Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Rough around the edges, Marie was a road show John Casablancas. “François probably fancied him,” says Sebastien Sed. “He went for Gérald like a guy would go for a fourteen-year-old girl.” Marie soon earned the nickname Chevalier de Longue Queue, or Knight of the Long Tail, a not-so-subtle reference to his sexual prowess. “He was the stud,” says Jacques Silberstein.

  By all accounts, Marie changed his women as often as the sheets on his bed. “That’s why François took him,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “For what he is. He’s funny, but he’s a pimp who fucks the girls.” He doesn’t deny it.

  “I’m not an angel,” he says. “But I’m very picky about the women I date, and I don’t work by quantity. We are men in the business of women. We love women, and I think we’re just acting normally. The woman at a model agency is using another kind of charm, playing mommy, sister, confidante.”

  For what? “Money,” Marie says.

  Huntsville, Alabama-born Beth Boldt, an aspiring model at Zoli, met Marie on one of his first scouting trips to America. “He tried to go to bed with me,” she says. “That’s why I joined Christa. Jacques and Dominique were cuter. I figured, if push came to shove, I’d rather do it with them.”

  Other models who met Marie in his early days at Paris Planning say there was nothing particularly sinister or sexist about him. “He was the cock of the court,” says Gaby Wagner, “handling the board, all the booking, reorganizing the agency. He was bad since the beginning! I never had a problem with him, but of course, he wanted to screw me.” He would tell new models that they would get editorial work if they slept with him. “I’d just go, ‘Fuck you,’” Wagner says.

  Another model, who asks to be called Aquamarine, says she greatly preferred Marie to Casablancas, who also made himself available to her. “There was a sweetness about Gérald,” she says. “I’d liken him to a lion cub. He was young; he was fun; he was like a kid in a candy store, awed at finding himself in the position to sleep with all these girls.” Marie says he’s never offered career advancement in exchange for sex, but he struck Aquamarine as “somebody you could fuck for work,” she says. “He’d been very helpful to the girls he slept with. It was the only time I ever compromised myself, but it didn’t seem so serious. I liked him.” Their interlude lasted a few weeks. “He kept asking me to marry him, but I thought we didn’t have a lot in common. I never loved him, and he never loved me. And funny thing, I don’t think he got me any work.”

  “He was an episode in everybody’s life,” says another of Marie’s model lovers with a sigh. “His persistence amused me. He is relentless to the point of being humorous and I had nothing better to do for the day. There’s a hundred thousand guys like that in Paris. They’re nurturing, madly in love, and then they’re out of your life as fast as they got into it. A brief encounter of the most odd kind.”

  John Casablancas had an active sex life, too. Often he played with Riccardo Gay, his Italian collaborator. Gay was known as I1 Rabbino, the Rabbi, and he was that and more to Casablancas. “Oh, we had the best times,” Casablancas says. “We did every crazy thing in the world with the girls and with drinking. I admit I was not a saint. I was a young European guy. I loved to go out, to eat, to drink. I’ve never, ever touched drugs in my life. But everything else, yes.”

  They both had steady girlfriends, but that didn’t stop them. Their garter belt parties are the stuff of modeling legend. “We would be sharing an apartment, and while one of us was sleeping, the other one would push a couple of girls into the room,” Casablancas recalls. “We’d have the girls take their clothes off and peekaboo. You have to remember that we were very young.”

  Stories about Casablancas’s free-and-easy lifestyle soon spread through the modeling business. He’d pop into the agency and buy dinner for whoever was around. “Right off the plane he’d buy lingerie and cocktail dresses on the Champs-Élysées, dress ’em up, and take ’em out,” says model Debbie Dickinson. But the same behavior that attracted models to him disturbed agents of the old school. Once, at a dinner in Paris, the Fords watched in disbelief as a fifteen-year-old who’d lived with them before joining Elite lit John’s cigar for him. “I was a couple times shocked when I saw him with very young girls,” says Jerry Ford. “I can’t recall people we sent to him with whom he became involved, but I remember a lot of people he sent to us who he’d had.”

  Casablancas’s girlfriend, Jeanette Christjansen, was more forgiving. She’d heard all the rumors, but she didn’t believe them. “I never was jealous,” she says. “I could not have lived with John for seventeen years if I’d been jealous. He might have been fucking around, but I never knew. I trusted him very much. He was always home when I called. I knew how badly he wanted to make it, and I wanted to help him.”

