Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (62 page)

John Casablancas in Rome
top
and New York with Stephanie Seymour in 1985
John Casablancas and Stephanie Seymour (2) © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

Stephanie Seymour chose to walk—not run—about six months later, just after she made the jump from Model Management, the agency’s second tier, to Elite, its star board. At Christmastime Casablancas felt a change in her. They’d planned a trip to St.-Barth, but he ended up going alone. Jeanette and Julian were on the island with Patrick Demarchelier, but John’s ex-wife refused to see him. Then, in a matter of days, Casablancas developed a toothache and almost broke his ankle, swimming in rough surf. “I was so fucking miserable,” he says. “It was like God was punishing me.”

Francesca Magugliani realized John’s love affair was over at the January 1987 couture shows in Paris. They’d had dinner with Jacques de Nointel and Casablancas was driving down the Champs-Élysées, when suddenly he U-turned and began racing back to his hotel. “I’d never seen John so desperate in my life,” Francesca says. Arriving at the hotel, he called Seymour at a studio. “She said she couldn’t come over because she wanted to look at slides,” Francesca continues. “John tore the phone out of the socket.” Then he headed to Les Bains, where he sat until 4
A.M.
praising Seymour to a photographer.

“I don’t think he was conscious that it was finished, but he was extremely depressed,” Francesca says. “She was the only girl he didn’t want to leave. He must have sensed she was pulling out. The roles reversed. I’d never seen him so in love. She pulled a John Casablancas on him.” To this day Casablancas finds it hard to admit that he was dumped. “When I broke up with Stephanie,” he says, it was her father who “made her have the guts to tell me.”

“I just needed freedom, period,” Seymour said, after moving into a loft with another model. Eventually she would leave Elite as well.

“It was the first time in my life that I found myself alone, really alone,” Casablancas said.

Stephanie Seymour wasn’t alone. She briefly got married and had a son she named Dylan in 1990. By 1991 she could be seen on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
’s swimwear issue
and
on the arm of Warren Beatty. A year later she was linked with Guns N’Roses singer Axl Rose, who gave her a 4.5 carat diamond and ruby engagement ring and, that July, used a Paris concert as an occasion to abuse Beatty from the stage as “an old man who loves to live vicariously through young people and suck up all their life because he has none of his own.”

This latest relationship was high-profile and highly volatile. Seymour appeared in Guns N’Roses videos and had a ring of roses tattooed around her ankle. But things took a bad turn at their Christmas party in Malibu in 1992. They’d been bickering when Rose asked everyone to leave. During the forty-five-minute fight that followed, Seymour swung at him with a chair and punched him in the crotch. Stephanie, said the singer’s sister, “wants to push things to the edge.”

By February 1993 they were broken up. Seymour, twenty-four, had contracts with L’Oréal and Victoria’s Secret, and she’d become Richard Avedon’s favorite model. She was also pregnant again. And the father of the child was married, but not to her. He was Peter M. Brant, forty-seven, an entrepreneur, horse breeder, polo player, publisher, and newsprint manufacturer, who already had five children by his wife of almost twenty-three years, Sandra. He also had a criminal record. In 1990 he paid a $200,000 fine and served eighty-four days in federal prison for failure to keep proper tax records after pleading guilty to billing $1.5 million in personal expenses—including silk sheets and massages—to two of his companies.

Within weeks Rose sued Seymour in Los Angeles Supreme Court for assault and battery at the Christmas party, emotional abuse, and the return of $100,000 in jewelry, including her engagement ring. Rose said he hoped to sell the jewels and donate the proceeds to a child abuse charity.

Seymour countersued. She said Rose punched and slapped her, gave her a bloody nose and black eye, and kicked her down a flight of stairs after their party. “I was never engaged to Mr. Rose,” she said. “I have gone on with my life, and I hope he can do so as well.” Her second baby was born late in 1993. Sandra and Peter Brandt were still married late in 1994.

