Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  MTV taught her to be comfortable in front of video and film cameras and, she believes, led directly to the first of her popular series of Pepsi commercials, her subsequent signing with the William Morris agency for nonmodeling work, and her best-selling exercise videos. “People got to see me being real, so it’s demystified the glamour a lot,” she said in 1994. “That lets the general public embrace you and made me more valuable to Pepsi, which wanted a beautiful all-American girl that people could relate to. Five years ago I didn’t really know where everything was going. Things would come up, I would usually say, ‘Well, why not?’ And if there was no ‘Why not?’ I would do it. I kind of had my one finger in ten different pies, and I learned things I did like and things I didn’t like, and thank God, I didn’t make any major fumbles along the way, so things have really come together. I’m doing my thing, as opposed to coming in and putting on whatever dress they hand me and whatever face they tell me.”

  She earned royalties from her calendars but “gave half the money away to charity,” she says. “That made it palatable for me. OK, it’s really cheesy, but I also understood that it went to a different audience from Vogue readers.” Her next project was more lucrative and less cheesy. “Instead of trying to create equity for other people, I’m trying to create it for myself,” she says. “That’s why the exercise video was really important for me. I was a full partner in that. It was thirty degrees, and we were shooting on the beach, but hey, if we had to do another shooting day, it was going to cost that much more out of my part of the profit. You definitely think about that when you have something invested as well.” Crawford’s video sold two million copies in its first month of release.

  Once again she was leading the pack. Right after her exercise video came out, she heard that Claudia Schiffer’s agent had started calling the company she’d made it with, feeling it out about doing one with Schiffer. “Part of me is flattered,” Crawford says. “Part of me is irritated. Why am I the one who has to come up with all the good ideas?” The same goes with being on television. “At the last collections every model had a camera crew following her around! Christy, Naomi, Veronica Webb!” Cindy exclaims. “Even Claudia had Entertainment Tonight. The most challenging thing now is that I gotta stay one step ahead.”

  One way she’s done that is by branching out beyond the fashion model agency system. Although the latest agency angle has it that model managers can move models beyond modeling and can handle more than models (Dieter Esch has partnered with a firm that represents athletes; Elite’s Pillard recently opened a “celebrity” division), Crawford doesn’t buy it. “I’m actually really happy with Elite, and I’m happy because I’m still there,” she says. “Believe me, if I wasn’t happy, I wouldn’t be there. But I also think that modeling agencies don’t always look at the big picture. For instance, Monique didn’t really understand why I was doing MTV that first year. She said I should be doing catalogs and all that. And they couldn’t have done the video the way William Morris did. They wouldn’t have known how to put together that kind of deal. I’d have been hired for the day and gotten a small percentage, as opposed to fifty percent.”

  Crawford has apparently even managed to renegotiate her agency’s 20 percent commission. “Elite’s made enough money from me,” she says. “They understand that if I do a big, big deal, I’m not gonna be paying them twenty percent for the whole five years. They also bill the client twenty percent, which my lawyer assures me is usurious, or whatever that word is, but legal. He just can’t believe that. The newer you are, the harder they work for you, because they’re pushing you to everybody, you’re always doing these little jobs, and they advance you money. I don’t need that anymore. I see myself as a president of a company that owns a product, Cindy Crawford, that everybody wants. So I’m not powerless because I own that product. When you start thinking that the agency owns it and you don’t own it, then you have a problem. You have to have a pretty strong position to go in and negotiate, but it can be done. I know that if I went around shopping for agents, each one would go a percentage point less than the next, but I feel comfortable. What I’m paying now I feel is fair. I’m not paying full twenty percent on everything. But part of the agreement is that I don’t talk about it.”

  Ever since Anita Colby, the face of the early 1940s, went west, the typical path out of modeling had run through Hollywood. For a time that seemed to be where Cindy was going. She dated a William Morris agent. Then she met Richard Gere in 1988 at a Los Angeles barbecue for Elton John, hosted by photographer Herb Ritts, who shot her Playboy spread. “My mom, Shirley, pushed them together,” Ritts recalled the next year. “They got to talking, and it grew. He’s changed her. He’s a mature, intelligent guy. Anybody older, you learn if you’re open to it. It’s a very easy relationship. They’re very sweet and good to be around.”

