Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (40 page)

Despite—or perhaps because of—incidents like that, Elite became the hot model shop in town. “The clients loved it,” says Casablancas. “They always love the little guys. This is why I always expect my clients to betray me now. There is this irresistible attraction towards the new thing. I say this without bitterness. It’s what fashion is about.” The girls talked up the service they were getting from John and Christine Lindgren, a booker who’d come with him from Élysées 3. More models followed.

In the wake of Casablancas, a new breed of agent rushed into the model trade. Claude Haddad was one. But the most successful by far has been Gérald Marie. At least, that’s what he calls himself now. In the beginning he used an aristocratic name, Gérald Marie de Castelbajac. “I didn’t want to work under my name at the time,” he (sort of) explains. “I didn’t know what was possible, and at the time everybody was working under a different name. Maybe I was stupid or crazy enough to say I was going to work and invent myself another personality, another system. I didn’t have anything in common with myself, so I worked with that a little bit and I dropped it.”

Though some people who have worked with him believe he was an orphan, Marie has said he is the son of a hospital administrator. He apparently grew up near Marseilles and entered show business as a go-go dancer on local television, or at least that’s what he told one of his many model lovers who marveled at his bedroom acrobatics. Marie says that as a student he promoted ballroom dance concerts. “It worked quite well, and through that I started to meet a lot of girls because they followed the bands, and some of them happened to be models,” he says. He fell in with an older woman, and she offered him a modeling agency. They called it Modeling. “She proposed to me that I work with her,” Marie says. “I didn’t know a thing, frankly. But I knew how to look at a girl, how to talk to her. I think François Lano heard about me. He was in the middle of a kind of war with John Casablancas, and he proposed that I work with him.”

François Lano didn’t like what was happening in modeling. “The work was different, more aggressive and much more money-looking,” he says. Casablancas denies it, but Lano says Elite made special commission deals to lure his stars away. “John was the first to do that,” Lano says. “‘Come with me, you will pay nothing.’ If the girl was not interested, he would say to the boyfriend, ‘Arrange something for me, and I’ll give you some money.’ It’s not dishonest, but it wasn’t right.” An American photographer who worked in Europe adds that Casablancas paid bounties to photographers who steered models to him. Casablancas also slept with the girls. “John Casablancas was giving new services.” Jérôme Bonnouvrier smirks. “Lano had to do something.”

Casablancas says his success was also a concern for the Fords. “I’m a not bad-looking guy who is having a lot of success with personal relationships with the models, so I’m a nuisance in the sense that they send models to Paris Planning and to other agencies and they end up with me. It’s a small agency; we’re very prestigious; we’re demanding higher prices. We’ve already begun to have all the characteristics of what Elite is about. Eileen and Jerry, who had slammed the door in my face at the time of Élysées 3, now came and said, ‘It’s embarrassing for us. You’ve got ten of our girls, and we don’t have a relationship with you.’ I said, ‘All you’ve got to do is give me the girls yourselves.’ So we started a relationship. It was a big deal for me. I was a young guy, and these were the kings of the business.”

The European agents all felt like pawns of the Fords. In Paris “Eileen enjoyed the game of divide and conquer,” says Bonnouvrier. “It kept the situation under control. She was here every two months. It was an obsession. But she made a major mistake. Suddenly she turned from Lano to her new toy, Elite.”

A solution came to hand when Gérald Marie called Lano, who offered him a job. “I liked the way he was,” Lano says. “He was pushing. He was attracted by beauty. He knew how to speak about girls and make you want to buy them. When I took him, it was not against John. I needed fresh blood in managing. But when I came back to the agency and told everyone I’d made a deal for Gérald,
everybody
immediately said, ‘If Gérald comes, we’ll leave.’ I told Gérald, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Instead Lano hired Fabienne Martin, a German-speaking student who’d gone to school with one of Dorian Leigh’s daughters. She created a new department called Covers “for top girls, because of Elite,” she says. Her stars were Susan Moncur, Louise Despointes, and another favorite of Newton and Bourdin’s, Wallis Franken. “Fabienne was like John the Baptist,” says Steve Hiett. “She was the first to promote soulful, poetic-type girls.” But the times weren’t ready for her approach.

