Hunter and Richard Talmadge, one of the Fords’ lawyers and a music business investor, arranged the meeting between Jerry Ford and Masucci. They agreed to do the same thing Elite had done in Paris with its second agency, Viva, and open an independent editorially oriented boutique agency. Stinson and Marchiano got 5 percent each. Talmadge got 10 percent and was named a director. Masucci owned the remainder of the stock. “It was an opportunity for us to get two great bookers who had control of a couple models,” Hunter says. They hoped that Kelly Emberg and Nancy Donahue would follow Esme to Fame. It was also a chance to see if John Casablancas could take what he’d been dishing out.
No surprise, Casablancas wasn’t happy about this arrangement. Between them Bernadette and Eleanor “had every phone number, contact with every girl. It was the scariest moment I ever had,” he says. “So I said to the models, ‘If you stay with this agency, there’s a bonus. One percent less every year you stay with us.’ Some years later I had to write a letter to people like Paulina and Carol Alt saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t have you under a certain percentage.’” He’d won the battle, but the war wasn’t over. “I will never sleep with both eyes closed as long as that woman is around,” he said at the time of Eileen Ford.
Alex Chatelain was one of the first photographers to shoot Esme. “I believed in her,” he says. “She was wonderful.” But he thought Finkelstein was a bad influence on her. “The drugs were so out in the open,” he says. “Finkelstein was friends with everyone who was in. If they were famous, he was with them. Esme was in love with him. He took her everywhere, and you’d see her getting hyper and thinner, and at a certain point I couldn’t use her anymore. She was too thin. Finkelstein had destroyed her.” Esme dismissed published reports that she and her lover were cocaine users as ridiculous. “A lot of people like to blow things out of proportion,” she said.
Fame signed a few more good models, including Terri May and Nancy Decker, but it was short-lived. The first sign of trouble came when Alan Finkelstein called the booking desk, demanding that Marchiano cancel one of Esme’s bookings. If she didn’t, Finkelstein threatened, he would go to Albert Watson’s studio and drag her out. “Watson stopped the shoot and let her go,” Marchiano remembers. Then Finkelstein called back. “I was just playing with you,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Marchiano replied, hanging up. Their relationship went downhill from there. “It was beyond my control,” Esme said later. “He used to not let me go to bookings. It was very weird. He tried to run me over once. He was jealous of my booker ‘controlling’ me.” Though Finkelstein had promised he wouldn’t try to play agent, “he threw a monkey wrench in for no reason,” Marchiano says. “We’d have battles, battles, battles. Boyfriends are the major flaw in the modeling business. I wouldn’t talk to boyfriends. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was a problem. My problem was Esme’s boyfriend. Someone else had control. Alan didn’t want that.”
Finally, early in 1981, Finkelstein took Esme from Fame to Ford. According to an $8 million lawsuit Marchiano and Stinson later filed against their partners, Joe Hunter assumed the presidency of Fame at that time. “We stayed around awhile, booking the other models,” Marchiano says. But one morning in late May she arrived to find the locks changed and Fame’s books, records, furniture, and models all moved to Ford. Hunter told them they’d henceforth be working for the Fords. Less than two weeks later they were fired. Two days after that Fame Ltd. was formally dissolved.
“What happened was, the money went out of control,” says Hunter, who claims that Marchiano and Stinson were spending without consulting Masucci. “Jerry got disenchanted,” Hunter claims. “We felt we had a runaway ship financially, and we decided enough is enough. We did lock them out, and we bought Masucci out over a period of a couple of years.” In response to the bookers’ lawsuit (which was prepared by Elite’s lawyer, Ira Levinson), Jerry Ford said they’d been dismissed for incompetence and dereliction of duty and claimed that Fame was insolvent.
Marchiano categorically denies that Fame was losing money. In fact, she says, it had just started turning a profit when Ford closed it down. “There was no financial reason to close it,” Marchiano says. “I finally decided it was a whim of Alan’s.” She turned down Hunter’s offer to work at Ford and instead went back to work for Casablancas, who was starting a chain of franchised modeling schools with his brother, Fernando. Stinson moved to Miami, where she still works as a modeling agent. Their lawsuit against the Fords, Hunter, and Masucci was eventually abandoned. A suit the Fords subsequently filed against Ira Levinson for defamation was decided in Levinson’s favor.
