Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Matthew Rich came to New York in 1977 and fell in with the Halston crowd at Studio 54. “It was my idea of heaven,” says the public relations consultant, who asks to be described as “one of the survivors.” Rich longed for a male model he’d seen in GQ magazine named Joe Macdonald. They soon met at Studio, “and we ended up necking in the balcony,” Rich says. They also sniffed coke, “and my heart was already going a mile a minute. That was it. We became almost live-in lovers.”

  They hung out with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Calvin Klein, and Halston—“all my godheads,” Rich says. “Andy drew Joe, drew his penis.” Macdonald became interested in art and started collecting photographs. But that and his growing taste for cocaine diverted him from his trade. “He alienated people,” says Rich. “He was temperamental.”

  Macdonald bounced between Zoli and Ford. “Don’t call me anymore if you’re going to send me on bullshit,” he’d yell at his booker. Macdonald was the first male supermodel, and many opportunities were available to him—in play as well as work. “After three years he decided to sleep with every man who ever lived,” Rich says. People started whispering to Rich that “Mary,” as Macdonald was known, was hanging out at gay bathhouses. Rich and he broke up. Within two years Macdonald was dead of AIDS.

  Rich went to work for Studio 54’s PR man and got a close-up view of the action there. “The big models were all there with their tops off—male and female—demigods. They were a draw, so they were protected,” Rich says. “Steve [Rubell] protected the people he liked. Aspiring models may have gotten a little used.”

  Everyone was using drugs. “It got to the point where if you wanted to fuck a model, you had to have coke or Quaaludes,” says Alex Chatelain. “I’d fuck girls at Studio 54. To have a ’lude made it quite easy. But I wasn’t a club person, and I didn’t like drugs, so I didn’t do it that much.” One night Matthew Rich watched a model spy a rolled-up $100 bill between some cushions on a sofa in Studio’s celebrities-only basement. “She unrolled it, snorted it, licked it, and then threw it on the ground, having gotten what she wanted,” Rich says. “I snapped it up and bought more dust.”

  The snorting, like the hustling busboys downstairs, who serviced the mostly gay Studio in crowd, were kept an inside secret for many years—even from insiders. Vogue’s Polly Mellen saw what was going on in the club’s balcony, though. “Two boys going at it, two girls, a girl and a boy. I saw every stage of something going on, and that scared me.” It was the same at Halston’s house. “Heavy drugs,” says Mellen. “I came, I saw, I left.”

  When Kay Mitchell first met freckle-faced sixteen-year-old Patti Hansen at a Wilhelmina party in 1973, “she was very shy,” the booker says. “You couldn’t get her to talk, but there was something in her pictures.” Mitchell sent her to Seventeen, and Hansen spent the next two years “leaping and running and jumping” for the young women’s magazine. Then Glamour booked her and gave her a new look. “She was the epitome of the healthy teenager,” Mitchell says. “The product people all jumped on board and she just took off.” Hansen dropped out of school and moved into 300 East Thirty-fourth Street, the same building where Bruce Cooper later stashed his girlfriend.

  Patti Hansen photographed by Charles Tracy for Calvin Klein Jeans

  Patti Hansen by Charles Tracy, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

  In the summer of 1974 Hansen went to Europe, where she signed with Elite. “She’s basically fearless,” Mitchell says, “and that part of her personality gave her the impetus to forge ahead. She did intense, strong pictures there, came back to America, we sent them to Vogue and they saw a whole different person.” In 1976 Hansen became one of the magazine’s stars. In 1978 she appeared on the cover of Esquire, representing “The Year of the Lusty Woman.”

  Hansen’s model friend Shaun Casey played ingenue parts longer. She lived in New York with her fiancé, real estate heir Martin Raynes, and caught the last good days of El Morocco and Le Club. It wasn’t until 1977 that she went to Paris and grew up. Hairdresser John Sahag cut her hair off and bleached the gamin’s cap that remained white. Paris Planning’s Gérald Marie took one look at her and decided to make her a star. Helmut Newton put her on the cover of French Vogue. Six weeks later she returned to America. “My bookings were off the charts,” she says. “I had five a day to choose from.”