“The scene became totally different,” says photographer Guy Le Baube, who started shooting fashion in 1970. “Before, the girls were older, more mature; they wore glasses and read books. Some of them had Ph.D.’s. The level of conversation was much higher. Now people who have nothing to say make pictures. They are like monkeys, greedy for success. So they imitate success; they look like success, without having it. Fake emotions are their hallmark. Modeling brings the worst out in you if you don’t have the background to elevate it.” And the new models were looking for flash, not the careful, creative guidance Fabienne Martin was offering. “I tried to do my best,” she says, “but I wasn’t that strong. There were some wonderful girls there, but it was nothing compared to Elite.”

Then Marie called Lano again and said he was shutting Modeling because Elite had snatched two of his top earners, Lena Kansbod and Anna Anderson. This time Lano hired him. A quarter of Paris Planning’s girls weren’t working. “I posed this as a challenge,” Lano says. “He worked like a dog. He worked all day alone, calling photographers, protecting the models. Each time he took a new girl, he would drop another one who was not doing well. He said, ‘Try another agency because I don’t know how to manage you.’ He built completely his own department. Then I gave him charge of all the women’s division.”

Lano was an excellent teacher, and Marie was a quick study. A street fighter by temperament, he learned to charm but didn’t make it a habit. “François was too much of a gentleman for the concert that was playing at the time,” Marie says. “When a model said she was leaving, he would take her to lunch,
offer her a ring or pearls to say good-bye. François was a different generation. My goal was to catch Elite.”

Rough around the edges, Marie was a road show John Casablancas. “François probably fancied him,” says Sebastien Sed. “He went for Gérald like a guy would go for a fourteen-year-old girl.” Marie soon earned the nickname Chevalier de Longue Queue, or Knight of the Long Tail, a not-so-subtle reference to his sexual prowess. “He was the stud,” says Jacques Silberstein.

By all accounts, Marie changed his women as often as the sheets on his bed. “That’s why François took him,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “For what he is. He’s funny, but he’s a pimp who fucks the girls.” He doesn’t deny it.

“I’m not an angel,” he says. “But I’m very picky about the women I date, and I don’t work by quantity. We are men in the business of women. We love women, and I think we’re just acting normally. The woman at a model agency is using another kind of charm, playing mommy, sister, confidante.”

For what? “Money,” Marie says.

Huntsville, Alabama-born Beth Boldt, an aspiring model at Zoli, met Marie on one of his first scouting trips to America. “He tried to go to bed with me,” she says. “That’s why I joined Christa. Jacques and Dominique were cuter. I figured, if push came to shove, I’d rather do it with them.”

Other models who met Marie in his early days at Paris Planning say there was nothing particularly sinister or sexist about him. “He was the cock of the court,” says Gaby Wagner, “handling the board, all the booking, reorganizing the agency. He was bad since the beginning! I never had a problem with him, but of course, he wanted to screw me.” He would tell new models that they would get editorial work if they slept with him. “I’d just go, ‘Fuck you,’” Wagner says.

Another model, who asks to be called Aquamarine, says she greatly preferred Marie to Casablancas, who also made himself available to her. “There was a sweetness about Gérald,” she says. “I’d liken him to a lion cub. He was young; he was fun; he was like a kid in a candy store, awed at finding himself in the position to sleep with all these girls.” Marie says he’s never offered career advancement in exchange for sex, but he struck Aquamarine as “somebody you could fuck for work,” she says. “He’d been very helpful to the girls he slept with. It was the only time I ever compromised myself, but it didn’t seem so serious. I liked him.” Their interlude lasted a few weeks. “He kept asking me to marry him, but I thought we didn’t have a lot in common. I never loved him, and he never loved me. And funny thing, I don’t think he got me any work.”

“He was an episode in everybody’s life,” says another of Marie’s model lovers with a sigh. “His persistence amused me. He is relentless to the point of being humorous and I had nothing better to do for the day. There’s a hundred thousand guys like that in Paris. They’re nurturing, madly in love, and then they’re out of your life as fast as they got into it. A brief encounter of the most odd kind.”

