Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (39 page)

In 1967 Cleveland switched agencies. “Eileen Ford was a snob and a bit prejudiced,” Cleveland says. “She wanted me to have my nose done. She didn’t like black girls. I was sitting in the agency, watching beautiful black girls come in day after day, and she didn’t take any of them, and I finally went to her and said, ‘I am leaving.’”

Wilhelmina had just opened, and Cleveland signed up. She modeled by day and partied every night. “That’s part of what makes you a good model, when you live the life and wear the clothes,” she says. “I’d drive around in Rolls-Royces, and I thought that was pretty hot.” Cleveland became part of the group that surrounded Stephen Burrows. “There were fashion gang wars,” she says. “It was right out of
West Side Story
. You’d be in one group or another. Stephen Burrows’s group, or Antonio’s group, or Warhol’s group. Donna Jordan, my girlfriend from school, was hanging around with Andy. All these groups would show up dressed to kill, and they wouldn’t socialize together. My group said Donna was a show-off. I went over and danced with Donna. Donna would kick her legs up and show her underwear.
Nobody
did that. People were taking drugs. I wasn’t used to this—yet.”

Jordan introduced Cleveland to Antonio. “And oh, boy, the world stood still,” she says. “But I was working with Manning, doing the collections. Then they took him off the job, and there was Antonio. Great God! This is as high as you can go in fashion. He asked me to come to Europe, and I packed my bag. This rag doll, no tits, was on her way to Europe.”

Her first stop was Milan, but she soon left to join Antonio and his group in Paris. “I went to stay with Antonio in an apartment on rue Bonaparte he lent to his friends,” Cleveland says. “No agency. I met Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Hans Feurer. But I was turning down covers because Antonio and Karl Lagerfeld were taking my life away. We worked together in St.-Tropez. I’d go to lunch on the beach in diamond collars, bracelets, rings, high-heeled shoes and a G-string.”

Meanwhile, Club Sept had been discovered. “You saw everyone there,” says male model Ingo Thouret. “Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Grace Jones. It was one big saloon of flirting. Everything was possible, and nobody had to say, ‘Are you straight?’ or, ‘Are you gay?’” Antonio was in the middle of it all. “He would find somebody he liked and make them,” Thouret continues. “He became the number one unpaid model scout in Europe. If Antonio called a designer or an agency and said, ‘You’ve got to see this one,’ people did.”

Antonio was always having affairs with his finds. He was seeing a male model when he met Jerry Hall (“this giant girl in a trashy outfit and huge cork heels,” says Ramos) at Club Sept, and she became his lover. “Antonio was with women and men,” says Ramos. “He liked Jerry’s
Hee-Haw
quality.” They all lived together in the bohemian St.-Germain district. “Jerry’s room was called the Corral,” says Ramos. “She knew every comic book in the room, and if you touched one, you were in trouble. She wore a new pair of panties every day and then tossed it in that room.” Antonio gave Hall a crash course in fabulousness. “He had all these fantastic books on fashion and glamorous Hollywood movie stars, and I used to study all those books and look in a full-length mirror and copy all the poses,” she says.

Ingo Thouret
(left)
and Pat Cleveland photographed by Rose Hartman
Ingo Thouret and Pat Cleveland by Rose Hartman

Ultimately Hall was replaced in Antonio’s affections. No one was exactly monogamous. “Pat Cleveland and Antonio used to disappear for days and lock themselves up with some boy they’d found,” says Ramos. “Pat was a bit of a nympho, and Antonio was, too.” Once, in Venice, Antonio and Juan gave Karl Lagerfeld a birthday party at Harry’s Bar. “Pat stripped naked on the tables,” showing everyone the heart she’d shaved into her pubic hair, Ramos recalls. Harry’s waiters scurried about, he continues, “pulling down the shades.”

Cleveland says she never had steady boyfriends. “I was married to my career. I had fun with the boys, and I stayed out of trouble. But finally I got real tired, and I had to go off by myself. I cut off my hair, put on my backpack, and went to Egypt dressed as a boy. That’s the kind of stuff you have to do.” Cleveland ended up moving to London, where she partied with the gay crowd and went out with Mick Jagger. While she was there, she met Zoli, and she joined up with him and returned to America, ending up in Los Angeles, where she tried acting and kept playing. “I had some nice boyfriends,” she says. “Jack, Warren, Ryan. All of them. Look, I grew up with the Pill. You took one, and you could have fun. So it was love ’em and leave ’em even when they tried to attach themselves to you. I’m very independent. I like to make my own scene. I don’t want to be anybody’s shadow.”

Meanwhile, back in Paris, Claude Haddad was finding more models. Gaby Wagner, who now runs the Zoom agency in Paris, joined Euro-Planning for several months, “until he stole so much money from me, I ran away,” she says. Though Haddad denies financial irregularities (“Elite don’t pay any commission,” he says. “I am white; they are black”), Wagner wasn’t the only one who felt ripped off. “Claude used people, and Antonio used him,” says Paul Caranicas, an artist who was part of their set. “We found out what a slime he was a few months later when he wouldn’t pay Jerry.” Haddad “never told me how much money I was making, and he never paid me,” Hall confirms. “I’d
get the cover of some magazine, an ad for some gasoline company, and he would just give me a hundred francs when I would cry.”

The agency wasn’t entirely useless. “I met Helmut Newton through them,” she says. “We bought all these leather clothes and whips and chains, and I was throwing my hair and cracking a whip for
Photo
magazine, and at the end of the day I started to cry. Helmut said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I said, ‘I think this is pornography.’ And he said, ‘No, this is art!’ And I said, ‘But I really want to do fashion,’ and he said, ‘OK, if that’s what you want,’ and about a week later he booked me to do the cover of French
Vogue
, and I worked with him quite steadily for years.” Within two years Hall was a star. “At one point I was on the cover of every magazine in Paris,” she says. “I was taking Paris by storm.”

