Focus

by Michael Gross

  The model agent Wilhelmina took a liking to Bantry and suggested he seek out Chatelain, who introduced him to Demarchelier. Chatelain was impressed that Bantry knew his photographs. “They all had an eye on coming to the States,” Bantry says. “At sixteen, I left home and never talked to [Soames or Leiter] again.” He took a studio on Madison Avenue for $195 a month and became a photographer’s agent, or rep, in the parlance of the day.

  The photographers streamed across the Atlantic. “They were all starting,” says Bantry. “They all worked for Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen.” And they all mixed work and play. Houlès was their role model. “He was so good-looking and the rest were not,” says a model. “He got the chicks and they followed him because they wanted to get laid.”

  Demarchelier played the field, dating lots of models. “You meet the people you see every day,” he says. “Doctors meet patients and nurses.” But unlike his fellows, he insists models weren’t his priority. “First, I liked to make money,” he says. “Girls weren’t the most important thing. I loved the work, the magic of the picture. After, you realize there are models. You like women. It’s a lucky thing. I’m a lucky guy.”

  “I wouldn’t call Patrick nice,” says Louise Despointes, a top French model who stayed in fashion as a modeling agency owner. “He plays very well the game, he’s a very smart guy, he liked money, and he likes to be famous.” He also liked models. “He saw every new girl. He was all over the place. He was always with the new Swede in town. Not the top girls, though. He tried, but it didn’t work for him. This macho thing is pretty French. To exist, you have to chase every girl, and if they told him to get lost, they didn’t get the job unless he was obliged to use them. But he always tried.”

  Demarchelier would play the field openly until 1981, when he married a Swedish model, Mia Skoog. Then, he played more quietly. “He managed to wiggle his little affairs no matter how much Mia was on him, and she came to a lot of shoots,” says fashion editor Lizzette Kattan. “Don’t get me in trouble with Mia,” he once warned a writer at the start of an interview. He got into trouble often enough himself that industry gossip has it that Mia owns an extensive jewelry collection. Demarchelier could afford it. Other photographers admired how he handled himself. “I’m the exact opposite of Patrick,” said Alex Chatelain. “I never think things through. He’s in control of everything.”

  Success “started rather quickly,” says Mike Reinhardt. At first he was “barely scraping by.” But then, like Demarchelier, he started getting jobs with Italian magazines. “One day in Milan, after three or four years, I walked into the Hotel Diana and there are two girls in the lobby and one of them said, ‘That’s Mike Reinhardt,’ and I had almost a heart attack of joy.”

  In 1970, after his wife left him, he hooked up with another model, named Beska, whom he stayed with for the next five years. Though he kept an apartment in Paris and traveled constantly, they moved to New York that fall. “They heard about us, the Frenchies doing something in the States,” says Claude Guillaumin. “It was freedom, freedom, freedom. Homosexuals, blacks, music, girls, marijuana. It was love.”

  Freedom meant temptation. Reinhardt says he was “being a good boy, relatively,” but “I was unfortunately neurotic enough to fall in love and I couldn’t be completely faithful. I didn’t realize monogamy was necessary for a relationship until much later. It’s hard to be monogamous in your twenties. Models are prepared, in many cases, to fuck for work. It’s easy to do with a young, sympathetic, attractive photographer. It’s convenient.”

  Meantime, Demarchelier had followed Reinhardt to New York, sometimes sleeping on the couch in the Carnegie Hall studio Pierre Houlès shared with his then girlfriend, model Viviane Fauny. “I didn’t speak English,” Demarchelier says. “Doors were closed. I had to redo everything. It was difficult.” But Reinhardt helped him, they both started working for Glamour, and in 1972, Houlès told Reinhardt that an advertising photographer named Art Kane was abandoning his Carnegie Hall studio, and Reinhardt took it over.

  Reinhardt and Demarchelier were hard workers; Houlès, not so much. “The rest were more interested in money,” says his sister, Valerie Unger. “Pierre wasn’t.” He loved to travel. “He was all over the place.” He also loved women, particularly models, and they him. “I prefer women to photography, and I’m always available to seduce them,” he told the journalist Jean-Jacques Naudet.