  Gere was good for Crawford in many ways, not least because his celebrity added to hers and accelerated her momentum. While she was first dating him, she could often be found reading for movie roles and taking acting classes. “I’m sort of at the pinnacle of the model Cindy Crawford,” she said in 1989. “A career should get better as time goes on. So modeling is out. I’d like to show another side of myself.”

  But in Hollywood she was just another wannabe actress. Typically she wanted more, and with the guidance of William Morris and Gere she managed to avoid many of the pitfalls that have tripped up models turned actresses in the past. Elite brought her an offer for one film, White Orchids, but she turned it down because of its sex scenes. Then came a reading for Beverly Hills Cop II. “I had to pretend I was holding a guy by his collar, say, ‘Hey, squirrel brains,’ and then pull a gun out of my leather jump suit,” she says. Instead she couldn’t stop laughing. Luckily, “It’s not my whole life to be an actress,” she concluded. “And I don’t know if I deserve it if I won’t give up my firstborn for it.”

  Her independence also showed in the way she initially concealed her relationship with Gere. Though their coupling was common knowledge among fashion and film types, in public she referred to the actor only as “my friend in L.A.” “I don’t want to get scooped up in someone else’s fame,” she explained at the time, “because then it’s not mine. When I started modeling, no one knew me. I wasn’t someone’s daughter. I have managed to be this thing that appeared out of nowhere. I’ve never tried to be on ‘Page Six.’ I wasn’t in clubs and being seen. I don’t go to dinner every night when I’m on a trip, and photographers don’t like that. Models are supposed to be entertainment. I do my job. That validates me. My relationships are personal.”

  Finally, though, Crawford and Gere went public, and when they did, it was in style. Wearing a red Versace dress with a plunging décolletage at the Academy Awards in March 1990, Cindy nearly stole the show from her actor escort. It turned out that Crawford’s fame gave Gere’s career a boost and vice versa. At first they were cautious about appearing together in print, turning down a chance to grace the cover of Vanity Fair, for example. But finally they posed for a Vogue cover shot by matchmaker Ritts. “There was obviously no marketing move there,” Cindy says. “We never really made the decision. But unless we hibernated for the rest of our lives, it would have to be public sooner than later. How has it affected my life? I don’t think it really has. I get asked a lot of questions about him in interviews, that’s the main thing.”

  There are a lot more interviews. Crawford now graces the covers of Rolling Stone and People as often as Vogue and Bazaar. “I see myself as someone who speaks to my generation,” she says. But her new role wasn’t always comfortable. She and Gere were plagued in particular by recurring rumors that they both are gay. Though the couple had heard the stories in various versions—including one, Crawford says, in which Herb Ritts played their beard—they at first never acknowledged or denied them. Indeed, they sometimes seemed to be playing up the controversy, as when Gere refused to answer an interviewer who asked his sexual orientation or when Crawford posed for a magazine
cover with the lesbian chanteuse k. d. lang.

  “I wasn’t trying to make a statement; that’s my statement,” Crawford said of those pictures. But then, in 1994, press reports of the couple’s impending divorce caused them to reconsider. On May 6, The Times of London carried a $30,000 full-page ad headlined A PERSONAL STATEMENT BY RICHARD GERE AND CINDY CRAWFORD.

  “For some reason unknown to us, there has been an enormous amount of speculation in Europe lately concerning the state of our marriage,” it began. Citing a “very crude, ignorant and libelous” article in a French magazine, Voici, that claimed they were splitting up because they “wanted to assume their real sexuality,” Gere and Crawford wrote that despite feeling “quite foolish responding to such nonsense,” they wanted to “correct the falsehoods” and “alleviate the concerns of our friends and fans.” It continued:

  We got married because we love each other…. We are heterosexual and monogamous…. There is not and never has been a pre-nuptial agreement…. Reports of a divorce are totally false…. We both look forward to having a family…. Richard is not abandoning his career…. We will continue to support “difficult” causes such as AIDS research … Tibetan independence … Gay and Lesbian Rights … irrespective of what the tabloids try to imply.

