Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (2 page)
Read Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Online
Authors: Michael Gross
If you don’t have anything bad to say, don’t say it here. Which model has slept with every photographer in town? Which one serviced the shah of Iran? Which one, high on LSD, jumped out a window? Which ones jumped out a villa’s second-story window, escaping a horny, hashish-smoking playboy? Which one disappeared on a shoot with a nonexistent Saudi Arabian magazine, ending up who knows where?
It’s not just the models. Ask them, and they’ll tell you about sadistic photographers like the one who makes a habit of exposing his penis while exposing his film. And playboys like the Hollywood producer who lures models to gang rapes by his friends and then ships them home suicidal. They are no worse than their agents. Which one tries to bed every model who passes through his office? Which one
doesn’t?
Which one is in Milan’s Mafia Bianca? Which one sells his agency over and over yet remains on the scene, a modeling monument? Which agent sells cocaine to photographers? Which ones feed it to their girls? Which one sends the stuff across the Atlantic, inside videocassettes carried by unwary friends? Spend a few weeks in model world, and you’ll hear about all of them. Some of these stories are true; some not. But all are repeated as gospel.
This is a world in which lawsuits fly as frequently as the models do from city to city, agency to agency, magazine to magazine, boyfriend to boyfriend. Loyalty is nonexistent. Betrayal is everywhere. But what else do you expect from a world that caters to envy and lust? Is it any wonder, then, that back at
the Fiera a booker named Alessandra exits Riccardo Gay’s booth, grimacing in pain, and leans her forehead against a wall for all to see?
Standing on the sidelines, Beatrice Traissac observes, “It’s like the pit in which the lions play at the zoo.”
The top cats hate each other, but they need one another, too. That is why they come together at the Nepenta party. Every year a class photo is taken there of all the agents in attendance. Riccardo Gay arranges it and then sells the photos to Italian magazines. Gay never misses a chance to make a buck. The agents all cooperate and stand together in a group. “Plotting to stab the next guy in the back,” one whispers as they head back to their tables.
The night wears on. A satisfied glow comes over the crowd. Naomi Campbell is moving across the dance floor without a partner. She doesn’t need a partner. Everyone—apart from Elite—wants the next dance. Kate Moss and Christy Turlington are head to head, puffing on cigarettes. They will stay and drink and dance until two-thirty, and they will both look vacant and pimply at a show the next morning, but it doesn’t matter. The gods of makeup and hair will be there to tend to them. But still. “I need some hair of the dog,” Turlington will say at eleven that morning, quaffing a glass of champagne in Gay’s Fiera booth. “It’s the only thing that helps.”
If they act like chosen people, it’s because they are. They’ve been chosen by the hand of fate to have chic bones. And they’ve been chosen by the agents in a never-ending process that leads from one young girl to the next and the next and the next….
Take Elite’s John Casablancas. He is here, of course, a man in his element, beaming a satisfied, proprietary grin at his long table filled with long-legged women. His back is to the wall, so despite the presence of his mortal enemies, no one can stab
him
in the back here. Casablancas’s arm is draped around the shoulder of his adoring third wife, eighteen-year-old Aline Wermelinger, a Brazilian Baptist whom he met when she entered Elite’s Look of the Year model search contest. She isn’t his first model, not by a long shot. His second wife was a model, too. And by his own admission, he’s loved several others and bedded countless more. He is past fifty. But it shows only in his belly, which creeps out over his belt. It is doing that now as he leans back and puffs on his cigar and swigs some champagne and the kittenish Aline curls against him.
A new song starts playing on Nepenthe’s dance floor. Hearing it, Casablancas starts lustily singing along. “We are the champions,” the song goes. “We are the champions … of the world!”
C
indy Crawford taps her foot and tsk-tsks impatiently. She’s clocked into photographer Patrick Demarchelier’s studio twenty minutes earlier—a mere six minutes late for a 9:00 A.M. modeling job. Crawford is prompt and expects as much from those she works with in fashion’s photo factories. But Demarchelier isn’t in sight. Nor are the day’s editors from British
Vogue
. Nor hair and makeup artists. Finally Demarchelier, a bearish fellow, drifts in, but after saying hello, he drops into a chair with the
Times
. A woman enters and gets on the phone. She’s an editor, looking for several stray bathing suits, which, she announces, will be the focus of the day’s shoot. Crawford is under the impression she’s been booked for a cover, and she isn’t pleased. Besides the loss of the prestigious cover, there’s the fact she has been booked under false pretenses. And bathing suit photos require … certain preparations.
“Somebody should have told me,” Cindy mutters. “I didn’t shave.”
Just then the rest of the crew, including Mary Greenwell (makeup) and Sam McKnight (hair) arrives. Crawford eyes her watch; it’s nine-forty.
“What time were we supposed to be here?” Greenwell asks innocently.
“Nine,” Crawford says. A pause. “I’m ready whenever you want to start.”
At last the studio stirs. Demarchelier rises and begins hulking around, muttering in incomprehensible French-accented English. The phones—and the British editors—chirp. Crawford settles at a makeup table under a wall of blown-up old
Vogue
covers. They look down as Greenwell, barefoot, circles Cindy, smearing foundation on her face. Sarajane Hoare,
Vogue’s
fashion editor, approaches. “I’m
so
glad I got you,” she says with a sigh.
Though she’s since been replaced in fickle fashion hearts by waifish models like Kate Moss, Beri Smithers, and Amber Valletta, Cindy Crawford (then
twenty-three) was the model of the moment that fall day in 1989. She was the
top du top des top models
, according to French
Vogue
, one of the “divine,” according to Francesco Scavullo, who shot her sexy
Cosmopolitan
covers. She had the look, and the perks that came with it: her own show,
House of Style
, on MTV; appearances in lucrative Japanese soda pop commercials; sexy
Playboy, GQ
, and
Sports Illustrated
layouts; a best-selling swimsuit calendar and posters; proposals by mail from men in prison; and a Prince song, “Cindy C,” written just for her. She’d been dating Richard Gere for more than a year and would soon marry him, and Hollywood had already beckoned, although only with parts for bimbos and babes.
