Modelizers are a particular breed. They’re a step beyond womanizers, who will sleep with just about anything in a skirt. Modelizers are obsessed not with women but with models. They love them for their beauty and hate them for everything else. “Their stupidity, their flakiness, their lack of values, their baggage,” says Jack. Modelizers inhabit a sort of parallel universe, with its own planets (Nobu, Bowery Bar, Tabac, Flowers, Tunnel, Expo, Metropolis) and satellites (the various apartments, many near Union Square, that the big modeling agencies rent for the models) and goddesses (Linda, Naomi, Christy, Elle, Bridget).
Welcome to their world. It’s not pretty.
THE MODELIZERS
Not any man can become a modelizer. “To get models, you have to be rich, really good-looking, and/or in the arts,” says Barkley. He’s an up-and-coming artist, and he has a face like a Botticelli angel, framed by a blond pageboy haircut. He’s sitting in his junior loft in SoHo, which is paid for by his parents, as are all the rest of his expenses, his father being a coat-hanger magnate in Minneapolis. That’s good for Barkley, because being a modelizer isn’t cheap—there are drinks at clubs, dinners, cab expenses from one club to another, and drugs—mostly marijuana, but occasionally heroin and cocaine. It also takes time—lots of time. Barkley’s parents think he’s painting, but he’s too busy spending his days organizing his nights with models.
“Frankly, I’m kind of confused about this whole model thing,” Barkley says. He’s pacing around his loft in leather jeans, shirtless. His hair is just-washed and his chest has something like three hairs on it. Models love him. They think he’s hot and nice. “You’ve got to treat them just like regular girls,” he says. Then he lights up a cigarette and says, “You’ve got to be able to roll into a place and go right up to the hottest girl there—otherwise, you’re finished. It’s like being around dogs, you’ve got to show no fear.”
The phone rings. Hannah. She’s doing a shoot in Amsterdam. Barkley puts her on the speaker. She’s lonely and she’s stoned. “I miss you, baby,” she moans. Her voice is like a serpent trying to crawl out of its skin. “If you were here right now I’d have your ding-dong down my throat. Aaaaahhhh. I love that so much, baby.”
“See?” Barkley says. He talks to her, raking his fingers through his hair. He lights up a joint. “I’m smoking with you now, baby.”
“There are two kinds of modelizers—those who are closing the deal, and those who aren’t,” says Coerte Felske, author of Shallow Man, a novel about a man who chases models.
Leading the pack are the supermodelizers—men who are seen with the likes of Elle Macpherson, Bridget Hall, Naomi Campbell. “There are guys like this any place models congregate—Paris, Milan, and Rome,” says Mr. Felske. “These guys have status in the world of modeling. They can pick off models like clay pigeons. They burn ’em and churn ’em.”
But not all modelizers are high profile. In Manhattan, a necessary stopping-off point for young new models, just being rich can be enough. Take George and his partner, Charlie. On any given night of the week, George and Charlie are taking a group of models, sometimes up to twelve, out to dinner.
George and Charlie could be Middle European or even Middle Eastern, but in truth they’re from New Jersey. They’re in the import-export business, and though neither is thirty yet, they’re each worth a few million.
“Charlie never gets laid,” says George, laughing, spinning around in his leather swivel chair behind a large mahogany desk in his office. There are oriental carpets on the floor and real art on the walls. George says he doesn’t care about getting laid. “It’s a sport,” he says.
“For these guys, the girls are a trophy extension,” confirms Mr. Felske. “Maybe they feel unattractive or are blindly ambitious.”
Last year, George got a nineteen-year-old model pregnant. He knew her for five weeks. Now they’ve got a nine-month-old son. He never sees her anymore. Here’s what she wants: $4,500 a month in child support, a $500,000 life insurance policy, a $50,000 college fund. “I think that’s a little excessive, don’t you?” George asks. When he smiles, the tops of his teeth are gray.
