Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (37 page)

In fall 1970 Élysées 3 ran out of money and briefly closed its doors. John’s father reluctantly came to the rescue with $100,000. “John’s father wasn’t so happy about him doing an agency,” Christjansen says. “He would have liked him to do other things.” But John was committed. “He could have gone into his father’s factories and been much richer than he is today,” Christjansen says. “In a way he chose the hard way.”

He hired a booker named Tichka from Models International and reopened, but his problems weren’t over. In a letter to Eileen Ford he announced a series of changes that he hoped would prove that “our growing pains now over … we have become an attractive agency to do business with.” Unfortunately he quickly lost the money that had been lent to him. “My father was panicky.”

By mid-1971 John knew he needed more help and turned to his older sibling.
Life
magazine had closed its Paris office, where Fernando Casablancas worked, so John asked him to take over the business side of Élysées 3. They were macho siblings with look-alike Zapata mustaches, but Fernando may have thought his little brother was a bit of a flake. Not only was John mixing business and pleasure by day, but he was also losing money gambling at night. “I did have a serious gambling problem,” John admits. “But if anybody could have complained about it, it was Jeanette, because I borrowed money from her.” He also borrowed from Bob Zagury, a playboy, backgammon player, and onetime lover of Brigitte Bardot, nicknamed Concrete Cock by women who knew him.

Finally, in October 1971, Casablancas decided to do exactly what Jacques de Nointel had suggested two years before. He announced his intentions in a letter to Eileen Ford that month. Because of the different requirements of “beginner, average and good models as opposed to top models … who need no more promotion but do demand constant attention,” he wrote, “Élysées 3 will continue to grow and consolidate its position under Fernando’s management…. I will be opening a completely separate operation in new offices…. Elite Model Management will represent 10-20 top models.” It was the birth announcement of the most important model agency since Ford.

“Before, it was divine, joyful,” says Auro Varani, an Italian lawyer who came to London in 1961 and went to work with Peter Marlowe, the printer who invented model composite cards. “There were very few agencies, and the people who ran them were cultivated and refined. It was like an elite. Francois Lano had culture to die. Catherine Harlé made me read books. Dorian Leigh wasn’t much of a businesswoman, but goddamn, she was fun, and she had
more guts than anyone I know. Then, all of a sudden, other people, straight boys, realized there was an enormous potential to go to bed with dream girls. You saw the sprouting of so-called model agents who are nothing but glorified pimps. John Casablancas started it. Before him, it was not a job a straight man would do. He was divine, handsome, enormously charming. But all the acolytes of John can’t kiss his shoes. He was the pioneer. He opened a new frontier, and then everyone wanted it. It became a nasty business. A few manipulative people realized beautiful girls could be fucked in every way. The society became venal. All that mattered was money. I’m not cynical or bitter. I
hate
these people.”

The turbulence at Élysées 3 mirrored the chaotic state of modeling throughout Europe following the passage of the new law governing French agencies. In 1969 Colette Gambier hired Maximiliano Patrini and his partner, Athos Contarini (whose girlfriend was a Ford/Paris Planning model named Ula Bomser), to run her agency in Milan. Four months later, back in Paris and pregnant, Gambier learned that Max and Athos were about to leave with all her models and open an agency of their own, 21 International, backed by a clothing manufacturer from Bologna. She flew to Milan, where she learned that not only had the pair decamped with her models, but they had also upset her landlord so much that he wouldn’t renew her lease. Gambier reopened in another office and hired Natasha Gumkevitch, an ex-model, and a friend of hers from Paris named Beatrice Traissac, to run it for her.

Max and Athos didn’t last long. “It was the up-and-coming agency,” says Ula Bomser. “Athos wanted to make a lot of money very fast, which he basically did by gambling. Most of the money I made went into his pocket. Athos had a very destructive streak, Max was heavily on drugs and I suppose so was Athos, and the whole thing just fell apart.” Adds Veruschka, who was dating Patrini at the time: “Maximiliano couldn’t really deal with this fashion world. He would come to my hotel room and throw knives into the closets. He finally left, he couldn’t stand it anymore.” Late in 1970 Athos put 21 up for sale.