  So was he screwing around with young models? “As in everything, there’s a little bit of truth and there’s a little bit of lie,” he says. “Did I ever sleep with any of the models? Yes, I did. Were they young? When you say young girls, it usually implies sixteen-year-olds. That’s absolutely not true. The average age of starting models in those days was more like eighteen. Had there ever been any young girls? Of course, there had been. You know, I know sixteen-year-old girls that are going on fifty.”

  John Casablancas positioned himself as a child of 1968, a rebel, an outsider. “Therefore, certain people had automatic sympathy for me, others had automatic antipathy,” he says. Right from the start he had problems with American agencies. “They were sucking our blood,” Casablancas says. “They wouldn’t let a European agent scout outside of New York. You had to go through them. I spent twenty thousand dollars on four trips to New York. I saw a hundred twenty girls, out of which I wanted fifty. I got five. In the meantime, New York agents came ten times to Paris, it cost me fifty dinners, and they took away our six top-grossing girls.”

  That year in Capri one of his bookers, Francesca Magugliani, sat in on an all-night conversation between Gay and Casablancas about opening an agency in New York. Casablancas was furious with the Fords. “Their philosophy was to reign through division,” he says. “They would go into a city and promise the same girl to five agencies. And everybody was kissing their asses. I felt this was unbearable.”

  “They were playing backgammon,” Francesca recalls, “and John said, ‘I’m going to open in New York.’ Riccardo said, ‘It’s not that easy.’ It went on and on. They got really heated up, both of them. Riccardo had a good idea. He wanted all the agencies in Europe to form a conglomerate. Each agency would have a percentage of the stock in a holding company according to turnover so there would be no more jealousy; it would all go into the same pot.”

  Casablancas tried to put that plan into action in summer 1976. “It was the time of the film The French Connection,” he says. “I called for a meeting of SAM [the French syndicate of modeling agencies, a trade group] and proposed that five of us join forces, buy a building on the Avenue Foch, make every floor an agency, everyone independent, paying rent to the cooperative, and then go to New York and open an agency there called the French Connection. I said, ‘Let’s do our own scouting. America is enormous, and let’s get our own girls.’ It didn’t happen because the fear of Eileen and Wilhelmina was so great, rumors started spreading, and they all chickened out.”

  In fall 1976 Casablancas and François Lano revived the idea and discussed merging Elite and Paris Planning into a new entity, Elite Planning. “We were mostly interested in Gérald Marie,” says Alain Kittler, who’d begun as Elite’s backer and quickly turned into a full partner. “Dollé and Lano had the shares, but they were already the old regime.”

  Lano agreed, but then, says Casablancas, he tried to exempt Marie from the deal. “Gérald wasn’t the owner, but he was the heart of the agency,” Casablancas says. “I hated his guts. But I said that he had to be in the deal, so François finally accepted. I came to the States to look into the possibility of doing this agency, and the day I arrived I got a phone call from Eileen Ford. She always us
ed to call me at eight o’clock in the morning. She knows I hate being woken up early. She says to me, ‘Gérald was in the Bahamas, and he gave us a little phone call and told us that you were coming to look at the possibility of opening an agency, and I just wanted to tell you his message: The deal’s off.’” Because of what she’d learned about his plans, Ford added, Bruce and Wilhelmina Cooper would be joining them at a dinner they had planned for Casablancas that night at ‘21.’

  At the dinner “they all started accusing me of opening this agency,” Casablancas says. He shot back that Eileen Ford was trying to “screw up my scouting” in Scandinavia, “and if she’s going to do that, I’m going to come to America. I don’t want to come to America. But I will not take this shit any longer from Eileen.” The dinner degenerated into a shouting match. Wilhelmina threatened to destroy Casablancas. “She took off on him in a way that embarrassed us,” confirms Jerry Ford. “We told him we had no intention of opening in Europe, but that if he opened here, we’d be sure none of our models went to him in Paris again.”

