Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (32 page)

“The magazine had leprosy,” says another editor of that time. “No one wanted to come near it. It was too weird. The turmoil in the country was present in all the pages.” Hearst’s powers were appalled. “It was fun on the one hand and ominous on the other,” Brady says. “As we were number two in a two-horse race, I thought I had a license to change.” But sixteen months after he started, Brady was fired by letter. It said a new team—headed by Anthony Mazzola, a Hearst art director—would be taking over.

Mazzola remade
Bazaar
as a celebrity fashion magazine. He favored saccharine blond models, Hollywood starlets, and themed issues like “Forty and Fabulous” or “The World’s 10 Most Beautiful Women” (staffers called them
“The Old Bag Issue” and the “Ten Most Available”). The models Mazzola favored were given featured treatment, and Tiegs was one of the first.

Soon she had contracts with Cover Girl and Virginia Slims cigarettes. Everything was fine until the mid-seventies, when Tiegs and Stone had what both refer to without elaboration as “a personal difference.” Tiegs was in Rome, modeling the collections, when she joined Ford. “I just walked up to Eileen and talked to her,” she says. “It was as easy as that.” Then she adds cryptically, “It didn’t come as any surprise that [Stone] shut down.”

After Tiegs left, “I lost the heart one needed to continue” is all Stone will say. “A few months before she closed, Barbara and her husband came to see me about merging Stone and Mannequin,” says Gillis MacGil. “But I discovered she was less than truthful about her financial condition. She was out of business two weeks later.” Stone called the Fords and gave them a day to buy her out. The next morning she met with one of Ford’s attorneys, the closeted homosexual Roy Cohn, who’d become a power in New York in the days since he started his career as a pit bull lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy. “He was the most disgusting human being that ever existed,” Stone says. “He had frogs on his desk and looked like he’d come out from under a rock himself. It was a boring meeting, so I wandered around and came to a hall into a connecting town house and there was this boytoy in bed wearing satin underpants.” When Ford agreed to take over and pay off her models, Stone left the business, never to return.

All through the sixties one modeling agency stayed apart from the pack. Paul Wagner, a handsome blond onetime male model, opened the Paul Wagner Agency in the Brill Building in 1957. “You wouldn’t say he was a nelly, but he was flamboyant, a mad queen who knew how to run a business,” says Dan Deely, a booker who later worked for him. The same year he opened, Wagner met a teenager, Zoltan Rendessy, who was known as Zoli. “I had a lover,” Wagner says. “I came home one night and found the two of them flying around my apartment like naked wood nymphs.”

Zoli had come to America from his native Györ, Hungary, as a refugee of World War II. He was the child of an Hungarian Army captain who was estranged from his wife, a dance instructor. She, Zoli, and his older sister, Livia, left their hometown a few hours before Russian troops took it over in 1945. “They hid the three of us among the luggage in the back of a bus,” Livia Rendessy Oliver recalls. Zoli was raised in Austria and London, attended boarding schools, and he and his mother followed Livia to Alabama, where
she’d settled with an American husband, in 1956. Soon, though, their mother got a job in New York and brought Zoli there. He was fifteen years old and “a rebellious young man,” says his sister. “He wanted the good life, and my mother, who’d gotten a job in a cafeteria, couldn’t give it to him. He probably didn’t want to tell my mother what he needed.”

The night he met Zoli, Wagner ordered him and their mutual lover out of his apartment. But when they met again soon afterward, Wagner says, “Zoli and I seemed to have bonded.” They went to New Orleans together, returned to New York, and moved in together. Wagner needed help in his agency, so he gave the young man a job.

Wagner booked only women until 1964, when he went to England, saw what was happening there, and signed up a bunch of long-haired men on his return. “Everyone thought, ‘This man’s crazy,’” Wagner reports. “But in less than six months all the stores got mod clothes and wanted long-haired male models. In less than a year I controlled ninety percent of the men’s photographic work in New York. The Fords laughed. Barbara Stone laughed. While they laughed, I was making money.”

