Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (31 page)

In 1978, while divorcing Judith, Jeremy Foster-Fell opened Beaumont Models. “He took my bookers and paid them twice what I was paying,” Judith says. “He told me, ‘Ellen showed me how to do it.’” Beaumont went bust in 1982, when its backer, Juan Zavala, was charged with stealing $2.6 million from Barclays Bank and the Small Business Administration, jumped $500,000 bail, and disappeared. Foster-Fell and his second wife, Barbara, also a model, then started an agency called L’Image. It was financed by Ed Feldman, a model’s husband and financial consultant who’d previously worked with Bernie Cornfeld’s IOS. Feldman, who still lends money to model agencies, freely admits that their relationship ended after he put Foster-Fell in the hospital by beating him with a mallet.

Foster-Fell took a well-deserved vacation in Vancouver after that, but a year later he was back in New York and the agency business. Married to yet another model, he found yet another backer and bought the Foster-Fell name back from his first wife. Judith retired to the country “and never looked back,” she says. Jeremy took the company public—and then got fired. Four days later he was back in business, in partnership with Dick Robie, who owned John Robert Powers. That relationship ended in a lawsuit. Today Foster-Fell is on his fifth model wife and is still running Foster-Fell out of a dingy office in an unglamorous neighborhood.

Back at the top of the business, Stewart Cowley and Barbara Stone had turned Stewart Models into a powerhouse. With Twiggy and the Ford rejects Veruschka and Marisa Berenson in their stable, the agency became what Stewart Cowley had always wanted. “Eileen’s bailiwick was Europe,” Stone says. “I’d done pretty good with her slop, her inability to spot good models. But I had to find more. So I turned toward the United States.”

Lucy Angle had wanted to be a model from the moment she heard that George Harrison of the Beatles had married Patti Boyd. In January 1967
Angle celebrated her sixteenth birthday by moving to New York. By that December she’d appeared on the covers of
Seventeen
and
Bazaar
, but she worked mostly for
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
. “They were proponents of the all-American thing that took over fashion in the seventies,” Angle says. Stewart’s models were in the forefront of that look.

Cheryl Tiegs also arrived at Stewart in 1966. A farmer’s daughter from Minnesota, she’d spent a year in a trailer park in Wichita, Kansas, before her family moved to Alhambra, California, when she was five. Her father worked as a mechanic while studying to become a mortician. At a high school dinner she listened to a model agent give a speech and then joined his Pasadena agency. For four years she modeled part-time, posing for illustrations, department stores, and beach movies, earning little or nothing. Then she joined the Nina Blanchard Agency in Los Angeles.

Modeling was a tiny business in L.A. in the sixties. Walter Thornton was the first agent to open there, and his license passed to one Dorothy Prebble, who had a modeling school. Mary Webb Davis ran that school for a while, then took over its offices and Prebble’s few models. Her office door was later immortalized on television’s
77 Sunset Strip
, even though its actual address was 8532 Sunset Boulevard. Davis opened her agency there in 1947.

Nina Blanchard was married to a New York television producer, and when his show went off the air, Blanchard and her husband bought a Midas muffler franchise in Phoenix. “I know how to split a manifold,” she says, “but I’ll tell you, you live in Phoenix a year and you’ll want to come back to your phony friends.” After a series of jobs in L.A. charm schools Blanchard decided to set up on her own in June 1961.

She had one real model, Peggy Moffitt, and about a dozen pretenders. “I sent out a brochure and started getting calls. I knew ten of my thirteen girls couldn’t move, so I said they were all booked.” It being L.A., people decided she had to be the most exclusive agent in town.

Tiegs came to the attention of New York editors and agents in 1964, after she appeared in a Cole of California swimsuit ad in
Seventeen
magazine. Julie Britt, an editor at
Glamour
, booked her sight unseen for a shooting in St. Thomas. For the next four years Tiegs worked for
Glamour
and
’Teen
, winning covers and disproving the notion that a model had to live in New York to be successful. She’d gone from beach to big time.

Finally, in 1966, Bob MacLeod, the publisher of ’
Teen
, convinced her to join Stewart Models. A former publisher of
Harper’s Bazaar
, MacLeod had battled with the Fords over model rates; he’d almost opened a Hearst model agency to compete with them. He believed Tiegs would be lost on Ford’s head sheet and was so sensitive she “could have easily been discouraged by less than a large amount of personal attention,” he says.

Cheryl Tiegs on her first magazine cover in 1966
Cheryl Tiegs, courtesy
Teen
magazine

Her image was goody-goody California blond—healthy, if a little vapid; enthusiastic, if not terribly interesting. She promoted that image with a vengeance. “I would show up on time, and I would work late if people asked me to, and I would care for the people that I worked with,” Tiegs says. “I don’t mean to be saying this to puff myself up. I hope it doesn’t sound like that. But if they believed in [their product], then I was going to get on the bandwagon and help them out with it. That’s what we were all there for. And I worked closely with people like Cover Girl for many years and had long-term relationships and cared about them and their families.”

By 1967 Tiegs was one of the country’s top junior models. She had seventy covers on her résumé and earned as much as $3,000 a week. That year, she moved in with an advertising executive named Stan Dragoti, whom she married in 1970. She also appeared for the first time in
Sports Illustrated’s
annual swimsuit issue, working for an editor named Jule Campbell.