  Houlès seemed to know it all. “Stay away from this one and that one,” he instructed a model he slept with. “Don’t be like those models.” And he was manipulative, playing models and model agents against each other in what is usually described as mind games. John Casablancas came to despise him, considering him “a shit because he was a guy who didn’t like money, didn’t like anybody, didn’t like his own shadow.” Houlès’s sister, Valerie, in turn, calls Casablancas “a nasty piece of work,” but admits that her brother “was really opinionated.” Did he know a lot about the model business? Valerie Unger ponders that a moment, then says, “He probably thought he did. Those girls were very young. They were in love with the guy. They followed.”

  Model Christie Brinkley was an art student when she was discovered in Paris in 1973 and began working almost immediately, with Reinhardt among others. He told Eileen Ford about her, and Brinkley moved to New York, where she shot multiple covers of Glamour, won a spot in the influential Sports Illustrated bathing suit issue—a star-making vehicle for models—and a contract with CoverGirl cosmetics.

  After five years with Beska, Reinhardt lived with model Barbara Minty for four years. When they broke up, she took up with another French photographer in New York, Jacques Malignon.II He shared a studio with Patrice Casanova, who first took test photos of Reinhardt’s next model girlfriend, Janice Dickinson, who had dark hair, big lips, small eyes, and major attitude. Dickinson and Brinkley became pals, and Dickinson sometimes photographed her when they did shoots together. She showed Brinkley’s pictures to Houlès, “and of course, they ended up in bed,” Dickinson recalled.

  By 1979, Brinkley was living with Houlès in Paris, unaware that Viviane Fauny was still sharing his Carnegie Hall studio. When she found out, she had a brief rebound affair with Reinhardt that she came to regret but, perhaps, shouldn’t have. That year, Pierre’s sister had a birthday dinner in a private club and Houlès drove her crazy, dithering over which of his two girlfriends he should bring. “Christie showed up, thank God,” says Valerie Unger. “She was well known and beautiful. My husband asked Pierre, ‘How can you cheat on a girl like Christie?’ Pierre said, ‘She has short legs.’ ” In the aftermath of the romantic roundelay, Dickinson and Reinhardt broke up, and he and Houlès didn’t speak for years.

  Reinhardt and Houlès wreaked havoc on their girlfriends’ relationships with their agents; they advised the girls to be tough with them. Former model Louise Despointes was shocked when Houlès and Gilles Bensimon let her know that they expected to be paid the equivalent of a finder’s fee for delivering Brinkley to her new modeling agency. “Gilles was not yet powerful,” Despointes continues. “Their only power was, sorry, fucking top girls. They threatened, ‘We won’t use your girls.’ I said, ‘Fuck you all, I don’t care.’ Christie did come with me,” thanks to Reinhardt, who she thinks won a psychic arm-wrestling match with the others over her. “Mike was much cooler than Gilles Bensimon,” says Despointes. “Mike made it through the girls, too, but he had a jolly hippieish way; the others were much more vicious. And Pierre liked to flex his muscles with me because he wanted to go out with me and I always refused. I loved him as a friend and was sad he mixed the two,” work and personal relationships.

  * * *

  I. Faurer left his negatives and prints with a friend in New York when he moved to Paris and despite constant importuning never picked them up. They were presumably destroyed.

  II. In 1977, the actor Steve McQueen saw Minty’s photo in an ad and arranged to meet her.She later married McQueen, who died in 1980.

  Chapter
24

  * * *

  “YOU’RE GOING TO BE HUGE”

  Five foot ten, with auburn hair and blue-gray eyes, Patty Owen was a sexually precocious athlete—a high jumper in training for the Olympics—when she came to New York in 1979 to model. Two weeks later on a go-see, she was raped by a fashion photographer she won’t name. Then, he tried to befriend her, and “I succumbed,” she says, “thinking that would make it okay.” Then he raped her again, only the second time he drugged her first. So going to Paris meant escaping a fire, even if she landed in a frying pan. “I was very happy to leave my rapist and heroin-ridden models hanging out with William Burroughs,” she says.

