Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (48 page)

“What happened was, the money went out of control,” says Hunter, who claims that Marchiano and Stinson were spending without consulting Masucci. “Jerry got disenchanted,” Hunter claims. “We felt we had a runaway ship financially, and we decided enough is enough. We did lock them out, and we bought Masucci out over a period of a couple of years.” In response to the bookers’ lawsuit (which was prepared by Elite’s lawyer, Ira Levinson), Jerry Ford said they’d been dismissed for incompetence and dereliction of duty and claimed that Fame was insolvent.

Marchiano categorically denies that Fame was losing money. In fact, she says, it had just started turning a profit when Ford closed it down. “There was no financial reason to close it,” Marchiano says. “I finally decided it was a whim of Alan’s.” She turned down Hunter’s offer to work at Ford and instead went back to work for Casablancas, who was starting a chain of franchised modeling schools with his brother, Fernando. Stinson moved to Miami, where she still works as a modeling agent. Their lawsuit against the Fords, Hunter, and Masucci was eventually abandoned. A suit the Fords subsequently filed against Ira Levinson for defamation was decided in Levinson’s favor.

At Ford Esme remained erratic. “She was always out, and you’d never know whether she would get to her booking or not,” Joe Hunter later said. In the
Daily News
series published in April 1980, unnamed sources referred to the twenty-year-old as “a burn-out” and “sort of gone.” It was said she’d stopped taking location trips, canceled bookings, turned up late, cried on sets, lost
weight, and lost her luster. Elite was promoting a new model, Julie Wolfe, who was an Esme look-alike. Chain-smoking Marlboros, Esme denied it all, saying she lost weight because she was hyperactive. “I really don’t care what the fashion industry thinks,” she said. “They have a warped perspective anyway.”

Janice Dickinson later told writer (and ex-model) Lynn Snowden that the problem wasn’t drugs. Finkelstein was beating Esme up. “She was covered in bruises and didn’t want people to see her like that,” Dickinson said. “Esme was getting the shit kicked out of her. She just entered into this Svengali relationship.” Once she even showed up at Marchiano’s door bleeding. “He abused her,” Marchiano confirms. “She was physically abused and controlled.”

Finally, Esme told Snowden, she manipulated Finkelstein into throwing her out. Even then he kept victimizing her. “I just signed everything over to him,” Esme said, including property she’d bought in Colorado. She ended up owing $350,000 in back taxes. Esme retired from modeling in 1985, married a professional volleyball player, moved to France, had a baby, divorced, and launched a brief comeback in 1990. Friends say she’s since moved to California. Finkelstein lives there, too. He resurfaced in 1992, running a supper club called the Monkey Bar, part owned by his best friend, Jack Nicholson.

Nicholson’s friend Zoli kept a diary for the last five years of his life. Though there is scarcely anything written in it, a few sketchy passages offer a glimpse of his life and thoughts. On September 8, 1977, he and an “R. H.” attended an Irving Penn opening at the Marlborough Gallery and “saw I. Penn, L. Hutton, the Fords, Karen Bjornsen, Tim and Joe Macdonald, Mrs. V.” They went on to Julie Britt’s birthday party for model Peter Keating, where they saw Patti Hansen, Patti Oja, Janice Dickinson, and Lisa Cooper. “Home with R. H.,” the entry concludes. “HANGover.”

On September 8 Zoli picked up his mother, who’d been diagnosed with cancer, at the hospital. “She’s doing fine.” An entry about falling in love with R. H. follows. “It’s the only thing that I can’t count on like my job, my house, my family, my friends and yet in that uncountability [
sic
] I feel more stable than in all those other temporary securities.” That October Zoli noted his plan to move from the town house to 955 Lexington Avenue. “It’ll be fun to live alone and somewhat strange,” he wrote. Not long after Zoli and his partner, Bennie Chavez, began to have differences over money.

Chavez says, “There were people in his life who were rather unsavory. A couple of his lovers were great sources of trouble, asking why I should have
half the business. The problem was, we had a written agreement.” Then Chavez fell in love with an Englishman and decided to marry him. Zoli felt sure she was making a mistake. The next entry in Zoli’s diary are notes headed “CHAMELEON.” After a scientific description of lizards Zoli added, “also a changeable and fickle person.”