At Ford Esme remained erratic. “She was always out, and you’d never know whether she would get to her booking or not,” Joe Hunter later said. In the Daily News series published in April 1980, unnamed sources referred to the twenty-year-old as “a burn-out” and “sort of gone.” It was said she’d stopped taking location trips, canceled bookings, turned up late, cried on sets, lost weight, and lost her luster. Elite was promoting a new model, Julie Wolfe, who was an Esme look-alike. Chain-smoking Marlboros, Esme denied it all, saying she lost weight because she was hyperactive. “I really don’t care what the fashion industry thinks,” she said. “They have a warped perspective anyway.”
Janice Dickinson later told writer (and ex-model) Lynn Snowden that the problem wasn’t drugs. Finkelstein was beating Esme up. “She was covered in bruises and didn’t want people to see her like that,” Dickinson said. “Esme was getting the shit kicked out of her. She just entered into this Svengali relationship.” Once she even showed up at Marchiano’s door bleeding. “He abused her,” Marchiano confirms. “She was physically abused and controlled.”
Finally, Esme told Snowden, she manipulated Finkelstein into throwing her out. Even then he kept victimizing her. “I just signed everything over to him,” Esme said, including property she’d bought in Colorado. She ended up owing $350,000 in back taxes. Esme retired from modeling in 1985, married a professional volleyball player, moved to France, had a baby, divorced, and launched a brief comeback in 1990. Friends say she’s since moved to California. Finkelstein lives there, too. He resurfaced in 1992, running a supper club called the Monkey Bar, part owned by his best friend, Jack Nicholson.
Nicholson’s friend Zoli kept a diary for the last five years of his life. Though there is scarcely anything written in it, a few sketchy passages offer a glimpse of his life and thoughts. On September 8, 1977, he and an “R. H.” attended an Irving Penn opening at the Marlborough Gallery and “saw I. Penn, L. Hutton, the Fords, Karen Bjornsen, Tim and Joe Macdonald, Mrs. V.” They went on to Julie Britt’s birthday party for model Peter Keating, where they saw Patti Hansen, Patti Oja, Janice Dickinson, and Lisa Cooper. “Home with R. H.,” the entry concludes. “HANGover.”
On September 8 Zoli picked up his mother, who’d been diagnosed with cancer, at the hospital. “She’s doing fine.” An entry about falling in love with R. H. follows. “It’s the only thing that I can’t count on like my job, my house, my family, my friends and yet in that uncountability [sic] I feel more stable than in all those other temporary securities.” That October Zoli noted his plan to move from the town house to 955 Lexington Avenue. “It’ll be fun to live alone and somewhat strange,” he wrote. Not long after Zoli and his partner, Bennie Chavez, began to have differences over money.
Chavez says, “There were people in his life who were rather unsavory. A couple of his lovers were great sources of trouble, asking why I should have half the business. The problem was, we had a written agreement.” Then Chavez fell in love with an Englishman and decided to marry him. Zoli felt sure she was making a mistake. The next entry in Zoli’s diary are notes headed “CHAMELEON.” After a scientific description of lizards Zoli added, “also a changeable and fickle person.”
Zoli was having a crisis. “I thought the solution would be to move from this house, this beautiful house inhabited by ghosts, namely me, mutti [his mother] & B. C. [Chavez],” h
e wrote. “The next minute, it was to change professions completely as work seems to be a compote of self-indulgent, greedy, ungrateful, egotistical narcissists…. I’ve arrived somewhere and stayed too long.” That Christmas he went to Aspen and saw ex-model and designer Jackie Rogers, François de Menil, and Jack Nicholson. “What a blasé, spoiled man I am,” he wrote. “How well I seem to have it, but if I could only get some real enthusiasm for anything I would be most pleased. I am learning to resign myself, to accept reality in people without rose-colored glasses…. It’s no fireworks for me. I’m probably better off for it. But I yearn for the passions of the moment and also want to pass my life in insanity and recklessness which I repress for the sake of? what I don’t know.”
