Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  A press blitz followed. But when it got to be too much, Toye failed her Svengali and escaped to Key West with Way Bandy, the made-up make-up man who could have been the Odd Squad’s godfather. One friend referred to what followed as “their little Peyton Place.” Another called it “a lover’s spat.” Meisel’s odd little squad fell apart. His agent called Toye “boring and sad.” Toye put it all down to a “high school girls’ fight.” Frances Grill, who lost touch with Meisel at the time, put it down to boredom. “Steven is fashion,” she says. “As fast as you think you’ve got it, it changes. That’s how Steven is. He moves on.”

  Following the breakup of the Odd Squad, Meisel was seen far less in public, but his career took off. He quickly left Mademoiselle behind. Briefly he championed a Dutch-Japanese model named Ariane, who was dating a musician who lived in his building. He shot her in an influential makeup spread for Italian Vogue. “I didn’t look like a girl,” she says. “I didn’t look like a boy I looked like this rock and roll thing.”

  Then came Christy Turlington. “I always wanted to work with Steven,” she says. But Vogue’s editors told her he liked only big, strong girls. “I kept asking,” she says, “becoming a little baby,” and finally a go-see was arranged. “So I met him one day, and he was very nice but didn’t seem to pay much attention.” It wasn’t until six months later, in 1986, that she finally worked with him for British Vogue. “I came an hour late, by subway, got off at the wrong stop—a disaster story,” she says. “But I worked with him for four days, and we had so much fun.” It was the first sitting where the team of Meisel, hairdresser Oribe Canales, and makeup man François Nars came together. Henceforth they worked together all the time. And over the course of the next several years they created a three-headed monster known as the Trinity: Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista, the three models who came to epitomize fashion.

  The second figure in the Trinity was hardly haute when she arrived in New York that April to do her very first shoot—for British Elle. Naomi Campbell was discovered in 1985 by former model Beth Boldt, who’d opened an agency called Synchro in London. She spotted the fourteen-year-old Campbell buying tap shoes near her office in London’s Covent Garden. “She was wearing a little school uniform,” Boldt recalls. “I took her first tests, and she was sooo sweet, like sugar. Everyone who met her wanted to hug her.” Some might say they hugged the sweetness right out of her.

  A theater and dance student from Streatham, England, and daughter of a dancer who’d traveled the world in sequins and plumes, Campbell was already show biz bound when she signed up for a modeling course at Boldt’s instigation. A few short months later she was on her way to America for Elle, where a pretty new black face was always welcome. “A girl from New York let them down, and Naomi got the booking,” says Boldt.

  That summer Ford “traded” Turlington to London for a week in exchange for a Synchro model. “I met Naomi the day I got there,” Christy says. “We had lunch, and she was in high school uniform, hanging out at the agency. She was really cute. She’s still sweet, but she’s a completely different human being now.”

  They hung out together and saw each other again a few months later, when they both landed at the Paris nightclub Les Bains at 4 A.M. Campbell had been taken up by Azzedine Alaïa, a diminutive Tunisian-born designer in Paris. Models loved his sexy clothes as much as he loved models. “He was way ahead of all of them,” says John Casablancas. “He created the fashion show as a social event, and he got every single superstar in the business to come for free.” He also let them stay in his house and referred to them as his daughters. “Naomi says I am like her mother,” he explains. “I keep an eye on her. Cities are dangerous for young girls. There is too much temptation. Everything is easy, and at that age they never think anything can happen to them. For models it goes very fast.”

  It did for Campbell. Christy recalls, “I kind of felt protective over her, and I was only a year older. I also wanted the company. So she moved in with me.” Christy soon introduced Campbell to Meisel. “Because Naomi lived with me, we all hung out a lot,” Christy says. “So Naomi got in really quickly.”

  The final member of the Trinity, the most dedicated model of the three, is Linda Evangelista. Though she’s been dubbed Evilangelista by wags at Elite, she’s also the most accomplished model of her time. “I know what and where I would be if I wasn’t modeling,” she once said. “I thank God every day for my looks.”

