Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (47 page)

“Gia was a real mess,” says Bill Weinberg. “A trashy little street kid, not unlike Janice Dickinson. If she didn’t feel like doing a booking, she didn’t show up.” Gia hit quickly after arriving in New York. “She was about melancholy and darkness, and that made great pictures,” says a fellow model. But it didn’t make Gia any happier. At a shoot for
Vogue
she stumbled out of the dressing room in a Galanos gown, collapsed in a chair, and nodded out, blood streaming down her arm, right in front of Polly Mellen. Weinberg told Francesco Scavullo that Gia had become unreliable, but the photographer insisted she’d show up if she knew the booking was with him. Gia always showed up for him. “Frank called up raving and screaming,” Weinberg recalls wryly. Gia never arrived. “She would have been a casualty in any life,” says John Warren. After several comeback attempts Gia fell out of modeling and died in 1986.

Lisa Taylor never wanted to be a model. She thought the job was prissy and stupid. But the daughter of a J.P. Stevens executive from Oyster Bay, Long Island, did it anyway, to earn extra money while she studied dance. A friend who was a model brought her to Ford. “It was so easy,” Taylor says. “I walked in and started working.” She won her first cover, on
Mademoiselle
, at nineteen. Three years later, in 1974, she met
Vogue
’s Polly Mellen and became a star.

Eileen Ford introduced Taylor to her off-and-on boyfriend for the next decade, producer Robert Evans. “He was getting divorced, and he saw someone he wanted to meet, and he asked his friend,” she says. “I know there was something going on with Eileen and Bob and people like him, but I thought I was more special for Bob.”

Unfortunately Evans was often in California. That left a lot of nights free, and soon Taylor filled them with drinking and drugs. “I didn’t have too much self-esteem,” she says. “I was a prime suspect. I was partying, Studio 54, the whole number. Everyone our age was doing it.”

Taylor says she began to hate being touched and prodded by stylists and had paranoid visions of being in the center of a crowd of thousands, all trying to take her picture. “When you have a certain number of pictures taken of you, you feel robbed,” she says. “I felt I was giving, giving, giving and getting nothing back. Drugs made it a lot easier to sit there and look dumb in front of the camera. Modeling isn’t the most inspiring, intellectual thing to do. At the beginning the money and traveling were fun, but it gets tired very quickly. Me, me, me. I, I, I.”

Lisa Taylor photographed by Helmut Newton in 1975
Lisa Taylor by Helmut Newton

Unlike some of her peers, Taylor says she kept her fun and games limited to the evening hours. “I was very professional,” she says. “And the more weight you lose, the more they love you. It was not a healthy job.”

In 1976 Taylor met actor Tommy Lee Jones on the set of a film about a fashion photographer,
The Eyes of Laura Mars
. She abruptly moved to California, informing Ford with a letter. “I wasn’t very communicative in those days,” Taylor says. A few years later she decided Jones was too possessive and returned to New York. That’s when she started seeing Cheryl Tiegs’s ex, Stan Dragoti. He didn’t make much of an impression either. “He was the next person for me,” she says. “Someone I dated. It wasn’t a great love affair.”

In 1981 the behavior of models and photographers finally started making the papers.
New York
magazine’s Anthony Haden-Guest wrote an article, “The Spoiled Supermodels”; the
Daily News
ran a series of profiles subtitled “The Dark Side of Modeling.” Taylor was featured in the first installment, “A Top Model’s Struggle Back from ‘Rock Bottom.’” She admitted her drug problems in often painful detail. “I was finally beginning to see the light,” she says. “I was seeing friends on covers whose eyes were dead on drugs. It was the end of modeling and the beginning of my life.” She moved back to California, joined Al-Anon, and began doing charity work. She married in 1989 and had twins in 1993.

“I had grown up at last,” she says. “Not that it’s their job, but the business, particularly the agents, could have helped more. Someone should have said, ‘Slow down.’ Instead they said, ‘Look at the money.’ You’re innocent and naïve, and they don’t want you to grow up. When I realized my life was more important than money, I left the business.”