  Casey signed with Estée Lauder and joined the scene at Studio 54. “It was champagne, coke, uppers, downers, poppers, all that,” she says. “Everybody was doing drugs at that point.” She married Roger Wilson, of New Orleans, whose father had coowned an oil services company. Both his parents had died when he was a teenager, leaving him with a fortune of several million dollars. Though he liked Studio 54, too, “we didn’t dive in headfirst,” Casey says. “I worked every day. I’d do bookings at night. I was into making money and putting it away.”

  It went on like that until 1983, when Casey’s Lauder contract and her marriage both ended. Lauder, which had always stuck with its faces for years, had grown more fickle. It replaced Casey with Willow Bay, who gave way in a few years to the more international Paulina Porizkova. Casey’s husband, Roger Wilson, “didn’t want to be married,” Casey says. “He wanted to be a playboy.” Then, that August, Casey’s younger sister, Katie, who was also a model, died of a drug overdose. Overwhelmed, Casey drank, stayed out late, and canceled bookings. “I think I canceled one hundred forty with Lord & Taylor alone,” she says. “I wasn’t partying. I was an absolute mess. So I changed my life. I married a guy who didn’t drink, moved to Florida, got a contract with Burdine’s, had a baby, chose my friends wisely, did my work, and went home. If you had money, you could do anything, and if you weren’t grounded, you could drown so easily.”

  Casey’s best friend, Patti Hansen, had a wilder reputation. “She didn’t really have boyfriends,” Kay Mitchell says. “She had hair and makeup guys who liked to hang out and party, and Patti was their star. Gay guys. One of them said to me, ‘I’m looking for a man like Hansen.’ I said, ‘So’s everybody.’ She was big and strong. A photographer once came on to her, and she flipped him over her shoulder and knocked him out.”

  Hansen would also “pull her shirt off if no one in the agency was paying attention to her,” says a Wilhelmina booker. Ever the athlete, on a shoot with Peter Strongwater at Lake Mohonk, in upstate New York, “Patti dropped acid and went rowing,” Strongwater says. Sometime later she went to Mexico City for a catalog shoot with Jerry Hall and photographer Guy Le Baube. “We went to the plane with a bus and a mariachi band to welcome Patti and Jerry and Bryan Ferry,” Le Baube recalls. “Patti got off the plane wearing transparent plastic shorts with no underwear and spike heels. She was literally steaming and showing Mexico City she was a real redhead.”

  Hansen was resilient. “She could drink a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and look perfectly normal,” says a photographer she got high with. “The key to Patti was her ability to absorb drugs without losing control. What would floor another person wouldn’t bother her. She never missed a booking. She was never out of control.”

  In 1979 Hansen met her match in Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard. “He became part of her energy instead of her becoming part of his,” says Shaun Casey. “She pulled him up.” But not without worrying her friends first. After they were introduced by Jerry Hall, Hansen disappeared for several days. “She got very, very, very skinny,” says Kay Mitchell. “Her hours turned around. He stayed up all night and slept all day, and she did, too. But for me that behavior, whether it was cocaine or tossing back drinks, was the aberration. She saved one of the great rock stars of our time. She was goodness personified, and I’m really not putting a pretty face on it. Doing the job and making everyone else look good because she showed up was the norm for Patti Hansen.”

  Not so for Gia Carangi, a bisexual drug addict whose brief rise, long fall, and final death from AIDS were the subject of a book, Thing of Beauty, that infuriated models, who say she was hardly representative. “Gi
a walked in and walked out,” says Mitchell, who booked her as well. “The difference between her and models like Patti or Shaun Casey is that they worked for years. They’d go anywhere and do anything for work.”

  For a moment Gia was a star, though, working with all the best photographers. She and Joe Macdonald bought their coke from the same Colombian on Fiftieth Street. “Joe would go off to the baths after we scored,” Matthew Rich says. “Gia and I would go out. I loved my Gia. She was adorable and sweet and loved to get fucked up the ass with fingers, and that horrified me, so she talked about it more. We loved to spell our names out on a mirror in coke.” Gia would get mad because Matthew’s name was so much longer than hers.

  “Gia was a real mess,” says Bill Weinberg. “A trashy little street kid, not unlike Janice Dickinson. If she didn’t feel like doing a booking, she didn’t show up.” Gia hit quickly after arriving in New York. “She was about melancholy and darkness, and that made great pictures,” says a fellow model. But it didn’t make Gia any happier. At a shoot for Vogue she stumbled out of the dressing room in a Galanos gown, collapsed in a chair, and nodded out, blood streaming down her arm, right in front of Polly Mellen. Weinberg told Francesco Scavullo that Gia had become unreliable, but the photographer insisted she’d show up if she knew the booking was with him. Gia always showed up for him. “Frank called up raving and screaming,” Weinberg recalls wryly. Gia never arrived. “She would have been a casualty in any life,” says John Warren. After several comeback attempts Gia fell out of modeling and died in 1986.