  Now, that said, we do feel we have a basic right to privacy…. Marriage is hard enough without all this negative speculation. Thoughts and words are very powerful, so please be responsible, truthful and kind.

  In response, London’s Daily Mail made the double-negative observation that they hadn’t said they weren’t bisexual. In the months to come, newspapers continued to question the Crawford-Gere union, delighting in detailing Cindy’s and Richard’s increasingly frequent and public extramarital dalliances. And finally, in December, they issued a brief statement admitting they’d separated that July. Soon, Richard’s friends started saying Cindy was at fault.

  It’s enough to make anyone crazy. But Crawford is tough. Or at least the tough outer shell that modeling made for her is.

  She calls it the Thing.

  “Are you going to do the Thing tonight?” Gere would ask her when they were getting ready to go out.

  She fluffs her hair and strikes a pose, and suddenly the Thing is in the room. “I’m becoming this other character, and all of a sudden—I don’t know why—all of a sudden I’m brave, I’m telling jokes, I become much more theatrical … and then I wash it off.”

  Cindy Crawford laughs, and as suddenly as it appeared, the Thing slinks away.

  Mary Jane Russell photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe

  Mary Jane Russell by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

  PART ONE

  IN LOCO PARENTIS

  Who am I? I’m Polly, Polly Magoo.

  But between us, I’m not sure how I can answer you.

  You ask who I am.

  Sometimes, I ask myself, too.

  They take my picture.

  Every day, they take my picture, and that makes millions of times that they’ve taken my photo.

  And each time they take my picture, a little bit less of me is left.

  So what can I have left in the end?

  I ask you….

  —FROM THE FILM QUI ÊTES-VOUS, POLLY MAGOO,

  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY WILLIAM KLEIN

  $5 AN HOUR

  “It all started with being out of a job.”

  John Robert Powers was a dark, handsome man but a lousy actor, as he was the first to admit. So around 1915 he took a job as a bit player and wardrobe boy with impresario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the Shakespearean actor, in his touring theater troupe. Powers’s acting skills eventually won him a job as assistant business manager. When Tree closed his company, the scarcity of parts for a man with no talent became a problem.

  Then, one day, a man approached Powers about posing for a photograph with silent screen star Mary Pickford. Powers showed up at the appointed time and place three days in a row. Pickford never appeared. But Powers, $30 richer, had experienced nothing less than an epiphany. He found another commercial photographer who needed a model. Although he had a long, sharp nose, thick eyebrows, and thin lips, it didn’t seem to matter.

  It was the Damon Runyon era, when urban fables embellished their way from the Great White Way into history. So almost every account of the birth of the John Robert Powers agency differs from the last, sharing only hyperbole and an apocryphal quality. But a sketch emerges nonetheless of how Powers invented the modeling business. By the most likely account, in about 1921, Powers showed up for a job with a photographer named Baron Adolphe de Meyer. The baron worked for fashion magazines and clothing manufacturers. He asked Powers to round up seven more men to work in an ensemble. “I got them for him and then he kept asking me to get him some more,” Powers said. The job was easy because “most of my friends, like myself, were actors, and again like myself, they were what is laughingly known as ‘resting.’”

  These were the days when two-reel silent films were produced in a small circuit of studios stretching from South Brooklyn to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Out-of-work thespians would loiter in front of the Palace Theater in Fort Lee, hoping for work. Powers knew them all, and soon his pockets were overflowing with their phone numbers. Photographers began calling him instead of advertising for models. “I seemed to be able to get in touch with people more readily than anyone else,” Powers said. “Bit by bit I seemed to be assuming the proportions of an extra’s clearing house. But this was all unconscious. I didn’t have the business sense to see the possibilities.” Finally, though, “a great light smote me in the face. If I was becoming so useful, why couldn’t I become useful to myself?”

