Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (25 page)

“When I did
Blow-Up
, I remember smoking pot. That was a big thing. At that time it wasn’t so normal to smoke. And after the film it became the big thing. Everybody smoked.

“After
Blow-Up
I was not so strong with Rubartelli anymore. I got a lot of offers, and I refused them because Franco was just so jealous about it. I was very inexperienced. I’d never lived with a man before Rubartelli, and I thought, OK, men are like that. They are just so jealous. I thought it was awful, but I took it for a while. But then I couldn’t anymore, and I said, ‘No, it’s impossible.’

“We were together five years, until the beginning of the seventies. I was already separated with him, but we did, in the time of separation, a film together called
Stop Veruschka
. I was very upset because I didn’t want my name on the title, because everybody would think it was my story. But he did it anyhow. He put all his own money in, and it was kind of a disaster. The film came out, it wasn’t a success, and he had so much debts that I think he had to leave Rome. He went to Venezuela, and he became a producer there, but I never heard of him anymore.

“The first stone face I did was on the terrace in Rome where I stayed with Franco. I was alone, I was depressed, and I said to myself, ‘What’s to become of me? I’ve become so many things already. I’ve done so many different women.’ I had already painted myself as animals and plants. Now, I thought, I would like to disappear into something and become like a stone. And I saw the beautiful structure of the stone of the terrace. And so I went back, got the colors, and with a mirror imitated all this on my face. And Rubartelli came, and he saw this and he photographed it. Then I did it in a much better way for the film
Stop Veruschka
. I had a rubber scalp put on and stones around me, and I was lying on the stones and the camera went over stones, over stones, stones and stones—and then one stone opened its eyes and looked at you.

“Then I disappeared, too, in about 1971. My last pictures never came out. Dick Avedon decided to do the whole Paris collection only with me. So we went to Paris with Ara Gallant, who was doing the hair, and Serge Lutens, a very good makeup man. For hours he did this powdery makeup, and then Ara did my hair very white in front and very long. We didn’t like the look. We wanted to change it. We would have maybe done something else—worked with wigs or whatever. We were experimenting. But then Alex Liberman and Grace Mirabella [who had just replaced Diana Vreeland as editor of
Vogue
] looked at the pictures, and they were very unhappy, too. They didn’t like this look. Grace Mirabella liked a certain look, the hair always to the shoulder and very fresh and very bourgeois. And she wanted me to be that. I felt that they wanted to change my personality into something more salable. She said, ‘People have to identify with you.’ I said, ‘No. You have to take another girl for that.’ So they actually did ask another girl. And I never did any modeling again for a long time.

“Of course I was a model, but I didn’t see myself as typical. Maybe I’m a frustrated actress. I did it more like a big theater play. With accessories and clothes, you invent; you become a person who is very sexy or very Garbo or whatever. I never liked to be one thing. It was very natural for me to do it that way. Otherwise I couldn’t have been in that business so long, just putting on clothes, being detached from it, making money, and going home.

“When I traveled with Giorgio [Sant’Angelo], we would even cut up clothes if we didn’t like them. The designers were all happy because the pictures looked great. Now all this changed completely. You always had to see the dress. This whole thing didn’t work at all with my way of working. I had always refused commercial work. They wanted to do Veruschka Vodka, but they would have been very upset later, seeing me painted like walls. For me, no million dollars is worth giving up my freedom of expression. I called Diana Vreeland about that contract. I already had decided to say no, but I wanted her advice. She said, ‘Veruschka, be very, very, very difficult and then say no.’ I loved that.

“I went to Germany from 1971 until about 1976. The outside world was not anymore interested in what I wanted to do as a model, so I was clearly saying, ‘OK, that’s it. Now I do other things.’ It was very natural to go into other things. I started working on body painting with Holger Trülzsch. I had a house, and I stayed there with Holger, and we did the body painting, which made me disappear. I was working against my model career. Then we started doing the dress paintings. It was a parody on modeling. I would paint myself
as a man. I did this thing in
Playboy
[in 1973] where I was painted like vulgar gangster men.

