Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Top model agents like the Fords or John Casablancas live very well on what they take out of their businesses. To support their glitzy images, they fly the Concorde to Europe, stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris or the Four Seasons in Milan, wear Rolex watches, and own multiple houses. Agencies have few expenses: rent, staff, and champagne. Models pay for everything else, from composites to messengers to “model” apartments. They often even pay to appear in an agency’s promotional “head” book.

  But back to Chandra’s job. The $1,000 is just for one kind of use in one geographical market for a specified period of time. Use Chandra’s picture longer, use it on a tag as well as a bag, use it in Europe as well as in America, or buy it out for all uses for all time all over the world, and a one-day job has become an annuity.

  Still, that’s not enough to explain why men like Esch, Cornfeld, Bob Zagury (a playboy backer of Elite), Thierry Roussel (the pharmaceutical heir and ex-husband of Christina Onassis), Carlo Cabassi (the younger brother of one of Italy’s most important real estate developers), and sundry lesser-known Wall Street types, Middle Eastern businessmen, and others get into the relatively small-time modeling game.

  The obvious reason is money. “The modeling world is driven by a powerful fundamental force,” says Foster-Fell. “But it’s rather hard to escape sex as a motive, a power to influence. Men are fascinated and envious of men who have power over women. Would he spend the same amount for a diaper company? I doubt it. Most men looking to get into this business have an ROI complex, and I’m not talking about Return on Investment. Roi is French for ‘king.’”

  It is ten-twenty, and Cindy Crawford has been transformed into what Sarajane Hoare calls a Cindy doll. Blemishes are banished. Eyelids are a dusky gray. For the finishing touch, Greenwell picks up a pot of bloodred Chanel lip gloss. She is supposed to use only Revlon products, but Crawford doesn’t seem to notice. Still, though she’s already appeared on two hundred magazine covers (“and counting,” said Pillard), Crawford is hardly blasé. She eyes herself in the mirror. “It looks like I have no top lip,” she says. “And I think the cheeks are a bit too much.”

  “Cindy Crawford, shut up your mouth,” Greenwell says. Then she does what Crawford wants.

  “I look sort of like a tart,” Crawford says when she’s satisfied.

  “You can write that down,” Greenwell tells me.

  Crawford quickly agrees. “Sultry Cindy,” she says. “Vixen.”

  Finally, around noon, the missing swimsuit surfaces. Cindy is ready to dive into work. “Uh, Patreek,” she says to Demarchelier in a broad French accent. “Uh, maybe we should work today?”

  Finally the team piles into a location van and heads for SoHo. “Where is he going?” Crawford demands of the driver. “You’re way out of your way. Take a right at Houston.” To herself she adds, “This isn’t my job.” But at last it is time for her job. McKnight removes her rollers, and she sits at a mirror as he combs her hair into masses of Cindy doll curls. Crawford studies the mirror again. “I did my hair like this every day in high school,” she says dreamily.

  As he exits, Demarchelier leaves the van’s door open. “We’ve got fans,” Cindy warns as three young girls approach. She signs autographs. They giggle. As they leave, one cries out, “I saw her mole!”

  “I come from the Midwest, and I’m just a normal girl.”

  Cindy Crawford was the second of three daughters born to a blue-collar family in 1966. “We never had any extras,” she says. Her father worked variously in a pizza parlor, as an electrician, and as a glazier. He separated from his wife when Cindy was a freshman in high school. “We were angry,” she says. Crawford had a happy childhood but admits she was driven. She was a straight A student who, in junior high, fantasized about being the first woman President. “I was rebelling against what my mother was at the time,” she says. “I loved her, but I didn’t respect her.”

  Though she’d always been pretty, she’d never worn makeup, looked at fashion magazines, or considered modeling until her junior year, when she was asked by a local clothing store to be in a fashion show. “Some people got jealous, but it was worth it,” Crawford recalls. “I was still buying on layaway. We got a discount on clothes.” Soon afterward a local photographer asked her to pose as the “Co-Ed of the Week” for a college newspaper and introduced her to a local makeup artist, who suggested she volunteer as a model for a hairstyling demonstration Clairol was sponsoring in Chicago. Lured by the promise of an all-expenses-paid weekend in nearby Chicago, Crawford agreed. A Clairol representative gave her the number of a local model agency.

