$1,500 A DAY
Jeanette Christjansen had just been named Miss Denmark when she came to Paris on a visit at Christmas 1967 and met a long-haired Danish photographer named Gunnar Larsen. He had a bad reputation. He took lousy photographs. But he had a great eye for girls. So when Jeanette went back to Denmark, Larsen sent her a letter, a thousand francs, and an invitation to work in Paris early the next year, shooting couture press photographs. He put her up in the Hôtel d’Argout, a tiny little place near the open markets at Les Halles.
Also at the D’Argout that week was a public relations man who worked for Trabeco, a nearby architecture firm. He’d just left his wife, and he was staying at the hotel while he looked for a new apartment. A news junkie, he would watch the broadcast every night in the reception area. And every night Larsen would stalk by with the blond, booted, miniskirted Christjansen in tow. “I fell in love at first instant,” she says of the night she first set eyes on John Casablancas.
He wasn’t uninterested. But as he puts it, he couldn’t just walk up to Larsen and say, “Excuse me, sir, could you leave?”
Finally, one night at two, the hotel doorman told Casablancas that the blonde wasn’t Larsen’s girlfriend; she was his model. “I’m going to call her in the morning,” the love-struck Casablancas decided. “But she has asked for a taxi to the airport in the morning,” the doorman warned him. Rushing to his room, John dialed Jeanette’s room and woke her up. He was a salesman at heart. He could talk for hours if he had to to get what he wanted. Minutes later Jeanette was dressing for a rendezvous at the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon. She decided Casablancas was devastatingly handsome and extremely well educated. He also spoke several languages. He was quite a catch. The trick was to catch him.
Casablancas was a child of once-wealthy refugees from the Spanish Civil War. His grandfather, who’d owned textile factories outside Barcelona, was a tinkerer who’d invented the Casablancas high draft system—a modern method for transforming cotton balls into thread—and owned the patent. “We would have been a very, very rich family had not the Civil War brought down everything,” Casablancas says. Wealthy antifascists, the Casablancas family was disenfranchised by that conflict pitting fascists against anticapitalists. John’s future father and his mother, who’d briefly been a model in Barcelona, were on a beach holiday when that city was overtaken by anarchists. Grabbing their eldest and then only son, Fernando, they crossed into France just before Spain’s borders were closed.
Their factories were ruined, but luckily they had investments outside Spain, and as they moved about the world, seeking safe haven, they opened new plants in Manchester, Lille, and Bombay. Next stop was Rio de Janeiro, where John’s sister, Sylvia, was born. Then came New York, where John joined the family in December 1942. Home was a large house in Forest Hills, Queens, but John was a jet set kid. He received holy communion in Mexico City and grew up resort hopping from Lake Placid to Palm Beach. Finally his family moved to the Riviera. John describes them as “nomads.”
“My life was a dream,” he says. “I always think of those people who say there’s life after life and that if you’re very good in one life, you get a marvelous life in the next turn. I must have been so perfect the life before.”
At eight John was sent to Le Rosey, the exclusive Swiss school where the children of kings and princes of industry are educated. Among his classmates were Egon von Fürstenberg; Alfredo Beracasa, scion of Venezuelan bankers and industrialists; Alan Clore, the son of one of England’s richest men; and Alain Kittler, whose family owned a textile design business, Anatolie St. Fiacre.
Though he was raised as a member of the elite, “we were poor by all the standards,” Casablancas says of himself and Kittler, who became his best friend and later his business partner. “Our parents were very regular people with very average fortunes. My father spent money for the last fifteen years of his life without making any money. He was not productive, and he continued living like a king. Which I think was exactly the right thing. He earned his money. Why shouldn’t he spend it?”
By the time John was finishing school, his sister, Sylvia, had become a star of international society. For five years in the late fifties and early sixties she was the Aga Khan’s girlfriend. “Together with the princess Soraya, Sylvia was the number one jet set person in Europe,” John says. “On the front page of every magazine and every newspaper. She had a knack for scandal. She was very beautiful and very explosive. The press decided that we were Mexican because my sister had a Mexican passport. So she was the Mexican heiress. And I remember a big article that said my father owned as many oil wells as he owned cattle heads. And we said, ‘That’s the first time they write the truth; he has not any of either.’”