“When Holger and I found the rag warehouse in Italy [where they did a stunning series of photographs in 1988], we didn’t think that it had to do with clothes. We just saw it as a visually interesting place, but it happened to have thousands and thousands of old dresses all piled up, which were related to my life. I don’t want to make it such a psychological thing, but there’s always a link with my background, my history. The warehouse looks very beautiful in our pictures, but if you really look close, thinking of the camps, where they tied up clothes, too, it is actually quite scary. So this is beauty with a monster sitting, hiding behind it. That’s serious.”

“I
longed to grow up to be the best butcher in the world,” Gertrude Behmenburg said about herself in 1943. Instead the four-year-old grew up to be Wilhelmina, America’s greatest model of the 1960s. She might have been happier—and lived longer—had she kept to her original dream.

When she died of cancer in March 1980, Wilhelmina was remembered as a great success—the last star of the couture era in modeling, the top moneymaking face of her time. She’d appeared on 255 magazine covers, including a record 28 covers of American
Vogue
. And in her second career as co-owner and president of Wilhelmina Models, she’d won one last magazine cover four months before she died; her photo illustrated an article about the rancorous competition that had made modeling,
Fortune
said, “more lucrative than at any time in its history.”

In her ten years of posing and a baker’s dozen more years as an agency head, Wilhelmina saw her trade change from a polite cottage industry filled with ladylike creatures who looked as if they never went to the bathroom to a $50-million-a-year business seething with enmity and greed and—apparently, at least—running on a current of money, drugs, and promiscuous sex.

Wilhelmina changed, too. She started out a willful beauty, master of herself and her course in life. But she ended up a secret victim, known as the head of the world’s second-largest model agency; a caring mother to models who could always come to her for advice; and a pacesetter who promoted blacks in the face of her industry’s indifference and racism—not as the battered wife of an abusive alcoholic; a mother who couldn’t protect her own children; a picture of superficial perfection whose daughter believes she
chose to kill herself with cigarettes instead of facing, and fixing, her horribly imperfect life.

Wilhelmina was born in May 1939 in Culemborg, Holland, the daughter of a German butcher and a Dutch seamstress. Growing up in Oldenburg, Germany, she dreamed of a career as a nurse, a teacher, or an international spy. But on V-E Day she and her four-year-old brother were skipping down the street to get their day’s allotment of food rations when a group of drunken Canadian soldiers passed by, shooting their pistols in wild celebration. One of their bullets killed Wilhelmina’s brother. She determined that day somehow to make up the loss to her grieving mother, Klasina.

“She lived her life for other people,” says her daughter, Melissa. “The only thing she ever did for herself was become a model.”

In 1954 Wilhelm Behmenburg moved his family to a one-and-a-half-room apartment on Chicago’s North Side, where he’d opened another butcher shop. Daughter Gertrude entered high school not knowing a word of English, but she picked it up quickly from television, a part-time job in a five-and-ten-cent store, and the fashion magazines that “became my favorite reading material,” she said. “I even went to secondhand stores to buy all the old issues…. I read them cover to cover, devouring every word and every picture of my new idols, the beautiful models who reached so glamorously from the pages—out to
me
.”

In 1956 she accompanied a friend to a modeling school for an interview. The friend was too short. Gertrude, on the other hand, was tall enough and had the looks: widely spaced, hypnotic eyes and a full, sensuous mouth. “My head began to spin,” she recalled. Promising to repay him from her five-and-dime earnings, she borrowed the tuition from her father for an intensive modeling course. That May Sabie Models Unlimited presented her with a certificate stating she’d completed its professional modeling course “in creditable manner.”

Now Gertrude Behmenburg no longer existed. Gertrude just wouldn’t do, Behmenburg was too long and awkward to remember, and her middle name, Wilhelmina, was too foreign. In her place stood Winnie Hart, model. In 1957 “Winnie” began her career at beauty pageants. She was named Miss Lincoln-wood Army Reserve Training Center on Armed Forces Day in May. In July she was off to Long Beach, California, to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. She had small modeling jobs, too, and she took an after-school job as a designer-secretary-house model with Scintilla, a local lingerie company, to augment her earnings.