  Lisa Taylor never wanted to be a model. She thought the job was prissy and stupid. But the daughter of a J.P. Stevens executive from Oyster Bay, Long Island, did it anyway, to earn extra money while she studied dance. A friend who was a model brought her to Ford. “It was so easy,” Taylor says. “I walked in and started working.” She won her first cover, on Mademoiselle, at nineteen. Three years later, in 1974, she met Vogue’s Polly Mellen and became a star.

  Eileen Ford introduced Taylor to her off-and-on boyfriend for the next decade, producer Robert Evans. “He was getting divorced, and he saw someone he wanted to meet, and he asked his friend,” she says. “I know there was something going on with Eileen and Bob and people like him, but I thought I was more special for Bob.”

  Unfortunately Evans was often in California. That left a lot of nights free, and soon Taylor filled them with drinking and drugs. “I didn’t have too much self-esteem,” she says. “I was a prime suspect. I was partying, Studio 54, the whole number. Everyone our age was doing it.”

  Taylor says she began to hate being touched and prodded by stylists and had paranoid visions of being in the center of a crowd of thousands, all trying to take her picture. “When you have a certain number of pictures taken of you, you feel robbed,” she says. “I felt I was giving, giving, giving and getting nothing back. Drugs made it a lot easier to sit there and look dumb in front of the camera. Modeling isn’t the most inspiring, intellectual thing to do. At the beginning the money and traveling were fun, but it gets tired very quickly. Me, me, me. I, I, I.”

  Lisa Taylor photographed by Helmut Newton in 1975

  Lisa Taylor by Helmut Newton

  Unlike some of her peers, Taylor says she kept her fun and games limited to the evening hours. “I was very professional,” she says. “And the more weight you lose, the more they love you. It was not a healthy job.”

  In 1976 Taylor met actor Tommy Lee Jones on the set of a film about a fashion photographer, The Eyes of Laura Mars. She abruptly moved to California, informing Ford with a letter. “I wasn’t very communicative in those days,” Taylor says. A few years later she decided Jones was too possessive and returned to New York. That’s when she started seeing Cheryl Tiegs’s ex, Stan Dragoti. He didn’t make much of an impression either. “He was the next person for me,” she says. “Someone I dated. It wasn’t a great love affair.”

  In 1981 the behavior of models and photographers finally started making the papers. New York magazine’s Anthony Haden-Guest wrote an article, “The Spoiled Supermodels”; the Daily News ran a series of profiles subtitled “The Dark Side of Modeling.” Taylor was featured in the first installment, “A Top Model’s Struggle Back from ‘Rock Bottom.’” She admitted her drug problems in often painful detail. “I was finally beginning to see the light,” she says. “I was seeing friends on covers whose eyes were dead on drugs. It was the end of modeling and the beginning of my life.” She moved back to California, joined Al-Anon, and began doing charity work. She married in 1989 and had twins in 1993.

  “I had grown up at last,” she says. “Not that it’s their job, but the business, particularly the agents, could have helped more. Someone should have said, ‘Slow down.’ Instead they said, ‘Look at the money.’ You’re innocent and naïve, and they don’t want you to grow up. When I realized my life was more important than money, I left the business.”

  Despite the Ford agency’s image, one rival booker says there were drug problems there, too. “Ford is extremely tolerant,” said a friend of Taylor’s at Wilhelmina. “Nobody ever said to Lisa, ‘You moron.’ Lisa was screaming for help, but people are afraid to speak up because the girl is going to pack up her vouchers and walk.”

  Eileen Ford wasn’t the only one seeing no evil. A European model hit New York for a Vogue booking, collapsed on the set, and was rushed to a doctor who said she was so stoned her gag reflex was suppressed. “Vogue wasn’t concerned,” Wilhelmina’s Weinberg says. “All they wanted to know was, Would she be able to work the next day?” Grace Mirabella, Vogue’s editor then, sees it differently. “You don’t have time to wait,” she says. “Long stories don’t matter. When push comes to shove, what you care about is whether you have a picture.”

