Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  The new photographers had disasters, too. In those days they kept their samples in huge wood-covered portfolios. In July 1970 Casablancas dumped the books into his Porsche Carrera, drove to Germany, and spent four days pitching the photographers to advertising agencies there. He got back to Paris at 2:00 A.M. “I was so exhausted, I didn’t want to carry the books,” he remembers. “Each one weighed about thirty pounds! So I shut them in the car, and someone with a knife cut open the top and stole them. I was hoping I’d get them back. They had no value. But I didn’t get them. I never had the guts to tell the photographers, so I just resigned and sold the business for twenty thousand francs. Elgort never forgave me.”

  The buyer was Patrick Demarchelier’s half brother, Gérald Dearing, who worked for the photo agency. “John quickly found out he couldn’t mix photographers and models,” Dearing says. Despite the offhand manner in which he disposed of them, most of the photographers stayed friends with Casablancas. The French Mob was a tight little mutual-support group. “In the beginning, when Mike Reinhardt was still a director of Dorian, all of the top models would do tests with him,” recalls de Nointel. “Mike would call Patrick, and say, ‘Patrick, I can’t do this light, come and help me.’”

  “I was hanging around with the young assistants,” says Reinhardt. “Newton and Bourdin were the big guys. We were just starting. There was Pierre Houlès, my best friend, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen, Patrick, Duc, who was Bourdin’s assistant. Alex was just back from New York. A couple of us had apprenticed with New York photographers. We’d assist each other when we did tests. Duc went with me on my first job. I was separated, living in a hotel, barely scraping by. I got a trip to Algeria from a magazine. Then it started rather quickly.”

  Photography was almost everything to Reinhardt. Models were the rest. “After Bernadette left me, two weeks later the other girl leaves, and I’m left with my pants down and nobody,” Reinhardt says. For a while he played the field. “There’s a mercenary thing going on,” he says. “Even with girlfriends, there was a commercial side to the relationship. We used each other. The male psyche always wants to be the exception. I always said, ‘Would you be with me if I was the garbage man?’ But it’s convenient. You travel together; you have the same sense of humor. It’s a given that you end up with a model. I was unfortunately neurotic enough to fall in love, but I couldn’t be completely faithful.” Not when there were models around who would sleep with a young, sympathetic, and attractive photographer in exchange for work.

  Patrick Demarchelier had a model girlfriend, too, of course—an American named Bonnie Lysohir, whose brother assisted Arthur Elgort. Of all the photographers, Demarchelier was the closest to Casablancas. Everybody loved Demarchelier. Some suggest that his gravel mumble was the key to his success. Nobody could understand a word he was saying. He also had an appealing modesty. “Now young photographers want to be like Avedon,” he says. “When I was young, I didn’t have a goal like that. You didn’t project yourself.”

  Born in Normandy in 1944, Demarchelier worked in a photo shop, learning to print and retouch photos, before he moved in 1964 to Paris. There he worked in a lab, and then for a head shot photographer who gave him a list of model schools in Paris. Patrick started offering them his services. One, conveniently located next door to Paris Planning, set him up with a little studio, where he tested thirty girls a month, helping them pull their portfolios together. After a year he won a job assisting Hans Feurer. Then he hooked up with de Nointel and started shooting on his own for Marie France and Elle. Unlike his peers, he didn’t settle down with any model for long.

  “Those guys wanted to get married,” he says. “I had a lot of girlfriends. I loved the girls, yeah, it was true.” Demarchelier’s girlfriends were “all tops,” says Gérald Dearing. “He had a good nose for girls. He always found them before the others did. He was a tremendous asset to John.”

  Alex Chatelain wasn’t as lucky in love as Demarchelier and Reinhardt. A struggling painter in New York, Chatelain shared an apartment with a friend who worked for Vogue. “We were both like rabbits,” he says, “going out model fucking. That’s basically how I got into the business.” Through a model, he got jobs assisting Bazaar’s Jimmy Moore, Roger Prigent, and then Hiro, who’d just begun shooting on his own after assisting Richard Avedon. Chatelain ended up printing Avedon’s pictures for $60 a week. “I slept on the couch at the studio, and they never knew it,” he claims.

