Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (63 page)

Through the summer of 1988 London’s agents were in an uproar. Finally Marie talked three of them, including Models One and Synchro—Beth Boldt’s nearly bankrupt agency—into opening a desk within Elite Paris instead. But before the deal was finalized, Models One pulled out. “We weren’t getting [Elite’s] top models,” April Ducksbury says. “We were getting the beginners. We sent a fax to John saying it’s about time we had a rest from each other. The minute we said that, they went in with Beth Boldt.”

Then came a tragedy. Late that August fifty people died when a party boat called the
Marchioness
sank in London’s Thames River after being hit by a barge. Among the dead—all guests at a party hosted by a former Synchro booker—were bookers, agents, photographers, hairdressers, and models. Soon afterward Elite “announced that they were closing Synchro down and taking over its accounts receivable,” Boldt says. She blames Marie. “Gérald came to London and wanted to rule. Everything had to be his way. Gérald once called me ‘a worse bitch than my wife.’ There were too many drugs, too much craziness.”

In 1991 Elite merged with yet another London agency, Premier. The next year Elite severed its ties with Parker-Sed and opened in Hamburg and Munich. It now has fourteen separate companies, “all making profit,” according to Kittler. By handing the reins of power to Gérald Marie, says Ducksbury, “John finally got the empire he always wanted.”

Elite wasn’t the only agency with image problems at the end of the eighties. Indeed, just a few months after the story of John Casablancas and Stephanie Seymour was made public, another scandal made Elite’s problems yesterday’s news.

In April 1988 Craig Pyes, an investigative reporter under contract to
60 Minutes
, met two models at a party in Paris and, through their friends, heard of models who’d been drugged, raped, or sexually pressured by two agency owners, Claude Haddad of Euro-Planning and Jean-Luc Brunel, who’d taken over the Paris agency of Eileen Ford’s friend Karin Mossberg after her banker husband was transferred out of town.

Haddad’s reputation had spread since the days of Antonio Lopez and Jerry Hall. For a time his star had been on the rise. He started exchanging models
with Elite in 1978. He also worked with the Fords, who sent him one of their Face of the 80s winners, Suzy Amis, in the summer of 1980. Amis, seventeen, became Haddad’s girlfriend before returning to New York in 1982. Haddad called her John Wayne, because he thought she walked like the western movie star. Amis won’t discuss her relationship with Haddad, but Jacques de Nointel says it ended badly. “She doesn’t like him anymore,” de Nointel says. “He took advantage.”

When Ford stopped working with Haddad, he formed Prestige, a joint venture with Elite. “Claude wanted an interest in a U.S. agency,” says Doug Asch, a tennis partner of Casablancas’s who went to work for the new agency. “It’s not fashionable to say you like Claude,” Asch says, “but in his time he had one of the best eyes in the business. He was very perceptive about character. It’s often not the most beautiful girl who makes it. Did she have that killer thing? If a girl had it, he went with it.”

The Elite-Prestige partnership ended two years later, in 1984. “Claude Haddad has a devious way of trying to get into girls’ pants,” John Casablancas told a journalist in an unpublished interview. “It’s pathetic. I stopped my relationship with him after I sent him a girl, he had her in his apartment, he never even made a
pass
at her. He never tried to sweet-talk her or hold her hand. He just got into bed with her. It was embarrassing for me as a man. Certain moments he doesn’t think with his head; he thinks with his cock.”

By that time it seemed that everyone in the modeling business had a story to tell about Haddad, and few of them were good. After the breakup with Elite, Haddad seemed to lose control. Nobody stopped him. “We were guilty of neglect, but we weren’t conspirators,” says Doug Asch. “We weren’t pimping for him.”

They were an audience, however. “Claude would go in his office and lock the door, and we’d all laugh,” says an ex-employee. “It was done up like a Moroccan nightclub, dark red, with a big couch and an armchair for two, but a tight two. Everything was scaled to make people two. And he had a scale to weigh girls. We never scaled girls. But he would say, ‘Undress, I have to weigh you.’” After his closed-door weighing sessions, Haddad would emerge, hair askew, and announce that he’d taken on a girl who, as often as not, was “a monster who could never be a model,” the ex-employee continues. “So we knew of course something must have happened.”

