Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (55 page)

“I was very spoiled in a way. I got the highest-paying jobs, I got the best jobs, and he made sure I got good treatment at the studios. They were all intimidated. All the other girls were having to deal with slimebags, but no one went near me, ever. He put out the word, ‘This is mine—don’t even think about it.’ I was basically his fiancée. I had a ring.

“There was a photographer who was one of the bigger sleazeballs in the business. He and his wife would pick up girls together. He had me cornered once. It was ‘If you don’t do this, you will never work, you will never model.’ I told him to get lost, and I told Gérald, and he disappeared. I think that Gérald had something to do with that. He blackballed him.

“Gérald was like a mini-mafioso boss, but in the modeling world. He would get calls in the middle of the night, and he would hear something that someone said about him, and he would say, ‘This one is never going to work again.’ His ego couldn’t handle anyone saying anything about him that was negative or that he didn’t want to hear. He wanted everyone to do what he said. He could say, ‘Do this with this person by this day,’ and it would happen!

“People were very, very nervous to be around me. Certain hairdressers who were dealing with Gérald on another level were very intimidated by me. The
girls felt very threatened, too, I’m sure, because I was the queen mother. It made me feel really strange, because I was nice enough. I was quiet, but I would stand up for something if it wasn’t right on a booking or someone was treating a model badly, and I would tell a client to go fuck themselves if I was really unhappy. And Gérald would back me up. He would turn it around so it was the client’s fault, but girls were very wary of me.

“So I didn’t have any friends, and he wanted it like that. I was isolated from everyone except clients. I always felt like there was a million eyes watching me, because he knew everybody, and he spoke to everybody at every job I went to. I couldn’t do anything without him knowing. Even shopping. You know when you’re just in a bad mood and you want to buy something? He would know the next day exactly how much I spent, what I got, even if it was hiding in the back of my closet. I felt like I was being followed all the time. Probably was! Who knows? I was sixty-three hours a week in the air, traveling, working, going to Milan and Germany. I was on trips, and he was having a great time! He was always out at the Palace, Les Bains, all those big hangouts, constantly. If I was working or I wasn’t in town, he would go.

“He’d changed. I think that drugs had a lot to do with it, and the fact that he had as much power as he did. He was overwhelmed by it. He took advantage of it, and he really became sinister. Eventually I started to get a mind of my own. We had a friend named Jean-Marie Marion who was going out with my girlfriend Elle MacPherson, before she met Gilles Bensimon. Jean-Marie was a male model. He was older, rode a motorcycle, very promiscuous guy. He hung around with Gérald. Gérald started not coming home at night.

“They were so promiscuous it got to the point that our freezer was full of shots, the stuff you take when you’ve got VD—a box of this in our freezer! I, amazingly enough, didn’t get anything because I think he gave himself his own shots! I’d walk in, and they’d be bending over the kitchen table with their pants down, and Gérald would jam them, and they would pay him for these shots! Every now and then something like that would happen that would make me sick to my stomach.

“We ended up with separate bedrooms in rue du Bac because he was seeing other people and I’m not stupid. I would find my clothes walking around Paris. Europeans are very discreet about that stuff. But I knew. I approached him saying, ‘How come so-and-so has my Azzedine dress on? I know that’s my dress because it’s missing!’ I spent at least a year and a half trying to catch him. I was just dying to catch him because he was so sneaky. He tried to make
me feel stupid. He would say, ‘But I spent the night in jail,’ or some ridiculous story, and Jean-Marie would call and say, ‘Yes, it’s true,’ and back him up on it. I know they discussed it. He told me at one point, ‘You will never leave me; I will leave you.’ And I said, ‘We’ll see.’

“Things finally started to slow down. I couldn’t leave. I was literally stuck there because I was doing very well, and I really enjoyed what I was doing, and he told me I couldn’t leave him [and if I tried] he would make sure that was the end of me. But I was obviously getting bitter, because I was starting to know, and he was lying to me. I never liked anyone to think I was stupid, so I started to talk back to him. I was speaking French a little bit, and he was surprised. Jean-Marie had little pins that he wanted to stick in Gérald sometimes, but [he did it] through me, so that he wouldn’t get in trouble. He would teach me slang that there’s no way any American would know, and I would practice and then say it, and Gérald would be like, Where did you learn that? The first thing Jean-Marie taught me how to say was the most disgusting thing I’d heard in my life. ‘Blow it out the veins of your ass.’ I said it to Gérald at a dinner with the girls from Italian
Vogue
, and he turned red and then white. You didn’t do that stuff to him. My nickname, by the way, was
Casse-couille
, which means ‘ball breaker.’

