Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  “I’m at the top of my game now. The question is, Where do I go from here? I’m twenty-eight. I’d like to model for as long as the check is there, because let’s be serious, my sister is an oncologist who went to school for fourteen years and her income does not compete with mine. So I’m not going to say I’m above that check.

  “Let’s face it, I hit the jackpot. But you only hear success stories. So the problem is, all those little girls in Iowa and Kansas think they’re going to become millionaires: You’re better off buying a lottery ticket.”

  $25,000 A DAY

  Shortly after Elite Models opened in New York in 1977, Jeanette Christjansen arrived to join her boyfriend, John Casablancas. “It was a critical period for me,” she says. “I was turning thirty. In America nobody knew me. My career was over.” A new generation of models—Esme, Nancy Donahue, Kim Alexis, Kelly Emberg, Carol Alt—had arrived via an Elite recruitment blitz in America’s small local agencies and model schools. Though she worked here successfully for six months, that fall Christjansen got pregnant. “It was a very nice way for me to quit,” she says.

  Julian Casablancas was born the next summer, and John and Jeanette finally got married late that year at New York’s City Hall. But his first wife—Elite—was demanding all his time. “America just took us over,” Christjansen says. “The business became his life, and there was nothing left.” Casablancas was doing one-nighters in cities around the world. “I was so happy being a mother,” says Jeanette. “It was no fun to join him, so I didn’t. When I look back, maybe I should have.” Until that time Casablancas had been relatively discreet about his extramarital activities. “He was unfaithful to poor Jeanette from the word go, but she had no idea,” says April Ducksbury. It was an open secret in his agencies, though. “I knew he was sleeping with underage girls, but not big models,” says Elite booker Monique Corey. “John always screwed around, always, the younger the better. I worried that he’d get in trouble with a mother, but it never fazed me. I’m French.”

  “Take the whole Elite head sheet,” says Francesca Magugliani. “There were three nos and five yeses.” The affairs never lasted long. “When you reach eighteen, you start thinking and become intelligent,” says Francesca. “The day the girl matured and had a mind of her own, it was finished. John wants adulation. They’d start talking back to him. In my opinion, John was afraid they’d find out he’s a terribly insecure man, loyal only to himself, born to have fun. When a girl starts questioning what you’re doing, it becomes itchy. He’s afraid of a woman. So he withdrew from them and made the affairs end. John has never left; he makes the girl leave.”

  Nearing forty, Casablancas was still a magnetic charmer. “I’ve seen girls scratch at his door,” says photographer Guy Le Baube. “Modeling brings out the worst in girls. But John was very careful. He’s not mercantile.” Many found no fault in his behavior. “OK, he goes out with young girls, but it’s not dirty,” says a woman who owns one of the larger agencies in Paris. “Young girls say yes. I never heard he forced a girl.” And unlike many other men in modeling, Casablancas, by all accounts, never took drugs or offered them.

  But then Casablancas made what many perceive as the biggest mistake of his life. He began getting serious about the girls he was sleeping with. And where once they were the children of sophisticated Europeans, now they were Americans, descendants of Puritans. In 1982 Casablancas was thirty-nine when he began courting a barely postpubescent girl from the South. “She was thirteen or fourteen, a baby when she met John,” says Francesca.

  Casablancas had dinner one night with photographer John Stember and Gunilla Lindblad’s husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen. Stember was just back from a trip for Vogue in Florida. “John had been selling him a new girl who was about thirteen,” Zachariasen says. “He was extremely involved in this girl for some reason.” Stember was telling Casablancas about the horrors of the trip—lost luggage, bad weather, bad moods—when Casablancas interrupted. “What about my young girl?” he demanded.

  Finally, Stember admitted that he’d never even shot her. “John was banging his fist on the table,” Zachariasen says. “‘Why didn’t you use this girl?’ Stember said, ‘Because she was brand-new and she was stiff, and the others were broken in.’ John said, ‘My God, what did this poor girl do the whole time?’” “Don’t worry,” Stember replied. “She went to the beach every day. She bought a pail and a spade, and she made sand castles!”

