Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (38 page)

Bracco became a top model before moving on to Hollywood, where she won acclaim as one of the rare working models who managed a smooth transition between still and motion-picture stardom. And before she left Paris, she also played a small but key role in launching the career of Christa’s biggest star and one of the top editorial models of the late seventies.

Born to Byelorussian parents in Brooklyn in 1955, Janice Dickinson moved to Hollywood, Florida, as an infant. In the early seventies she enrolled in a John Robert Powers school “to learn how to put my makeup on,” she says. Her little sister, Debbie, who also became a model, says Janice always wanted to model. Because of her dark skin and exotic looks, their father called her Nile Princess.

In 1972 the Powers school brought Janice to a modeling convention in New York. At these biannual gatherings, which still take place, charm and model school students compete for trophies and the attentions of agents who
use the cattle calls as one-stop mannequin-shopping marts. “The babes walk up and down the runway, and whoever wins, wins,” Dickinson says. “I won. I knew how to work it.” The judges who agreed included such fashion experts as hairdresser turned disco star Monte Rock III, crooner Tom Jones, and Telly “Kojak” Savalas.

“I just wanted to go to New York for the weekend,” Dickinson says. “I skipped some of the boring lectures and sneaked out to go to the ballet and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” After graduating from high school, Dickinson returned to New York with a boyfriend who played piano in B. B. King’s band. Only then, she says, did she decide to model. “I picked up the phone book and found out who the agencies were.” But she hadn’t made it to any of them yet when she met Sue Charney, a booker from the Fords, on a Second Avenue bus.

“I got this woman, Sue Charney’s card,” Dickinson continues. “I’m smart. I followed the card to Ford, East Fifty-ninth Street, knocked on the door, and showed my portfolio. I had seven bad pictures in it. Eileen Ford, from across the room, said, ‘No. Get that girl outta here. She’ll never make it.’” Charney says, “Eileen looked at her through the door and said, ‘Sue Charney, you’re blind. Look at that mouth. She’ll never work.’”

Dispirited, Dickinson took off for Las Vegas, where she worked as a cigarette girl and married her boyfriend before returning, “more secure,” to New York six months later. Eileen Ford was in Europe, so Charney put Dickinson on the test board. “Get rid of her,” Ford snapped upon her return. “I don’t want her.”

French photographers Jacques Malignon and Patrice Casanova both were at Wilhelmina the day she washed up there. “Patrice and I saw she was wild, exuberant, explosive,” Malignon says. “A photographer knows the moment he takes a picture. But she was too ethnic for New York. I remember we called two or three agencies in Paris and said we had this big potential model.”

They didn’t pull their punches with Dickinson. “They were nice guys,” she says. “They told me I definitely had it, but I was going to have problems in New York because people in New York in those days couldn’t identify with my exotic, big lips, small eyes, I don’t know what you call it, my Lolita sexy, sexy look.” For a while she stayed in New York, doing the rounds of gosees. “I was trying to get in the front door,” she reports. “Wilhelmina said, ‘Oh, darling’—smoking two packs of Marlboros at once—‘you really have it. You just have to hang in there.’ I had about twelve bad photographs. Then I met Lorraine Bracco and Jacques Silberstein in Wilhelmina’s office, and they
took one look at a Casanova photograph, and Bracco said, ‘That’s the one. She gets the ticket.’ That’s how it happened. I owe it all to Lorraine.”

Dickinson arrived in Paris in January 1975 and, in essence, set off a revolution. She was the first of modeling’s bad girls, and she did nothing to hide it. “Janice was excessive right from the beginning,” says Jacques Silberstein. “She made photographers feel like they were her great friends, she was a great beauty, and she had no problem taking off her clothes. French people are uptight. She made us feel comfortable. She was an instant success.”

Dickinson says her every move was planned. “I had to strategically ask all the girls and sniff things out; it took me about two weeks,” she says. “All the agencies were on strike against French
Vogue
, because of the tariff rate at the time. I could have cared less. My purpose was to work as a model, become a star, and go back and make the big bucks. So I walked into the French
Vogue
studio, and I saw Guy Bourdin. He was my favorite photographer in the world, and he liked me. He asked me if I was a Pisces. I was Aquarius, so I passed, and he promised me that in the next few days we’d be taking pictures. Then I went over to
Elle
, to Peter Knapp’s studio, and asked him for some food. I didn’t know it was him. I told him that I was real jealous of his photographs, because he was the great photographer at the time. We did about seven
Elle
covers in eight weeks. Then I traveled. I went to New Guinea.”