  In 1967 Chatelain won a grant and went to Paris. He met Reinhardt and Demarchelier at a party Dorian Leigh hosted at Jacques Chambrun’s house. “We’d run into each other at the lab,” Chatelain says. “Eileen Ford would come and take everyone to Coupole for dinner.” They all made fun of Ford behind her back. “She was patronizing, always quoting from the Bible, holier than thou,” according to Chatelain. “American photographers accepted her as an institution. We could see through her behavior. We refused to let her control everything. She’d say, ‘Sit next to me,’ at Coupole, and I’d fart to the utter joy of my friends.”

  After Guy Bourdin fought with French Vogue and left, Alex Chatelain won a job there, “so I was the one they all looked up to,” he says. But Reinhardt was the ringleader. “Everyone congregated around Mike,” Chatelain adds. “There was always a box full of grass in his refrigerator. He cooked marvelously, had great taste and a beautiful place full of sun and light and pretty girls. Then came the revolution of May 1968. We’d meet at Mike’s house on Avenue President Kennedy and piss on the police from the roof.”

  But it wasn’t all fun and games for Casablancas and his crew. A group of French legislators, some of whom had models as girlfriends, responded to their frequent complaints just as Casablancas had to his girlfriend Jeanette’s. Their response was a new law governing model agencies. Henceforth models in France would be considered salaried workers, and agents would be required to insure that they were over eighteen years old and held valid working permits. Not only that, but the agents, as employers, would have to pay a charge sociale similar to America’s Social Security tax, which effectively doubled the cost of hiring a model. After taxes, commissions, and social charges were deducted, a FF10,000 job would net a model only FF2,000.

  “John arrived at that time,” says Francois Lano. “He was really unlucky.” And to make matters worse, almost immediately, Élysées 3 was hit with a major defection. The bookers all left and took most of the models with them to Models International. Panicked, Casablancas called his sympathetic friend Riccardo Gay, who promptly dispatched one of his best multilingual bookers, Brigitte Grosjean, to Élysées 3.

  Thanks to Gay, Casablancas hung on. “I went through so much shit, and I never complained,” he says. “Every time I had a good model, she was stolen away from me. Eileen Ford contributed to that.” She and Jerry arrived at Élysées 3 in a chauffeured car one day, looked the place over, and agreed to start trading models with the new company in exchange for a 3 percent commission. But Casablancas says they were double-dealing him. “They would meet my models in my agency and advise them to go to Paris Planning and Models International,” he charges. “Everyone was playing marionettes with everyone else. They wanted to see if they could muzzle me.”

  In fall 1970 Élysées 3 ran out of money and briefly closed its doors. John’s father reluctantly came to the rescue with $100,000. “John’s father wasn’t so happy about him doing an agency,” Christjansen says. “He would have liked him to do other things.” But John was committed. “He could have gone into his father’s factories and been much richer than he is today,” Christjansen says. “In a way he chose the hard way.”

  He hired a booker named Tichka from Models International and reopened, but his problems weren’t over. In a letter to Eileen Ford he announced a series of changes that he hoped would prove that “our growing pains now over … we have become an attractive agency to do business with.” Unfortunately he quickly lost the money that had been lent to him. “My father was panicky.”

  By mid-1
971 John knew he needed more help and turned to his older sibling. Life magazine had closed its Paris office, where Fernando Casablancas worked, so John asked him to take over the business side of Élysées 3. They were macho siblings with look-alike Zapata mustaches, but Fernando may have thought his little brother was a bit of a flake. Not only was John mixing business and pleasure by day, but he was also losing money gambling at night. “I did have a serious gambling problem,” John admits. “But if anybody could have complained about it, it was Jeanette, because I borrowed money from her.” He also borrowed from Bob Zagury, a playboy, backgammon player, and onetime lover of Brigitte Bardot, nicknamed Concrete Cock by women who knew him.

  Finally, in October 1971, Casablancas decided to do exactly what Jacques de Nointel had suggested two years before. He announced his intentions in a letter to Eileen Ford that month. Because of the different requirements of “beginner, average and good models as opposed to top models … who need no more promotion but do demand constant attention,” he wrote, “Élysées 3 will continue to grow and consolidate its position under Fernando’s management…. I will be opening a completely separate operation in new offices…. Elite Model Management will represent 10-20 top models.” It was the birth announcement of the most important model agency since Ford.