  By 1985 the southern girl was gone. “She was very intelligent,” says Francesca. “Then she grew up. She looked at John, and he wasn’t an idol anymore.” The brown-haired, brown-eyed woman—who remained with Elite for many years and is now married and a mother—confirms her affair with Casablancas. “It happened,” she says. “It was a nice part of my life, but I’d prefer it to be unpublished.”

  She was gone, but Casablancas had a new source of temptation. That year Elite launched an international competition modeled after Steward Cowley’s failed Model of the Year pageant and the Ford agency’s Face of the ’80s contest, which quickly became an internationally televised event.

  Promotional literature for the Look of the Year contest boasted that Elite models had been featured on 60 percent of major magazine covers in the preceding eighteen months, more than all the other New York agencies combined, and that the Elite Group of ten agencies had booked $22 million in business the preceding year. The John Casablancas Career Centers—franchised modeling schools coowned by Kittler and the Casablancas brothers—had also taken off after a rocky start that cost Casablancas and Kittler at least a million dollars. Now fourteen schools had opened, and thirteen more were planned.

  Stephanie Seymour, who’d just turned fifteen, was an entrant from San Diego in California’s semifinal for the first Look of the Year. Casablancas chose her as the local winner. But he really preferred her mother. “Stephanie was a charmer, a puppy dog, a pony with long legs,” Casablancas says. “But she was such a baby that there was no way. If I looked at anybody with interest, it was her mom! I was not having any affair with the mother, but she would not have had to ask me twice for me to say yes.”

  In November one hundred aspiring models from America and thirty from other countries competed for Elite contracts guaranteeing as much as $200,000 a year at the finals in Acapulco, Mexico. Up against Cindy Crawford, among others, Seymour appeared in a tank T-shirt, suspenders, and a Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairdo. She placed in the top fifteen but didn’t win a contract and returned to school. Throughout her freshman year in high school, she wrote to Casablancas. “The kid was delightful,” he says. “She charmed everybody. She would send little letters to everyone at the agency, and when you’d open the letter, little silver stars fell out.” He responded, urging her to come to New York and join Elite. Seymour’s mother finally convinced her husband in June 1984. “The mother of this model should have kept her daughter out of the way,” says April Ducksbury. “But she wanted her daughter to be a model.”

  After testing in New York, Stephanie went to Europe and was booked to shoot the alta moda in Rome for Italian Bazaar. “I sent her a note saying, ‘We’ll go to the ball, save a dance for me,’” Casablancas says. At the Rome shows Casablancas posed for a picture with her. As she leaned against him, she told him it was her sixteenth birthday. He was thunderstruck by the change in her. “By that time her physique had changed. She was not anymore a little girl; she was this young woman. Her body was extraordinary—she was long and thin, and the shapes were where they had to be—and her face was gorgeous, with this innocent little-child voice.”

  The next fall the child’s body was back in school, but her mind was on modeling. Then she and her mother went to Acapulco as Casablancas’s guest at the second Look of the Year contest. Casablancas’s attentions had the desired effect. Stephanie transferred to professional school in New York and moved into a model apartment—next door to John, Jeanette, and Julian Casablancas.

  The next January at the collections in Rome, Stephanie w
as booked into one of Italian Harper’s Bazaar’s model rooms, but she didn’t sleep there. “I saw Stephanie Seymour take her suitcases and move them into John’s bedroom,” says Francesca, whose room was across the hall from John’s. “And that I will never forget. I’m not saying John didn’t entice her. But he’d never slept with her. And then Peppone made a stink because he didn’t want to pay for Stephanie’s room.” Casablancas insisted that she had to keep the room for the sake of appearances.

  After Rome Seymour went to Paris, where she worked for the rest of the summer. Back in New York the affair continued. “Stephanie would come over and play with Julian; they were about the same age anyway,” says Francesca, only half-jokingly. “Jeanette would cook dinner for them.” Some of Elite’s bookers were outraged. “She was living with John, and her mother thought it was the greatest thing in the world,” says one. “Stephanie was a little kid. I found it shameful.”