  Then came the rumor that the Fords were setting up one of their models, a Swede named Karin Mossberg, in a Paris agency. Mossberg insists she opened alone, “just me,” financed with her savings and aided by all the friends she’d met as a model. “People trusted me,” she says. “I went to Sweden to the agencies. I picked six girls, and I started in my living room.” Mossberg says she booked no Ford models for a year, but to this day the competition thinks she did. “Eileen put all her girls in Karins,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. Adds German agent Dorothy Parker: “Everyone knew it was Ford’s agency, financed by Ford, totally Ford, with Ford models.”

  “We really tried to talk her out of it,” Eileen Ford insists. “We were working with Elite. It just rocked the boat.”

  Regardless, Casablancas decided he “was going to watch Eileen,” he says. “I had a spy in New York who found out when she was going to Scandinavia.” He followed just behind her and learned “that she was selling her new stallion, Karin Mossberg, who was opening an agency in Paris. She did exactly what she’d promised not to do at that dinner. She said I was a playboy, that all I wanted to do was date girls, that I introduced them to disgusting—one day it was Arabs, the next day it was Jews from New York. Every place I went it was someone different, Lebanese, Iranians. She denied it, but she was asking people to work with Karin and not with me. This was stabbing me in the heart. So I said, ‘OK, fuck this.’ I had a meeting with my partners and asked them to put up money to open in New York.”

  “We had to do it very quickly,” says Alain Kittler. “Secrecy had to be absolute. We wanted some kind of blitzkrieg operation.” They gathered $20,000 in seed money and a $300,000 credit line. “From that moment on I was devious,” Casablancas says, not without a touch of pride. Early in 1977 he set up trips to New York as he always had, arranging to meet models at Wilhelmina and Ford. He was giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine. The only agent he confided in was Stewart Cowley. “John told me he was opening here,” Cowley recalls. “He said he wasn’t going to fuck around with me, but he was going to kill Eileen and Wilhelmina.” He even briefly considered opening in Cowley’s offices, but there wasn’t enough room.

  “I was told by my attorneys that I couldn’t solicit people,” Casablancas explains, “so I came to New York, visiting and pretending everything was fine, and in the meantime I was looking for offices and I had my friend [photographer] Alain Walch, spreading the rumor and giving me information. Alain made a report on every single booker in New York.” He singled out Monique Pillard. “He said she is probably the best booker in town, but she has a vile mouth,” Casablancas remembers. “She still laughs about that.”

  The daughter of hairdressers from Nice, Pillard met Eileen Ford in the late sixties in the Revlon beauty salon that Pillard ran in midtown Manhattan. Impressed with her energy, Ford offered her a job as a booker. Pillard says of Ford, “She’s a tough cookie, a very shrewd businesswoman. I’m still thankful for the things she taught me.”

  But as the rumors spread that Casablancas was coming, Ford got suspicious. “I was getting too strong, so she tried to put the fear in me,” Pillard says. “She made me feel small, like an object on a table. She had me in her office every day, telling me no one liked me. She’d beaten me so regularly and mercilessly I had no confidence. Then, when she heard John was coming, she told me to take the summer off with full pay. I didn’t understand. Later on I realized she wanted me out of the way.”

  “She was flouncing around the office, never at her desk, fighting with Rusty, making speeches about ‘What I have to do,’” Jerry Ford recalls. “We suspected she was going with John.”

  In February Casablancas sent a telegram to Eileen Ford, asking her to set up go-sees for him in early March. He signed it, “Love John.” Elite Model Management Corporation was incorporated on March 22. A month later comptroller Jo Zagami and Pillard both gave notice to Ford. At the same time Casablancas sent a telex, fessing up to what he was doing.

  “When we closed our deal with Monique Pillard, we went to Rumpelmayer’s because I was staying at the St. Moritz,” Casablancas recalls. “Who comes behind? There was Roy Cohn with [Ford executive] Joey Hunter. They were obviously waiting for us. I thought Monique was going to die!”

  “Eileen and Jerry wanted [Cohn] for that suit,” says Richard Talmadge, the lawyer who handled most of Ford’s other legal affairs. “He said he could stop Casablancas from opening in New York. I disagreed.”