  Though its scouts arranged test photographs, they couldn’t see past Cindy’s mole, and she returned to De Kalb, Illinois. But one of her photos stayed in Chicago in another makeup artist’s portfolio. “It was a funny-looking picture,” recalls Marie Anderson, an ex-photographer’s assistant who, in 1982, was just starting out as a model agent. “She had her hair up like a palm tree, a kooky dress, a parasol, and a pucker.”

  Anderson looked up Crawford’s parents and “tried to explain Cindy wasn’t average.” The Crawfords weren’t enthusiastic. “They thought I was a cute kid, not a model,” Cindy says. She also had a summer job, working with all her friends detasseling corn for minimum wage in the seed cornfields of De Kalb Ag. “Sort of like my job now,” Cindy says jokingly. “Worms, snakes, slugs, and bugs in your hair.”

  Still, the Crawfords decided to let Cindy take a chance. “They gave me five hundred dollars—all they could afford to lose,” she says. “I paid them back with my first check.” That didn’t take long. A photographer down the hall from the agency shot a composite, carefully hiding Crawford’s mole in shadows, and she went out looking for work. When potential clients turned her down, suggesting she have her mole removed, Anderson supported Crawford’s inclination to keep it. “Someday they’ll know you by that,” she advised.

  But at first Crawford gained renown because of other natural attributes. “I had no hips then, but I had boobs,” she says, and they made her a natural for the lingerie ads that many other models refuse. Her first job was a bra ad for Marshall Field, the department store. It caused a stir among her fellow students, but Crawford didn’t care. “If you knew what I was getting paid, you wouldn’t be laughing,” she told her tormentors. After a few weeks of driving back and forth between her two jobs, Crawford gave notice at De Kalb Ag. She was hooked. Senior year she arranged her classes so she could drive to Chicago every afternoon. “She worked her ass off—excuse the expression,” Anderson says. “She was a pro from the beginning.”

  Six months later her agency was sold to the big New York firm Elite. Bob Frame, then a Chicago photographer, met Crawford at the party celebrating the merger. “Cindy hadn’t really done much yet,” he recalls. Frame used her often. “I was learning, too. We sort of grew together. But even then she knew what it was about: You’re a product. You have to maintain it and sell it.”

  Crawford was already in demand—she’d seen ten top photographers, including Richard Avedon and Albert Watson, in her first two days in New York—but she was not yet willing to take the bait being dangled before her. She was entered in Elite’s Look of the Year contest and made it to the national finals in New York. “I didn’t win,” she recalls. “They asked you if you’d leave high school. I wanted to graduate.” And she did—as valedictorian.

  For most models, postgraduate work begins in Europe, where agencies learn who will sink or swim by throwing them into a pool full of sharks. For the model it’s a crash course in the real world of modeling. They are paid little, if anything, but if they’re lucky and photogenic and develop a “look,” they can emerge with all-important tear sheets—pages from European magazines that go into their portfolios and serve as their visual calling cards. Cindy—who already had tear sheets galore from Chicago—only lasted three weeks there. She started in Rome, where Italian Vogue had Demarchelier shooting the alta moda—or high-fashion—collections.

  He wanted he
r to cut her long hair. She said no. He insisted. He also had her hair dyed. “I was crying,” Cindy says. “I wouldn’t look in a mirror for two weeks. Patrick was going, ‘Oh, bébé doesn’t like her hair. Oh, ha-ha-ha.’ The only way you learn is by making mistakes.” Even something as simple as going to a dinner with other models and photographers and agents after a shooting can be a mistake. At one dinner that week in Rome, Crawford recalls, “someone, an unnamed certain model, was on the table in a skirt with no underwear on, and all the models were sitting on all the men’s laps. You go to one of those, and then you figure it out.”

  Then it was on to glamorous Paris, where “they put four girls who don’t speak French in a tiny apartment and leave them alone,” Cindy says. “I worked, but I had this short hair. I didn’t know who I was.” Then came an offer to pose for French Elle. “They wanted me nude, and I was like eighteen, and it was my first week in Paris—how could I say no? I felt used, because they played off my insecurities or my right to say no.”

