Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  At a party in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center, celebrating Paulina Porizkova’s contract with Estée Lauder that week, Casablancas joked darkly about throwing New York’s editor, Edward Kosner, out a window. Casablancas admits he can be childish. “The personal drama of my life is that I have lacked maturity to really build a relationship that overcomes the erosion of time,” he says. “I get along great with younger girls. I really get along well with them, you know? I’ve always been a little bit of a Pygmalion. I love the way they’re natural about everything, about their bodies, about relationships; they’re frank; they don’t carry with them the burden of past relationships and problems. I really understand their mind very well, and they understand mine.”

  He thinks he’s always been a gentleman. “Have I taken advantage of my position? Probably yes,” he admits. “Where I feel that someone is being easy with me because she wants something from me, then I might take advantage. Why not? If she is ready to do that, why should I be shy? But it doesn’t happen very much. Have I ever taken advantage of a young girl’s innocence? I categorically say no. All my ex-girlfriends are friends of mine. I got [a few] days ago a thank-you note from Stephanie Seymour, because I sent her a little present for her kid. This was a girl who could have said, ‘When I was sixteen, this guy took advantage of me.’ She stayed with Elite for years after that happened!”

  Nonetheless, Casablancas was labeled a libertine. Trudi Tapscott had to deal with the fallout. She worked on the new faces board at Elite. “People in this business use their power to manipulate people in ways that are unfair,” Tapscott says. But she told the many parents who were concerned about Casablancas that he wasn’t a manipulator. “My answer was always that no one ever did anything that they didn’t want to,” Tapscott says. “I’m amazed how these girls act in certain situations. They know more about making passes than I ever knew. It is part of taking good pictures.”

  “One day I’ll take him by the balls,” Gérald Marie once said about John Casablancas. Their rivalry didn’t end when Marie joined Elite. If anything, it intensified. Top executives at Elite think that it was no coincidence that Marie was brought into the fold in Ibiza the same summer that Casablancas was there with Stephanie Seymour. He lost his wife that summer of 1985. It was also the beginning of the end of his reign as the European king of models.

  Top to bottom: Elite’s Gérald Marie (left), John Casablancas (seated), and Alain Kittler in Ibiza in 1988; John Casablancas and Riccardo Gay in Mauritius in 1985; Gérald Marie and his then wife Linda Evangelista, in Ibiza

  John Casablancas, Alain Kittler, Gérald Marie, Linda Evangelista, and Riccardo Gay (3), © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

  By 1979 Casablancas and Alain Kittler had decided that Elite had to be autonomous, free of dependence on other agents. “John was trying to create the most powerful network in the world,” Trudi Tapscott says. Over the next few years they created it. A holding company owned by Casablancas, Kittler, and Monique Pillard controlled Elite New York and the other American agencies. Another holding company, based in Switzerland and owned by Casablancas, Kittler, and Gérald Marie, controlled the European operations. A third holding company, Hong Kong Global, is something of a mystery. Monique Pillard first learned of its existence from a reporter. Kittler brushes off questions about its purpose. But a Swiss company, Elite International, S.A., functions much as Models S.A. does, helping Elite’s owners skirt France’s draconian tax laws. “There’s a lot of cash booking through Elite,” says April Ducksbury. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars. All the bookings went through Switzerland. The girls all had Swiss bank accounts.”

  Alain Kittler is the manager of Elite in Switzerland. “I have my working permit in Switzerland, my home in Switzerland,” he says. “We pay the Swiss taxes. It’s perfectly legal. After a while I thought that we should have a structure. One day we may want to go public, so we have to be managed like a public company. We have passed the age of doing things which are not clear because we are too rich and too exposed to do anything illegal.”

  Elite’s expansion sputtered in the mid-eighties. “We had a big head,” Kittler says. “We wanted to create agencies in Copenhagen, Brussels, London, Miami. And we lost a lot of money by going too fast.” The company was also roiled by the power struggle between Casablancas and Marie. “Gérald is on a maniac ego trip,” says Francesca Magugliani, who found herself at odds with Marie after Elite Plus opened. “Gérald wanted to get rid of all the people who helped John make Elite in Europe.” Francesca was one of them, leaving the company in September 1988.