“He never laid a finger on me. And I did everything to deserve it, because I couldn’t stand looking at him by that point, which was hard, because it’s very exhausting to hate someone, you know? You have the same business, the same interests, and I basically had all of his friends like Peter Lindbergh and André Rau, who was Lindbergh’s assistant at one point before he started to become a photographer. He was Linda Evangelista’s first boyfriend and Gérald’s best friend.

“I went on Linda’s first trip with her, which I thought was kind of strange because she had longer hair and a long skinny nose and glasses, and I thought she was such a dog and André was the most disgusting person in the world, German, full of pimples, fat and greasy and slimy. I could never understand what she saw in him. But he was a photographer. She knew what she wanted, and she was going to get it, too.

“I’d started to work in America. I didn’t have an American agency for a long time, and then I went with Eileen. She got me bookings, a couple of commercials. I was with them for about a year, and then I went with Elite just as the transaction was happening in Europe with Elite Plus and Paris Planning. I remember first meeting John Casablancas at the collections in Rome in 1985 at a dinner. John and Gérald were enemies. They were in competition
for having the reputation for being a womanizer, and they were in competition for having the best agency. Gérald always said that he was going to be bigger and better than John Casablancas.

“I was going to start going back and forth between Paris and New York. Gérald got me an apartment there. I’d moved most of my stuff there. Unfortunately I had a lot of Erté pieces that he kept. They weren’t there when I came back to get the rest of my stuff. They didn’t know I was back in Paris. I got on a plane myself. I finagled Monique Pillard to give me an advance to get a ticket back, and there was no way he could find out that I had arrived. I got in the apartment. Gérald was at work. He didn’t know I was there, and I was digging through the closet, and I found photographs of him and Linda on vacation with Cookie [Marie’s daughter by Lisa Rutledge]. He didn’t try to hide them. They were just in a box in a closet.

“I just thought,
Finally
. It was such a relief that I’d finally caught him. I’d put up with so many of his stupid alibis because he had three people vouching for him. I always hated his friends for doing that. I hate it when people kiss ass and then turn around and they’re bad to you. Finally I had proof. And ten minutes after I found them, Linda walked in, with a key. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Just the person I want to see.

“I said, ‘So, what’s going on? And she said, ‘Well, I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I was so angry. I said, ‘I want you to get out until I get the rest of my stuff packed up.’ It was pissing rain, and she said, ‘But I don’t want to go wait in the rain.’ She was just beside herself. She’s very whiny. I can’t stand her. She waited outside for hours, and then she went to the agency and she told him I was there. I was trying to get everything else that I had there. I ended up staying two days. I’d been there for years!

“When he came home that evening, I had the door locked. He knew I was leaving because Linda had told him I was packing. He was pounding on the door. His ego was tremendous. He said no one would ever believe that I left him. The world would think that he left me. He said, ‘You will never get away with this! In New York you’d better take care, and don’t walk past too many dark alleys.’ He basically threatened me. He slept in the hallway that night, because I wouldn’t open the door. I was scared, too. I didn’t know if he had a gun or what he was going to do. I knew a lot of things he did at this point. I’d sat in on a lot of the dinners that he didn’t think I understood.

“I sort of died when I left Paris. I lost all desire to create, and New York didn’t help any, because it was the nine-to-five grind, and it was so cold, and my apartment there was the dingiest place. I fell in love with someone on the
rebound in New York. A model. He listened to every trouble that I ever had in five years. I sobbed and I wept, and he listened, which is what I really needed, because I had no one to talk to. I was guarded and I felt safe because I moved in with him right away, like after six days.

“I was working, but I wasn’t enjoying it at all. Gérald had stolen my
joie de vivre
. I stopped showing up for bookings. I was depressed. I was broke. I had no idea, to tell you the truth, how much money I should have had in my Swiss bank account. I never kept track. I trusted him, you know? And then there was nothing I could do to get the information together. My mom flew to Paris to talk to Jean-Pierre Dollé, and she came home just raging. My money was gone, but I couldn’t prove it, because you don’t have any records for a Swiss bank account. It’s in the agency’s name.