Zoli was having a crisis. “I thought the solution would be to move from this house, this beautiful house inhabited by ghosts, namely me, mutti [his mother] & B. C. [Chavez],” he wrote. “The next minute, it was to change professions completely as work seems to be a compote of self-indulgent, greedy, ungrateful, egotistical narcissists…. I’ve arrived somewhere and stayed too long.” That Christmas he went to Aspen and saw ex-model and designer Jackie Rogers, François de Menil, and Jack Nicholson. “What a blasé, spoiled man I am,” he wrote. “How well I seem to have it, but if I could only get some real enthusiasm for anything I would be most pleased. I am learning to resign myself, to accept reality in people without rose-colored glasses…. It’s no fireworks for me. I’m probably better off for it. But I yearn for the passions of the moment and also want to pass my life in insanity and recklessness which I repress for the sake of? what I don’t know.”

There are no more diary entries for six months until Zoli notes a July 1978 sailboat trip to the Virgin Islands with a man named Bob. “Both quit smoking and eating meat, a changing time,” Zoli noted. When he got back, it was time to split up with Bennie Chavez. The next few pages were filled with angry ideas on how to separate their business. “A lawyer convinced him he should get tough, and he took me to court,” Chavez says.

Zoli’s diary picks up again many blank pages later, with the 1981 notation “My dear sweet mama died on April 16 at 1
A.M.
” Again many pages intervene, and then in the very back of the book are three more entries. The first two are lists of Zoli’s stock holdings late in 1980 and in mid-1981, when they totaled almost $145,000. The last entry in the diary appears to be the beginning of a screenplay. Two men meet in a dark gay bar. A young executive type picks up an older man, takes him home, and they have sex. Then the man reveals “he’s a vampire,” Zoli writes. “Vampire is … 30 going on 300. Likes boy and confides that he is tired of being a vampire….”

By all accounts, Zoli was only a voyeur at the party that fascinated him so and was in certain ways quite bourgeois. He was never promiscuous, according to his friends. He had boyfriends and “lived with them,” says Barbara Lantz, who now co-owns Zoli with Vickie Pribble. “He was very relationship
oriented. In one case, Zoli’s mother lived with them and Zoli moved out and the guy kept living with [Zoli’s] mother.”

But not long after his mother died, Zoli started feeling ill. “He had the weirdest symptoms,” Lantz recalls. “He went to forty doctors all over the country for tests. Joe Macdonald had already been diagnosed with AIDS. Zoli had an AIDS test, and it came back negative.” He went to clinics and gurus and even hooked himself up to a biofeedback machine. On one of his trips he visited ex-Wagner model Geraldine Clark in California. “I got very frightened when I saw him,” she says. “He was thin as a stick and had a high fever.” He cried while they were having dinner. In September 1981, Zoli’s sister says, his doctors diagnosed lung cancer. “We thought he was being melancholy,” says Lantz. “He had a tendency.” He’d lost his case against Chavez, and they’d finally split their holdings. She kept the town house; he got the agency.

In November 1982 Zoli checked into the hospital. He had his doctors tell his employees he had tuberculosis and would be all right. Bennie Chavez knew differently. “I saw him on the street a few days before he went into the hospital,” she says. “He was very thin; he had no voice. He had a look of peace in his eyes. It was almost hypnotic, and it disturbed me.” Geraldine Clark flew to New York to nurse him. The cancer had spread to his esophagus, and the radiation treatments that doctors prescribed caused his food and air pipes to fuse together. Clark prepared food in a blender for her friend. That was the only way he could eat. Finally, the day before he died, Zoli sent his sister back to her home in Virginia and Clark back to California. “He knew there was the possibility he had AIDS,” Clark says. “He had one lover who’d been very promiscuous. He’d become like a pariah. No one wanted to touch him. I was terrified, but before I left, I pushed the pipe away and kissed his lips. It was the first time he’d smiled in days.”