  She started thinking of quitting and called her mother to see if a scholarship she’d refused could be reinstated. So when she was offered a British Vogue booking in Bermuda, she says, “It was perfect. I could come back.” But first there were more lessons to learn. “They had me lying in the surf for two hours with a mud mask on and waves splashing over my head,” she says. “I didn’t know I could say no. Those same people now would be, ‘Anything you want.’” She was supposed to return to New York but grabbed the first flight home instead. “I waited three hours and paid like five hundred dollars one way, but I was going home, and I didn’t care.”

  Crawford decided to split her attention between modeling and college. She wasn’t ready to decide. She enrolled as a chemical engineering major because it was an easy way for a girl to get a scholarship. She lived in a dorm at North-western University for one semester but spent most of her time thirty minutes south in Chicago, where she met her most important teacher.

  Victor Skrebneski is the long-reigning king of Chicago fashion photography. For the next two years Crawford was his queen. “I went to obedience school,” she says. “The Skrebneski School of Modeling.” Even competitors are in awe of the dapper, hawk-faced Skrebneski. “Cindy and I were doing amazing photos,” says Bob Frame, “but then Victor started using her, and she disappeared. Victor has a group he works with and is very loyal to. He’s a really incredible teacher. His photographs are meticulous in detail, so the people in them learn how to work with themselves. If a strong girl comes around, Victor adopts her,” Frame says. Unfortunately for Skrebneski, he adds, “the good ones always leave.”

  For two years Crawford was satisfied. She quit college and moved to Chicago. Her income shot up to $200,000 a year. “And it’s cheap to live there,” she says. “My rent was half what it is now, I had a car. I was only two hours from home. It was great. But slowly you start wanting more.”

  From the moment she first saw Crawford work in 1985 at an Azzedine Alaïa fashion show, Monique Pillard tried to lure her to New York. Now, for three months in 1986, Crawford commuted between her place in Chicago and a New York model’s apartment. But she didn’t move mentally until she had a falling-out with Skrebneski. To this day he won’t discuss what happened. Crawford remembers precisely because it was her twentieth birthday.

  “I was leaving for New York that night,” she says, “and I didn’t want to work that day.” But two clients begged, so Cindy—ever the pro—obliged. The first client was so grateful he gave her roses and a birthday cake. At the second studio—Skrebneski’s—she was asked, “Why do you have all that?”

  The next day, in New York, Crawford learned she’d won a ten-day big-money job in Bali. She had to cancel a conflicting shoot with Skrebneski. “That was it,” she says. “I understand his feelings. He made me. He did. But you can’t make something and keep it for yourself. That was the break. Even if I didn’t make it in New York, I couldn’t go back to Chicago.” A day later she moved into a friend’s apartment in Manhattan.

  She now cut another tie as well. For several years Crawford had dated a quarterback from her De Kalb high school. A friend since elementary school, he was her “grounding link” when she started modeling, she says. Even though he was in college in Arizona, he protected her from many model pitfalls. “I had blinders on and gave off ‘unapproachable, don’t ask me out, don’t talk to me, not interested,’” she says. “But our lives totally diverged. This might sound bad, and I don’t mean it to, but it’s like a little kid who is finally ready to give up that security blanket. I can go to sleep by myself in the dark now.”

  New York wasn’t always easy. Crawford’s worst moment came one night in June 1988, when she returned at 1:00 A.M. from a five-week working trip and discovered things out of place in her Greenwich Village apartment. Her phone book was missing. There was fresh food in the refrigerator, but her bed wasn’t fresh. Then the phone rang. “Don’t be mad,” said a man’s voice that then started listing the contents of her drawers.

  “He went on to confess,” she says. “I don’t know why.” He’d somehow entered her apartment, made friends with her neighbors, taken an extra set of keys, and nightly made himself at home after calling to be sure the apartment was empty. Now he said he was coming over again.