He started to operate in a grand manner. Wagner’s office had red flocked wallpaper, a French desk, and a gold cigarette lighter in the shape of an angel that played music each time it was flicked. “The staff bought him a Persian lamb coat, and he bought a white Afghan hound to go with it,” remembers Vickie Pribble, who joined him after leaving Ford. “He’d play records and sing and dance. The girls were so elegant, always swathed in fur. One of them came in with nothing underneath and would flash us. Sinatra was dating all those girls. I think that’s where the fur coats came from.”

Zoli and Wagner were part of the social avant-garde. In January 1966 Zoli was arrested along with about thirty friends when police raided a marijuana party in his East Fifty-fifth Street penthouse apartment. “Smelling marijuana fumes, the patrolmen searched and found—in addition to a rug, a bed and a blaring hi-fi set, the only furniture in the apartment—several marijuana cigarettes, 15 pep pills and some loose marijuana,”
The New York Times
reported the next day. “They were on cloud nine and did they stink!” one of the arresting officers announced when the happy crowd of girls with Sassoon haircuts and boys with beatnik goatees was brought in to be booked for disorderly conduct. Zoli was charged with maintaining a premises for the use of narcotics.

By the late sixties Wagner wanted to be a singer more than an agent and began absenting himself from the agency as he started his new career. “Every time I tried to step away to work in Vegas or whatever, I was pulled back by
some trauma,” he says. “I was tired of it. Next thing I was off to Europe. I was away a long time.” In his absence Wagner put Zoli and another executive in charge of his two divisions, booking models like Richard Roundtree, Pam Huntington, Christina Paolozzi, Geraldine Frank, and Cheyenne. But soon Wagner’s employees grew disenchanted. Dan Deely, who’d worked in the men’s division, left for Wilhelmina in 1968 to open a men’s board there.

Zoli had grown close to a former Wagner model, Bennie Chavez, who’d become a stockbroker. In 1970 Zoli and Chavez decided to open their own agency. “He took half my male models,” says Wagner, who sold what remained of his agency, and, after failing as a singer, moved to Los Angeles, where he’s been a makeup artist in a department store ever since.

That October Zoli announced his arrival with a poster shot by Richard Avedon of the agency’s twenty models, all in the nude. “It opened doors,” Zoli deadpanned. He started trading men with Francois Lano in Paris and claimed $100,000 in bookings his first year. “It was OK, but it was not enough,” says Vickie Pribble, who’d joined the agency.

In 1972 Chavez and Zoli decided to expand and bought a town house. They installed the agency on the lower two floors and lived upstairs, each on a separate floor, with a shared living floor in between. The agency’s new home became a social center. “There was never a dull moment,” says Bennie Chavez. Their parties attracted Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, David Bowie, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Sue Mengers, Robert Altman, Lauren Hutton, Woody Allen, and David Geffen. “At one point, Genevieve Waite chased Mick Jagger up the stairs,” Bob Colacello wrote about one party. “Her hair was soaking wet and his jacket had tomato juice all over it.”

“All those guys were there for girls,” says one of Zoli’s bookers. “It was voluntary, but the girls would fall at their feet, of course. It was all about who was gonna get who. The girls were into it. Going to bed with lots of people was what sophisticated people were doing. It was the beginning of the days of cocaine, champagne, and airplanes. Gays really came to the forefront. You had straight men trying to make people think they were gay. It became fashionable for girls to be gay. Everything was wide open, fun, and accepting.” And Zoli and his fashionable cabal were in the lead.

Zoli in the 1970s
Zoli, photographer unknown, courtesy Lydia Rendessy Oliver

By 1975 Zoli had earned the sobriquet Svengali of the Strange. Bruce Cooper called the agency Zoli’s zoo. But Cooper may have been a little jealous; Zoli’s weirdos were bringing in several million dollars in bookings a year. “It created a whirlwind,” says former Zoli model David Rosenzweig. “Zoli selected people for how they behaved as well as how they looked. People wanted to meet Zoli’s models. Willie was like Ford was like Stewart. Zoli was like nothing else.”

Although she was introduced as “the most powerful woman in the modeling world” when she appeared on the ABC network’s
Dick Cavett Show
in January 1971, Eileen Ford was obviously not invulnerable to the upheavals of the age.