John Casablancas had an active sex life, too. Often he played with Riccardo Gay, his Italian collaborator. Gay was known as I1 Rabbino, the Rabbi, and he was that and more to Casablancas. “Oh, we had the best times,” Casablancas says. “We did every crazy thing in the world with the girls and with drinking. I admit I was not a saint. I was a young European guy. I loved to go out, to eat, to drink. I’ve never, ever touched drugs in my life. But everything else, yes.”

They both had steady girlfriends, but that didn’t stop them. Their garter belt parties are the stuff of modeling legend. “We would be sharing an apartment, and while one of us was sleeping, the other one would push a couple of girls into the room,” Casablancas recalls. “We’d have the girls take their clothes off and peekaboo. You have to remember that we were very young.”

Stories about Casablancas’s free-and-easy lifestyle soon spread through the modeling business. He’d pop into the agency and buy dinner for whoever was around. “Right off the plane he’d buy lingerie and cocktail dresses on the Champs-Élysées, dress ’em up, and take ’em out,” says model Debbie Dickinson. But the same behavior that attracted models to him disturbed agents of the old school. Once, at a dinner in Paris, the Fords watched in disbelief as a fifteen-year-old who’d lived with them before joining Elite lit John’s cigar for him. “I was a couple times shocked when I saw him with very young girls,” says Jerry Ford. “I can’t recall people we sent to him with whom he became involved, but I remember a lot of people he sent to us who he’d had.”

Casablancas’s girlfriend, Jeanette Christjansen, was more forgiving. She’d heard all the rumors, but she didn’t believe them. “I never was jealous,” she says. “I could not have lived with John for seventeen years if I’d been jealous. He might have been fucking around, but I never knew. I trusted him very much. He was always home when I called. I knew how badly he wanted to make it, and I wanted to help him.”

So was he screwing around with young models? “As in everything, there’s a little bit of truth and there’s a little bit of lie,” he says. “Did I ever sleep with any of the models? Yes, I did. Were they young? When you say young girls, it usually implies sixteen-year-olds. That’s absolutely not true. The average age of starting models in those days was more like eighteen. Had there ever been
any young girls? Of course, there had been. You know, I know sixteen-year-old girls that are going on fifty.”

John Casablancas positioned himself as a child of 1968, a rebel, an outsider. “Therefore, certain people had automatic sympathy for me, others had automatic antipathy,” he says. Right from the start he had problems with American agencies. “They were sucking our blood,” Casablancas says. “They wouldn’t let a European agent scout outside of New York. You had to go through them. I spent twenty thousand dollars on four trips to New York. I saw a hundred twenty girls, out of which I wanted fifty. I got five. In the meantime, New York agents came ten times to Paris, it cost me fifty dinners, and they took away our six top-grossing girls.”

That year in Capri one of his bookers, Francesca Magugliani, sat in on an all-night conversation between Gay and Casablancas about opening an agency in New York. Casablancas was furious with the Fords. “Their philosophy was to reign through division,” he says. “They would go into a city and promise the same girl to five agencies. And everybody was kissing their asses. I felt this was unbearable.”

“They were playing backgammon,” Francesca recalls, “and John said, ‘I’m going to open in New York.’ Riccardo said, ‘It’s not that easy.’ It went on and on. They got really heated up, both of them. Riccardo had a good idea. He wanted all the agencies in Europe to form a conglomerate. Each agency would have a percentage of the stock in a holding company according to turnover so there would be no more jealousy; it would all go into the same pot.”

Casablancas tried to put that plan into action in summer 1976. “It was the time of the film
The French Connection
,” he says. “I called for a meeting of SAM [the French syndicate of modeling agencies, a trade group] and proposed that five of us join forces, buy a building on the Avenue Foch, make every floor an agency, everyone independent, paying rent to the cooperative, and then go to New York and open an agency there called the French Connection. I said, ‘Let’s do our own scouting. America is enormous, and let’s get our own girls.’ It didn’t happen because the fear of Eileen and Wilhelmina was so great, rumors started spreading, and they all chickened out.”

In fall 1976 Casablancas and François Lano revived the idea and discussed merging Elite and Paris Planning into a new entity, Elite Planning. “We were mostly interested in Gérald Marie,” says Alain Kittler, who’d begun as Elite’s
backer and quickly turned into a full partner. “Dollé and Lano had the shares, but they were already the old regime.”