  She spent the next two years in Paris, where she met Pierre Houlès and a more important Parisian shooter, François Lamy, on a go-see. “Let’s ‘go and see’ if the photographer wants to screw you on a trip,” Owen jokes about that term. “Of course, I wasn’t aware of that yet.” She did a trip with Lamy, and he booked her again the next week when she was also offered a trip to Mexico with Houlès. “He wanted me to cancel and work with him, so I go to Mexico, I’m having fun with the editors and other models. We had to sit in the sun for three days to get tan, and Pierre’s very nice, interested in my life, sympathetic and understanding, and then the shoot starts and he turns into an utter monster, screaming at us. ‘You look like fucking cows!’ Just berating and degrading.”

  At the end of the first day of shooting, a dinner was planned, but when the group gathered in the hotel lobby, Owen appeared with a packed suitcase and demanded to be taken to the airport. “Ah, c’mon, Patty, this is just the way I shoot,” Houlès said. “You’re new; you don’t know what you’re doing.” When she again demanded to go home, he sat on the lobby floor and apologized and said he would “try to be somebody I’m not because you’re going to be huge. You have an amazing body.” She agreed to stay another day on condition he behave. “He was such a good boy,” she says, “after a couple of days, I started sleeping with him.”

  His seduction began with innuendo. “Stop the bullshit,” she told him. “He said, ‘I have such a small dick, it won’t hurt you. You won’t notice it. You had a black boyfriend.’ He said it several times over a couple days.” She wondered if he said that to all the girls. Then they had sex, and “I realized he wasn’t kidding,” she says, “and therein lies his Napoléon complex. It was so small that to this day, I’ve never again encountered anything like it. My pinkie, when erect. I felt sorry for him. Was this God’s way to keep him humble?”

  Houlès was fourteen years older, “which seemed really old to me,” she says. But he was so handsome. “Very handsome, very charming, and he had the time to seduce because he wasn’t working. His girlfriends made the money.” Back in Paris they had dinner, and Houlès and Lamy both urged her to join L’Agence, an offshoot of Elite owned by Casablancas.

  Owen did, but kept frustrating Houlès. She met a wealthy Frenchman named Thierry with a Harley, and they were a couple by the time Houlès called again. He demanded she join him for dinner because he’d met her first. “Trust me, you’re going to make it,” he told her. “Don’t waste your life with a rich kid when you’ll have travel, covers, famous friends, artists and writers.” And “he seduced me,” she says, “and I end up sleeping with him again.”

  A month later, Houlès was back. Again, she refused to see him. But her boyfriend became Houlès’s unwitting accomplice. “He wants to be a photographer,” says Owen, so the next time Houlès called and complained his assistant had just quit, Owen told Thierry even though “I knew in my bones it was a bad idea,” and he got the job.

  “I knew I was in trouble,” Owen says. “I felt sick. It was Pierre’s way to stay close. We’d go out to dinner, the three of us, and he’d have his hand up my dress under the table. ‘Follow me to the bathroom. You don’t call me anymore.’ I’m still feeling sorry for this guy with his little dick, and I’m afraid of being blackballed because to me, he was pretty big.” They hooked up sporadically for the next three years. Then she moved to New York and her boyfriend joined her and “I became his sugar mommy,” paying all the bills, she says. “Pierre encouraged it. He said, ‘You girls make so much money! C’mon, share!’ ” At twenty-two, she developed ulcers.

  Owen understood that her secret ménage was a problem and again tried to break with Houlès. In response, he turned aggressive whenever he saw her, “grabbing my tits, kissing me, ‘Why won’t you see me?’ And Thierry saw my face. He smelled the truth.”

  “Is it true?” he demanded. She told him to ask Houlès. “Eh, yes, sometimes, I’m a man, but, you know, I met her before you,” Houlès said. Then he asked Patty, “Happy now?” She stayed with Thierry until he got nasty, demanding money. That was Pierre Houlès’s mantra. Thierry was history.

  Owen knew the whole Mob and shot with most of them, but not Reinhardt. “Never such a cold go-see,” she says, “and Mike is notoriously chaleureux, very warm with the girls.” The others wouldn’t go near her off set. “I think I got a pass because they all knew I was sleeping with Pierre. He didn’t respect their girls, but they respected his.”