  In a treatment for an as-yet-unproduced film called Model Mafia, Sebastien Sed—who severed his ties with Elite after giving it a precious German agency license—writes that Gérald Marie “swore he would make Elite Paris equal to New York and at the same time take control of Europe by destroying John Casablancas’s relationships with his associates in Milan, London and Hamburg.” Nobody was betting against him. “He saved Elite,” says Jerry Ford. Adds Monique Pillard: “Maybe his morals are not to my speed, but he knows how to develop and sell a girl.”

  After stabilizing Elite in Paris, Marie went hunting for Casablancas’s friends. For years Casablancas had protected Riccardo Gay’s position, even though he admits that his friend played fast and loose with Elite. Gay billed his clients from Lugano, Switzerland, and pocketed the Italian taxes he deducted from his models’ checks, says Sed’s wife and partner, Dorothy Parker. At first Elite ignored what was seen as a common practice in Italy. “All Riccardo wants is money,” says Casablancas. “So when I sent my girls to Milano, I couldn’t care less if they were making money or if I was being paid my commission. You sent a girl with the hope that she’d come back with a great book.”

  But now Gérald Marie began agitating for a change in the relationship with Gay. Kittler, too, began pressuring Casablancas. “How long is this guy going to call on the fact that he sent you a booker fifteen years ago?” he demanded. Responding to the pressure, Gay vowed to change his ways. But “his accounts were always late, inexact, incorrect, incomplete,” says Casablancas. “He sent checks for partial payments. His computers never worked. It was a commedia Italiana, a big farce. His accounting was all in pencil! He enjoyed swimming in troubled waters.” Finally Kittler confronted Gay himself. “He took the accounting of one year from Riccardo and threw it into the wastepaper basket,” Casablancas says. “He took a check for ten million lire and tore it up.”

  In fall 1987 Casablancas’s growing irritation with Gay burst out in an internal Elite memo. Casablancas wrote that Gay’s methods of vouchering through Switzerland were compromising the agency. “We are becoming more Italian than Riccardo!” Getting out in front of Marie, Casablancas suggested opening a branch of Elite in Milan and asking Gay to be a partner. “In front of the world he would be the king of Milano,” Casablancas says. “It was his chance to be number one. I was his savior. He accepted the deal.”

  Then Gay changed his mind. He called a meeting of all the agents in Milan and demanded they all sign a document promising never to deal with Elite. “It was like a Mafia film,” says Sebastien Sed. “Riccardo put pepper in his eye, crying, playing Rigoletto, making a big opera.” But no one signed, and Elite opened in Milan.

  In response Gay “went to every ally I ever had and told them that I had betrayed him,” Casablancas says. One of them was José Fonseca at Models One in London, who soon decided it was time her agency opened a branch in Paris. Alain Kittler considered this a betrayal. Among other considerations, Elite had never taken commissions from Models One. Marie was unhappy, too. “Gérald was jealous,” Casablancas says. “The relationship between Models One and Elite was a relationship between April and José and me. So what does he do? He goes around saying, ‘I’m thinking of opening in London.’”

  Through the summer of 1988 London’s agents were in an uproar. Finally Marie talked three of them, including Models One and Synchro—Beth Boldt’s nearly bankrupt agency—into openi
ng a desk within Elite Paris instead. But before the deal was finalized, Models One pulled out. “We weren’t getting [Elite’s] top models,” April Ducksbury says. “We were getting the beginners. We sent a fax to John saying it’s about time we had a rest from each other. The minute we said that, they went in with Beth Boldt.”

  Then came a tragedy. Late that August fifty people died when a party boat called the Marchioness sank in London’s Thames River after being hit by a barge. Among the dead—all guests at a party hosted by a former Synchro booker—were bookers, agents, photographers, hairdressers, and models. Soon afterward Elite “announced that they were closing Synchro down and taking over its accounts receivable,” Boldt says. She blames Marie. “Gérald came to London and wanted to rule. Everything had to be his way. Gérald once called me ‘a worse bitch than my wife.’ There were too many drugs, too much craziness.”

  In 1991 Elite merged with yet another London agency, Premier. The next year Elite severed its ties with Parker-Sed and opened in Hamburg and Munich. It now has fourteen separate companies, “all making profit,” according to Kittler. By handing the reins of power to Gérald Marie, says Ducksbury, “John finally got the empire he always wanted.”