“A couple days after I met my boyfriend, I met a lady in New York who was an agent at Zoli, and she believed in me. She was into crystals and that kind of stuff, and she told me that I was a witch, and she got me into this whole voodoo doll thing. She said, ‘You can slowly torture Gérald.’ I had venom for this guy. It wasn’t the things he was into or that he cheated on me. It’s because he basically ruined my life.

“I saw Linda once more in the agency in New York. She walked in when I was there, and I turned around and I looked at her, and she started to cry and she ran into Monique Pillard’s office, and I never saw her again. Monique said that I was being terrible to her, threatening her. But I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her! And she freaked out!

“I didn’t trust Elite New York for a second. Gérald obviously had a lot of control over my bookings in New York, because he was now affiliated with Elite New York. Monique was trying to take me to dinner because she could see that my work was suddenly disappearing, and she didn’t know if it was because of him or because of me, because I wasn’t turning up on bookings and they were having to pay cancellation fees.

“The truth is, I was so depressed that I just couldn’t get up in the morning. Everything that I enjoyed he had control over still. I was exhausted, and anything to do with modeling made me think about him, and I just wanted to forget about him. Finally I came out to California to get some sunshine and rest and relaxation. But I started doing drugs again for about a year because I wasn’t working and I wanted to work, and I had fucked it up, and clients didn’t trust me. Capucine, who is with Elite here, is one of my dearest friends. She broke down my door one day with an ax to get me to a booking for a Vidal Sassoon commercial. She knew what I was going through.

“I suffered a lot, and I still don’t trust people, and I don’t let a lot of people in. I keep to myself. I go out with my husband. I met Robert Davi in 1989. I was dating a friend of his, Mickey Rourke, who invited me to this guy’s house who had a karaoke machine, and we were singing along, and Robert was there. We shook hands, and he told Mickey on their way out the door that he was going to marry me someday. About three weeks later I get this job, which was strange, because I wasn’t really modeling anymore, I was doing one job every two weeks. But it was for
GQ
, and it was with Robert, and he had requested me on the shoot. He asked me to marry him on the shoot. I had only known him for twenty minutes! I said, ‘Ask me again in a week.’ We fell in love right away.

“Modeling was my life for six and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, and I loved every second of it. I have to thank Gérald for that, but that’s why I dislike him so much, because he took that away from me. I have a completely different life now. I can’t believe it sometimes. I have two children of my own, and Robert has a son from a previous marriage who’s thirteen, who breaks my balls! But I feel really clean now.

“I’m just amazed I survived!”

“I
’m not a morning person,” Christy Turlington said in apology as she strolled into Superstudio Industria, the fashion photo factory in New York’s Greenwich Village just after nine one frigid morning in December 1991. Turlington had been booked for a three-day job, posing for an Anne Klein ad campaign consisting of a dozen studied, glamorous black-and-white pictures by photographer Stephen Klein. Then twenty-three, she was chosen to exemplify classic American beauty. For doing that, she would earn about $60,000 in seventy-two hours. A sum well worth waking up for.

Stripping off a mustard-colored jacket, beige Italian jeans, a white shirt, a scarf, white socks, and black suede Chanel ballet flats, she tried on several outfits over a little lacy bra, white bikini panties, and thousands of goose bumps. Between changes, Garren, a hairstylist, gave her a blunt trim, and makeup whiz Kevyn Aucoin worked on her face, chattering about lipsticks, movies, and models. He did most of the talking. Turlington’s task was to sit still while others made her beautiful. Not that she was so bad to begin with. But three hours after she arrived in the studio, she’d blossomed, becoming, as Aucoin cooed in her ear, “the beauty of the earth.”

“Thanks, kid,” Christy said, brightening.

“I was gonna say the universe,” Aucoin went on.

Christy spun around in her chair, her feline eyes widening. “Bigger!” she shouted.

“Bigger!” Aucoin declared. “The most beautiful
anything
there is!”

Christy Turlington was at the top of her profession, one of that small, special band of young women known as the supermodels. Remote confections
of cultured image and cherished dreams, she and colleagues like Cindy Crawford, Paulina Porizkova, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Elaine Irwin, Tatjana Patitz, Yasmeen Ghauri, Karen Mulder, and Claudia Schiffer had come to epitomize modern beauty and grace. They seemed to be in charge of their lives and their careers.