  Esme Marshall may be the only model whose personal problems ever led to the creation of a new agency. The daughter of a former Chanel model, Marshall was a seventeen-year-old salesgirl in a department store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was discovered by a fashion editor at Mademoiselle. That fall Marshall moved to New York, joined Elite, and took up modeling full-time. She fitted Elite’s new image precisely. “The style of girls had changed,” says booker Gara Morse, who’d left Wilhelmina for Elite’s new faces division. “It went from midwestern blondes to darker girls with crooked teeth. They weren’t ordinary. The nuttier the girl, the more John liked it.” Morse was given a free apartment on the East Side in exchange for playing chaperone to a revolving cast of eight aspirants who were crowded into another apartment next door. “I got what I was paid for,” she says. “If a girl wasn’t there, I had to go out looking for her.”

  The night after her first job, Esme was at Studio 54, where she met Calvin Klein, who immediately booked her for an ad for his new line of designer blue jeans. The bushy-browed brunette’s career was launched. Soon thereafter she met Alan Finkelstein. The owner of a Madison Avenue boutique called Insport, he was a long-haired New York night bird, ten years her senior. They soon moved into a Greenwich Village duplex together. By 1980 she was one of modeling’s superstars, earning $2,000 a day.

  Bernadette Marchiano, the then-estranged wife of sportscaster Sal Marchiano, was Esme’s booker at Elite. “Esme and I became fast friends,” she says. But Finkelstein got in the way. “He told me what Esme should be doing,” Marchiano recalls. “She was a child with no self-esteem, and this guy dazzled her.”

  Finkelstein thought that Elite had gotten too big and that John Casablancas wasn’t paying enough attention to Esme. But Monique Pillard says the model wouldn’t listen to advice from her agency. “She never wanted to hear anything,” Pillard says. “She was telling us what to do. She was mixed up with drugs, everyone knew, but at the time you turned the other way when you had a very big model. I saw a lot. A lot. But I didn’t understand. If I’d been in that circle and done it, I might have understood more. It took me a long time to realize.” Finally a male model, Jack Scalia, “came in one day and told me all about drugs,” Pillard says. “I
was so straight, and suddenly I felt very stupid. After that I’d say to girls, ‘Do you do drugs?’ And I got a lot of ‘Will you help me?’ But let’s face it, when you’re seventeen, you fuck around, and you don’t tell your mother.”

  Finkelstein suggested to Bernadette Marchiano that she form a new agency, backed by a friend of his, a record label owner and producer named Jerry Masucci. It would handle just stars, and the first would be Esme. Marchiano liked the idea and spoke to a friend who also worked at Elite, Eleanor Stinson, about joining them. In June 1980 they formed their new agency. They called it Fame Ltd.

  “Our approach was to treat models as businesswomen and not as pieces of ass,” Marchiano says. “There were no men in the agency. It was women working for women.”

  The model wars were still raging. That month Ford signed up Lisa Taylor (who’d come back from Elite), Christie Brinkley (from Zoli), and Beverly Johnson (from Wilhelmina). Brinkley was actually suing Elite, as was Opium perfume model Anna Anderson, who’d left the agency and was demanding an accounting of her earnings. But the news wasn’t all bad for John Casablancas. Within a month Johnson left Ford for Elite. The same day Wilhelmina’s Patti Hansen joined Elite, too.

  Almost immediately after Fame Ltd. opened its doors, it was revealed that the new agency had a silent partner: Ford, which owned a third of the agency in exchange for guaranteeing its vouchers. “Alan Finkelstein came to me and said Esme, Eleanor, and Bernadette were unhappy and wanted to start their own agency,” says Joey Hunter, a Ford executive.

  Born Joe Pantano in Brooklyn, Hunter, a former doo-wop singer and actor, had a successful career as a Ford model throughout the sixties. “He was Mr. Seventeen, the cutest clean-cut guy in the world,” says Jeff Blynn, who modeled with him. After appearing in an off-Broadway flop in 1969, Hunter asked Jerry Ford for a job. He became Ford’s assistant and rose to second-in-command of Ford’s men’s division. Hunter’s involvement in modeling extended to his private life. After his first marriage, to an actress, failed, he married the socialite/Ford model now known as Nina Griscom Baker. They broke up within a year, and Hunter took up with Elite’s Debbie Dickinson. Hunter’s third wife, Kim Charlton, was also an Elite model.