  Born in 1965 to an Italian Roman Catholic family in St. Catharines, Ontario, she was the daughter, niece, and sister of General Motors auto plant workers. Her mother enrolled her in dance and self-improvement classes starting at age seven. She became a model as a teenager, working in local stores for $8 an hour. “Even when she was thirteen, I knew she’d be good at it,” her mother said.

  Like Steven Meisel, Linda “was always obsessed with fashion—with the magazines, the models and the poses,” she’s said. She signed with an agency in Toronto and in 1981, at sixteen, entered a Miss Teen Niagara contest in Niagara Falls. An Elite scout was in the audience. Not long afterward she arrived in New York to test. But not much happened.

  Determined to succeed, or at least not to return to Ontario, Evangelista packed her bags for Paris in 1984. Her father gave her a year to make it. “I thought I was good,” she’s said, but she was “doing mediocre jobs for $650.” She was her own harshest critic. “I didn’t really have myself so together,” she’s recalled. “I still had baby fat and the hair was a problem.”

  “Actually, she worked very well,” says Francesca Magugliani, who watched her progress at Elite Paris. “She was doing covers right away for Figaro Madame and Dépêche Mode.” Then, Francesca recalls, Evangelista had a booking in Spain with Gérald Marie’s photographer friend André Rau. “She did a lot of jobs with Rau,” Francesca says. Upon her return Elite got a letter saying she was switching agencies. “André took her to Paris Planning,” Francesca says. “I called John, and he said, ‘Don’t give her her book.’ So she leaves, never calls for her book, never calls for her money. And that’s when she started her superstar career.”

  Evangelista had been having an affair with Rau. “She was the only girl he ever loved,” a friend of Rau’s says. “He was two years with her. Gérald Marie stole this girl from him. After her he never recovered.”

  Marie met Evangelista at his apartment in Paris. “She came with a friend, and we looked at each other, and in the same moment, boom!” he recalls. “She was with Elite. She was not an important model. I was still at Paris Planning, and she came to work there.” Christine Bolster was at Paris Planning, too. And she wasn’t Marie’s only girlfriend. “Gérald was going out with Linda, with one of my models, with a top booker, and with Christine,” said a competing agency owner. “There were at least four, and he said to each of them, ‘I love you, I’m going to marry you.’”

  The next month, when Marie opened Elite Plus, Evangelista switched back, and Marie began making her a star. “Gérald made her career,” says Francesca. “Linda was madly in love with him.” He introduced her to his close friend photographer Peter Lindbergh. “I brought Peter to my place for dinner, and I told him, ‘I bet you when you start working with her, you’re not gonna stop,’” Marie remembers. “One month after, he booked Linda, and for one year and a half he never stopped booking Linda. He was the king of Italian Vogue, of Marie Claire; he was putting her everywhere.”

  Their new alliance proved a boon to both Linda and Gérald. “Elite was never that hot,” says a Paris competitor. “With Linda it got really, really hot. Gérald was using Linda to meet all the photographers, imposing himself in the studios, all the luncheons. I think she’s really a cold fish. But she’s really clever at keeping relationships with photographers.” After a few months Marie and Evangelista came to New York. “We did a list of who we should see, and the first day she went to see Steven [Meisel],” Marie says. Evangelista was the perfect appurtenance for the peculiar photographer. Her desire
to make great pictures transcended all else, and as time went by, she proved willing to be bent and shaped to Meisel’s every whim. “She had a tremendous desire for success,” says Marie. “And she is somebody who knew really quickly to correct what imperfections she had by moving differently, finding the angle for the light. She is no more or less beautiful than many other women, but she wants it really bad.”

  By the end of 1986 Gérald Marie had “started speaking about marriage,” Linda said. “I never ever thought he would get married. So I said, ‘Well, put the ring on my finger and then we’ll talk about it.’ And he did. When I was on my way back here for Christmas, we had a dinner. He put the ring on my finger and I went into shock.”