They’d even remade the ideal of perfection. No longer was it necessary to have a belly like a washboard or skin as white as snow. While Irwin, Patitz, and Mulder all are classic blondes, more than half the supermodels, including Turlington, had dark hair. Some even had dark skin. Crawford has a mole near her lip; Campbell, a scar on her nose. Evangelista is scrawny; Schiffer is strapping.

Supermodels were rich in more than their fortuitous conjunctions of flesh and bone. Like Crawford, who’d become Revlon’s principal contract face, and Porizkova, who represented Estée Lauder, Turlington was an “image” model. She’d been the face of Calvin Klein’s Eternity fragrance since 1988 and had just signed a new contract to represent Maybelline cosmetics. As that company’s symbol Turlington was projected to earn about $800,000 a year for twelve days of work selling makeup. Escalators in her contract, governing geographic areas where her photos could be used, appearances in additional non-makeup assignments, and separate photo usage fees, created the potential for even more income. A million dollars a year was a lipstick trace away.

And that was peanuts compared to what companies had come to believe they could earn by using supermodels. The theory went that image leads to income. “It’s like buying a Gucci bag,” says Milanese model agent Marcella Galdi. “You show the world you have the money. Especially for an unknown company, you show the world that small as you are, you have the twenty thousand dollars.”

Turlington’s Maybelline contract was state-of-the-art. Despite the fortune being paid her, she was allowed to continue to work for magazines, for clothing companies like Anne Klein, Michael Kors, and Chanel, for Calvin Klein, who had her under contract as his Eternity fragrance model, and for any designer who could afford to send her stalking the runway in fashion’s seasonal selling rituals. Each of the elite young supermodels was regularly raking in anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 per runway show. Turlington’s agents at Ford Models estimated her 1992 income at about $1.7 million. “We completely reinvented the whole money thing, we make a ridiculous amount of money,” Christy admits. But it is more than money that sets her apart from the mannequin pack.

Linda Evangelista in Versace couture, photographed by Dan Lecca

Naomi Campbell in Versace couture, photographed by Dan Lecca

Christy Turlington in Versace couture, photographed by Dan Lecca

“She’s a very rare girl,” says photographer Bruce Weber, who is best known for his Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren ads. “She can give herself up totally to the situation, whereas a lot of girls say, ‘What’ll this picture do for me?’ Christy has done more great photos for little money than most models. Most of them are worried about how much they’ll make. She wants to be able to look back and say, ‘I did great work.’”

As Aucoin penciled and shaped Turlington’s pussycat eyes, Stephen Klein came into the dressing room and silently studied her, his basset hound eyes obscured behind blue-tinted sunglasses. Forty-five minutes were spent placing, then re-placing a birthmark, first beside her eye, then higher, then lower.

“Put it in my ear,” Christy said.

“I’ll put it on the tip of your tongue,” Aucoin threatened.

Finally, just before 1:00 P.M., Christy stepped before the camera for the first time. Klein shot a couple of Polaroids, then had Aucoin soften her makeup. Forty-five minutes later Klein finished his first shot and called a break for food. Turning up her nose at the catered health food lunch, Christy ordered from a Chinese menu. “Fried kitten paws?” Aucoin joked.

“Shish-ka-dog,” Christy said.

Before her food arrived, the team knocked off another shot, and Anne Klein’s then designer Louis Dell’Olio arrived, full of praise for his supermodel. A resolutely regular guy, he explained that Christy was right for all the wrong reasons. In an era when too many models had become as lofty as the Concordes they flew on, Christy was humble and down-to-earth. “She’s a real person,” Dell’Olio said. “No attitude. With models, when you get ’em in a group, they’re not sweet. But not with her. No matter what, she’s sweet.”

Born in 1969, Turlington grew up in a suburb of Oakland, California, the middle daughter of a Pan Am pilot and an ex-stewardess of Salvadoran extraction. The Turlingtons moved to Coral Gables, Florida, when Christy was ten years old. She never gave a thought to fashion. Her mother had to force her to look at
Seventeen
to spruce up her look. She was more interested in the horse her father bought her. She rode competitively, training every day after school at a local farm.

She was riding the day she was discovered by a local photographer. Dennie Cody was shooting photos of two of her schoolmates, aspiring actresses, when he spotted fourteen-year-old Christy and her older sister, Kelly. “Christy was sitting straight and tall in the saddle,” Cody says. “I knew right away. You don’t run across many girls you know can make it to the top.”