Wilhelmina photographed in Valentino couture
Wilhelmina, photographer unknown, courtesy Melissa Cooper

In 1958, just before she graduated from high school, Winnie joined the Models Bureau, the first agency in Chicago. “I damn near fell off my chair when she walked in,” recalls her booker, Jovanna Papadakis. The chestnut-haired beauty was already fighting the weight problems that plagued her throughout her career. Her Models Bureau composite gives her height as five feet nine inches, her weight as 132 pounds, and her measurements as 37-24-36. “A hundred thirty-two?” Papadakis laughs. “I’ve got news for you: We lied even then.” Winnie weighed 159. Nonetheless, the agent thought she resembled Suzy Parker and immediately called Victor Skrebneski, then, as now, the king of Chicago fashion photography.

Skrebneski, who’d started working for the Marshall Field & Company department store in 1948, had just lost his favorite model and girlfriend Mary van Nuys to the greener pastures of New York (where she later met and married literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar). When Winnie arrived at his coach house studio, Skrebneski took her under his wing. He even taught her how to back-comb her hair. “We spent many hours on that,” he says.

In 1959 Winnie’s picture started appearing in Scintilla’s mail-order catalog, and sales boomed. Impressed, her boss sent her picture to the International Trade Show in Chicago, and she was named its Miss West Berlin. “I had to speak to the girls at the trade fair,” says Shirley Hamilton, then a booker at another Chicago agency, Patricia Stevens. She took Winnie downstairs to a coffee shop and told her to order whatever she wanted. “Enjoy it,” she said. “You’re not going to have anything like it until you lose thirty pounds.”

Hamilton asked her why she called herself Winnie, then declared, “From now on you will be Wilhelmina.” Within six months all her advisers believed she was ready to go to New York. Early in 1960 Hamilton called Eileen Ford and set up an appointment. Skrebneski accompanied her. Ford told her that she couldn’t be a model “with those hips” but that if she lost twenty pounds, she could go to Paris and try to start with Dorian Leigh. So Wilhelmina flew to Europe, “sort of saying to myself, as an excuse in case nothing happened, that I was visiting relatives,” she said. She ended up staying a year and working nearly every day. “I put her on a diet, and she lost a lot of weight, and everyone adored her,” Dorian remembers. “She said, ‘I want Eileen to eat crow.’”

Willie, as friends called her, soon got jobs in London and Germany (where her native language came in handy). She also took her first location trip, to Gardaja, Algeria, where she was to pose in the Sahara in clothes by the couturier Madame Grès. The resulting pictures earned Willie her very first cover, for
L’Officiel
magazine. In fall 1961 she returned to New York, moved into a
small apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, and “took the city by storm,” says Papadakis. Wilhelmina appeared on twenty-nine more covers and was booked weeks, even months, in advance. She paid off the mortgage on her parents’ house, bought them a car, and made plans to send them to Europe.

It was a great time to be a model. The five top agencies in New York (Ford, Plaza Five, Stewart, Frances Gill, and Paul Wagner) claimed to book $7.5 million annually for print work alone. Beginners earned $40 an hour; top models, $60, less 10 percent commission to the agents. Even a junior category model, like Colleen Corby, could earn $45,000 a year at seventeen. Television residuals were a new and as yet unenumerated factor. “Some of us were earning seven hundred dollars before ten
A.M
. on the morning shows,” says Gillis MacGil, who’d kept working after opening her Mannequin agency for runway and showroom models.

By 1964 Wilhelmina had “risen to the top of the heap of the 405 girls who work under contract to the city’s top five agencies,” the New York
Journal-American
reported in a series called “Private Lives of High Fashion Models.” Jerry Ford called her the outstanding model of the early 1960s. “Her look was the look of the time,” he said. Although she was to earn $100,000 a year, she was plagued with insecurity. “It’s hard enough to become a successful model,” Wilhelmina said later. “But it’s twice as hard to stay successful. You can be out so fast if you don’t deliver.”

Wilhelmina delivered. For the next five years she went around the world, from South America to India to Hong Kong to Lapland. She drove herself hard, never taking vacations and often working twelve-hour days, lugging her fifteen-pound mailman’s bag full of model’s tricks, sometimes working from 7:00
A.M
. to midnight. “She was the salt of the earth,” says hairstylist Kenneth Battelle. “She was a model before she was a person, a doll and happy to be that.”