  Powers credited Alice Hathaway Burton, his wide-eyed Kewpie doll blond wife, with hatching the idea of a model agency. “There must be lots of commercial photographers looking for models,” she told him. “And we know dozens of actors and actresses out of work. Why can’t we find a way of bringing them together?”

  So Powers “had their pictures taken, made up a catalogue containing their descriptions and measurements, and sent it to anyone in New York who might be a prospective client—commercial photographers, advertisers, department stores, artists,” he recalled. “There were not more than 40 people listed in that first catalogue,” which was published in 1923, “but the idea was a new one. While I had started with the idea of supplying a demand, I began to realize that I was creating one.”

  A lucky break with real estate helped, too. “John lived in an old brownstone over a speakeasy just off Broadway then,” a friend of his remembered. “That was the humble beginning of the modeling industry. It went on like that—over the speakeasy—until Steve Hannagan, the press agent who was building up Miami Beach on a solid foundation of bathing beauty pictures, started nudging John to get away from Broadway and move his operation to Park Avenue.” Hannagan had a traveling architect friend with offices on the second floor at 247 Park Avenue that he let Powers share.

  Soon Powers, Alice, their three assistants, and seven French phones crowded the architect out. One wall was lined with charts—writing pads, actually—one per model, detailing jobs the agency had booked for its models, broken down into fifteen-minute intervals, and noting what accessories they needed to bring along. Powers would sit at a small table in the anteroom behind the door labeled “John Robert Powers Publications,” greeting visitors himself, studying everyone who walked in with his ever more practiced eye. He called himself “the highest paid reception clerk in the city.”

  Charles Rainey, the aging widower of Powers’s only child, an adopted daughter, lives surrounded by Powers agency mementos in the suburban ranch-style house on a corner lot in the Los Angeles suburb of Toluca Lake, where Powers lived before his death in 1977. “He did begin in 1923,” Rainey says, “but he didn’t get his act together until 1925.” He pulls out books and columns by his father-in-law and even a couple of children’s mystery novels featuring Powers Girl sleuths.

  “He was
a very good-looking man,” Rainey continues. “As an actor he was a spear carrier. That’s how he described himself.” Rainey points to an oil painting on his wall, titled “Her Knight Off.” It shows Powers, dressed in armor, jumping off a horse to save Alice, a damsel in distress.

  Rainey hands over a yellowing booklet, the Actor’s Directory and Studio Guide of April 1925, vol. 2, no. 2. John Robert Powers is listed as the publisher with offices at 19 West Forty-sixth Street. In an introduction he wrote, “The kind approval bestowed upon preceding issues renders it unnecessary to offer any apology for the appearance of our present number…. Our directory does, we think, strengthen the collusion so much to be desired among the members of the profession.” What profession, he doesn’t say.

  From the look of Gaston DuVal, with his twirled, waxed mustache and chestful of medals, preening inside, Powers would have happily taken bookings for Prussian officers. Among the women there are flappers, dowagers, and scruffs who look as if they stepped straight off the silver screen.

  By 1932 Powers’s booklet had grown up into a thick hard-cover book containing about five hundred models, very similar to today’s model head books. Models paid $25 a year to appear in it. Hannah Lee Sherman, a debutante in a long satin gown, is shown in Lauren Hutton in a photograph by Gabor Eder. Her height (5 feet 7 inches), weight (121 pounds), and measurements (32-27-35) are given, along with her shoe, glove, and hat sizes and her home phone number.

  Rainey pulls out scrapbooks Powers kept of his clippings. They are filled with stories about his models and about the society lifestyle modeling brought him. “They lived in a fifty-two-room estate in Locust Valley on Long Island,” Rainey says. “They had fifty acres. My wife grew up there. She had seven horses. He became a society person. They’d winter in Florida at the Everglades Hotel on Worth Avenue.” Powers spent money like water. “John would give away the store,” according to Rainey. “He wasn’t ever poor. He tried to keep up.” The scrapbooks show the Powerses at play at a Palm Beach dinner hosted by the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys. Powers models, “gay as magpies and dressed to the hilt,” traveled with him, enlivening the southern scene and not coincidentally garnering considerable publicity. Once Powers caught on, he played his hand for all it was worth.