Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
Page 62
Despite their status as officials of an exchange-traded public company, the men behind Elite still inspire allegations of misbehavior, thank goodness. In March 2009, Bertrand Hennet, Bernard’s son, a former rock musician installed as CEO to learn the business from Gérald Marie, was arrested in a big cocaine bust in Paris shortly before Marie left the company, severing its last links to its tawdry glory days. Bertrand left the stage after that, too. But the latest ruling regime at Elite has had its own tawdry troubles. Behind Pacific Capital is one Silvio Scaglia, an Italian businessman who made billions in cell phones and Internet companies. Implicated in a tax evasion and money-laundering scheme, he was placed under house arrest by Italian authorities in 2010. In February 2011 he was released from house arrest; he continues to deny the charges. Though his situation was unresolved as this latest edition of Model went to press, he surely seems to fit right in to the ongoing saga, not just of Elite but of the whole modeling industry.
The Fords took almost as long leaving their agency as Elite’s founders. But they’d been trying to find an exit strategy for years. At the end of 2000, Katie Ford agreed to sell to Magnum Sports and Entertainment, a public company run by former record executive Charles Koppelman, to form an IMG-like mega-agency with interests in sports, fashion, music, and other entertainment. She expected that once the sale closed, she would leave. “I did not want a boss,” she says. “I wanted to be out.”
That did not turn out to be easy. Shortly after agreeing to the deal with Magnum, but before it was concluded, Ford and her then husband, the budding hotel development mogul André Balazs, had hired a money manager to the stars, Dana Giacchetto, and not only gave him money to invest on their behalf but also asked him to peddle some Ford shares to raise money for an expansion. But Giacchetto turned out to be a crook. He caused millions of dollars of his clients’ money to vanish and then tried to skip town, getting arrested with a forged passport and eighty airline tickets. He’d sold shares of the agency to “a bunch of small investors,” Ford says, some of whom sued Giacchetto for fraud and the company for gross negligence and recklessness. “Luckily,” Katie Ford says, the squall passed after Ford ensured that the investors’ stakes in the agency were secure. But she wasn’t out of the woods yet.
In 2003, the sale to Magnum collapsed after Magnum failed to come up with the cash to close the deal and was then delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. Meantime, an ambitious plan to put a model-making competition on television was trumped by former model Tyra Banks and her America’s Next Top Model. That show proved to be a juggernaut, even if it had little to do with real-world modeling. Katie Ford threatened, but never pursued, legal action to stop it.
Finally, late in 2007, Katie Ford got her wish, selling a 93 percent stake in the agency to Stone Tower Equity Partners, a branch of a big investment firm, for about $60 million, according to an insider. At the time, Ford turned her CEO title over to Jon Caplan, the former head of marketing at About.com, whom she’d hired as the firm’s chief operating officer after the Magnum deal blew up. Together, they claimed to have quadrupled the agency’s revenues in the preceding five years. But early in 2009, Stone Tower pushed Caplan out, replacing him with Jon Diamond, a talent, marketing, and media entrepreneur and adviser to Stone Tower who’d been Ford’s chairman and head of its digital operations since the change in ownership. Eighteen months later, Diamond was out, too—and Russians were the reason.
Mikhail Prokhorov’s partner Vladimir Potanin was born the son of a Communist Central Committee member in Moscow in 1961. He attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and went to work for the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1983. In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he and Prokhorov cofounded a private investment company, Interros, established two private banks, and made a fortune. And that was before they took control of Norilsk Nickel and the Siberian Far Eastern Oil Company.
In 1996, Potanin and other oligarchs bankrolled the reelection campaign of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin in turn named Potanin first deputy prime minister. The next year, Potanin left that post when one of his banks took over Norilsk; on his own, he acquired the legendary newspaper Izvestia and Russky Telegraph, a business daily. Not even the collapse of the ruble in 1998 could stop Potanin; though he and investors in his ventures such as George Soros and BP/Amoco lost huge sums, he managed to hold on to a lot, too, and celebrated with a party for about a hundred friends at a nightclub in Courchevel, the French skiing town. His bank’s creditors eventually recovered about a third of their money.
Meantime, Potanin spread his wings, joining the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Board of Trustees in 2001 and two years later becoming chairman of the board of Russia’s great State Hermitage museum. In 2005, he hosted the Russian version of The Apprentice, called Kandidat, and two years after that, France named him an officer of the Order of Arts and Literature. But in January 2007, Prokhorov was arrested and held for four days on suspicion of supplying prostitutes to guests on a ski trip to Courchevel. Although he denied the charges, which were later dropped, and launched a retaliatory lawsuit against French authorities, the scandal widened a strategic breach that had grown between Prokhorov and Potanin and led the two oligarchs to dissolve their partnership; Potanin kept Interros.
