘Go in that room! Get undressed! Pluck your eyebrows!’ I was fascinated.

  Apollonia van Ravenstein photographed by Bob McNamara

  Apollonia van Ravenstein by Bob McNamara

  Louise Despointes photographed by Serge Lutens for Christian Dior

  Louise Despointes by Serge Lutens

  “I joined Ford, but I was always in battles with Eileen. Now she’s the lady I respect the most. People hate Eileen because she wanted women to survive in a cutthroat business. But then we clashed right away. I had a strong mind, and I thought she was a dictator. She told me, ‘Do as I say!’ I said, ‘No, I’m me!’ I wanted to do interesting work. I didn’t want to blend in. She hated that.”

  LINDBLAD: “I came to Paris in 1968. I was started by a woman in my town in Sweden named Kerstin Heintz. She was very respectable. She discovered many girls. She had me working for many Swedish magazines. She found me jobs, and she knew somebody in Paris who came to Sweden and he saw my book. I had a couple of tear sheets and some prints, and he liked what he saw. So he sent me to Paris, and I came to Paris Planning in 1968. It was during the student strikes. I thought it was very exciting. You had to walk to work, you’d arrive in a studio, and there was no electricity, nobody came! But I had a booking, so I said, ‘I’d better be there,’ and nobody else came, so I walked back home!

  “The editors in France, most of them are horrible women. They’re jealous of the models. They all treat you like shit. They did it to all the new girls, American or Swedish. So you were not at all treated with respect here. In America I think they’re much nicer to you.”

  DESPOINTES: “We all went to Max’s Kansas City. Everyone was there. I had no idea what was what. Then I met my chance, [photographer] Guy Bourdin. His girlfriend was a stylist. She thought I was refreshing. Guy took me back to Paris to do the collections for French Vogue, telling them I was a top model in New York when I’d never worked, except with [photographer] Arthur Elgort for American Girl, an awful kids’ magazine. We were all starting, trying to make it.

  Gunilla Lindblad photographed by her husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen

  Gunilla Lindblad by Jean-Pierre Zachariasen

  “When I got to French Vogue, they knew something was fishy. They told me I had to have an agent. I went to Paris Planning because it was the only agency I knew. There was a sweet boy there named Patrick Demarchelier. He liked to test little girls. He said, ‘I’ll give her a break.’ So they booked a test and said, ‘Good-bye, get out.’ I said, ‘I can’t go. I’m working.’ The booker said, ‘For who?’ ‘Guy Bourdin for French Vogue.’ I thought she would fall off her chair. Then François Lano came out, saying, ‘Ahhh, Louise,’ and I had a contract and champagne right away.”

  SMITH: “I was working on the college board of Lord & Taylor department store in New York City, and Diana Vreeland came in and discovered me. She said, ‘You are beautiful, and you owe it to the world to smile!’ She put her finger into my face and said, ‘Come to my office.’ The model editor, Sarah Slavin, sent me to photographers and to Barbara Stone. It was still the era of false eyelashes and stuff like that. I remember my first big picture for Vogue. My eyelash was on totally wrong. I knew nothing about this, and I came into Stewart after I did the shooting, and Barbara Stone looked at me and said, ‘I hope you weren’t photographed looking like that!’ It was so much easier later on when Way Bandy and all those wonderful people started to do makeup.

  “I remember going on tests. There were always come-ons from the photographers, jus
t about every one of them. There was never somebody who just wanted to take pictures. There was always a power play. If you wanted to get a copy of your picture, you had to come over at six and they wanted to have a drink with you. You just wanted to wash your hands and get your picture and go. It was very intimidating.”

  RAVENSTEIN: “I left Holland after a month and went to Milan. You’re thrown into this arena, thinking people love you for who you are. There was some emotional disappointment and a lot of learning about human nature. I didn’t really feel that people cared about what I was like. They had to love to be with me because I was a gorgeous young woman, and tall and beautiful, and a lot of fun. But I did feel an emptiness inside, and a certain sadness, because there was such untruth, it was such a fake. It’s very overwhelming and terribly exciting, and it can be profoundly empty at the same time. I didn’t understand people, I didn’t understand what they were after, the promises they made.”

  DESPOINTES: “Guy Bourdin trained me. He was like a father to me. He was a peasant from Normandy, so like a fox, he could see everything. He had a mind of his own. He made me have my own opinions. He sent me to museums to see paintings. At our first job he had a ballet barre, up off the ground, and I had to climb up on it in high heels. I had to do it a hundred fifty times for one shot. He wanted to see what I had in my belly. He called me Shirley MacLaine. He’d say, ‘Shirley MacLaine would not do that. She would stand on this bar until she died because she had to be the best.’ He liked perfection. You could think he was a sadist, but he wasn’t. People say it was misogyny, but it wasn’t. He was not nasty to people he cared for, but there were very few. He would make me walk through glass, but I understood that was his work, his vision.