On one occasion, says a regular on the agency circuit, a young model burst out of Haddad’s office, screaming, “He told me to give him a blow job!” The action wasn’t confined to Haddad’s office. He bunked aspiring models in his
apartment. Their bedroom and his connected through a bathroom, and he was in the habit of walking into the models’ room unannounced. A Parker-Sed model once threw a bottle of wine at him as he came through the door.

“Claude would take out ten girls and find the one who wanted to be with him,” says Asch. “But instead of saying, ‘Let’s go out and get crazy,’ he’d get her trust and do something rude in the house. What killed him was ‘Stay in my house, and everything will be fine.’” Asch thinks Haddad was addicted to sex with young girls. “He was like any other addict in the world. I don’t think he’d hurt a fly, but you create messes with an addiction, and you change everything else to cover up your problem. Claude’s addiction affected his business, his friendships, everything. I always thought he was an asshole not to admit it. People would’ve been sympathetic.”

But he didn’t admit it. He just kept going. And after six months of investigation,
60 Minutes
aired his problems for all America to hear in late 1988. “Every once in a while he’d catch a girl who wasn’t pleased,” says Asch. And one of them, identified only as Lorraine, told the newsmagazine show how Haddad had tried to corner her in the apartment and finally crawled into her bed. Most of the girls who stayed with him had the same stories to tell, she said.

Confronted with her accusations in an on-air interview, Haddad not only was unapologetic but even seemed proud of himself. Correspondent Diane Sawyer laid her trap well. How did he feel, she asked Haddad, waking up in his apartment full of models each morning? Like a gardener in a flower shop, he replied. “They are flowers. Just smell them, that’s it. Just smell the perfume.” Sawyer pressed: Had he tried to pluck any of the flowers in his shop? “When people say something, it’s always a little truth,” he allowed. “I hugged them…. I tried to flirt with them … never more.” No rapes, no sexual blackmail? “I don’t remember,” Haddad replied. “Maybe. It’s possible. I don’t know,” he continued weakly.

Five years later Claude Haddad is still angry about what he considers a sneak attack in which he was singled out for crimes many others had committed, too. His bitterness over the
60 Minutes
report is evident in his response to a request for his first interview since the show. “I don’t like the American way,” he says. “They picked the weakest one, and I did [the show] and I’m stupid. I work with beautiful girls. OK, I try to fuck them. It’s not a crime. In France you can fuck all the girls you want to.”

Six months, and several phone calls and letters later, Haddad arrives at the Café Flore on Boulevard St.-Germain looking like a professor of poetry,
glasses hanging around his neck on a cord. “I’m out of the business now,” he says. “I cannot survive.” His long, center-parted brown hair parts to reveal deeply circled eyes and skin pale as paper. He shut Euro-Planning in 1992. Though he tried to stay in business, fax attacks flew anywhere he went scouting. “From Elite,” he says. “They still do it.”

As he sits, a pink-cheeked teenager from the Baltics chucks him on his bottom. He introduces her as Goda and sends her to sit at another table out of earshot of his conversation. “I came from the street, and I want to take people from the street,” he says, glancing over at Goda every few seconds. “That’s the only reason why I did this business. Now I go to Eastern Europe and find girls who are hungry and don’t like to hear scandal shit.” Many agencies still use him as a scout, he claims. “All the bookers are kissing my ass, they are giving me blow jobs to find girls. I can still find beautiful girls.” But he doesn’t take money when he does, he insists. “They pay me travel expenses. Nobody can buy me. Bookers are like hookers. They all get bought by people with money.”

Haddad’s attitude toward bookers is benign compared to how he feels about the agents
60 Minutes
inexplicably ignored. “There are people who are killers who are still in the business,” he says. “You should investigate the life of Gérald Marie. Investigate Paris Planning. Models died when they were with Paris Planning. Every girl that came to his agency, they had to fuck with him! If not, they don’t work, and he scare them to death. I know a girl who cannot come back to Paris because she’s scared to death.”

Haddad goes on, building up steam as the topic turns to the focus of his life—young girls. “I have been with some girls, but I never forced them. You manipulate them, but with … words, with … charm, with my power”—not drugs, like other agents, he says. He draws the line at fifteen-year-olds, he says. “Above sixteen is not bad, because they’re a woman and they know what they do.”