The first guest on the show was Carolyn Kenmore, a model who’d written an autobiography. She told of being pressured by men for sex because “so many models are promiscuous.” Ford was the next guest, but she never got to talk about her book,
Secrets of the Model’s World
. Wearing a long blood-colored dress that covered her to the neck, a knotted strand of pearls, and her hair in a bun that was almost as tight as her expression, she looked like a Victorian scold as she came onto the set, sputtering at Kenmore.

“At the risk of being rude, it’s a lot of hogwash,” she said of the model’s tale. “I’m really … I’m enraged. If I had to run a business in which girls went to some filthy little office and some little pig of a guy tried to proposition them, how could I go home at night and face my children? I represent 125 girls, none of whom … I’m sorry. I’m not sore. I’m outraged. It doesn’t happen at the Ford Agency and it needn’t happen in our business…. It doesn’t happen with
professional
models. In the first place, they cost too much by the hour. You can get a lot of girls to do a lot of things for a lot less than you can get a model.”

Hoots of derision rose from the audience, leaving Ford with her mouth open and a finger in midair. Kenmore protested, saying a Ford model had sent her to just such a man. Ford said she “eliminated” and “censored” such “mangy types,” sending her models only to the likes of Avedon, Penn, and Bill Helburn, who “would faint dead at such a suggestion.”

“Oh, come on, Eileen,” Kenmore spit back. “That’s ridiculous. They’re all men.” The audience burst into applause.

The confrontation continued as Cavett asked questions. Can a model survive without Eileen Ford? “Lots of models are not with us,” Ford said. “We get a lot more of the cream of the work.”

“You have such a controlled voice when you’re angry,” Cavett said a bit later.

“I’m not angry now,” Ford replied.

“But it sounds exactly like it did when you were,” Cavett replied, breaking for a commercial.

A moment later the writer Gwen Davis joined the group on Cavett’s stage. “It’s a really warm kind of communication going on here,” she observed.

“I guess there is a certain tension in the air,” Cavett admitted.

“In the air, in the green room, on-stage.” Davis laughed. Looking at Ford, she said it frightened her that “this lovely lady … would go to Europe and pick up four or five faces like broodmares, only not for breeding purposes…. It’s a great deal like pimping, except the girls don’t get to have any fun…. It’s a very sad premise that a girl should be put on display to make other ladies feel that they can never look that good, but must try. But enough about the flesh business.”

Stroking her neck, Ford replied, “I never worry about fat people worrying about thin people—”

“That’s very constructive,” Davis interrupted.

“—because slender people bury the dead,” Ford concluded.

Later Charlotte Curtis, the women’s page editor of
The New York Times
, joined the panel. “Models are used as agents of sales,” she said, “and I think to use humans in this way is unfortunate.”

Ford was ready with a reply. “I just have to ask you this, Miss Curtis, and as you’re a client of mine, I realize I’m treading on very thin ice and all of you have rapier wits and I’m sort of a square. I understand all that. But why do you have models in
The New York Times
if you think they’re exploiting women?”

“Our job is to report the news,” Curtis replied weakly, drawing derisive laughs from the crowd. “When we report Seventh Avenue, we photograph the clothes as they are shown.” Attempting to rally, she concluded that fashion is like war. “We must report atrocities, if you will.”

The single-minded extravagance Diana Vreeland championed was out of fashion. “She was going too far,” says an editor who worked for her. She was “too flamboyant, too over-the-top. You were beginning to feel restraint. It was time to move on, and she couldn’t make the change.” Alex Liberman decided Vreeland had to go.

Called back from a sitting in California, Vreeland’s assistant, Grace Mirabella, was handed the daunting task of updating
Vogue
for an era of antifashion and women’s liberation. After brief stints at Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, Mirabella had arrived at
Vogue
in 1951 and risen from a job checking store credits for captions to become Vreeland’s assistant. As the sixties ended,
Mirabella had seen Liberman grow irritated with Vreeland. The clothes Vreeland showed often didn’t even exist in stores. “She wasn’t interested in deadlines,” says Mirabella. “And women weren’t buying fashion magazines. Circulation was plummeting.
Vogue
had nothing to do with anything going on in the world—zero—it was all icing and no content.”