  Casablancas was walking a fine line. “He was crazy, madly in love,” Francesca says. He says his marriage was failing. “We were beginning to have problems. I was losing interest. I’m dating Stephanie on the side. Jeanette knew about it because I’d spoken with her. Obviously she could see it; she’s not a dummy.”

  Jeanette Casablancas says she was in the dark, but she wasn’t for long. Seymour shared an apartment with another contestant from the 1983 Look of the Year contest, Hunter Reno, whose aunt Janet later became the attorney general of the United States. In midsummer Hunter Reno busted John and Stephanie.

  Reno “was living at the model apartment with Stephanie and two other girls,” Francesca recalls. Casablancas was at Alain Kittler’s house in Ibiza with Seymour when he got a call from Elite’s lawyer. “The night before, Hunter Reno had come over and told Jeanette everything,” Francesca says. “Details, dates, everything.” Though she’d had her suspicions, Seymour was the first girl Jeanette ever knew about. She sent Casablancas a telegram and told him their marriage was over. He wanted to come back to New York and talk about it. She said no. “I think I would have strangled him,” she says. They didn’t see each other again for months. Then Jeanette asked for a divorce.

  Stephanie Seymour photographed by Marco Glaviano

  Despite it all, almost a decade later Christjansen has kind words for her ex. “I don’t feel he left me for a young girl,” she says. “Maybe he went through his menopause. Men get funny at forty, and girls were serving themselves up on silver platters to him. He didn’t want to leave; but he did things, and when I found out, I just went crazy. I didn’t even let him explain. I told him, ‘If you want to do this, do it a hundred percent.’ Sometimes I wonder, Should I have reacted differently? I care a lot about John. I couldn’t accept him as a husband, but as a person, I still respect him very much. In a way it’s courageous. John lives the moment. He’s always had a good heart.”

  Though Stephanie’s mother knew about the relationship, her father didn’t. So at Thanksgiving Casablancas flew to San Diego to meet him. “After dinner, he said, ‘OK, ladies, you go to sleep,’ and him and I, we got drunk together,” Casablancas recalls. “We talked all night, and by the end of the night he said, ‘I think that you really love my daughter. I think that you’re taking a lot of risks, but if you want to see her and she wants to see you, I’m not gonna stand in the middle.’”

  “[John] is a brainwasher,” Seymour later told an interviewer. “He convinced my father that he loved me more than anybody in this world, and my father gave his consent…. My dad just didn’t even want him to leave.” On their return John and Stephanie moved into a luxury apartment on Fifty-seventh Street.

  The next summer—just after the breakup of his marriage and his affair with Stephanie, now seventeen, made gossip columns—Casablancas arrived at a party in St.-Tropez, at the villa of Régine, the nightclub owner. Lauren Hutton, in the south of France filming a miniseries, was at a table with several other Americans when the tanned, beaming Casablancas strolled past, Seymour under one arm and an equally young girl under the other. “Who’s she, the mother’s helper?” Hutton cracked.

  Apparently unaware that she wasn’t a fan, Casablancas later approached Hutton. She sneeringly addressed him as “Jimmy Morocco” and told Stephanie and the other model, “Run for your lives.” Casablancas says that only Bob Zagury’s intervention kept him from punching Hutton. “I thought she was a dyke, so I felt like treating her like a man,” Casablancas says. “Bob said, ‘She’s not worth it, just leave,’ and I left. But I was ready to break her rabbit teeth, I was so angry.”

  John Casablancas in Rome top and New York with Stephanie Seymour in 1985

  John Casablancas and Stephanie Seymour (2) © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

  Stephanie Seymour chose to walk—not run—about six months later, just after she made the jump from Model Management, the agency’s second tier, to Elite, its star board. At Christmastime Casablancas felt a change in her. They’d planned a trip to St.-Barth, but he ended up going alone. Jeanette and Julian were on the island with Patrick Demarchelier, but John’s ex-wife refused to see him. Then, in a matter of days, Casablancas developed a toothache and almost broke his ankle, swimming in rough surf. “I was so fucking miserable,” he says. “It was like God was punishing me.”