WILHELMINA GIRLS
So how does a guy get into George’s position? “The girls travel in packs,” explains Barkley. “It’s a very closed group. The models hang out in posses and live in groups in model apartments. They don’t feel safe unless they go out together. It’s intimidating to a guy.
“On the flip side, it works to your advantage, because if there are twenty models in a place, the one you want is not going to be the most beautiful. You have more of a chance. If there’s just one, she’s the most beautiful, and she can work it. When you go up to one in a group of four or five, it makes that girl feel like she’s better than the other girls.”
The trick is meeting one girl. The best way is through a mutual friend. “Once a guy has access, once you get validated by one of the girls,” says Mr. Felske, “then the guy gets beyond being an ordinary Joe.”
Three years ago, George was at a club where he ran into a girl he knew from high school who was with a booker with an agency. He met some models. He had drugs. Eventually, they all went back to the models’ apartment. He had enough to keep them going until seven in the morning. He fooled around with one of them. The next day, she agreed to see him again, but only if all the other girls could come, too. He took them all out to dinner. He kept going. “That was the beginning of the obsession,” he says.
George knows all of the model apartments now—the places where, for five hundred dollars a month, a new model gets to sleep in a bunk bed in a cramped two- or three-bedroom apartment with five other girls. But he’s got to keep up, because the girls come and go all the time, and you have to stay close to at least one girl in the apartment.
Still, there’s a free-flowing supply. “It’s easy,” George says. He picks up the phone and dials a number.
“Hello, is Susan there?” he asks.
“Susan’s in Paris.”
“Oooooh,” he says, sounding disappointed. “I’m an old friend of hers [in truth, he’s known her for two months], and I just got back into town myself. Damn. Who’s this?”
“Sabrina.”
“Hey, Sabrina, I’m George.” They chat for about ten minutes. “We’re thinking about going to Bowery Bar tonight. Getting a group together. Do you want to come?”
“Ummmm. Sure, why not,” Sabrina says. You can practically hear her thumb pop out of her mouth.
“And who else is there with you?” George asks. “Do you think they might want to come too?”
George hangs up the phone. “It’s actually better if there are more guys than girls when you go out,” he says. “If there are more girls, they get competitive with each other. They get quiet. If a girl is seeing a guy and she lets the other girls know, it can be a mistake. She thinks the girls she’s living with are her friends, but they’re not. They’re girls she just met who happen to be in the same situation. Girls try to steal guys all the time.”
“There are a lot of bambis out there,” says Mr. Felske.
George says he has a system. “There’s a hierarchy of sexual availability in the model apartments,” he says. “Wilhelmina girls are the easiest. Willi tends to get girls who grew up in mobile homes or the East End of London. Elite—they have two apartments—one uptown, on 86th Street, and one downtown, on 16th. They keep the nice girls in the uptown apartment. The girls in the downtown apartment are ‘friendlier.’ Girls who live with Eileen Ford are untouchable. One reason is that Eileen’s maid hangs up if you call.
“A lot of these girls live between 28th Street and Union Square. There’s Zeckendorf Towers on 15th. And a place on 22nd and Park Avenue South. The older models who work a lot tend to live on the East Side.”
A MODELIZER GLOSSARY
Thing = a model
Civilian = women who are not models
“We talk about it all the time, how hard it is to go back to civilians,” says George. “You never meet t
hem or make an attempt to meet them.”
“It’s easier to get a model into bed than it is to get a civilian with a career to put out,” says Sandy. Sandy’s an actor with brilliant green eyes. “Civilians, they want stuff from guys.”
THINGS DISSECTED
Thursday night at Barolo. Mark Baker, the restaurateur and promoter, is throwing one of his special parties. Here’s how it works: The promoters have a relationship with the agencies. The agencies know the promoters are “safe”—i.e., they’re going to take care of their girls, entertain them. In turn, the promoters need the modelizers to take the girls out. The promoters don’t always have the money to take the girls out to dinner. The modelizers do. Someone’s got to feed them. The modelizer meets someone like Mr. Roque. Mr. Roque wants girls. The modelizers want girls and they also want to hang out with Mr. Roque. Everyone is happy.