  In spring 1987 Christy Turlington returned from a location trip in Russia and went straight into a session with Evangelista and Meisel. “I was helping him,” Christy says. “He’d be looking for girls all the time. I got him to work with Naomi. Now Linda arrived. She was a little bit wary of me, because she knew we were all a team and good friends. I never had anything in common with her in the beginning. We were around her a few times, and she was nice; but I found she was a little competitive.” As it happened, the only pictures that ran from their first shoot together were of Evangelista. Her success with Meisel proved a perfect wedding present. Marie and Evangelista were married in July 1987 at St. Alfred’s Catholic Church, in Evangelista’s hometown.

  Things began to happen fast for the Trinity after that. Their success was due, in no small part, to a shakeup at Condé Nast. Vogue was in a crisis, a result of the success of the upstart Elle, just launched in America. In June 1988 S.I. Newhouse, Jr., and creative director Alex Liberman decided they had to do something. In a stunning coup they fired Vogue’s editor, Grace Mirabella, and replaced her with Anna Wintour.

  Wintour’s career in fashion began in her hometown of London in 1970, when she went to work for Hearst’s British Harper’s Bazaar (now called Harper’s & Queen). Moving to New York in 1975, she joined American Bazaar under Anthony Mazzola but didn’t last long. “Tony felt the sittings I was doing weren’t right for the American market,” Wintour says. “And he was probably right.” She went on to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s women’s magazine, Viva, and New York magazine. She spurned Condé Nast’s early approaches, although she met with Mirabella. “Grace asked what job she wanted,” says an editor who heard of their encounter.

  “Grace, of course I want your job,” Wintour replied.

  Finally, in 1983, Liberman lured Wintour to Vogue with the new—and purposefully vague—title of Creative Director and a mandate to use her elbows. Liberman says he felt “an absolute certitude I needed this presence. In my innocence I thought she could collaborate with Grace and enrich the magazine. I’m not sure the relationship was the way it should have been.”

  Both Wintour and Mirabella felt frustrated. “Things worked differently then,” Wintour says diplomatically. “Grace picked the clothes. There was one point of view. It’s not how we do it now.” Wintour got out in January 1986, when Beatrix Miller, the longtime editor of British Vogue, decided to retire. Her new appointment was controversial. Under Miller, British Vogue was a whimsical, eccentric magazine, much admired by the fashion crowd, but not terribly realistic. “It was a rare animal,” says Liz Tilberis, who started at the magazine after placing second in a 1969 Vogue talent contest. Wintour changed it, trading idiosyncrasy for rational uniformity, quirkiness for speed, the strangely erotic for the straightforwardly sexy. Suddenly the magazine looked just like Wintour, in her short skirts, high heels, bobbed hair, and dark glasses.

  During Wintour’s first months on the job, unhappiness spilled into the pages of the feisty British press. For a supposedly civil people the British gave Wintour an extraordinarily hard time. They nicknamed her Nuclear Wintour, the Wintour of Our Discontent, and Desperate Dan, for, as the Evening Standard put it, “her habit of crashing through editorships as though they were brick walls, leaving behind a ragged hole and a whiff of Chanel.” By April 1987 speculation was fierce that Wintour’s chill reception in London was about to send her scurrying back to America. Pregnant again and often alone in a long-distance marriage, she began discussions with American Elle.

  “I was having a hard time,” she admits. “It wasn’t a secret.”

  Si Newhouse flew to London to see her—and keep her—by offering the editorship of another Condé Nast magazine, House & Garden. But Wintour’s eight-month attempt to remake the magazine (renamed HG) into a cross-disciplinary journal of style quickly ran into trouble. Things got so bad it was widely believed that Condé Nast operators were fielding an avalanche of subscription cancellations. “It was a horrible time,” Wintour says. “I thought I was doing an interesting magazine.” Meanwhile events outside Condé Nast were conspiring to take it away from her.

  As Wintour crossed the Atlantic, Vogue still ruled the roost, but things were changing. It was the year of Elle. The slick, gorgeously printed Paris-born magazine was growing fast, and suddenly people were noticing it. In 1987 Vogue’s advertising revenues hit $79.5 million. Bazaar—still in a holding pattern under editor Anthony Mazzola—earned $32.5 million. Elle, at $39 million, was gaining fast and outselling Bazaar. Hearst seemed not to notice, but Condé Nast did. “There was a slight tremor,” Liberman says. “People looked at Elle carefully. There was something unconventional and a little new about its approach. It’s quite possible we learned certain lessons.”