Finally Zoli succumbed. He was forty-one. To this day his friends and family aren’t sure what really caused his death, though they note that his last boyfriend later died of AIDS. “There are no records saying it was anything but cancer,” says Lantz. “It certainly sounds like AIDS. But there was never a diagnosis.”

The day Zoli died, the word went out among the models, but they were asked to keep his death a secret. A quiet memorial was scheduled because Zoli wanted no fuss, and indeed, except for a brief notice in a photographic trade newspaper, his death was never publicly acknowledged. Meanwhile, Zoli’s lawyer called six key employees together. There were two wills, he told them.
Only one was signed. Both split the agency among the employees, but in different ways. The minority shareholders wanted to sell. But Lantz and Pribble wanted to keep the agency going and did.

If there is such a thing as karma, Zoltan Rendessy’s stayed good to the very end. Shortly after Zoli died, John Casablancas and Wilhelmina’s Fran Rothschild both called and offered to lend the agency bookers, so the staff could attend the memorial service. Zoli’s most fitting epitaph may be what
didn’t
happen next.

“We didn’t lose a single model,” says Barbara Lantz.

O
f all the models who emerged in the early eighties, Bitten Knudsen had one of the worst reputations. She was a free spirit who one minute would be climbing the walls, and the next, collapsed in a heap on the floor, unconscious on drugs, and uncaring about who knew it. Bitten’s fantasy was to open a model agency called the Unprofessionals. Its motto? “Double rate if we show up,” Bitten says. “Triple rate if we step on the set.”

Tara Shannon’s reputation couldn’t have been more different. She was known as a consummate professional, a modeling virtuoso. Sitting down for lunch in a restaurant near her Manhattan apartment, Shannon wears studious frameless glasses that almost give her a schoolteacher’s look but can’t quite obscure the beauty lurking just underneath.

Today both models are in their late thirties and have gone on to other careers. Shannon has appeared on several television shows. Bitten makes films, lives in SoHo with a painter, and still sees lots of her friends from the old days—at least, those who are still alive. “I feel like I’m a warrior who survived the front lines,” she says, her voice slinking out from under a thick mane of white blond hair. “There weren’t any medals, but we were definitely out there with guns, shooting straight at the enemy.”

T
ARA
S
HANNON
: “I was this flat-chested, skinny, blue-eyed, curly-haired little girl in Denver. I would take
Cosmo
magazines, paint tits on my chest like circles, and copy the poses. I loved
Milly the Model
comic books. I have my collection still. You would draw the hairdos and clothes, and mail them in, and they would give you a little credit in the comic. One of the
tragedies in my life is that my mother never mailed the letters. It made me what I am today.

“I dropped out and left home when I was thirteen. I was living on my own in a hippie house. My first modeling job was
Playboy
. I was sixteen, and I was going to be a centerfold, but it was never published because I wasn’t girl next door enough. Which turned out to be what made my career. I wasn’t the girl next door.

“I really started when I was eighteen. I hustled, hustled, hustled, hustled. I went to the department stores, to the illustrators. I went to restaurants and said that I knew a clothing store that wanted to do tearoom modeling. And then I would go to the clothing store and say I know a restaurant that wants to do clothing modeling.

“I had so much drive to be a model. I would practice in the mirror with makeup, with my hair, with poses. I went to see photographers, and I was teaching them how to light, how to crop. I was getting locations. I would get my contact sheets, and my goal was to go from having ten percent of the shots be good to twenty to thirty to fifty to seventy percent. And I had all my newspaper ads, and I would take my ads and a pencil and I’d retouch them myself.”

B
ITTEN
K
NUDSEN
: “I started in Denmark. I was fresh out of school, and I had a bunch of jobs. One was tutoring an actress who was an ex-model, and one day she sent me to her agency with her book. They said, ‘What if we take some shots with you?’ The next thing I knew I was flying off to Germany. I went with a photographer to shoot covers for sexy magazines. Dorothy Parker-Sed said I should stay there. She said, ‘You’re such a kid,’ and I became known as the Kid.”

S
HANNON
: “I wanted to get to New York. I got hooked up with this guy—my Svengali—who was a total asshole. I’d organized a troupe of disco-dancing models, and he was my dance partner. He had been in Dallas as a model, and he knew an agent, Kim Dawson. I broke up with him, and I went to Dallas in ’77.