  “Paranoia was rampant,” says Gillis MacGil, the owner of Mannequin. And now, with characters like Cohn thrown into the mix, “it was starting to get exciting,” says Gara Morse, who was then a young booker at Wilhelmina. “We’d started hearing stirrings, but the Coopers felt safe. They thought John was only hitting Ford.” Still, they sent memos to the staff, warning them to keep close tabs on their models.

  Then, the first week in May, Wilhelmina’s Maarit Halinen became the first model to join Elite New York. “Wilhelmina was not doing a great job with her.” Casablancas sneers. “She was becoming a catalog queen.”

  A week later—three weeks before Elite’s offices even opened—the Fords sued Casablancas for $7.5 million for violating the “fiduciary trust” they felt he owed them. “We were really hurt emotionally,” says Eileen Ford. Adds Jerry: “We were under siege. We had to do something.”

  “The lawsuit was the mistake of [Eileen Ford’s] life,” says Alain Kittler. “From one day to the other we were known; people thought we were rich and powerful when we were neither, because we were attacked for seven million dollars. So we made the breakthrough in two months, but I tell you it was a gamble.” By July Elite was the talk of the town. That month journalist Anthony Haden-Guest published a story in New York magazine called “Model Wars.” In the most famous passage he described how Eileen Ford had sent Pillard and Zagami Bibles with passages about Judas Iscariot (“And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, ‘Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.” Mark 14:18) underlined in red ink.

  Ford confirms that she sent Pillard a Bible. “I’d do it all over again, too,” she says.

  Haden-Guest quoted Janice Dickinson boasting about running around Elite’s offices in the nude; described the arrival of immigration men at Elite’s offices, looking to deport Casablancas (who was an American citizen) and chief booker Christine Lindgren (whose papers were in order), and took readers into a summit conference at Bruce and Wilhelmina Cooper’s house, where François Lano, Gérald Marie “de Castelbajac,” and several other agents and photographers held a “council of war” to plot against Casablancas.

  Aftershocks continued for months. Wilhelmina filed suit against Elite, too, for $4 million. Ford and Willie were allied against Casablancas; they declared war on two fronts: in the courts and in fashion industry gossip. “They tried to demonize John,” says Alain Kittler, “but people were amused or excited. After all, he wasn’t doing anything abnormal.”
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  In Haden-Guest’s article Bruce Cooper bluntly called Casablancas a pimp. “I didn’t expect the violence,” says Casablancas. “It was a constant climate of terror. [Eileen] told people that we had orgies every Thursday in the agency. I wasn’t living a life of orgies. I had some parties that were, by American standards, very wild. You go to a wedding in America, and people just get silently drunk at their tables and throw up in the toilet. You go to a wedding in France, and usually someone will stand on a table and lift their skirt up or do something a little bit sexual, because that’s the nature of that society. My nature was more French. But I mean, it was a nightmare.”

  The Americans decided—and still believe—that any Frenchman with a camera was working for Casablancas. “What do you do when a bunch of photographers tell your models to leave you?” Eileen Ford asks. Monique Pillard says Ford called photographers and told them they’d have no more Ford models if they ever booked girls from Elite. “When I arrived in New York, she’d invite me to dinner parties,” says Patrick Demarchelier. “She never talked to me after John came to New York.” Adds Jacques Malignon: “Willie told me she’d send me back to my country because I was involved with John. Everyone thought there was a connection, and John very smartly didn’t deny it.”

  When Fortune magazine did a story on the model war, a reporter told Alex Chatelain that Ford had accused him of owning a piece of Elite. “I got mad and arranged a lunch with the Fords,” he says. “She started crying, asking why I didn’t book her girls. I told her, ‘Get modern.’ John’s girls were different.”

  Model Barbara Minty became one of John’s girls. Gunilla Lindblad joined immediately, too. Ford sent a letter to her. “She said, ‘We believed you were part of this family, and we feel very betrayed and hurt that you gave us not a word of explanation,’ which was true,” says her photographer husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen. “We should have been courteous. We hadn’t been correct. But Eileen had made some huge mistakes, too. When we had our son, for instance, she said, ‘What a disaster! I have a doctor. Get rid of it right away!’ Like, go to the loo and then go back to work!” Casablancas was different. “John loved the girls,” Zachariasen says. “He saw that the girls had talent and that they were personalities, and he decided he would give them a status. Eileen did not love the girls. For Eileen, they were cattle.”