Meanwhile, in Paris Simone d’Aillencourt and Christa Fiedler had turned Models International into a powerhouse with the help of the Fords. But John Casablancas was scary new competition. “John was strong because he represented the photographers,” d’Aillencourt says. “They were all going out together, taking the girls out. It was a thing I couldn’t get into.” She and her partners needed a new gimmick to stay on top, so when they heard that Max and Athos were selling, they approached the Fords about buying 21 together.
“We didn’t want to offend anyone else in Paris and Milan,” Jerry says. But Eileen went to dinner in Paris with Simone and her husband, filmmaker José Benazeraf, to discuss it.

Over the meal she was stricken with food poisoning. “I was lying on the floor, saying I wanted to go to the hospital,” says Eileen. Jerry adds: “José refused to call her a taxi. He was demanding a commitment about Milan.” Finally Eileen struggled downstairs and hailed a taxi. Another alliance had ended. The Fords began working with Élysées 3, and Models International turned to Wilhelmina. But its troubles had only begun. Things had soured between Christa and Simone, in part because Simone’s husband “made dirty movies and he tried to hire girls from the agency for them,” Fiedler says. Then Fiedler disappeared, leaving her husband, photographer Claude Marant, their child, and their agency, to run off with a younger man she’d met on a Club Med vacation. “He was a friend of mine,” Francois Lano remembers, chuckling. “She followed him into the desert in a long dress, like Dietrich in
Morocco
.” A booker named Stéphane Lanson took over when Fiedler departed. But soon Francois Lano offered Lanson a job at Paris Planning. He was the next one out Models International’s revolving door. “And most of the girls followed me, a whole stable of girls,” he says.

At Paris Planning Lanson was put in charge of women models, but because of the new law, Lano says, French clients started balking at the prices being charged for models. “Nobody wanted to declare or pay taxes,” Lano says, “so a parallel market began to exist. We were obliged to offer representation outside of France because the social security charges were so expensive.” In order to avoid the new taxes, bookings had to be taken and jobs paid for outside France.

Tired of fighting her losing battle with Riccardo Gay, Colette Gambier sold her agency to Lano, who changed its name to Talents and opened branches in Germany. Lano also inherited Gambier’s friends Natasha and Beatrice and her enemy Riccardo Gay. Lano believes that Gay “gave orders” to shut Talents down. “We did our best for the agency,” Beatrice says, “but we always had this big, big, big competition with Riccardo Gay and Fashion Model. A lot of unfair situations were happening in Milan. The models were chased and escorted, and Francois Lano was going forth and back, and finally he got a little bit tired and sold the agency to Riccardo Gay.”

Though he lost his agency in Milan, Lano made some important connections there. In 1969 he flew to Switzerland, to meet with a businessman who helped him form a company where money could be processed out of sight of
French taxmen. Such “black money” systems are common in Europe, where avoiding taxes is a way of life. Model agents are extremely unwilling to discuss these systems, even as they insist they are totally legal. “As babies, the first thing the French learn is how to avoid taxes,” says Sebastien Sed, another composite printer, who became a key German agent.

Lano put Jean-Pierre Dollé in charge of the Swiss billing system. He’d been an eighteen-year-old singer when he met Lano in a nightclub in the 1950s, and in 1961 he went to work at Paris Planning. Now the duo met Jean-Marie de Gueldre, who was married to a model. A lawyer for Formula One racers, de Gueldre was familiar with the intricacies of cross-border commerce. “Lano and Dollé asked, ‘How can we compete?’” de Gueldre recalls. His solution was to set up a Swiss company called Models S.A. But after a few months it became clear that Lano would still have tax liability if the company were in his name, so he “let it go to Swiss people,” de Gueldre says.

Models S.A. allowed Paris Planning’s clients to save the taxes and social charges the new French law mandated and to limit their liability to Switzerland’s maximum 23 percent tax. “Dollé would bring the money back to Paris and pay the models in cash,” says Servane Cherouat, a Paris Planning booker.

Most models accepted de Gueldre’s explanation of why Swiss invoicing benefited them. Louise Despointes was not one of them. “Only dishonest people won with this law,” she says. “They pretend they have a model agency in Fribourg. They put out a fake head sheet, fake vouchers, and pretend the billings went through there, except there is not one telephone or one booker there.”