Outside, on this Thursday night, there’s pandemonium on the sidewalk. People pushing, trying to get the attention of a tall, mean-looking guy who could be part oriental, part Italian. Inside, the place is jammed. Everyone is dancing, everyone is tall and beautiful.
You talk to a girl with a fake European accent. Then a girl from Tennessee who just returned from a trip back home. “I was wearing bellbottoms and platform shoes, and my old boyfriend said, ‘Carol Anne, what the hell are you wearing?’ And I said, ‘Get with it, honey. This is New York.’”
Jack slides by and starts talking.
“Even if they’re dumb, models are very manipulative. You can split them into three types. One: The new girls in town. They’re usually really young—sixteen, seventeen. They go out a lot. They might not work that much, they want something to do, they need to meet people, like photographers. Two: The girls who work a lot. They’re a little older, twenty-one and up, they’ve been in the business for five years. They never go out, they travel a lot, you almost never see them. And three: The supermodels. They’re looking for a big-time guy who can do something for them. They’re all obsessed with money, maybe because their careers are insecure. They won’t even look at a guy who has less than twenty or thirty mil. Plus, they have the ‘big girl’ complex: They won’t hang out with any girl who’s not a top model, and they ignore other models or bitch about them.”
You go down to the bathroom with Jack and hang out in the men’s room. “By the time they get to be twenty-one, these girls have tons of baggage,” says Jack. “They have a history: Children. Guys they’ve slept with. Guys you don’t like. Most of them come from broken homes or fucked-up backgrounds. They’re beautiful, but in the end, they don’t do anything for you. They’re young. They’re uneducated. They have no values, you know? I prefer the older ones. You have to find one without baggage, and I’m on the search.”
GET ONE, GET THEM ALL
“The trick is to get one big girl—like a Hunter Reno or a Janna Rhodes,” says George. “These are girls who have done covers in Europe. If you get one, you can get them all. At a nightclub, you pay attention to the older girls. They always want to go home early because they have to get up and work. You walk them out to a cab, being a gentleman, then you go back in and attack the young ones.”
“These girls just want to be comfortable,” says Mr. Felske.
“They’re so young. They’re just finding their way in a grownup world. They’re not fully developed, and they meet these guys who know all the tricks. How hard can it be?”
Back in the loft, Barkley opens a bottle of Coke and sits on a stool in the middle of the room. “You think, Who’s prettier than a model. But they’re not so smart, they’re flakey and fucked up, they’re a lot looser than you think. It’s way easier to screw a model than a regular girl. That’s what they do all the time. It’s the way regular people are when they’re on vacation. They’re away, so they do things they wouldn’t normally do. But these girls are away all the time because they travel from place to place. So that’s what they’re like all the time.”
Barkley takes a sip from his Coke and scratches his stomach. It’s three in the afternoon, and he just woke up an hour ago. “These girls are nomads,” he says. “They have a guy in every city. They call me when they’re in New York, and I always imagine that they call someone else when they’re in Paris or Rome or Milan. We pretend that we’re going out when they’re in town. We hold hands and see each other every day. A lot of girls want that. But then they’re gone.” Barkley yawns. “I don’t know. There are so many beautiful girls around that after a while you start looking for someone who can make you laugh.”
“It’s amazing sometimes what you’ll do to be with these girls,” George says. “I went to church with one girl and her daughter. I’ve started to hang out with older girls almost exclusively. I’ve got to retire soon. They keep me from getting work done. They make me fuck up my life.” George shrugged and glanced out the window of his 34th-floor office at the view of midtown Manhattan. “Look at me,” he says. “I’m an old man at twenty-nine.”