In June Debbie Dickinson joined her sister in Paris. Jacques Silberstein’s brother, Dominique, picked her up at the airport. Paris took to the two antic Americans. But Janice wasn’t satisfied with Christa and soon left for Paris Planning. “I thought I could get handled with better attention and more professionalism,” she says. “Paris Planning was the only agency. There was Elite, but John Casablancas had seen my photographs. Patrice Casanova had showed him one night coming out of Castel, and he just said, ‘No, I don’t like her.’ So I had a vendetta against Casablancas. I thought he was a jerk-off for not recognizing my true gloriousness in all its rare form.”

Janice also made a change in her domestic situation. “I went back to New York,” she says. “I was faithful to my husband the whole entire time. I get back, and I caught him with a black chick. So I said, ‘See ya,’ got divorced, and went back to Paris.”

Jerry Hall’s mother had always wanted to model but her husband wouldn’t let her, so she transferred her ambition to her eldest daughter. “I was always very tall and skinny, and I used to get very depressed about it, and my mother would say, ‘Look at Twiggy.
She’s
skinny,’” Hall recalls. “She sort of planted the seed.”

Jerry was fourteen, but she looked a lot older when she started prowling the halls of the Dallas Apparel Mart, looking for work as a showroom model. Kim Dawson, the biggest agent in Dallas, told the youngster she was too tall (six feet plus) to make a living doing showroom work and suggested she go to Europe. “I had a car accident where they gave me some insurance money, eight hundred dollars,” Hall twangs, Texas-style. “I was fifteen, and I went off to Paris with a backpack and a sleeping bag.”

Her mother, obviously a liberal parent, suggested she start her trip on the Riviera. Hall decided she’d be discovered there. “I don’t know what I had in mind,” she admits. “I’d been watching all those Hollywood movies! So I went down to St.-Tropez, and by then I had practically no money, because I’d bought this pink crocheted bikini for the beach, and it was my first day there, and a man put this phone number in my bikini bottom, and said, ‘Would you like to be a model?’”

His name was Claude Mohammed Haddad. The son of a Tunisian carpenter, he arrived in Paris in 1956. He says he worked in a factory but somehow always dated beautiful women who became models. Others say he ran a temporary employment agency. In 1972 he was at a nightclub, the White Elephant, when Stéphane Lanson of Paris Planning approached him and asked if he was interested in modeling. “He was handsome, dark, beautiful,” Lanson says. But he was also uninterested. “I said no, but after we met, we became good friends, and he told me he wanted to open an agency,” Haddad recalls. “So I started to think maybe I should manage the girls.” Soon Lanson quit Paris Planning and, with Haddad, opened Euro-Planning/Stéphane Lanson.

Then came Jerry Hall. “It’s really luck, big, big luck,” Haddad says. “Truly coincidental. I was in St.-Tropez the first year of this business. I meet a tall girl, completely clumsy. It was Jerry Hall in a pink bikini. And a few weeks after she saw me, she was in Paris. We sent her to see clients, and she became very successful.”

It turned out that Haddad had an exceptional eye for potential models. “I went to New York,” he says. “I found Grace Jones, the black girl, in an elevator. She was coming down from an agency. She looked so angry. She said, ‘They don’t like black people in this country.’ I said, ‘Come to Paris.’”

He also recruited girls on the streets of Paris. Linda Morand had been a successful model with Ford from 1966 until 1968, when she met a viscount at the nightclub Régine’s and quit to get married and travel. Divorced in 1972, Morand decided to return to modeling. She remembers walking on the Left Bank when “this swarthy character comes up to me and hands me a card.”
The name and address of Euro-Planning were printed on the front. On the back was a handwritten addendum promising “85% cash every Friday.”

After hours Haddad entertained his and Lanson’s finds. “He was going out all night long with the girls!” Lanson says. “And I’m at Euro-Planning at eight
A.M.
with all the magazines calling, ‘Where is she, where is she?’ Or they were arriving with eyes red. And one day I told Claude, ‘You can’t do that!’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll still do it,’ and every night he was in the nightclubs making dinner with twenty girls.”