Despite the Ford agency’s image, one rival booker says there were drug problems there, too. “Ford is extremely tolerant,” said a friend of Taylor’s at Wilhelmina. “Nobody ever said to Lisa, ‘You moron.’ Lisa was screaming for help, but people are afraid to speak up because the girl is going to pack up her vouchers and walk.”

Eileen Ford wasn’t the only one seeing no evil. A European model hit New York for a
Vogue
booking, collapsed on the set, and was rushed to a doc
tor who said she was so stoned her gag reflex was suppressed. “
Vogue
wasn’t concerned,” Wilhelmina’s Weinberg says. “All they wanted to know was, Would she be able to work the next day?” Grace Mirabella,
Vogue’s
editor then, sees it differently. “You don’t have time to wait,” she says. “Long stories don’t matter. When push comes to shove, what you care about is whether you have a picture.”

Esme Marshall may be the only model whose personal problems ever led to the creation of a new agency. The daughter of a former Chanel model, Marshall was a seventeen-year-old salesgirl in a department store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was discovered by a fashion editor at
Mademoiselle
. That fall Marshall moved to New York, joined Elite, and took up modeling full-time. She fitted Elite’s new image precisely. “The style of girls had changed,” says booker Gara Morse, who’d left Wilhelmina for Elite’s new faces division. “It went from midwestern blondes to darker girls with crooked teeth. They weren’t ordinary. The nuttier the girl, the more John liked it.” Morse was given a free apartment on the East Side in exchange for playing chaperone to a revolving cast of eight aspirants who were crowded into another apartment next door. “I got what I was paid for,” she says. “If a girl wasn’t there, I had to go out looking for her.”

The night after her first job, Esme was at Studio 54, where she met Calvin Klein, who immediately booked her for an ad for his new line of designer blue jeans. The bushy-browed brunette’s career was launched. Soon thereafter she met Alan Finkelstein. The owner of a Madison Avenue boutique called Insport, he was a long-haired New York night bird, ten years her senior. They soon moved into a Greenwich Village duplex together. By 1980 she was one of modeling’s superstars, earning $2,000 a day.

Bernadette Marchiano, the then-estranged wife of sportscaster Sal Marchiano, was Esme’s booker at Elite. “Esme and I became fast friends,” she says. But Finkelstein got in the way. “He told me what Esme should be doing,” Marchiano recalls. “She was a child with no self-esteem, and this guy dazzled her.”

Finkelstein thought that Elite had gotten too big and that John Casablancas wasn’t paying enough attention to Esme. But Monique Pillard says the model wouldn’t listen to advice from her agency. “She never wanted to hear anything,” Pillard says. “She was telling us what to do. She was mixed up with drugs, everyone knew, but at the time you turned the other way when you had a very big model. I saw a lot. A lot. But I didn’t understand. If I’d been in
that circle and done it, I might have understood more. It took me a long time to realize.” Finally a male model, Jack Scalia, “came in one day and told me all about drugs,” Pillard says. “I was so straight, and suddenly I felt very stupid. After that I’d say to girls, ‘Do you do drugs?’ And I got a lot of ‘Will you help me?’ But let’s face it, when you’re seventeen, you fuck around, and you don’t tell your mother.”

Finkelstein suggested to Bernadette Marchiano that she form a new agency, backed by a friend of his, a record label owner and producer named Jerry Masucci. It would handle just stars, and the first would be Esme. Marchiano liked the idea and spoke to a friend who also worked at Elite, Eleanor Stinson, about joining them. In June 1980 they formed their new agency. They called it Fame Ltd.

“Our approach was to treat models as businesswomen and not as pieces of ass,” Marchiano says. “There were no men in the agency. It was women working for women.”

The model wars were still raging. That month Ford signed up Lisa Taylor (who’d come back from Elite), Christie Brinkley (from Zoli), and Beverly Johnson (from Wilhelmina). Brinkley was actually suing Elite, as was Opium perfume model Anna Anderson, who’d left the agency and was demanding an accounting of her earnings. But the news wasn’t all bad for John Casablancas. Within a month Johnson left Ford for Elite. The same day Wilhelmina’s Patti Hansen joined Elite, too.