  One night Houlès said, “You know, Christie, she hates you. She knows I’m fucking you.”

  “Isn’t she fucking Mike?”

  “Well, she loves to see me, too.”

  “He loved to stir up shit,” Owen says. “His biggest turn-on wasn’t sex; it was a power trip.” And his power base was the Mob. “He couldn’t be bought and all the others were, so they listened. ‘Fuck these people and this bullshit business.’ He held on to his artist’s roots. They made a fortune.”

  Pierre spread stories about Bensimon, Owen thinks, out of penis envy. “Gilles had a big dick,” she says. “I saw it in pictures.”

  Louise Despointes liked Pierre Houlès so much she set him up with the only woman he married, Josie Borain, whom Despointes had brought from her native South Africa to Paris in 1982: “She was staying with me, and Pierre was after me again, so I put Josie in his arms so he’d leave me in peace.”

  “I was very young, I didn’t speak French, I was a handbag,” says Borain. “She was invited to dinner by Pierre and brought me along. She didn’t want to be alone.” After dinner, they visited a peep show near the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. There, the two women’s stories diverge. “I put them in the same booth and she flipped, it was love at first sight,” says Despointes. “I left and they were together for quite a long time.”

  “We were never alone” and never in a peep show booth, Borain says. Houlès called her sometime later, took her to La Coupole for lunch, and they clicked and were together for the next few years. She knew Houlès was a player. “I knew some of the women he fucked,” she says. She lived with him, but “I never worked with him and he didn’t work that much. The industry is a bit of an ass-lick and he didn’t like it. He was doing more documentary stuff,” photographing artists and boxers. But Houlès became her adviser: “Pierre was eighteen years older, he was my guru.”

  Borain moved into Carnegie Hall with Houlès in March 1983. She started out with Ford Models, but only stayed for two months. During that brief tenure, the Ford family realized, in the words of the agency’s president, Jerry Ford, that “she was getting other advice.” It led her to another agency, called Click, which had offices in Carnegie Hall. Agents there introduced her to the photographer Bruce Weber, who shot for the wildly competitive Bronx-born fashion designers Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.

  Borain shot many photos for Lauren that year, while also modeling in-house for Klein, as a sort of muse, since Click wanted her to belong to Lauren exclusively for advertising. According to court documents, Click tried to win her a contract with Lauren while she was privately discussing a similar arrangement with Klein. In the meantime, she and Houlès talked about taking a year off and driving from the northern edge of Europe to the southern tip of Africa. They went so far as to get married so Borain could get a French passport that would allow them to cross borders freely. Ho
ulès encouraged her to tell all concerned she’d decided to quit modeling.

  When Borain told Klein, he asked, “What if I made you an offer you can’t refuse?” She and Houlès continued planning their trip. But just before they were set to leave, Klein reappeared, offering her a $1 million, three-year contract. Houlès urged her to sign. “He said Africa’s always going to be there,” Borain recalls. The deal with Klein was made without Click, and when its principals learned of Borain’s end run, Click claimed it had negotiated a much better deal for her with Lauren and sued. Borain claimed, then and now, she knew nothing about any Lauren deal.

  Months later, just before the case went to trial, Klein settled and paid commissions to Click. Borain says she wrote a check, too. Joey Grill, one of the agency’s founders, is unsure what role Houlès played in the drama. “She or he didn’t want her to pay commissions,” he thinks. “That, I felt, was the crux of the matter.” Louise Despointes thinks there was more to it than that. “I know [Houlès] got money” from Klein, she says. “He told me after he left Josie.”

  Josie says she left him due to the disparity in their ages and experience. “I was at the beginning of my career and he’d done it all already,” she says. Soon, Houlès installed another model, Julie Nelson, in his Carnegie Hall studio, though she says their relationship was platonic. Meantime, Borain realized she still loved him, and they discussed getting back together. “He was definitely ready to settle down,” Borain thinks. “We were talking about having a baby.” She finds it hard to believe Despointes’s story that Houlès made money off her Calvin Klein deal. “Very unlikely. Pierre never met Calvin.” Borain felt his manipulative days were over. “I never knew that Pierre. I found an older, wiser Pierre.”