Jeanette Christjansen strikes a pose for Gianpaolo Barbieri
Jeanette Christjansen by Gianpaolo Barbieri
John Casablancas as a young wolf in the 1970s
John Casablancas, photographer unknown, © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved
After Le Rosey, John attended several universities. “I used to fight with my father,” he says. “When I fought, I went to work. If I made peace, I went to college.” He transferred to a law school in Spain. “Then I would take my car and take off for two months and come back just before exam time and study day and night, drinking coffee,” he says. “Typical kind of thing that students do.” In between, he worked for Merrill Lynch in Cannes, Brussels, and Paris; for a PR company; and then, at age nineteen, for a real estate company in Barcelona, where he sold real estate to English investors with undeclared income.
Then he was offered a job in Brazil. A Le Rosey schoolmate’s mother had inherited a Coca-Cola franchise in the country’s northeast and thought her Brazilian managers were stealing. “At the age of twenty I went to Bahia, to become marketing manager for Coca-Cola,” Casablancas says. “I had no marketing knowledge, but I could be trusted. So I was there for three and a half years. Now I was a typical European, used to a lot of dating, a lot of fun with the girls. And here I am, in Bahia, which was very, very far from any civilization. The only girls were prostitutes or society girls surrounded with chaperones and impossible to date unless you were marrying them.” So he called his girlfriend in France and invited her to join him in Bahia. But her father laid down the law: not unless they got married. “So I said, ‘OK, fine,’” John says. “So I married her. And you know, it was too early.”
According to Casablancas, he left Brazil because of “a Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands very comedy-tragedy type of circumstance within the Coca-Cola factories.” Luckily his wife’s family helped him find a PR job in Paris. “I start working there, and of course, the moment I get back to Paris, my marriage starts falling apart because I’ve got in me still so much desire to party,” he says. “I’m not mature enough to settle down. The only thing that tempered this was that I didn’t have any money.”
He left his wife and met Jeanette. But after their late date she went back to Denmark. “She was supposed to call me, and I was supposed to call her; but we didn’t, and about three months later, walking in the streets of Paris, again just by chance, I bumped into her,” Casablancas says. She’d returned to Paris to work with Larsen. She started dating Casablancas, who’d moved into an apartment on the rue de Seine with Alain Kittler. “I didn’t want to get married at nineteen, and I didn’t worry that he wasn’t divorced,” Christjansen says. But six months later his wife got pregnant. “I wanted to leave him, but he said he had no intention of going back to her,” Jeanette says. “He wasn’t exactly sorry. I either had to accept it or leave. I thought I’d stick it out and see what happens.”
Though John had dated “four or five models” before Jeanette, he says, “the idea that I would be involved with their world never came to my mind.” But he was looking for a career, and somehow the one he found, selling glue and construction materials, just wasn’t as appealing as their friend Larsen’s suggestion that he open a model agency. Casablancas had learned a bit abo
ut modeling from Jeanette. Though she’d quickly become one of Catherine Harlé’s top earners, she had problems with the agency. “I didn’t think they were taking good care of me,” she says. “They were an old-time agency with thousands of girls, sending me on go-sees right and left. I did garbage jobs. Then John got his idea.”
In 1969 Casablancas took an office in the American Chamber of Commerce’s building on Avenue George V and opened a small agency with a handful of shareholders, Gunnar Larsen among them. “It was a decision of sheer ignorance,” he says. “I knew nothing. But my thinking was not to do this because there’s a lot of pretty girls. That’s a rich man’s thinking. I was a poor guy.” He named his business Élysées 3—after his new telephone number and in homage to New York’s Plaza Five.
Though it was years before Casablancas made his presence felt on an international level, modeling was never the same. No longer would the business be run exclusively by the women and homosexual men like François Lano. With Casablancas, a new generation entered modeling. Raised on the new values of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they were the children of Blow-Up, and their arrival on the scene was explosive.