Campbell came from
Glamour
magazine, where she’d been the accessories editor, under model turned editor Betty McLauchlen Dorso. Campbell joined
SI
in 1959 and put together its first swimwear spread in 1964 as an accompaniment for a travel story on a Mexican resort. Campbell didn’t like New York models. “They were skinny, skinny, skinny,” she says. “I wanted girls with meat on ’em, so I never booked top models. I discovered my own. I looked for girls who led a
sportif
life.”

By 1968 Stewart Models was challenging Ford’s preeminence. “We were the best in the world for a while there,” Stewart Cowley says. Though Stone had attracted a group of top models, including Tiegs, Susan Dey, Randi Oakes, Sigourney Weaver, and Lois Chiles, television was the key to his agency’s ascendance. Cowley had moved aggressively into the commercial business and opened a talent division to get its models into television and movies. More important, though, while Stone ran the agency, Cowley put together the first successful model search promotion since the Miss Rheingold contest.

“I’d watched Miss America get top, top ratings,” Cowley says. “I’d go down to Atlantic City to interview the contestants. They all wanted to be models, but they were a bunch of bimbos. So I thought, what if we had a show with girls who really could be top models?” Cowley’s first Model of the Year contest aired live in prime time in 1967 on CBS. It was known as Stewart’s Folly, he says, until it won a huge audience share. In 1968 the winner was a recent high school graduate named Cybill Shepherd, who quickly became one of Stewart’s top models. For the next two years it seemed that Shepherd and Tiegs had a lock on
Glamour
’s cover. Then, in 1970, Shepherd met director Peter Bogdanovich after he saw her on a cover, and she went off to star in his film
The Last Picture Show
.

Stewart Cowley of Stewart Models with his Model of the Year, Cybill Shepherd (
second from right
), and runners-up in 1967
Stewart Cowley and Cybill Shepherd, photographer unknown, courtesy Stewart Cowley

In 1969 Stewart International Productions, Inc., went public, selling its stock on the open market and offering to buy European agencies like Paris Planning. (Ford tried to go public, too, “but the market fell apart and, happily for us, we didn’t,” says Jerry Ford.) Within a year Stewart’s billings and earnings had gotten clobbered by the shaky economy. He also had legal problems. CBS had dropped its option to air a third Model of the Year pageant when it was sued by a man in Miami who claimed Cowley had stolen his contest idea. Although Stewart Models remained in operation until 1982, from then on Cowley’s attentions were so diverted, and he was involved in so much litigation, that he came to be known in the business as Suin’ Stew.

Barbara Stone was frustrated. “We were number two,” she says, “I wanted to knock Eileen Ford’s block off, but there was not the money to make the last thrust and really spend to almost buy girls in Europe and set them up in apartments here. Another factor was that I had a husband and a life. The Fords never had dinner without three or four models and photographers. They didn’t have a life.” And there was another, internal problem at Stewart Models. “I just couldn’t stand Stew Cowley anymore,” Stone says. He was obsessed with his lawsuits. “I can’t blame him,” she adds. “He worked very hard to pull that contest off.”

Then Cowley had a heart attack. Stone went to the hospital and, with his doctor’s permission, she says, offered to buy the agency from him. “Her contract was up,” Cowley says. “She demanded the presidency and a lot more money.” Cowley was already angry with her. “She liked girls like Veruschka, who did prestige work,” he says. “The catalog girls were money machines, and she said she couldn’t stand them.” Two of them had left and gone to Ford. Then there was the matter of Stone’s expenses. Models would stay with Stone and her husband. “I got a bill every Monday for several hundred dollars for rooms, dinners,” Cowley says. “I was paying Barbara Stone’s rent!” So when she issued her ultimatum in the hospital, Cowley says, “We let her go.”

When she told him she was starting her own agency, Cowley sued to stop her. Her contract had a restrictive covenant, barring her from competing for two years and calling for arbitration to settle disputes. At the end of a summer
of negotiations Stone won the right to open in exchange for her agreement not to steal any Stewart models for a year. “I thought that was the kiss of death,” Stone says, “but I stubbornly opened anyway,” and exactly one year later ten of her models jumped over from Stewart to the new Stone Models.

Despite the high-powered models who joined her, Stone soon went out of business. Her first year operating without models had hurt her, and she never really recovered. “I had a huge apartment,” she says. “Dick and my son hated girls living there, walking around in bra and panties. I’d throw parties for four hundred people. But I couldn’t do anything creative without a million dollars, and everyone who wanted to inject money wanted to inject the models, if you get what I mean. I got out before I went berserk. I was too easily hurt, I think. I didn’t have the hard skin Eileen Ford had.”

The final blow was delivered by Cheryl Tiegs. After three years of semiretirement, reading and playing tennis in L.A. while Stan Dragoti entered the movie business, Tiegs returned to modeling in 1972. “I’d gotten thin and fit and looked older,” Tiegs says. “I went into high fashion. I just started accepting more jobs and realized that it was fun after all.”

Julie Britt had gone to work at
Harper’s Bazaar
, and Tiegs started working there. In July 1971 Hearst hired James Brady, then the publisher of
Women’s Wear Daily
, and installed him over Nancy White as
Bazaar
’s publisher and editorial director. “Nancy saw the handwriting on the wall and resigned within a month,” says Brady. He dubbed his
Bazaar
“the thinking woman’s fashion magazine,” brought in new editors and topical writers, and squeezed out art directors Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, both of whom ended up at Condé Nast, as did their replacement, Rochelle Udell. Brady even hired a Richard Nixon look-alike to pose in an early fashion layout and ran a photo of Faye Dunaway with unshaved armpits. “He was a daily journalist,” says an ex-Hearst editor. “He was not visually astute.”