The facts about Casablancas’s affairs with the underage models became known in January 1988, when
New York
magazine ran a profile on him under the title “Girl Crazy.” The cover showed Casablancas framed by models Andie MacDowell, Iman, and Carol Alt. The article painted him as a champagne-guzzling pasha of pleasure, ogling the breasts of his charges. The article shocked Casablancas. He called Francesca in Paris, “totally hysterical about it,” she recalls. “I said, ‘John, everything is true.’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s very bad for me. Find out what people think about it.’” Francesca duly polled all his contacts, some of whom had received copies in the mail from Eileen Ford. One suggested dryly that the next time Casablancas was photographed, he should try drinking milk.

He’s still angry six years later. “In Europe no one gives a shit if someone is older,” he says. “There’s something that Europeans have understood that Americans don’t want to admit to. A young girl will fall in love with a guy who’s famous and who’s done things and who’s got power. She’s not being a whore; it’s just that it’s intoxicating. [Americans are] programmed to say that it’s disgusting.”

At a party in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center, celebrating Paulina Porizkova’s contract with Estée Lauder that week, Casablancas joked darkly about throwing
New York’s
editor, Edward Kosner, out a window. Casablancas admits he can be childish. “The personal drama of my life is that I have lacked maturity to really build a relationship that overcomes the erosion of time,” he says. “I get along great with younger girls. I
really
get along well with them, you know? I’ve always been a little bit of a Pygmalion. I love the way they’re natural about everything, about their bodies, about relationships; they’re frank; they don’t carry with them the burden of past relationships and problems. I really understand their mind very well, and they understand mine.”

He thinks he’s always been a gentleman. “Have I taken advantage of my position? Probably yes,” he admits. “Where I feel that someone is being easy with me because she wants something from me, then I might take advantage. Why not? If she is ready to do that, why should I be shy? But it doesn’t happen very much. Have I ever taken advantage of a young girl’s innocence? I categorically say no. All my ex-girlfriends are friends of mine. I got [a few] days ago a thank-you note from Stephanie Seymour, because I sent her a little present for her kid. This was a girl who could have said, ‘When I was sixteen, this guy took advantage of me.’ She stayed with Elite for years after that happened!”

Nonetheless, Casablancas was labeled a libertine. Trudi Tapscott had to deal with the fallout. She worked on the new faces board at Elite. “People in this business use their power to manipulate people in ways that are unfair,” Tapscott says. But she told the many parents who were concerned about Casablancas that he wasn’t a manipulator. “My answer was always that no one ever did anything that they didn’t want to,” Tapscott says. “I’m amazed how these girls act in certain situations. They know more about making passes than I ever knew. It
is
part of taking good pictures.”

“One day I’ll take him by the balls,” Gérald Marie once said about John Casablancas. Their rivalry didn’t end when Marie joined Elite. If anything, it intensified. Top executives at Elite think that it was no coincidence that Marie was brought into the fold in Ibiza the same summer that Casablancas was there with Stephanie Seymour. He lost his wife that summer of 1985. It was also the beginning of the end of his reign as the European king of models.

Top to bottom:
Elite’s Gérald Marie
(left)
, John Casablancas
(seated)
, and Alain Kittler in Ibiza in 1988; John Casablancas and Riccardo Gay in Mauritius in 1985; Gérald Marie and his then wife Linda Evangelista, in Ibiza
John Casablancas, Alain Kittler, Gérald Marie, Linda Evangelista, and Riccardo Gay (3), © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

By 1979 Casablancas and Alain Kittler had decided that Elite had to be autonomous, free of dependence on other agents. “John was trying to create the most powerful network in the world,” Trudi Tapscott says. Over the next few years they created it. A holding company owned by Casablancas, Kittler, and Monique Pillard controlled Elite New York and the other American agencies. Another holding company, based in Switzerland and owned by Casablancas, Kittler, and Gérald Marie, controlled the European operations. A third holding company, Hong Kong Global, is something of a mystery. Monique Pillard first learned of its existence from a reporter. Kittler brushes off questions about its purpose. But a Swiss company, Elite International, S.A., functions much as Models S.A. does, helping Elite’s owners skirt France’s draconian tax laws. “There’s a lot of cash booking through Elite,” says April Ducksbury. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars. All the bookings went through Switzerland. The girls all had Swiss bank accounts.”