Christy was excited. But she already knew to play hard to get. Cody recalls her as “taken aback … reticent … skeptical.” A family meeting and several phone calls ensued. “I had a long talk with Christy’s mother,” Cody says. “I told her the only limitation would be her motivation.” Finally Elizabeth Turlington agreed and took her girls to Cody’s studio.

“He had a couple really sleazy pictures on the wall,” Christy says. “Some nudes. I was like,
God
!” But Cody’s wife worked with him, so Christy decided to go ahead. “He took ridiculous portraits with a lot of makeup. I was really quiet,” she says. “He was really positive I was going to be a star.” She wasn’t so sure. “I’d watched
Paper Dolls
on TV. I thought this is probably what they all say.” She had braces on her teeth and long, curly hair, and she’d always thought her sister was cuter, more outgoing, and more popular than she. Unfortunately Kelly was five feet six inches. Christy was five feet eight inches.

Cody told the Turlingtons about how model agencies worked, the big New York firms using local firms as feeders, the equivalent of baseball’s farm team system. “The only one I’d heard of was Ford,” Christy says, so she went to see Michele Pommier, an ex-model who was then associated with Ford.

“I said she was going to be a major star,” Pommier recalls. “They laughed. She was so shy. She didn’t know what was going on.” That changed soon enough. “My mom must’ve gotten excited,” Christy says. “She started buying me new clothes for testing. I wouldn’t imagine her making the investment just for the fun of it.”

Cody never saw the Turlingtons again. After a brief period of testing in 1983—making pictures with various local photographers—Christy put together a portfolio and a composite and began to earn back her mother’s investment, modeling after school for $60 a hour. Liz Turlington went everywhere with her daughter, “but she wasn’t a stage mom,” Pommier says. “I have mothers you could string up. She was just a doll. Always in the background, watching out.”

When the head of Karins, Ford’s associated agency in Paris, came to Miami, Pommier called Christy in, announced that of course, the big agencies would want her but then decided they couldn’t have her. “She’s not available,” Pommier said. “She’s too young. Maybe next summer.”

In 1984 Dwain Turlington had a heart attack and moved his family back to the San Francisco suburbs. Christy joined the Grimme agency. She took the BART subway system after school to model for Emporium Capwell, a local store chain. “For a hundred dollars an hour!” she says, laughing. “Which was great.”

Mostly she kept her career a secret from her schoolmates. But when she made the cover of the fashion section of the San Francisco
Chronicle
, “somebody passed it around in my French class,” she recalls. “The teacher grabbed it, made a big deal, ripped it up, and threw it away. I didn’t bring it to school! I never in any way brought it up or bragged about it. But I do remember taking advantage a couple of times when I wasn’t prepared for a careers class. ‘Shit, what can I use? Oh, I’ll use my career.’ I must have looked like such an idiot, passing my voucher book around.”

Karins invited Christy to go to Paris in 1984. Eileen and Jerry Ford came to San Francisco that spring, met Christy for the first time over breakfast in their hotel suite, and approved the plan. Her San Francisco agent was against it. “I never really liked Jimmy Grimme to begin with,” Christy says. “When he said, ‘I don’t think you’re ready to go to Paris, I think you should stay around here for a while,’ I was like, ‘What do you know? I already have an agent in Paris. I’m going.’”

That summer Christy and her mother went to Paris for a month, partly to test the waters and partly as a summer vacation. “I only worked a couple of times,” Christy remembers. “I tested a bit. We were in a little hotel. I remember seeing Linda’s pictures in French
Vogue
at that time. They were working, all of them.” Cindy Crawford was in Paris, as were Linda Evangelista and a teenage model, Stephanie Seymour. “She was there without her mother, and she was starting to see John Casablancas,” Christy says. “That’s what my mother was afraid of. I didn’t meet any slick people at all ‘cause I was with my mom.”

There was more than one pair of protective eyes watching the fifteen-year-old. When Eileen Ford arrived for the couture shows in July, she made a point of seeing Turlington and her mother and invited them to stop in New York for a week of testing on their way home to San Francisco. A rude surprise awaited Christy there. Ford didn’t remember telling her to come to New York. “I’m thinking, obviously she knows that I didn’t work, so she changed her mind,” Turlington says. “So my mom goes home, and I stay a week, and in that time I see all the magazines,
Vogue, Mademoiselle
, but then my grandmother passed away, so I went home.”