Why was he singled out? Haddad thanks his enemies: Casablancas and Ford. “They couldn’t accept that I could establish myself in New York,” he says. “I would rather marry and fuck with Yasir Arafat than be friends with these people! They are disgusting. John is a pig, and Ford is a witch. I don’t buy girls like John does. Half of his models, they fuck with him. He force them psychologically, with money: ‘You fuck me, you get what you want.’ In Ibiza Gérald Marie has girls for his guests. I have never in my life done that. What do you call that? I call that a kind of prostitution.”

Marie denies Haddad’s charge. “I have never done things like that for my friends,” he says. Haddad says he never played that way either. “The girls who
fucked me, they fucked me maybe expecting something would happen,” he says, but “maybe they love me. You never hear a big model complaining of being in bed with me.” He calls the
60 Minutes
interviews “the revenge of mediocre girls” who never made it big. “They are saying, ‘He tried, he tried!’ In France a man is allowed to try, and a girl is allowed to refuse. [To] every girl, I say, ‘I like you. I would like to make love with you. If you don’t want to, fine.’”

That’s why he can’t understand Diane Sawyer. “This girl who interviewed me, could she swear that she never fucked people to succeed?” he asks. “I hate American people. I want to kick the American girls out of the business, because they are prostitutes, sex cash machines, whores. You are the most dirty people I met in my life. I’m not bitter. It’s a fact.”

After dispatching Claude Haddad,
60 Minutes
shone its light on Jean-Luc Brunel, a diminutive party boy who could always be counted upon to be at Les Bains, the most durable nightclub in Paris, at a table full of models and friends.

Brunel says he grew up among the haute bourgeoisie in Paris. He started out in the public relations business, specializing in restaurants and tourism, and got into fashion, by arranging locations trips for magazines. He married a Swedish model, Helen Högberg, who was with Élysées 3.

“We played gin together,” says Paris Planning’s Francois Lano, who appreciated Brunel’s taste, education, and gambler’s outlook on life. “Helen came with him to my flat, and we played all night long, with John Casablancas, too.” Brunel organized dinners where celebrities like Johnny Halliday and Omar Sharif met models. “One day he told me he wanted to work with me on public relations, just to be there,” Lano says. Helen Högberg came along as part of the deal. But when Gérald Marie arrived at Paris Planning, Brunel left. “He said, ‘It’s Gérald or me.’”

Jean-Luc and Helen moved to Ibiza, where he opened a bar and restaurant called El Mono Desnudo—The Naked Monkey—with a few partners. “He had no money or at least not enough to support his tastes,” says someone who knew him well there. “If not for Helen, he would have starved.”

Ibiza had long been a destination on the hippie trail. In the mid-seventies it turned into a refuge of decadent chic. Young British lords and ladies with heroin habits mixed with dethroned royals and Paris models. They all went to El Mono Desnudo. There were lots of women. “He had them all,” says Brunel’s friend.

Gaby Wagner, the onetime Paris Planning model, was Helen Högberg’s friend. “I knew he was taking coke,” Wagner says. “I knew he was cheating on Helen. I traveled with her to Ibiza, and I went out with the crew at night, and I saw all these girls sitting on his lap.” But then Brunel ran afoul of some powerful people who gave him twenty-four hours to get off the island. “Whatever it was that he did, it was real bad,” the friend says. Borrowing money from one of his partner’s parents, Brunel ran.

Divorced, he was looking for something to do in 1979, when another of his ex-wife’s friends, Karin Mossberg, asked him to work for her model agency. She needed a man around “because Claude Haddad had scouts like Dominique Galas and they were cleaning Karins out completely,” Brunel says. “Karin called me up and said, ‘As you’re going out a lot, and you know everybody, can you come and help in the agency?’” He says he agreed to give it six months and buy half the agency if things worked out. Two years later he owned the place.

When Brunel arrived, Karins “was an empty shell,” he says. “Slowly the agency started to pick up. We developed the girls that nobody wanted! And I then got back all the girls that Karin loved who went to other agencies.” Brunel did know everybody, including some of the more interesting characters around modeling in Paris. And though he denies it, many modeling folk say that after he took over Karins, he started sharing his models with his friends. Where Gérald Marie operated “for himself,” says Jacques Silberstein, Brunel “operated for other people.”