Through Jerry Hall, Haddad hooked into the only group of fashion folk as influential as Casablancas and the French Mob of photographers. It was the circle of omnisexual renegades that surrounded a Puerto Rican illustrator from New York named Antonio Lopez. Lopez died of AIDS in 1987, but his longtime partner, Juan Ramos, recalls his lifetime love affair with fashion and fashion models. As a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1960, “Antonio knew all the models in the magazines by name,” Ramos says. “Anne Saint Marie, Carmen, and China were his favorites.”

Every Saturday Antonio organized fashion illustration classes, picking up kids who were willing to pose on the streets of Greenwich Village, where he lived. “He couldn’t afford top models,” Ramos says, “so out of need he started creating his own.” After school Antonio got a job at
Women’s Wear Daily
, the fashion trade newspaper, and then jumped to
The New York Times
, but his taste in models didn’t change. “He was never interested in the girl next door,” Ramos says. “Healthy wasn’t his thing. He wanted exotic, weird, a little fucked up. They all had their stories. Antonio loved that. He’d listen to their problems for hours on end. Most of them ended up living with us.”

They would make copies of clothes they saw in magazines, dress each other up, and go out to Cheetah, Electric Circus, and Trudi Heller’s. Finally, in the mid-sixties, Antonio began working with established photo models. But he always kept a couple of crazies around, such as Donna Jordan and Jane Forth, before they became Andy Warhol superstars, and Cheyenne, “always in trouble, very drugged out,” Ramos says. “Antonio loved her, of course.” And after cutting sixteen-year-old Donna Mitchell’s picture out of magazines for months, he managed to book her, too. “She wasn’t goody-goody,” Ramos says approvingly. “She was neighborhood.

“We lived a crazy life,” says Ramos. “We were night people. We ate breakfast at noon and started work at six. Everyone would hang out, and we’d work through the night.” On Sundays dressed in python boots and flowing scarves, they’d promenade at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. They found
more models there. “Antonio was like an employment agency,” says Ramos. “We didn’t care if they had bad skin, as long as they could stand still.”

In 1969 Antonio’s troupe moved en masse to Paris, where he started drawing for
Elle, Vingt Ans
, and Italy’s
L’Uomo Vogue
. They fell in with designer Karl Lagerfeld, who was then designing for the Chloé label, and followed him to St.-Tropez every summer, where he’d rent a house and fill it with models. Antonio and Juan knew and disdained the French Mob photographers. “Those guys weren’t taken seriously,” Ramos says. “They were out to fuck girls. They weren’t doing things in fashion. We were friends with Guy Bourdin and Helmut and June Newton.”

Soon Antonio found a Paris clubhouse, a disco called Club Sept, where he and all his friends could play. “It was a little tiny gay bar when we got there,” says Ramos. “They enlarged it for us. We’d bring records from New York, black music. We were transporters of culture.” Antonio’s entourage grew to include Ingo Thouret, a male model from Germany, Jay Johnson and Tom Cashin, two handsome Americans, the black runway models Pat Cleveland and Toukie Smith (who was designer Willie Smith’s sister), and Pablo Picasso’s daughter, Paloma.

Like Antonio, Cleveland went to FIT. She became a model when a
Vogue
editor’s assistant spotted her on the subway. “I was only fourteen,” she says. “This assistant followed me. My girlfriend said, ‘You better run. There’s a dyke chasing you.’ I said, ‘What’s a dyke?’ So I talked to her, and she said she loved the way I dressed and gave me her card, and I went up there. I was a designer, and they said they loved my designs. They photographed me in my creations, and I started modeling a bit. My mom helped me send pictures around, and
Ebony
responded. I modeled with Ebony’s fashion shows that went around America. I did ninety-nine shows.”

Modeling was so much fun Cleveland gave up on designing. But she didn’t have an easy time at first. “I kept meeting these agents who weren’t agents,” she says. “I met a lot of playboys, sort of bad personalities, and I made some money, but I was going the wrong way. I had to get rid of them. I think my agent did porn movies. They tried to get me to smoke dope and everything.”

Hanging out in clubs like Cheetah in plastic dresses studded with feathers, Cleveland met a friend of Eileen Ford’s. Moving to Ford, she returned to
Vogue
, where an illustrator named Manning Obregon decided he wanted to draw her and sent her to see Diana Vreeland. “I did a pirouette into Diana Vreeland’s office, and she said, ‘Stand like a tree with your feet rooted in the ground!’” Cleveland recalls. She sent me to Irving Penn, and he taught me to use my eyes.”