Almost immediately after Fame Ltd. opened its doors, it was revealed that the new agency had a silent partner: Ford, which owned a third of the agency in exchange for guaranteeing its vouchers. “Alan Finkelstein came to me and said Esme, Eleanor, and Bernadette were unhappy and wanted to start their own agency,” says Joey Hunter, a Ford executive.

Born Joe Pantano in Brooklyn, Hunter, a former doo-wop singer and actor, had a successful career as a Ford model throughout the sixties. “He was Mr.
Seventeen
, the cutest clean-cut guy in the world,” says Jeff Blynn, who modeled with him. After appearing in an off-Broadway flop in 1969, Hunter asked Jerry Ford for a job. He became Ford’s assistant and rose to second-in-command of Ford’s men’s division. Hunter’s involvement in modeling extended to his private life. After his first marriage, to an actress, failed, he married the socialite/Ford model now known as Nina Griscom Baker. They broke up within a year, and Hunter took up with Elite’s Debbie Dickinson. Hunter’s third wife, Kim Charlton, was also an Elite model.

Hunter and Richard Talmadge, one of the Fords’ lawyers and a music business investor, arranged the meeting between Jerry Ford and Masucci. They agreed to do the same thing Elite had done in Paris with its second agency, Viva, and open an independent editorially oriented boutique agency. Stinson and Marchiano got 5 percent each. Talmadge got 10 percent and was named a director. Masucci owned the remainder of the stock. “It was an opportunity for us to get two great bookers who had control of a couple models,” Hunter says. They hoped that Kelly Emberg and Nancy Donahue would follow Esme to Fame. It was also a chance to see if John Casablancas could take what he’d been dishing out.

No surprise, Casablancas wasn’t happy about this arrangement. Between them Bernadette and Eleanor “had every phone number, contact with every girl. It was the scariest moment I ever had,” he says. “So I said to the models, ‘If you stay with this agency, there’s a bonus. One percent less every year you stay with us.’ Some years later I had to write a letter to people like Paulina and Carol Alt saying, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t have you under a certain percentage.’” He’d won the battle, but the war wasn’t over. “I will never sleep with both eyes closed as long as that woman is around,” he said at the time of Eileen Ford.

Alex Chatelain was one of the first photographers to shoot Esme. “I believed in her,” he says. “She was wonderful.” But he thought Finkelstein was a bad influence on her. “The drugs were so out in the open,” he says. “Finkelstein was friends with everyone who was in. If they were famous, he was with them. Esme was in love with him. He took her everywhere, and you’d see her getting hyper and thinner, and at a certain point I couldn’t use her anymore. She was too thin. Finkelstein had destroyed her.” Esme dismissed published reports that she and her lover were cocaine users as ridiculous. “A lot of people like to blow things out of proportion,” she said.

Fame signed a few more good models, including Terri May and Nancy Decker, but it was short-lived. The first sign of trouble came when Alan Finkelstein called the booking desk, demanding that Marchiano cancel one of Esme’s bookings. If she didn’t, Finkelstein threatened, he would go to Albert Watson’s studio and drag her out. “Watson stopped the shoot and let her go,” Marchiano remembers. Then Finkelstein called back. “I was just playing with you,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Marchiano replied, hanging up. Their relationship went downhill from there. “It was beyond my control,” Esme said later. “He used
to not let me go to bookings. It was very weird. He tried to run me over once. He was jealous of my booker ‘controlling’ me.” Though Finkelstein had promised he wouldn’t try to play agent, “he threw a monkey wrench in for no reason,” Marchiano says. “We’d have battles, battles, battles. Boyfriends are the major flaw in the modeling business. I wouldn’t talk to boyfriends. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was a problem. My problem was Esme’s boyfriend. Someone else had control. Alan didn’t want that.”

Finally, early in 1981, Finkelstein took Esme from Fame to Ford. According to an $8 million lawsuit Marchiano and Stinson later filed against their partners, Joe Hunter assumed the presidency of Fame at that time. “We stayed around awhile, booking the other models,” Marchiano says. But one morning in late May she arrived to find the locks changed and Fame’s books, records, furniture, and models all moved to Ford. Hunter told them they’d henceforth be working for the Fords. Less than two weeks later they were fired. Two days after that Fame Ltd. was formally dissolved.