Crawford was and is neither. And that summer she’d first proved it when she grabbed modeling’s brass ring and was named the latest in a languid line of Revlon models, a series of fabulous faces dating back to 1952’s Fire and Ice face, Dorian Leigh.
These are pointedly different times, and Crawford is
their
girl. She may have lost the fashion flock’s ardor, but she’s won the admiration of the world. “There are lots of beautiful girls,” said Marco Glaviano, who photographed her swimsuit calendars. “But you need to have the brains to manage it. A lot of these girls don’t use them because they’ve been told models are supposed to be stupid. And it’s not a very stimulating business. They spend the day—poor girls—wearing lipstick and changing clothes. And look who they’re with. Photographers—and I include myself—aren’t noted for their intellectual attainment. And editors! Models spend their formative years with people who worry about skirt lengths. Even if they start smart, they can become stupid. Cindy’s not afraid of being smart. That’s a change.”
Models and modeling have in fact undergone an extraordinary change since 1923, when an out-of-work actor named John Robert Powers opened the world’s first agency for pretty faces in New York. Back then models earned $5 an hour. Today a day’s work can ultimately reap a five- or six- figure harvest. For a mere twenty days of Crawford’s work, Revlon anted up nearly $600,000 in 1989. And she probably made more based on escalators in her original three-year contract (since renewed) that govern how and how often her image is used. Add to that all she’s done since—her contract renewals, her Pepsi commercials, her celebrity endorsements, her continued modeling, and her ever-rising profile—and you end up with a lucrative lifetime career.
It’s a far cry from the first models, whose working lives usually ended by age thirty and left them with little except, if they were lucky, rich husbands and stable lives outside the limelight. They really were mannequins: nameless, affectless two-dimensional creatures in twin sets, pearls, and white kid gloves, whose only purpose was to draw the eye, most often in drawings made by commercial illustrators working for magazines or product manufacturers selling various goods to women. Nowadays models still sell, but they are the primary product. The “clothes hanger,” as one of the greatest models of all time, Lisa Fonssagrives, often called herself, has become more important, better known, and more sought after than any mere lipstick or designer dress. She is frequently not only better paid than the people who make those things but richer than those who buy them. More and more, the tail wags the dog. The fascination with models shows no sign of abating.
Cindy Crawford photographed by Marco Glaviano
Cindy Crawford by Marco Glaviano
So as Crawford sat around Demarchelier’s studio that day, she wasn’t just a model but a supermodel. The term itself wasn’t new (it had first been used in the 1940s by Clyde Matthew Dessner, the owner of a small model agency), but the phenomenon was. Crawford’s predecessor Dorian Leigh had led a similar jet set life, living footloose and free among the international set, making headlines and scandals almost everywhere she went. But Crawford and Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour, and Paulina Porizkova have become something much greater than the sum of their body parts.
They are the visual projection of the dreams of millions, the contemporary repositories of glamour, as powerful, sought after, and celebrated as the movie stars of Hollywood’s heyday. The supermodels of the nineties are icons, emblems of an industrial society that is ever more accomplished in the replication and use of selling imagery. Though they exist in an apparently superficial milieu, models are metaphors for matters of cultural consequence like commerce, sexuality, and aesthetics. Through the work of the image merchants who manipulate them in photographs and advertisements (and sometimes in their real lives), today’s models hawk not only clothes and cosmetics but a complex, ever-evolving psychology and social ambience, a potent commercial fiction that goes by the name lifestyle. Designers and photographers and fashion magazines create stories to sell products. Models are the stars of those stories. In the same way that young boys worship and want to be sports stars, today’s adolescent girls want to be like Cindy, Claudia, and Naomi and live the life the supermodels appear to in the pages of glossy magazines. “Every girl wants to be Cindy,” says model scout Trudi Tapscott. “She’s not only beautiful, but smart, she went to college, she transcended the business, and she married a guy they think is the greatest. She’s a symbol of the empowerment of women.”
Unfortunately for the many, only the few are genetic accidents of precisely the right kind. And even then good looks, a certain height, and a photogenic arrangement of features aren’t all it takes to succeed in this sometimes viciously competitive sphere. Indeed, it’s not so much her looks as her outlook and her drive to succeed that made Crawford the first supermodel and then an international celebrity. She’s the living proof that it takes more than a pretty face to scale modeling’s Mount Everest.
“Cindy’s incredibly aggressive,” says her friend Mark Bozek, a fashion executive turned television producer. “She always wants to be challenged.” And she constantly challenges others to meet her standards. “If I’m giving a hundred percent, I expect everyone else to,” she says. So she second-guesses everyone from photographers to cabdrivers. And when, inevitably, they don’t live up to expectations, she gets downright irritated. But then, this child of a broken blue-collar home will say, “I always felt I had to take care of everything myself.” It’s all made Crawford a candidate for an ulcer. “I internalize a lot,” she said that day. “I didn’t have an operation, but I take Xantac.” Sitting at Crawford’s side, fashion editor Hoare defends her perfectionism. “All the photographers love Cindy,” Hoare says. “She’s not tricky, no bad vibes, no headaches. She’s so professional, so thoroughly reliable, so kind. And here bang on time.”
“But some people don’t appreciate my bossiness,” Cindy says.
“You’re
not
bossy,” Hoare replies, dropping her voice in conspiracy. “Most models, when they get to Cindy’s stage, become prima donnas. They treat you like shit.”