There are no more diary entries for six months until Zoli notes a July 1978 sailboat trip to the Virgin Islands with a man named Bob. “Both quit smoking and eating meat, a changing time,” Zoli noted. When he got back, it was time to split up with Bennie Chavez. The next few pages were filled with angry ideas on how to separate their business. “A lawyer convinced him he should get tough, and he took me to court,” Chavez says.
Zoli’s diary picks up again many blank pages later, with the 1981 notation “My dear sweet mama died on April 16 at 1 A.M.” Again many pages intervene, and then in the very back of the book are three more entries. The first two are lists of Zoli’s stock holdings late in 1980 and in mid-1981, when they totaled almost $145,000. The last entry in the diary appears to be the beginning of a screenplay. Two men meet in a dark gay bar. A young executive type picks up an older man, takes him home, and they have sex. Then the man reveals “he’s a vampire,” Zoli writes. “Vampire is … 30 going on 300. Likes boy and confides that he is tired of being a vampire….”
By all accounts, Zoli was only a voyeur at the party that fascinated him so and was in certain ways quite bourgeois. He was never promiscuous, according to his friends. He had boyfriends and “lived with them,” says Barbara Lantz, who now co-owns Zoli with Vickie Pribble. “He was very relationshiporiented. In one case, Zoli’s mother lived with them and Zoli moved out and the guy kept living with [Zoli’s] mother.”
But not long after his mother died, Zoli started feeling ill. “He had the weirdest symptoms,” Lantz recalls. “He went to forty doctors all over the country for tests. Joe Macdonald had already been diagnosed with AIDS. Zoli had an AIDS test, and it came back negative.” He went to clinics and gurus and even hooked himself up to a biofeedback machine. On one of his trips he visited ex-Wagner model Geraldine Clark in California. “I got very frightened when I saw him,” she says. “He was thin as a stick and had a high fever.” He cried while they were having dinner. In September 1981, Zoli’s sister says, his doctors diagnosed lung cancer. “We thought he was being melancholy,” says Lantz. “He had a tendency.” He’d lost his case against Chavez, and they’d finally split their holdings. She kept the town house; he got the agency.
In November 1982 Zoli checked into the hospital. He had his doctors tell his employees he had tuberculosis and would be all right. Bennie Chavez knew differently. “I saw him on the street a few days before he went into the hospital,” she says. “He was very thin; he had no voice. He had a look of peace in his eyes. It was almost hypnotic, and it disturbed me.” Geraldine Clark flew to New York to nurse him. The cancer had spread to his esophagus, and the radiation treatments that doctors prescribed caused his food and air pipes to fuse together. Clark prepared food in a blender for her friend. That was the only way he could eat. Finally, the day before he died, Zoli sent his sister back to her home in Virginia and Clark back to California. “He knew there was the possibility he had AIDS,” Clark says. “He had one lover who’d been very promiscuous. He’d become like a pariah. No one wanted to touch him. I was terrified, but before I left, I pushed the pipe away and kissed his lips. It was the first time he’d smiled in days.”
Finally Zoli succumbed. He was forty-one. To this day his friends and family aren’t sure what really caused his death, though they note that his last boyfriend later died of AIDS. “There are no records saying it was anything but cancer,” says Lantz. “It certainly sounds like AIDS. But there was never a diagnosis.”
The day Zoli died, the word went out among the models, but they were asked to keep his death a secret. A quiet memorial was scheduled because Zoli wanted no fuss, and indeed, except for a brief notice in a photographic trade newspaper, his death was never publicly acknowledged. Meanwhile, Zoli’s lawyer called six key employees together. There were two wills, he told them. Only one was signed. Both split the agency among the employees, but in different ways. The minority shareholders wanted to sell. But Lantz and Pribble wanted to keep the agency going and did.
If there is such a thing as karma, Zoltan Rendessy’s stayed good to the very end. Shortly after Zoli died, John Casablancas and Wilhelmina’s Fran Rothschild both called and offered to lend the agency bookers, so the staff could attend the memorial service. Zoli’s most fitting epitaph may be what didn’t happen next.
“We didn’t lose a single model,” says Barbara Lantz.