“Kim sends me to Neiman Marcus for a go-see for a shoe shot. Whoever fits the shoe gets the job, and the shoe fit me. Cinderella. I am so thrilled. And shaking. Then she asks me to go to the Bahamas for Neiman Marcus. I’d never been out of Denver and Dallas. So I go to the Bahamas, to Mexico, to Thailand. I did shows, too. And I became the top model in Dallas, the highest-paid girl ever, five hundred dollars a day.

“Sometime they would fly in girls like Apollonia, and I would be beside myself. One time I went to Maine for a catalog, and Patti Hansen was coming! I mean, my God! And she got off the plane from Europe with a backpack, no luggage. And I just followed her wherever she went. We were in a small Maine village and she went to a store and she bought a pack of Haines men’s underwear and a pack of men’s T-shirts to wear and a big bag of potato chips. I was like Miss Anal Compulsive Professional Model with my little makeup kit, and I had never seen anything like her. I’d be taking notes, you know?”

Tara Shannon in Patrick Kelly’s autumn 1989 fashion show in Paris, photographed by Dan Lecca
Tara Shannon by Dan Lecca

Bitten Knudsen photographed by Robert Graham
Bitten Knudsen by Robert Graham, courtesy Bitten Knudsen

K
NUDSEN
: “Giorgio Piazzi heard about me, came to meet me, and I went to Milan for six months. I rented a room in a
pensione
with another Danish girl. We worked all week and went to castles on weekends. It was the beginning of the era of the hustling dinner whores in Milan. The girls were so broke they needed the playboys to buy them meals. I was always in a relationship, so I was never up for grabs. Milan was like organized crime, but the real crime was how naïve American girls are at eighteen! Danish girls have level heads. Playboy behavior got on our nerves. We would go to Nepenta after dinner and make fun of them—greasy Italians disco dancing and working the room.

“But at least Italians are artistic about their approach. The French are true dogs. John Casablancas was a dog. I’d actually met him in Denmark at a trade show where I was working for a designer. He kept following me around, and I was
not
interested. I said, ‘Who is that creepy guy? Tell him to stop.’ I don’t think all men are dogs. But most of them are. Alex Chatelain was a bulldog. I remember him getting tacky on a trip. Peter Beard is into what he calls living sculpture, a girl willing to be flattered into action. He goes for his type, and he’s very straightforward about it. He’s an honest dog.

“Giorgio Piazzi would protect me, because I was the Kid. He made sure I came to his house to eat. I wanted to come to America to study with Lee Strasberg. So Piazzi introduced me to Eileen Ford in Milan. I met her again in Denmark, and then I came to New York in 1977.

“Eileen arranged everything, and she had me modeling immediately. On my first day I rested a few hours, and then I worked nonstop. I was really pretty lucky; the timing was just right for my look. Some girls work really hard for it. I didn’t. In the beginning people said I was too blond, just like they said Janice was too Polynesian. We’d say, ‘Forget it. It’s not about that. It’s about opening up the looks.’

“I met Strasberg and started studying with him, but I wasn’t disciplined enough. The classes were so emotional it took me days to calm down, so I quit. I was spoiled already. Now I could kick myself, because he’s dead.”

S
HANNON
: “Everybody had come to Dallas and seen my book. Bruce Cooper told me girls made ten thousand dollars a month in New York. I was like, whoa! So finally, after a year, I went to New York. Before I left, I had my eyes done because I had puffy, fat bags. Honey, I tried everything, I knew every makeup trick, lighting trick, everything. I slept with pillow, no pillow, stayed up, slept a lot. Nothing worked. So I got my eyes done, I got my SAG card, I got my AFTRA card before I went to New York. I was a professional. I wasn’t going to waste my time when I got there.