“I brought a very different eye to modeling,” Casablancas says. “In those days it was a feminine activity. I was really the first total heterosexual agent in Paris. I knew a lot of models, I had met a few photographers, and I had been around, you know. I went into this with one premise: finding beautiful girls and marketing them. Getting girls was the easy part. By the time we opened the agency, I had a pretty good impression of what was missing in modeling. I did my homework. Every model I ever spoke to complained about their agency. Little did I know that models always complained. Had I known that, maybe I would not have gone into the business.”
While John was setting up Élysées 3, Jeanette kept modeling, flying to Hamburg, Munich, and Milan on jobs. In the latter city she was represented by Riccardo Gay (pronounced guy). Gay started his career as a journalist at Milan’s newspaper Corriere della Sera and, in the mid-sixties, became the model scout at a new magazine called Amica. Modeling was a new business in Milan. Colette Gambier, a friend of Catherine Harlé’s, had opened the first agency there in 1962. Four years later Giorgio Piazzi, who’d modeled in London and New York, opened shop, too, starting out booking his friends on a public telephone in a bar in Milan’s Brera district. He called his company Fashion Model. The next year the competition heightened. Gay’s sister, Lucetta, who worked at Giorgio Piazzi’s Fashion Model, is said to have made off with a client list. “I started an agency for fun with my sister,” Gay says. “I was the first in Europe to use vouchers. This was quite a big shock.”
Colette Gambier knew Gay from his days at Amica. “Before he had his agency, he went to nightclubs,” she says. “When I booked models to Amica, Riccardo would take them out and show them off. He’d thought a long time about this. I had no time for nightclubs. I never presented girls to men. Then the times changed. The girls preferred Riccardo. He was worldly; he introduced them to princes; he took the girls for weekends in castles. He immediately knew how to profit from his position. I called him a matrimonial agent and not a model agent. And he would say bad things about me. It was a war, and he quickly won it.”
Gay started booking models from Paris, Jeanette Christjansen among them. She was flying to Milan when two Frenchmen tried to pick her up on the airplane. One was photographer Patrick Demarchelier; the other, his agent, Jacques de Nointel. De Nointel made his living on the fringes of modeling. “He is a hunting dog,” says a photographer who knows him well. “He steals girls from one agency and presents them to another.” He tried it with Christa Fiedler, among many others. “He was always between the agencies, trying to tell one model to go to the other agency and being paid for that,” she says.
Now Christjansen was in his sights. “I said, ‘Hey, you’re so beautiful, how come you’re not working with magazines?’” de Nointel recalls. “She said, ‘I’m with an agency that doesn’t give me magazines, but my boyfriend is opening an agency.’ And I said, ‘Your boyfriend, I hope he’s gay, because have you ever heard of an alcoholic opening a bar?’ And she says, ‘I want you to meet this guy.’ So John came to see me.”
Riccardo Gay on the prowl in the 1970s
Riccardo Gay, photographer unknown, courtesy Jérôme Bonnouvrier
Casablancas was intrigued by de Nointel. “I don’t think there was anybody who understood the business and who lived it as intensely as Jacques,” he says. “He was a rep, and he had every good photographer in Paris.” Among them were Demarchelier, Gilles Ben Simon (as he was then known), Alex Chatelain, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen, and Arthur Elgort. Another was Mike Reinhardt, the grandson of Max Reinhardt, the German filmmaker. In the early sixties Mike was a lawyer, married to a German model named Bernadette, who’d been discovered by Eileen Ford and placed with Dorian Leigh. In 1965 Jerry Ford suggested Reinhardt go to work for Leigh, “straightening out her tangled affairs,” Ford says. “We agreed to pay her fifteen hundred dollars per month to pay Mike.”
With his salary guaranteed by the Fords, Reinhardt arrived at Leigh’s agency. “Dorian was obviously erratic and drinking,” he says. “I was between a rock and a hard place. I really loved Dorian, but she resented any intervention. So I ended up a booker and a sort of pseudoaccountant.” He stayed two years. “All these incredible girls around me!” he exclaims. “I was blown away. I met a model, fell in love, and had an affair with her. The situation destroyed my marriage.” But though he’d lost a wife, he’d gained an agent in Jacques de Nointel, who met him at Dorian’s and convinced him he could be a photographer.