Funny business wasn’t confined to the tax end of the modeling business. In the late sixties Pucci Albanese was in the lingerie business in Milan, and like Riccardo Gay at
Amica
, he booked models through Paris agencies. “Pucci and Riccardo were like brothers,” says Stephane Lanson. Albanese invested in Gay’s agency when it opened, and they stayed close, but Albanese hated Milan (“a fucking stink city,” he says) and moved to Rome in 1968. He opened an agency and soon expanded into Bologna, Florence, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Barcelona. “GiGi and Oleg Cassini were my closest friends,” he says. “Roman Polanski was always in the agency.” But then, in 1972, he was shut down by the Number One scandal.

Albanese and his friends all frequented a disco in Rome called Number One, partly owned by Paolo Vassallo, the latest boyfriend of Bettina, the Paris couture mannequin. Vassallo was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day after police found two ounces of cocaine and raw opium hidden in his club’s bath
room and his car. Three days later the actress (and ex-Ford model) Elsa Martinelli was arrested as she returned home just before dawn by three policemen disguised as hippies. She was questioned in the case, as were Albanese and a producer (and friend of Albanese’s and Riccardo Gay’s) named Pier Luigi Torri, who lived in a treasure-filled Roman palazzo. Vassallo charged that an envious Torri had planted the drugs, a charge the producer denied. Several months later Torri was arrested for his role in the affair on his yacht in Monte Carlo’s harbor.

Albanese confirms that he was arrested, too, and held in custody for three months, for possession of marijuana. He is obscure on other details of what happened, however. “It was a political scandal,” he says. “It was a stupid time; politics were very fucked up. They held me because I knew too much and they didn’t want me to talk to anybody.” Three years later, Albanese says, the charges against him were dropped. “But after what happened, I didn’t want anything to do with the agency,” he says. “I sold it to the employees, who unfortunately didn’t have the power and personality to keep it going.”

Torri was arrested again in London in 1977 and charged with forging $1.6 million in drafts on a “ghost” bank that couldn’t honor them. “He was strongly suspected by the Italian police of having very close ties to the Mafia,” London’s
Daily Mail
later reported. “He had jumped bail in Rome, had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in his absence for criminally libeling a judge and he had fled to London.” Torri escaped from London’s Central Court four months after his arrest there but was recaptured two years later by the FBI in New York and finally convicted and jailed in London after a trial filled with tales of a paper empire of companies stretching from Liberia to the Falkland Islands.

Ever since then the assumption has been that the Mafia is in the Italian modeling business. The same is assumed about many Italian businesses, but that did nothing to diffuse suspicions. Milan’s agents “didn’t look happily on competition in those days,” says Ulla Bomser, who’d retired and opened the Top Floor agency in Rome with her boyfriend, Athos Contarini. “It was a very big fight all the time,” says Simone d’Aillencourt, who’d bought 21 International from Contarini and renamed it World. The police were constantly rounding up her models and sending them out of Italy. “One time everybody was laughing because Riccardo made a mistake and the police went to the hotel where all of
his
girls were,” says d’Aillencourt. Neither World nor Models International lasted much longer, after someone tossed a fire bomb into the World Models offices in Milan.

Pucci Albanese dismisses the speculation about the bombing as paranoia. “I don’t think agencies were involved,” he says. “Fifty yards away there was a police post. Maybe they put it in the wrong window. I know the character of Riccardo Gay. He cannot hurt one fly. He would never jeopardize his life and career and family for such nonsense.” Giuliana Ducret, a booker at World, says she knows “exactly who did it” but won’t name names. “It was competition,” she says, laughing. “It was like a bad joke. But it was intimidating in a funny way.”

Back in Paris after her desert romance Christa Fiedler met Robert Silberstein, a Parisian real estate developer, who offered to back her in her own agency in 1972. “I didn’t really like him,” Fiedler says. “But you know, the way to impress me was to open a Louis Vuitton wallet filled with five-hundredfranc bills. And so I became partners with him, but not with him, because he could not be involved in a partnership on the papers.”

Briefly Christa Models had its moments of glory. Fiedler had worked with Wilhelmina toward the end of her career, and now they began trading girls. “Wilhelmina came to Paris, and we went to La Coupole with a couple of her models,” says Jacques Silberstein, Robert’s son, who worked with Christa. Among them was Lorraine Bracco, a teenager from Long Island, who’d started with Wilhelmina in eighth grade and was just beginning to work fulltime. “Willie said, ‘Jacques, she has the most beautiful body in my agency,’” Silberstein remembers. He agreed. “I spoke barely English; she spoke barely French,” he says. But they fell in love and spent several years together.