  Lesson number one? “It seemed a change at the top was necessary,” Newhouse says. “We had a magazine that needed attention.”

  As far back as 1986 Liberman had let Grace Mirabella know that something was amiss. But he did it with “words I didn’t quite understand,” she says. “I’m the first to see nothing coming. Even a bus.” Si Newhouse admits that Mirabella’s firing two years later was badly handled. “Alex and I made the decision to change,” he says, and somehow it leaked to Liz Smith, who promptly broadcast the news. “The way it was handled was graceless—without making a pun,” Newhouse continues. “So, fine. But it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision.” Within two days Rupert Murdoch got in touch with Mirabella. A few months later he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a new magazine bearing her name.

  Wintour’s first revamped issue of Vogue appeared that fall. Linda Evangelista got a makeover at precisely the same moment. In October 1988 Peter Lindbergh convinced her to let Parisian hairstylist Julian D’Is cut off her hair—just as Gérald Marie’s previous charges Shaun Casey and Christine Bolster had done before her. “I was terrified,” Evangelista said. “I cried through the whole thing.” She was canceled from more than a dozen runway shows as a result, but she had the last laugh. “Between December and March I appeared on every Vogue cover—British, French, Italian, and American,” she later boasted.

  Christy Turlington chose that moment to make herself scarce. In fall 1987 she met Roger Wilson—Shaun Casey’s ex-husband—at a party in Los Angeles. Before his marriage to Casey broke up, Wilson had decided to become an actor and debuted in Porky’s, a witless 1982 teen sex comedy that made a fortune. It kick-started his new career but also spelled the end of his marriage to Casey. “He says things didn’t work out because he had other things to do and she was used to having this young kid with a lot of money who was home all the time,” Turlington says. Wilson got a job on a television series. He dated model Kelly LeBrock. “Most of this stuff I found out afterwards,” Turlington says. “I thought he was a cute, sweet, normal guy when I met him.”

  Around the same time Turlington did her first big-money job—for Calvin Klein. Bruce Weber was in the midst of shooting Klein’s faux-orgiastic Obsession perfume ads when Turlington flew in for two days. “The shoot was wild,” she recalls. “Tons of people. Guys and girls. The clothes would come off. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’” As the ladylike ads that resulted attest, Turlington kept her clothes on. She didn’t like the pictures. But Klein liked her. And during the fittings for his fashio
n show in spring 1988, he started questioning her closely about her ambition. Later that day Klein called her. “I have this really crazy idea,” he said. “I love you so much I would marry you, but I already got married. So I want you to be the girl for my new fragrance. Just do me a favor, don’t break me.”

  Turlington starts hyperventilating remembering the moment. Eileen Ford tried to talk her out of it. But Turlington wanted to spend more time with her new beau, and being a contract model would allow her that. “I signed very quickly,” she says. “I didn’t have a lawyer. When I got home, Roger read the contract.”

  “You’re screwed,” he said.

  Though she was to be paid $3 million for eighty days’ work a year over four years, she was locked up. She couldn’t do interviews, editorial spreads, or any other advertising. At first that didn’t matter. The first month of her contract was a busy one. She shot photos with Irving Penn, began work with Richard Avedon on Eternity’s television commercials, and then headed to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot magazine ads with Weber. That’s when the problems started. Weber hadn’t been consulted on Klein’s choice of Turlington. “I think he should have had a voice in who the contract girl was,” she says.

  Their first shoot together—inspired by Toni Frissell’s photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Todd, and their daughter—went well. At least Weber thought so. Surrounded by children, Turlington “let her ego go completely,” he says. “Most girls are afraid of not being the star.” By giving up center stage to the children, he concludes, “she was the star of the shooting.” Unfortunately few of the photos ever appeared. “Calvin never ran that many pictures,” Weber says. “You know how it is: You shoot eight dresses, but they really only plan to run two. Christy was used to seeing a lot of pictures of herself. She really felt frustrated, and through that frustration she lost interest.”