John Casablancas listened to de Nointel also. “He started telling me about the industry,” Casablancas says. “And everything he told me was true, but I didn’t believe a word. He said he didn’t think there was room for one more agency; it would end up a big catalog agency like Paris Planning and Models International. He felt that what was needed was an agency that concentrated on stars. He described what Elite was going to be all about. But I didn’t listen to him. I did Élysées 3 instead.”
Casablancas introduced his agency with a double-page spread in Passport, an annual publication for models. The ad promised models “a new concept of cooperation … cash payments … free preparation of dossier, financing of composites, free juridical service, permanent door-to-door bookings.” For clients, Élysées 3 offered “efficiency in booking … precision of tariff … always on schedule … open Saturday.”
De Nointel predicted Élysées 3 would die within a year. “John had a lot of ideas, but the first year he knew nothing,” de Nointel says. “He learned from his mistakes.” De Nointel tried to help out. He sent Casablancas to his friend Stewart Cowley’s agency, for example, but Barbara Stone didn’t want to work with him. Neither did the Fords. “He was a friend of Mike’s, and I thought he was a nice young guy, and we wanted to work with him,” says Jerry Ford. “But he took a long time getting a handle on things. We told him very frankly that we wanted to do business with him but we wouldn’t until he was established.”
De Nointel quickly saw what Casablancas brought to the model trade. “John introduced sex,” he says. “Don Juan, Casanova, their whole life put together is not equal to one year of John! John can look at a girl, and in five minutes the girl takes her underwear off. I could tell stories! He’s a hell of a successful man. He introduced the truth against the lies of the good mommy Eileen. I was going out with a girl, and Eileen said, ‘Don’t spend the weekend with Jacques. I have to introduce you to somebody.’ And she introduced her to a millionaire, and she married him. It was a better deal than going out with a jerk like me! But still!”
Casablancas’s first move was to fly to Copenhagen for its ready-to-wear shows with Gunnar Larsen. He went from stand to stand at the trade fair, introducing himself to models and, by the end of his visit, had a dozen girls ready to return to Paris with him. Among them were several stars from Copenhagen Models, one of the largest age
ncies in Scandinavia. Its owner, Trice Tomsen, then an ally of Eileen Ford’s, woke up one morning and over coffee and Danish pastries, saw a photograph by Larsen in the newspaper, showing the girls and Casablancas over a caption that said they were going to Paris to join Élysées 3. Furious, Tomsen got them all back, but “she was so pissed off with me she didn’t even want to hear my name for two years,” Casablancas says, laughing.
Until his arrival Scandinavia had been Eileen Ford’s personal fiefdom. “There were one or two agents in Göteborg [Sweden] who would keep girls for Eileen,” says Monique Corey, who worked on Ford’s new faces board. “Eileen would bring them home and get them ready like fruit on a window until they were ripe enough. She went to Scandinavia every three months to pick up blondes. She had the market cornered. The clients all wanted that look.” Casablancas was poaching on her turf.
Back in Paris, Casablancas took over de Nointel’s photographer’s agency. Championed by Dépêche Mode, his French Mob photographers stood in opposition to the generation that immediately preceded them: Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, Barry Lategan, and Just Jaeckin. “We called them the telephoto brigade. They threw everything out of focus in the background,” says Lategan, whose carefully lit, controlled photographs for British Vogue were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Steve Hiett, a British photographer who moved to Paris at the time, also disdained the French Mob’s approach. “Everyone was shooting long lens, the same time of the day, the same blond girl,” he says. “It was all interchangeable.” But the new wave of photographers were well trained. Jacques Malignon, Bensimon, and Demarchelier all had worked for older photographers like Just Jaeckin, who shot fashion in the late sixties before turning to film. “They learned the basics of technique with us,” he says. “Then they left and said they’d do the same work for less money. It was a disaster for us.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 31