  “Before, it was divine, joyful,” says Auro Varani, an Italian lawyer who came to London in 1961 and went to work with Peter Marlowe, the printer who invented model composite cards. “There were very few agencies, and the people who ran them were cultivated and refined. It was like an elite. Francois Lano had culture to die. Catherine Harlé made me read books. Dorian Leigh wasn’t much of a businesswoman, but goddamn, she was fun, and she had more guts than anyone I know. Then, all of a sudden, other people, straight boys, realized there was an enormous potential to go to bed with dream girls. You saw the sprouting of so-called model agents who are nothing but glorified pimps. John Casablancas started it. Before him, it was not a job a straight man would do. He was divine, handsome, enormously charming. But all the acolytes of John can’t kiss his shoes. He was the pioneer. He opened a new frontier, and then everyone wanted it. It became a nasty business. A few manipulative people realized beautiful girls could be fucked in every way. The society became venal. All that mattered was money. I’m not cynical or bitter. I hate these people.”

  The turbulence at Élysées 3 mirrored the chaotic state of modeling throughout Europe following the passage of the new law governing French agencies. In 1969 Colette Gambier hired Maximiliano Patrini and his partner, Athos Contarini (whose girlfriend was a Ford/Paris Planning model named Ula Bomser), to run her agency in Milan. Four months later, back in Paris and pregnant, Gambier learned that Max and Athos were about to leave with all her models and open an agency of their own, 21 International, backed by a clothing manufacturer from Bologna. She flew to Milan, where she learned that not only had the pair decamped with her models, but they had also upset her landlord so much that he wouldn’t renew her lease. Gambier reopened in another office and hired Natasha Gumkevitch, an ex-model, and a friend of hers from Paris named Beatrice Traissac, to run it for her.

  Max and Athos didn’t last long. “It was the up-and-coming agency,” says Ula Bomser. “Athos wanted to make a lot of money very fast, which he basically did by gambling. Most of the money I made went into his pocket. Athos had a very destructive streak, Max was heavily on drugs and I suppose so was Athos, and the whole thing just fell apart.” Adds Veruschka, who was dating Patrini at the time: “Maximiliano couldn’t really deal with this fashion world. He would come to my hotel room and throw knives into the closets. He finally left, he couldn’t stand it anymore.” Late in 1970 Athos put 21 up for sale.

  Meanwhile, in Paris Simone d’Aillencourt and Christa Fiedler had turned Models International into a powerhouse with the help of the Fords. But John Casablancas was scary new competition. “John was strong because he represented the photographers,” d’Aillencourt says. “They were all going out together, taking the girls out. It was a thing I couldn’t get into.” She and her partners needed a new gimmick to stay on top, so when they heard that Max and Athos were selling, they approached the Fords about buying 21 together. “We didn’t want to offend anyone else in Paris and Milan,” Jerry says. But Eileen went to dinner in Paris with Simone and her husband, filmmaker José Benazeraf, to discuss it.

  Over the meal she was stricken with food poisoning. “I was lying on the floor, saying I wanted to go to the hospital,” says Eileen. Jerry adds: “José refused to call her a taxi. He was demanding a commitment about Milan.” Finally Eileen struggled downstairs and hailed a taxi. Another alliance had ended. The Fords began working with Élysées 3, and Models International turned to Wilhelmina. But its troubles had only begun. Things had soured between Christa and Simone, in part because Simone’s husband “made dirty movies and he tried to hire girls from the agency for them,” Fiedler says. Then Fiedler disappeared, leaving her husband, photographer Claude Marant, their child, and their agency, to run off with a younger man she’d met on a Club Med vacation. “He was a friend of mine,” Francois Lano remembers, chuckling. “She followed him into the desert in a long dress, like Dietrich in Morocco.” A booker named Stéphane Lanson took over when Fiedler departed. But soon Francois Lano offered Lanson a job at Paris Planning. He was the next one out Models International’s revolving door. “And most of the girls followed me, a whole stable of girls,” he says.