Thus Antonio’s set became celebrities, so it was inevitable that rumors would start flying around them. One of the most durable concerned the shah of Iran, who was said to have a procurer in Paris who would offer models money, furs, and jewels to fly to Iran for weekends of sex and Pahlavi. Jerry Hall is said to have gotten a fur that way. “It’s very exciting, but it’s not true,” says Hall, who has heard the story. “I bought it with cash. I saved up my money in a shoe box, and a whole gang of friends went with me to Revillon. A lot of girls were very jealous about that fur coat. And people did say, ‘Who bought that for you?’ I think that’s where that story came from.”

In 1974 Hall met Eileen and Jerry Ford in Paris, “and they invited me to come and live with them in New York,” she says. “I was working a lot with American
Vogue
and Richard Avedon and Irving Penn and Scavullo.” She also worked with Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, who booked her to pose for his band’s fourth album cover and then moved her into his house on London’s Hanover Square. Despite her problems with Claude Haddad, Hall stayed with Euro-Planning until 1977. “I left them because I did this Opium perfume contract for eight years for the entire world, and they only gave me a thousand dollars!” she says. “Claude was very bitter when I left. He said, ‘I made you a star. Then you left me!’”

He wasn’t the only man she left. She soon abandoned Bryan Ferry for Mick Jagger. By that time modeling had lost its allure for her. “Paris was so exciting,” Hall says. “They weren’t trying to sell clothes. It was more artistic; it was entertaining; you were creating something. When I went to New York, I started doing all this catalog stuff, making really good money, working every day, but you had to be there exactly on time, and they didn’t like you to chat; you had to hurry up and get on the set, and then you had to do sixteen pictures. You couldn’t do anything different; you couldn’t do anything artistic; you couldn’t make the skirt look better. Somehow it was sort of killing. I just got very, very bored.”

Jerry Hall and Antonio Lopez photographed by Norman Parkinson
Jerry Hall and Antonio Lopez by Norman Parkinson, courtesy Hamilton Photographers Limited

By 1975 Antonio and his crew had abandoned Paris, too. Though they returned often, they shifted their base back to New York, where “the gay scene blossomed and attracted Antonio back,” Ramos says. “Also, the attitude was changing in Paris. Lagerfeld was getting into his eighteenth-century phase. Everything was about money and houses and socialites. It got boring and heavy. There was no more room for us.”

Paris was no longer a place for artists. “It was a new age,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Agencies managed by playboys were new.” In 1972, suffering from throat cancer, Catherine Harlé went into semiretirement and turned her business over to her nephew Bonnouvrier and his mother. Tichka moved from Models International to Paris Planning to Euro-Planning to New York. Stéphane Lanson quit Euro-Planning, too, and formed his own agency in 1974.

Claude Haddad’s reputation was starting to catch up to him. “He was serious bad from the start,” says an American model who often went out with him and his friends, pretending she didn’t speak French. “They were greasy, like pimps, hustling, it was gross,” she says.

Refugees from his agency, Euro-Planning, turned up at Christa before it closed. “They said the guy would take money from his pocket and pay them cash,” Jacques Silberstein recalls. “He tried to brainwash them as if he was the guru Claude. He had an incredible apartment, girls all around like a harem. Swedish girls. They were quite naïve. They were good meat for the hunters.” Finally Stéphane Lanson couldn’t take it anymore. “When I realized Claude Haddad was behind me purely to go with the girls, I told him, ‘It’s the girls or me,’” Lanson says. “He told me, ‘It’s the girls.’ I said good-bye, we went to court, I sold him the name Euro-Planning, and I took back Stéphane Lanson.”

Lanson’s agency survived only three years. “I’m an artist,” he says. “I’m not good for accounting. I owned Stéphane Lanson one hundred percent because after Haddad, I didn’t want anybody else but me! But you have to support girls before they make you money, and I was giving too much away. I went bankrupt in 1977.”

Élysées 3 slid out of business, too, after John Casablancas and about a half dozen of his biggest models left his brother, Fernando, there. John launched Elite Models with “some of the best models of the time,” says Jeanette Christjansen. He signed up most of the French Mob’s women, plus British photog
rapher Clive Arrowsmith’s girlfriend, Ann Schaufuss; Barry Lategan’s wife, Lynn Kohlman; François Lamy’s wife, Ingmarie Johanssen; and Paris Planning’s Emanuelle Dano. But Casablancas soon realized that his all-star concept had a fatal flaw. “We didn’t want it to grow at first,” says Jeanette. “After a while he realized he had to create the stars of tomorrow.” But he couldn’t easily bring in new girls to replace his original dozen when their careers began to fade. “I was a little bit their prisoner,” he says. “Elite was a private club.”

Money wasn’t Casablancas’s only problem. Two of his original Elite models died before the agency got on its feet. Paula Brenken killed herself jumping out a window. And it was Casablancas who discovered the body of Louise Despointes’s ex-girlfriend Emanuelle Dano. “We had a booking for her; we called her for two days,” he recalls. He finally went to her home. “She’d been partying,” he says. “She was a girl who was always excessive. She was really, really living it, drinking tequila from the bottle, whatever. It was a whole bunch of people, and apparently they played some games which became rough, because she had traces of some very wild games. I think they were fooling around in a car, and she jumped or was thrown out, and that’s how she died. And then they brought her back to her apartment.” Casablancas says he knows who was with her but won’t reveal their names. “It was obviously not anybody who
tried
to kill her,” he says. “It just went bad, and they were not interested in an inquiry that would reveal that the daughter of a
ministre d’état
was living this way.”