“I visited all the agencies in one day. Eileen Ford says, ‘I’m going out for a manicure. I’ll be back in an hour; wait for me.’ I don’t think so. I go to Johnny Casablancas. ‘Oh, no, no, no,
darrrling, honnnney
, it is about sex with the photographers, you cannot be so businesslike, you know, you must be a woman….” I don’t think so, Johnny. So then I go to Wilhelmina, and she says, ‘Honey, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get you an apartment, put your money in the right bank, bang-bang-bang.’ She was my kind of girl, so I went with Wilhelmina, and she got me a place to stay, and I immediately started my life with catalog modeling because Wilhelmina cut deals with the catalog houses. If they used all her models, she would give them a much cheaper rate.

“It’s 1978. Milan and Paris are beckoning. Gérald Marie from Paris Planning sees me in New York. He tells [photographer] Francois Lamy about me. Lamy liked redheads, so I get a direct booking to Italy. I’m wearing Valentino, and I have more hair and makeup put on me than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m eating it up, man. I thought this happened to all the girls, getting a direct booking. And then I kept getting direct bookings, and I start doing all the runway shows. This is before you were allowed to be in Italy legally. You’d get chased; they’d stop you at the border; they’d take your money; it was all cash.

“The print girls were pretty, you know, dumb. They were just corn-fed, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but Nancy Donahue, Kim Alexis were not internationally savvy. The show girls were from these incredible countries, and they came from good families. They had rich husbands and clothes and a savvy that you get from working with the top designers around the world and hanging out in Monte Carlo doing benefits for Princess Caroline. Everybody spoke five languages. I was kind of a little pet, the jester, the mascot, in awe of everything.

“So I’m doing shows and photos. I get a thousand a show. I put it in a Swiss account. It was a day trip. They took a bunch of girls to Switzerland; you
opened up your account. I asked the other girls. Dalma and Iman, whatever they did, I did. They were smart.

“I met all the playboys. They’d pick you up from the airport and drive you into town so you didn’t have to take a taxi. If you had a job in another town, it would be like a convoy taking the girls to the job. You’d go out to dinners with them. It was commerce. All the other big girls were going, so I was going to go, too. ‘Cause they were
top
model hounds, those guys. You wouldn’t get a ride from the airport unless you were up there. They were into being in our presence. It wasn’t sleeping with us, although I’m sure that helped them score extra macho points.

“Nobody got in my pants. I’m an American guy kind of girl. Europeans never held an ounce of attractiveness to me. They tried. Oh, they tried. There was weekends in the country, but nothing happened. That little one—what’s his name?—the really little rich one: Umberto Caproni! Oh, Umberto, I loved him. That guy didn’t have a broom up his ass; he had a two-by-four.

“Gérald Marie was my agent in Paris. He was with a model named Lisa Rutledge, and they had a baby. I didn’t have a boyfriend, and one day Gérald is gone somewhere, and we decided we were going to go out. We go to Champs-Élysées to a photo booth and have our pictures taken. And then we walked down Avenue George V, and who do I see coming out of the Hôtel George V? Jack Nicholson. I’ve got to do something. So I say, ‘Jack, what are you doing in Paris?’ I’ve never met Jack Nicholson in my life. Lisa’s from Australia. She doesn’t know who he is. So he looks me up and down, he looks Lisa up and down, and he says, ‘Uh, ladies, I’m going to a little party if you’d care to join me.’

“So we go around the corner to this apartment, he rings the doorbell, and who answers the door but Roman Polanski. Oh,
shit
. We walk into a room full of fourteen-year-old blondes. We’re too old, and we’re looking at each other like, we’ve got to get out of here. Someone brings out a joint. Lisa doesn’t smoke pot. She’s a mom. But I smoke. I love to smoke. And all of a sudden I have to lie down. I feel really ill. I come out of it in two minutes. But there are other girls passed out, you know? Very nasty. We’re out of here. We head to the elevator, and Jack says, ‘What are you doing?’ So we kidnapped Jack Nicholson.”

K
NUDSEN
: “I did it all. I was at Studio 54 on opening night. You grow up really fast. I was out of control and rebellious right from the first. America has all these taboos about sex that didn’t exist in Scandinavia. I was staying at
Eileen Ford’s house, and I was invited to my first New York party. I had a see-through pink silk jump suit, and Eileen went, ‘Aaaaach! You can’t go outside like that.’ I was used to topless beaches!”