The separation did not go smoothly, drawing unwanted attention to both of them. The Sunday Times of London called their breakup “the biggest divorce in Russian business history.” Curiously enough, it is Potanin, a family man with three children, and not the notorious bachelor Prokhorov, who ended up owning a model agency. Stone Tower Equity Partners was mostly powered by Interros money, says a former Ford executive. Separately, Stone Tower put Interros into the very sort of debt—credit instruments and default swaps—that would shortly bring down the world economy.
After the implosion of Lehman Brothers in September 2009, Potanin and Stone Tower came to a parting of the ways. Interros had the right to take over the private equity investments if Stone Tower’s bets didn’t do well. “Stone Tower lost a lot of their money—billions,” thinks a Ford insider. Potanin took over the fund, which he renamed Altpoint Capital Partners, and all of its investments. Tucked in among veterinary supplies, crane rentals, and cell phone towers was Ford. A former banker and Interros vice president named Guerman Aliev was made Altpoint’s Chairman and CEO and promptly shook up the agency, forcing out Jon Diamond and taking over himself. “They were looking for a scapegoat,” says the insider. “And then, any remnant of the past had to be gotten rid of.” A purge of most of Ford’s remaining longtime employees followed. “I don’t even know who’s running it,” says Eileen Ford. “They fired everyone I knew.”
A native of St. Petersburg educated in the U.S., Japan, and England, Aliev stepped into the public eye when he opened fordPROJECT, an art gallery with no discernable relationship to the modeling business, in a duplex penthouse on New York’s 57th Street, part of an effort, the Wall Street Journal reported, to diversify. “I could go around and brand gas stations,” Aliev told the Journal, “but that would cheapen the brand.” Oddly, he added, “I think the biggest hurdle I have to overcome is that people affiliate this with a modeling agency.”
Another hurdle was a lawsuit filed against Ford, Aliev, a booker, and several models that same month by Next Models, another of the remaining powerhouse New York agencies. It alleged, among other things, that a nineteen-year-old Russian-born model with a three-year contract with Next, Inna Pilipenko, followed her booker to Ford in July 2010, not only breaching her contract but entering into “an intimate personal relationship” with Guerman Aliev. Ford’s lawyers responded with a motion to dismiss the whole case, which ends by arguing that the last allegation—“plainly included for the sole purpose of casting the defendants in a negative light and aimed solely as fodder for the press”—was scandalous and should be stricken.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Today’s models are “much better
behaved” than the Supes, says one agency owner. “Nobody will say she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars today. They come from more humble roots, from little countries, little cities. And there are all these new players in the agencies who don’t have a clue. In the old days, if there was a problem, you could work it out. These Russians—they don’t play.” Yet hope springs eternal in the muck. “There’s still a mafia,” says Barbara Pilling, a model who owns her own boutique agency, Edge, in Canada and California. “There are still scuzzy agents and playboys and money made from illicit means. But very slowly, the glamour will come back. The desire is still there.”
Beauty is ephemeral. Those who possess it come and go. The thirst for it, however, is eternal.
—Michael Gross
New York City, March 2011
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SEARCHABLE TERMS
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
Abbey, James, Jr., 226
ABC-TV, 182, 252, 331
Actor’s Directory and Studio Guide of April 1925, 34
Adams, Teddy, 182
Adamson, Robert, 38
advertising, 35, 46, 50
Advocate, 424
Agencies, 54
first, 10, 14-15
first devoted to runway models, 380
free-lance scouts and, 475
French tax laws and, 285, 286-287, 311, 460
informal matchmaking by, 37
model’s commission and, 16, 475
&nbs
p; networks of, 477-478
regulation of, 65
stars and, 14-15
typical model and, 15-17
women-run, 489-491
see also individual agencies
Alaïa, Azzedine, 21, 329, 427, 434, 446
Albanese, Pucci, 287-288, 289, 377, 384, 389, 392, 396
Alexis, Kim, 364, 418, 420, 449, 487, 491
Allaux, Jean François, 317, 319
Allure, 482
Alt, Carol, 353, 371, 420, 449, 481
Always in Vogue (Chase), 40
American Gigolo, 212, 221
American Girl, 259
American Models, 237, 402
Amica, 277, 287
Amis, Suzy, 463
Anderson, Anna, 303, 352
Anderson, Marie, 18-19
Angle, Lucy, 241-242
Ansel, Ruth, 247
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 173, 190
Aquilon, Jeff, 314
Arbus, Diane, 129, 225
Ariane, 426
Armani, Giorgio, 295
Armstrong-Jones, Antony, 167
Arrowsmith, Clive, 301
ArtForum, 437
Arthur, Jean, 37
Arts et Décoration, 39
Asch, Doug, 463-464
Ashby, Vera (Sumurum), 40
Ashland (Ky.) Independent, 60
Ashton, Laraine, 481, 483
Askew, Gloria, 377, 378, 379, 381, 384
Askew, Valerie, 377
Associates, The, 269