Alain Kittler is the manager of Elite in Switzerland. “I have my working permit in Switzerland, my home in Switzerland,” he says. “We pay the Swiss taxes. It’s perfectly legal. After a while I thought that we should have a structure. One day we may want to go public, so we have to be managed like a public company. We have passed the age of doing things which are not clear because we are too rich and too exposed to do anything illegal.”

Elite’s expansion sputtered in the mid-eighties. “We had a big head,” Kittler says. “We wanted to create agencies in Copenhagen, Brussels, London, Miami. And we lost a lot of money by going too fast.” The company was also roiled by the power struggle between Casablancas and Marie. “Gérald is on a maniac ego trip,” says Francesca Magugliani, who found herself at odds with Marie after Elite Plus opened. “Gérald wanted to get rid of all the people who helped John make Elite in Europe.” Francesca was one of them, leaving the company in September 1988.

In a treatment for an as-yet-unproduced film called
Model Mafia
, Sebastien Sed—who severed his ties with Elite after giving it a precious German agency license—writes that Gérald Marie “swore he would make Elite Paris equal to New York and at the same time take control of Europe by destroying John Casablancas’s relationships with his associates in Milan, London and Hamburg.” Nobody was betting against him. “He saved Elite,” says Jerry Ford.
Adds Monique Pillard: “Maybe his morals are not to my speed, but he knows how to develop and sell a girl.”

After stabilizing Elite in Paris, Marie went hunting for Casablancas’s friends. For years Casablancas had protected Riccardo Gay’s position, even though he admits that his friend played fast and loose with Elite. Gay billed his clients from Lugano, Switzerland, and pocketed the Italian taxes he deducted from his models’ checks, says Sed’s wife and partner, Dorothy Parker. At first Elite ignored what was seen as a common practice in Italy. “All Riccardo wants is money,” says Casablancas. “So when I sent my girls to Milano, I couldn’t care less if they were making money or if I was being paid my commission. You sent a girl with the hope that she’d come back with a great book.”

But now Gérald Marie began agitating for a change in the relationship with Gay. Kittler, too, began pressuring Casablancas. “How long is this guy going to call on the fact that he sent you a booker fifteen years ago?” he demanded. Responding to the pressure, Gay vowed to change his ways. But “his accounts were always late, inexact, incorrect, incomplete,” says Casablancas. “He sent checks for partial payments. His computers never worked. It was a
commedia Italiana
, a big farce. His accounting was all in pencil! He enjoyed swimming in troubled waters.” Finally Kittler confronted Gay himself. “He took the accounting of one year from Riccardo and threw it into the wastepaper basket,” Casablancas says. “He took a check for ten million lire and tore it up.”

In fall 1987 Casablancas’s growing irritation with Gay burst out in an internal Elite memo. Casablancas wrote that Gay’s methods of vouchering through Switzerland were compromising the agency. “We are becoming more Italian than Riccardo!” Getting out in front of Marie, Casablancas suggested opening a branch of Elite in Milan and asking Gay to be a partner. “In front of the world he would be the king of Milano,” Casablancas says. “It was his chance to be number one. I was his savior. He accepted the deal.”

Then Gay changed his mind. He called a meeting of all the agents in Milan and demanded they all sign a document promising never to deal with Elite. “It was like a Mafia film,” says Sebastien Sed. “Riccardo put pepper in his eye, crying, playing
Rigoletto
, making a big opera.” But no one signed, and Elite opened in Milan.

In response Gay “went to every ally I ever had and told them that I had betrayed him,” Casablancas says. One of them was José Fonseca at Models One in London, who soon decided it was time her agency opened a branch
in Paris. Alain Kittler considered this a betrayal. Among other considerations, Elite had never taken commissions from Models One. Marie was unhappy, too. “Gérald was jealous,” Casablancas says. “The relationship between Models One and Elite was a relationship between April and José and me. So what does he do? He goes around saying, ‘I’m thinking of opening in London.’”