  At Paris Planning Lanson was put in charge of women models, but because of the new law, Lano says, French clients started balking at the prices being charged for models. “Nobody wanted to declare or pay taxes,” Lano says, “so a parallel market began to exist. We were obliged to offer representation outside of France because the social security charges were so expensive.” In order to avoid the new taxes, bookings had to be taken and jobs paid for outside France.

  Tired of fighting her losing battle with Riccardo Gay, Colette Gambier sold her agency to Lano, who changed its name to Talents and opened branches in Germany. Lano also inherited Gambier’s friends Natasha and Beatrice and her enemy Riccardo Gay. Lano believes that Gay “gave orders” to shut Talents down. “We did our best for the agency,” Beatrice says, “but we always had this big, big, big competition with Riccardo Gay and Fashion Model. A lot of unfair situations were happening in Milan. The models were chased and escorted, and Francois Lano was going forth and back, and finally he got a little bit tired and sold the agency to Riccardo Gay.”

  Though he lost his agency in Milan, Lano made some important connections there. In 1969 he flew to Switzerland, to meet with a businessman who helped him form a company where money could be processed out of sight of French taxmen. Such “black money” systems are common in Europe, where avoiding taxes is a way of life. Model agents are extremely unwilling to discuss these systems, even as they insist they are totally legal. “As babies, the first thing the French learn is how to avoid taxes,” says Sebastien Sed, another composite printer, who became a key German agent.

  Lano put Jean-Pierre Dollé in charge of the Swiss billing system. He’d been an eighteen-year-old singer when he met Lano in a nightclub in the 1950s, and in 1961 he went to work at Paris Planning. Now the duo met Jean-Marie de Gueldre, who was married to a model. A lawyer for Formula One racers, de Gueldre was familiar with the intricacies of cross-border commerce. “Lano and Dollé asked, ‘How can we compete?’” de Gueldre recalls. His solution was to set up a Swiss company called Models S.A. But after a few months it became clear that Lano would still have tax liability if the company were in his name, so he “let it go to Swiss people,” de Gueldre says.

  Models S.A. allowed Paris Planning’s clients to save the taxes and social charges the new French law mandated and to limit their liability to Switzerland’s maximum 23 percent tax. “Dollé would bring the money back to Paris and pay the models in cash,” says Servane Cherouat, a Paris Planning booker.

  Most models accepted de Gueldre’s explanation of why Sw
iss invoicing benefited them. Louise Despointes was not one of them. “Only dishonest people won with this law,” she says. “They pretend they have a model agency in Fribourg. They put out a fake head sheet, fake vouchers, and pretend the billings went through there, except there is not one telephone or one booker there.”

  Funny business wasn’t confined to the tax end of the modeling business. In the late sixties Pucci Albanese was in the lingerie business in Milan, and like Riccardo Gay at Amica, he booked models through Paris agencies. “Pucci and Riccardo were like brothers,” says Stephane Lanson. Albanese invested in Gay’s agency when it opened, and they stayed close, but Albanese hated Milan (“a fucking stink city,” he says) and moved to Rome in 1968. He opened an agency and soon expanded into Bologna, Florence, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Barcelona. “GiGi and Oleg Cassini were my closest friends,” he says. “Roman Polanski was always in the agency.” But then, in 1972, he was shut down by the Number One scandal.

  Albanese and his friends all frequented a disco in Rome called Number One, partly owned by Paolo Vassallo, the latest boyfriend of Bettina, the Paris couture mannequin. Vassallo was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day after police found two ounces of cocaine and raw opium hidden in his club’s bathroom and his car. Three days later the actress (and ex-Ford model) Elsa Martinelli was arrested as she returned home just before dawn by three policemen disguised as hippies. She was questioned in the case, as were Albanese and a producer (and friend of Albanese’s and Riccardo Gay’s) named Pier Luigi Torri, who lived in a treasure-filled Roman palazzo. Vassallo charged that an envious Torri had planted the drugs, a charge the producer denied. Several months later Torri was arrested for his role in the affair on his yacht in Monte Carlo’s harbor.