  Elite wasn’t the only agency with image problems at the end of the eighties. Indeed, just a few months after the story of John Casablancas and Stephanie Seymour was made public, another scandal made Elite’s problems yesterday’s news.

  In April 1988 Craig Pyes, an investigative reporter under contract to 60 Minutes, met two models at a party in Paris and, through their friends, heard of models who’d been drugged, raped, or sexually pressured by two agency owners, Claude Haddad of Euro-Planning and Jean-Luc Brunel, who’d taken over the Paris agency of Eileen Ford’s friend Karin Mossberg after her banker husband was transferred out of town.

  Haddad’s reputation had spread since the days of Antonio Lopez and Jerry Hall. For a time his star had been on the rise. He started exchanging models with Elite in 1978. He also worked with the Fords, who sent him one of their Face of the 80s winners, Suzy Amis, in the summer of 1980. Amis, seventeen, became Haddad’s girlfriend before returning to New York in 1982. Haddad called her John Wayne, because he thought she walked like the western movie star. Amis won’t discuss her relationship with Haddad, but Jacques de Nointel says it ended badly. “She doesn’t like him anymore,” de Nointel says. “He took advantage.”

  When Ford stopped working with Haddad, he formed Prestige, a joint venture with Elite. “Claude wanted an interest in a U.S. agency,” says Doug Asch, a tennis partner of Casablancas’s who went to work for the new agency. “It’s not fashionable to say you like Claude,” Asch says, “but in his time he had one of the best eyes in the business. He was very perceptive about character. It’s often not the most beautiful girl who makes it. Did she have that killer thing? If a girl had it, he went with it.”

  The Elite-Prestige partnership ended two years later, in 1984. “Claude Haddad has a devious way of trying to get into girls’ pants,” John Casablancas told a journalist in an unpublished interview. “It’s pathetic. I stopped my relationship with him after I sent him a girl, he had her in his apartment, he never even made a pass at her. He never tried to sweet-talk her or hold her hand. He just got into bed with her. It was embarrassing for me as a man. Certain moments he doesn’t think with his head; he thinks with his cock.”

  By that time it seemed that everyone in the modeling business had a story to tell about Haddad, and few of them were good. After the breakup with Elite, Haddad seemed to lose control. Nobody stopped him. “We were guilty of neglect, but we weren’t conspirators,” says Doug Asch. “We weren’t pimping for him.”

  They were an audience, however. “Claude would go in his office and lock the door, and we’d all laugh,” says an ex-employee. “It was done up like a Moroccan nightclub, dark red, with a big couch and an armchair for two, but a tight two. Everything was scaled to make people two. And he had a scale to weigh girls. We never scaled girls. But he would say, ‘Undress, I have to weigh you.’” After his closed-door weighing sessions, Haddad would emerge, hair askew, and announce that he’d taken on a girl who, as often as not, was “a monster who could never be a model,” the ex-employee continues. “So we knew of course something must have happened.”

  On one occasion, says a regular on the agency circuit, a young model burst out of Haddad’s office, screaming, “He told me to give him a blow job!” The action wasn’t confined to Haddad’s office. He bunked aspiring models in his apartment. Their bedroom and his connected through a bathroom, and he was in the habit of walking into the models’ room unannounced. A Parker-Sed model once threw a bottle of wine at him as he came through the door.

  “Claude would take out ten girls and find the one who wanted to be with him,” says Asch. “But instead of saying, ‘Let’s go out and get crazy,’ he’d get her trust and do something rude in the house. What killed him was ‘Stay in my house, and everything will be fine.’” Asch thinks Haddad was addicted to sex with young girls. “He was like any other addict in the world. I don’t think he’d hurt a fly, but you create messes with an addiction, and you change everything else to cover up your problem. Claude’s addiction affected his business, his friendships, everything. I always thought he was an asshole not to admit it. People would’ve been sympathetic.”

  But he didn’t admit it. He just kept going. And after six months of investigation, 60 Minutes aired his problems for all America to hear in late 1988. “Every once in a while he’d catch a girl who wasn’t pleased,” says Asch. And one of them, identified only as Lorraine, told the newsmagazine show how Haddad had tried to corner her in the apartment and finally crawled into her bed. Most of the girls who stayed with him had the same stories to tell, she said.