“She was so sweet and generous to me,” remembers photographer Neal Barr. “She and Iris Bianchi and Tilly Tizani would do anything for you. You could book them for an hour. Wilhelmina would arrive in her limousine, makeup totally on, open her bag full of hairpieces on foam things, ask what you wanted, be on the set within fifteen minutes, do the shot, jump back in her limousine, and be gone.”

Barr remembers that most of the models when he started his career in the early sixties were “totally emaciated, veins sticking out, faces literally stenciled on.” But Wilhelmina was different; she was a very big girl. “I was on continuous diets,” she recalled. “I’m not fat as far as real life is concerned, but I cer
tainly was when it came to modeling. I ate twice a week. In between, it was cigarettes and black coffee. On Wednesday, I had a little bowl of soup so I wouldn’t get too sick or a little piece of cheese on a cracker. On Sunday, I’d have a small filet mignon, without salt or any sauce. I was running on nervous energy as well as determination.” Still, she had to keep her figure under wraps, often wearing both a regular girdle and a chest girdle to flatten her bust.

In Paris a colleague introduced Willie to diet pills. No one cared what a model put into herself, as long as she performed. “I found myself walking along the Champs-Élysées with the cars coming towards me, but my body had no reaction whatsoever,” she said. Finally she developed something she called the Hummingbird Diet and alternated it with binges.

Wilhelmina dated many men in her first years in New York. Early on “she was very involved with a tall dark actor,” Jovanna Papadakis remembers. “I didn’t care for him. She was making a lot of money, and he was using her.” Wilhelmina knew that. “They take you out because they want to be seen with a beautiful woman,” she said of New York’s playboys. “It’s easy here to be used as a display doll. But as a model, it’s important to be seen at nightclubs and restaurants.”

Then, in 1964, she met Bruce Cooper. Born in Ballard, Washington, Cooper later told reporters that he’d grown up in Shawnee, Oklahoma, served four years in the Navy, and entered show business as a San Francisco disc jockey. He later became an associate producer on
The Tonight Show
, where he booked guests and wrote questions for Johnny Carson. When Willie was nominated as one of the ten best-coiffed women in America, Cooper booked her for an appearance on the show. She forgot to plug the hair products she was meant to claim she used (although, in fact, she didn’t), so afterward she was nearly hysterical. Cooper took her out for a martini. “I was fascinated at how fast she could change hairpieces,” he later said.

They started dating, but Willie still played the field. “I was involved with a rich old man,” she said, “who showered me with gifts—including a huge bouquet every day.” He also provided her with a limousine. Cooper fought back. “Once in a while, I got a perfect rose from Bruce,” Willie said. “It made me mad, but I never knew why. Sometimes I was actually rude to him.”

Late in 1964 Cooper gave her a huge marquise-cut diamond ring, and they got married on the Las Vegas Strip in February 1965, with
The Tonight Show’s
Doc Severinson and Ed McMahon in attendance. In what their daughter, Melissa, later took as a sign of the pretense that characterized their relationship, their wedding photographs were staged after the actual event.

Handsome and fast-talking, Cooper presented a compelling facade. But behind it, says Melissa, there was turmoil. Bruce Cooper was a paradigm of the bad choices many models make in men. “We were all virgin princesses, and we all married creeps,” ex-model Sunny Griffin observes. “Nice guys thought we were stuck on ourselves.”

Cooper beat Wilhelmina. “A couple times she came to bookings with black eyes,” remembers Kenneth Battelle. “There were products you could cover black eyes with. She had all that. But she never talked about it. It was a more disciplined time. You wouldn’t spew your personal life out to anybody.”

Indeed, Wilhelmina’s problems with Bruce remained a secret for years. But after both her parents died, Melissa Cooper looked into her father’s past and discovered its tragic dimensions. “Bruce’s mother was most likely a prostitute,” Melissa says. “She lied to him about who his real father was. He had seven fathers and a lot of uncles, and every night there was another man. She started him hating women. He was a misogynist in every sense.”