  Francesca Magugliani realized John’s love affair was over at the January 1987 couture shows in Paris. They’d had dinner with Jacques de Nointel and Casablancas was driving down the Champs-Élysées, when suddenly he U-turned and began racing back to his hotel. “I’d never seen John so desperate in my life,” Francesca says. Arriving at the hotel, he called Seymour at a studio. “She said she couldn’t come over because she wanted to look at slides,” Francesca continues. “John tore the phone out of the socket.” Then he headed to Les Bains, where he sat until 4 A.M. praising Seymour to a photographer.

  “I don’t think he was conscious that it was finished, but he was extremely depressed,” Francesca says. “She was the only girl he didn’t want to leave. He must have sensed she was pulling out. The roles reversed. I’d never seen him so in love. She pulled a John Casablancas on him.” To this day Casablancas finds it hard to admit that he was dumped. “When I broke up with Stephanie,” he says, it was her father who “made her have the guts to tell me.”

  “I just needed freedom, period,” Seymour said, after moving into a loft with another model. Eventually she would leave Elite as well.

  “It was the first time in my life that I found myself alone, really alone,” Casablancas said.

  Stephanie Seymour wasn’t alone. She briefly got married and had a son she named Dylan in 1990. By 1991 she could be seen on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimwear issue and on the arm of Warren Beatty. A year later she was linked with Guns N’Roses singer Axl Rose, who gave her a 4.5 carat diamond and ruby engagement ring and, that July, used a Paris concert as an occasion to abuse Beatty from the stage as “an old man who loves to live vicariously through young people and suck up all their life because he has none of his own.”

  This latest relationship was high-profile and highly volatile. Seymour appeared in Guns N’Roses videos and had a ring of roses tattooed around her ankle. But things took a bad turn at their Christmas party in Malibu in 1992. They’d been bickering when Rose asked everyone to leave. During the forty-five-minute fight that followed, Seymour swung at him with a chair and punched him in the crotch. Stephanie, said the singer’s sister, “wants to push things to the edge.”

  By February 1993 they were broken up. Seymour, twenty-four, had contracts with L’Oréal and Victoria’s Secret, and she’d become Richard Avedon’s favorite model. She was also pregnant again. And the father of the child was married, but not to her. He was Peter M. Brant, forty-seven, an entrepreneur, horse breeder, polo player, publisher, and newsprint manufacturer, who already had five children by his wife of almost twenty-three years, Sandra. He also had a criminal record. In 1990 he paid a $200,000 fine and served eighty-four days in federal prison for failure to keep proper tax
records after pleading guilty to billing $1.5 million in personal expenses—including silk sheets and massages—to two of his companies.

  Within weeks Rose sued Seymour in Los Angeles Supreme Court for assault and battery at the Christmas party, emotional abuse, and the return of $100,000 in jewelry, including her engagement ring. Rose said he hoped to sell the jewels and donate the proceeds to a child abuse charity.

  Seymour countersued. She said Rose punched and slapped her, gave her a bloody nose and black eye, and kicked her down a flight of stairs after their party. “I was never engaged to Mr. Rose,” she said. “I have gone on with my life, and I hope he can do so as well.” Her second baby was born late in 1993. Sandra and Peter Brandt were still married late in 1994.

  The facts about Casablancas’s affairs with the underage models became known in January 1988, when New York magazine ran a profile on him under the title “Girl Crazy.” The cover showed Casablancas framed by models Andie MacDowell, Iman, and Carol Alt. The article painted him as a champagne-guzzling pasha of pleasure, ogling the breasts of his charges. The article shocked Casablancas. He called Francesca in Paris, “totally hysterical about it,” she recalls. “I said, ‘John, everything is true.’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s very bad for me. Find out what people think about it.’” Francesca duly polled all his contacts, some of whom had received copies in the mail from Eileen Ford. One suggested dryly that the next time Casablancas was photographed, he should try drinking milk.

  He’s still angry six years later. “In Europe no one gives a shit if someone is older,” he says. “There’s something that Europeans have understood that Americans don’t want to admit to. A young girl will fall in love with a guy who’s famous and who’s done things and who’s got power. She’s not being a whore; it’s just that it’s intoxicating. [Americans are] programmed to say that it’s disgusting.”