BITTEN KNUDSEN * TARA SHANNON
Of all the models who emerged in the early eighties, Bitten Knudsen had one of the worst reputations. She was a free spirit who one minute would be climbing the walls, and the next, collapsed in a heap on the floor, unconscious on drugs, and uncaring about who knew it. Bitten’s fantasy was to open a model agency called the Unprofessionals. Its motto? “Double rate if we show up,” Bitten says. “Triple rate if we step on the set.”
Tara Shannon’s reputation couldn’t have been more different. She was known as a consummate professional, a modeling virtuoso. Sitting down for lunch in a restaurant near her Manhattan apartment, Shannon wears studious frameless glasses that almost give her a schoolteacher’s look but can’t quite obscure the beauty lurking just underneath.
Today both models are in their late thirties and have gone on to other careers. Shannon has appeared on several television shows. Bitten makes films, lives in SoHo with a painter, and still sees lots of her friends from the old days—at least, those who are still alive. “I feel like I’m a warrior who survived the front lines,” she says, her voice slinking out from under a thick mane of white blond hair. “There weren’t any medals, but we were definitely out there with guns, shooting straight at the enemy.”
TARA SHANNON: “I was this flat-chested, skinny, blue-eyed, curly-haired little girl in Denver. I would take Cosmo magazines, paint tits on my chest like circles, and copy the poses. I loved Milly the Model comic books. I have my collection still. You would draw the hairdos and clothes, and mail them in, and they would give you a little credit in the comic. One of the tragedies in my life is that my mother never mailed the letters. It made me what I am today.
“I dropped out and left home when I was thirteen. I was living on my own in a hippie house. My first modeling job was Playboy. I was sixteen, and I was going to be a centerfold, but it was never published because I wasn’t girl next door enough. Which turned out to be what made my career. I wasn’t the girl next door.
“I really started when I was eighteen. I hustled, hustled, hustled, hustled. I went to the department stores, to the illustrators. I went to restaurants and said that I knew a clothing store that wanted to do tearoom modeling. And then I would go to the clothing store and say I know a restaurant that wants to do clothing modeling.
“I had so much drive to be a model. I would practice in the mirror with makeup, with my hair, with poses. I went to see photographers, and I was teaching them how to light, how to crop. I was getting locations. I would get my contact sheets, and my goal was to go from having ten percent of the shots be good to twenty to thirty to fifty to seventy percent. And I had all my newspaper ads, and I would take my ads and a pencil and I’d retouch them myself.”
BITTEN KNUDSEN: “I started in Denmark. I was fresh out of school, and I had a bunch of jobs. One was tutoring an actress who was an ex-model, and one day she sent me to her
agency with her book. They said, ‘What if we take some shots with you?’ The next thing I knew I was flying off to Germany. I went with a photographer to shoot covers for sexy magazines. Dorothy Parker-Sed said I should stay there. She said, ‘You’re such a kid,’ and I became known as the Kid.”
SHANNON: “I wanted to get to New York. I got hooked up with this guy—my Svengali—who was a total asshole. I’d organized a troupe of disco-dancing models, and he was my dance partner. He had been in Dallas as a model, and he knew an agent, Kim Dawson. I broke up with him, and I went to Dallas in ’77.
“Kim sends me to Neiman Marcus for a go-see for a shoe shot. Whoever fits the shoe gets the job, and the shoe fit me. Cinderella. I am so thrilled. And shaking. Then she asks me to go to the Bahamas for Neiman Marcus. I’d never been out of Denver and Dallas. So I go to the Bahamas, to Mexico, to Thailand. I did shows, too. And I became the top model in Dallas, the highest-paid girl ever, five hundred dollars a day.
“Sometime they would fly in girls like Apollonia, and I would be beside myself. One time I went to Maine for a catalog, and Patti Hansen was coming! I mean, my God! And she got off the plane from Europe with a backpack, no luggage. And I just followed her wherever she went. We were in a small Maine village and she went to a store and she bought a pack of Haines men’s underwear and a pack of men’s T-shirts to wear and a big bag of potato chips. I was like Miss Anal Compulsive Professional Model with my little makeup kit, and I had never seen anything like her. I’d be taking notes, you know?”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 41