  Crawford threatened to leave, but he said he could always find her. “I told him I was moving,” Cindy says. “He knew the address.” Finally she agreed to meet him the next day in a restaurant. She sneaked out to sleep at a friend’s and called the police the next morning. At the rendezvous the man was arrested, and the police discovered he had a prior armed robbery conviction. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary charges and was sentenced to two and a half to five years in jail.

  The night after the indictment, Crawford says, “I had a mini-nervous breakdown, and then I was fine. I knew it shouldn’t be a major event in my life. I wanted to tidy it up and get it taken care of. Now I live in a very secure building. I don’t have a listed phone. You don’t learn until you make mistakes.”

  Mostly life here has been good for Crawford. “She hit immediately, like a house on fire,” says her friend Mark Bozek. “She was very naïve, but she got street smart quicker than anyone I’ve ever met. The first six months always set the pattern. I stayed friends with her because she stayed real.”

  When she first arrived, Crawford was often compared to a better-known model, Gia Carangi, a bisexual drug abuser who had a short but highly visible career. “I was Baby Gia, but more wholesome,” Cindy says. “She was wild. Completely opposite me. She’d leave a booking in the clothes to buy cigarettes and not come back for hours.” A pause. “She’s not living anymore.” Carangi died in 1986 of AIDS.

  Crawford was never like that. “She was not your typical model,” says Marco Glaviano. “She wasn’t flirty. That slowed her down a little bit at the beginning, but it was good. That way you don’t get burnt out.” Crawford had no intention of burning out. She knew just what she wanted. Every time she saw Pillard at modeling functions, she’d shake her hand and say, “Contract, contract.”

  “They’re not very organized,” Crawford complains when, at 1:00 P.M., the British Vogue shoot still hasn’t started. She buries herself in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees until finally Hoare is ready to dress her. A few minutes later she emerges in a silver lamé bikini, matching fringed jacket, cowboy hat and boots, and a holster and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “I hope I don’t run into any neighbors,” she says.

  Instead she attracts a crowd as she clambers onto a wrought-iron fence, spreads her legs, and pulls her guns. When she disappears into the van to change, the bystanders stay glued to the spot. Drivers park their cars. A deliveryman deposits his boxes on the curb. “It’s the lunch crowd.” Crawford laughs.

  For the third setup Demarchelier wants Crawford, who is wearing a suit sprinkled with silver sequins, mesh wrist cuffs, and a pair of red stiletto heels, to push a baby carriage up Wooster Street. As she walks t
here, Demarchelier drapes her shoulders with his jacket. Eyeing the crowd that trails behind her, she tells him, “I’d rather cover my ass.” Crossing West Broadway, she causes actor Wallace Shawn to do a triple take. Then, turning onto Wooster Street, she stops work on a building site. Hard hats pour into the street. “How come my wife didn’t look like that after she had a baby?” one of the workers mutters. Cindy stares into her pram. “I’m still looking for a baby,” she says.

  “I’m sure any of these guys will help you,” an assistant comments.

  Several rolls of film later, “My shoe’s falling off,” Crawford complains. “My suit’s up my ass.” Just then a garishly customized motorcycle roars by. Greenwall yells for the driver to stop, and Cindy mounts the bike, first behind the driver on his vinyl, chrome, and fur seat. Then she clambers around in front of him and arches her back to pose with his face inches from her assets. Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye sing “Heaven Must Have Sent You” on the bike’s radio. The Voguettes are elated.

  “From mother to biker chick in five seconds,” Cindy says. “And I thought we were just doing a regular old studio shot!”

  Once upon a time a cosmetics contract was the crowning achievement of a model’s career. But by the time she signed with Revlon, Crawford was pushing the boundaries of where a paper face could go. “I’m not aware of any role models within the fashion business,” Crawford says. “I look at people who are doing their own thing. They have a vision and a drive to make it happen.” So does she. Violating one of modeling’s premier taboos by taking off her clothes for Playboy proved to be one of her best career decisions. An MTV producer saw those pictures and decided that Crawford had a young male following that would fit MTV’s audience profile. She wasn’t prepared for the demands that hostessing House of Style put on her. “Basically it was a day job for me. I was called in, I’d read a few cards, and that was it,” she recalls. “It evolved into so much more. Now I’m much more involved with what the show’s gonna be.”