6
New York’s Last Seduction:
Loving Mr. Big
A fortyish movie producer I’ll call Samantha Jones walked into Bowery Bar, and, as usual, we all looked up to see whom she was with. Samantha was always with at least four men, and the game was to pick out which one was her lover. Of course, it wasn’t really much of a game, because the boyfriend was too easy to spot. Invariably, he was the youngest, and good-looking in that B-Hollywood actor kind of way—and he would sit there with a joyously stupid expression on his face (if he had just met Sam) or a bored, stupid look on his face, if he had been out with her a few times. If he had, it would be beginning to dawn on him that no one at the table was going to talk to him. Why should they, when he was going to be history in two weeks?
We all admired Sam. First of all, it’s not that easy to get twenty-five-year-old guys when you’re in your early forties. Second, Sam is a New York inspiration. Because if you’re a successful single woman in this city, you have two choices: You can beat your head against the wall trying to find a relationship, or you can say “screw it” and just go out and have sex like a man. Thus: Sam.
This is a real question for women in New York these days. For the first time in Manhattan history, many women in their thirties to early forties have as much money and power as men—or at least enough to feel like they don’t need a man, except for sex. While this paradox is the topic of many an analytic hour, recently my friend Carrie, a journalist in her mid-thirties, decided, as a group of us were having tea at the Mayfair Hotel, to try it out in the real world. To give up on love, as it were, and throttle up on power, in order to find contentment. And, as we’ll see, it worked. Sort of.
TESTOSTERONE WOMEN, FOOLISH MEN
“I think I’m turning into a man,” said Carrie. She lit up her twentieth cigarette of the day, and when the maître d’hôtel ran over and told her to put it out, she said, “Why, I wouldn’t dream of offending anyone.” Then she put the cigarette out on the carpet.
“You remember when I slept with that guy Drew?” she asked. We all nodded. We were all relieved when she had, because she hadn’t had sex for months before that. “Well, afterwards, I didn’t feel a thing. I was like, Gotta go to work, babe. Keep in touch. I completely forgot about him after that.”
“Well, why the hell should you feel anything?” Magda asked. “Men don’t. I don’t feel anything after I have sex. Oh sure, I’d like to, but what’s the point?”
We all sat back smugly, sipping tea, like we were members of some special club. We were hard and proud of it, and it hadn’t been easy to get to this point—this place of complete independence where we had the luxury of treating men like sex objects. It had taken hard work, loneliness, and the realization that, since there might never be anyone there for you, you had to take care of yourself in every sense of the word.
“Well, I guess it’s a lot of scar tissue,” I said. “All those men who end up disappointing you. After a while, you don’t even want to have feelings anymore. You just want
to get on with your life.”
“I think it’s hormones,” said Carrie. “The other day, I was in the salon getting a deep-conditioning treatment because they’re always telling me my hair is going to break off. And I read in Cosmo about male testosterone in women—this study found that women who have high levels of testosterone are more aggressive, successful, have more sex partners, and are less likely to get married. There was something incredibly comforting about this information—it made you feel like you weren’t a freak.”
“The trick is getting the men to cooperate,” said Charlotte.
“Men in this city fail on both counts,” said Magda. “They don’t want to have a relationship, but as soon as you only want them for sex, they don’t like it. They can’t just perform the way they’re supposed to.”
“Have you ever called a guy at midnight and said, ‘I want to come over,’ and had him say yes?” Carrie asked.
“The problem is that sex doesn’t stay done,” said Charlotte. She had a name for men who were fantastic lovers: Sex Gods. But even she was having trouble. Her most recent conquest was a poet who was terrific in bed, but who, she said, “kept wanting me to go to dinner with him and go through all the chat bit.” He’d recently stopped calling: “He wanted to read me his poetry, and I wouldn’t let him.”
“There’s a thin line between attraction and repulsion,” she continued. “And usually the repulsion starts when they begin wanting you to treat them as people, instead of sex toys.”
I asked if there was realistically any way to pull off this whole “women having sex like men” thing.
“You’ve got to be a real bitch,” said Charlotte. “Either that, or you’ve got to be incredibly sweet and nice. We fall through the cracks. It confuses men.”
Sex and the City Page 4