  Confronted with her accusations in an on-air interview, Haddad not only was unapologetic but even seemed proud of himself. Correspondent Diane Sawyer laid her trap well. How did he feel, she asked Haddad, waking up in his apartment full of models each morning? Like a gardener in a flower shop, he replied. “They are flowers. Just smell them, that’s it. Just smell the perfume.” Sawyer pressed: Had he tried to pluck any of the flowers in his shop? “When people say something, it’s always a little truth,” he allowed. “I hugged them…. I tried to flirt with them … never more.” No rapes, no sexual blackmail? “I don’t remember,” Haddad replied. “Maybe. It’s possible. I don’t know,” he continued weakly.

  Five years later Claude Haddad is still angry about what he considers a sneak attack in which he was singled out for crimes many others had committed, too. His bitterness over the 60 Minutes report is evident in his response to a request for his first interview since the show. “I don’t like the American way,” he says. “They picked the weakest one, and I did [the show] and I’m stupid. I work with beautiful girls. OK, I try to fuck them. It’s not a crime. In France you can fuck all the girls you want to.”

  Six months, and several phone calls and letters later, Haddad arrives at the Café Flore on Boulevard St.-Germain looking like a professor of poetry, glasses hanging around his neck on a cord. “I’m out of the business now,” he says. “I cannot survive.” His long, center-parted brown hair parts to reveal deeply circled eyes and skin pale as paper. He shut Euro-Planning in 1992. Though he tried to stay in business, fax attacks flew anywhere he went scouting. “From Elite,” he says. “They still do it.”

  As he sits, a pink-cheeked teenager from the Baltics chucks him on his bottom. He introduces her as Goda and sends her to sit at another table out of earshot of his conversation. “I came from the street, and I want to take people from the street,” he says, glancing over at Goda every few seconds. “That’s the only reason why I did this business. Now I go to Eastern Europe and find girls who are hungry and don’t like to hear scandal shit.” Many agencies still use him as a scout, he claims. “All the bookers are kissing my ass, they are giving me blow jobs to find girls. I can still find beautiful girls.” But he doesn’t t
ake money when he does, he insists. “They pay me travel expenses. Nobody can buy me. Bookers are like hookers. They all get bought by people with money.”

  Haddad’s attitude toward bookers is benign compared to how he feels about the agents 60 Minutes inexplicably ignored. “There are people who are killers who are still in the business,” he says. “You should investigate the life of Gérald Marie. Investigate Paris Planning. Models died when they were with Paris Planning. Every girl that came to his agency, they had to fuck with him! If not, they don’t work, and he scare them to death. I know a girl who cannot come back to Paris because she’s scared to death.”

  Haddad goes on, building up steam as the topic turns to the focus of his life—young girls. “I have been with some girls, but I never forced them. You manipulate them, but with … words, with … charm, with my power”—not drugs, like other agents, he says. He draws the line at fifteen-year-olds, he says. “Above sixteen is not bad, because they’re a woman and they know what they do.”

  Why was he singled out? Haddad thanks his enemies: Casablancas and Ford. “They couldn’t accept that I could establish myself in New York,” he says. “I would rather marry and fuck with Yasir Arafat than be friends with these people! They are disgusting. John is a pig, and Ford is a witch. I don’t buy girls like John does. Half of his models, they fuck with him. He force them psychologically, with money: ‘You fuck me, you get what you want.’ In Ibiza Gérald Marie has girls for his guests. I have never in my life done that. What do you call that? I call that a kind of prostitution.”

  Marie denies Haddad’s charge. “I have never done things like that for my friends,” he says. Haddad says he never played that way either. “The girls who fucked me, they fucked me maybe expecting something would happen,” he says, but “maybe they love me. You never hear a big model complaining of being in bed with me.” He calls the 60 Minutes interviews “the revenge of mediocre girls” who never made it big. “They are saying, ‘He tried, he tried!’ In France a man is allowed to try, and a girl is allowed to refuse. [To] every girl, I say, ‘I like you. I would like to make love with you. If you don’t want to, fine.’”