Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  “’Round about that same time Christian Dior tried to force me into signing a three-year contract starting at fifty dollars a week and going to one hundred fifteen dollars the third year. When I told Williamson, he said, ‘That’s ridiculous. You should be a photography model. They make fifty dollars an hour, for God’s sake!’

  “I was afraid not to sign this Dior contract because I was desperately afraid of losing my secure job. But I got the idea from Williamson that he would disrespect anyone who was so lame that they would sign it, and I blew them off. I’d met Gillis MacGil, who ran Mannequin, and she would call me when there were little jobs, and I started doing showroom modeling once every two weeks to make enough money to go on go-sees, and try and get a book together. I got the names of two or three photographers. One guy did catalog stuff and took some pictures of me. The other guy was a wonderful man named Carl Shiraishi, and for three weekends we just shot pictures, and he basically made my book.

  “Finally I went to Frances Gill, Plaza Five, and Stewart, and they all turned me down; but they would always tell me why, and I would try to fix everything. I had been doing this for a while, and I figured it was time to go to Eileen, and she basically told me the same things everyone else had. I was on my way out of her office, desperate, because that was the last agency there was and I’d saved the best for last, when I saw a picture of some kids on the wall, and I said, ‘Oh, is your son in college? I just left college.’ She looked up. She was already on the phone, but she said, ‘Where’d you go?’ And I said, ‘Sophie Newcomb.’ I was burning with shame. I was being pushy or obvious, all these horrible things you’re taught never to do down South, but I did it, and she said, ‘Sophie Newcomb!’ I sat right down. She accepted me because I’d gone there. I guess she thought it meant there was more to me than met the eye.

  “I was on what they called the junior board to see if I would last or not. My booker would make appointments, three or four a day, and then I would make another six. It was dizzying. I would get little nibbles. A little job here, a little job there. I also did a lot of fittings, because I had a perfect size eight body. And finally, at month seven, I was doing a fitting for Cathy di Montezemolo, and she looked at me funny one day and said, ‘Come on up to Vogue.’ I told my booker that she wanted me. My booker went crazy. I had to go to Vogue one afternoon like three days later and try on the clothes for the real models that couldn’t come. There were three fitting models. We weren’t humans; we were just bodies.

  “We were in this huge red room with windows all along one side, window seats, and a shiny black lacquer desk. And there at the desk at the end of the room, with these little white gloves on and this hairdo and this nose and these burning eyes, was this raptor, an empress raptor. I’ve always loved raptors and snakes, and there she was. Diana Vreeland. I had not heard much about her. But I could tell she was some sort of serious cheese.

  “Along one side was a couch, and on that couch were maybe eight editors. Gloria Schiff, Babs Simpson, Cathy di Montezemolo, Polly Mellen, Nicky de Gunzburg with his Cartier lighters. We were just scurrying around. Nobody ever noticed models. So I tried on some things, and she was playing these games. She’d say these horrible things you’ve never heard before and hang some of these editors out with the wash, and they’d all say, ‘How divine,’ and she’d say, ‘But not really.’

  “Finally, after we’d been there about an hour or so, I just stopped. I sat on this window seat, and I completely forgot myself. I thought I was hidden by the racks and these other girls were marching around. Vreeland was in the middle of a sentence, talking about the dress. ‘It’s too poor, it’s simply too—You!’ I remember this glove, this long finger on the glove, pointing to me in the middle of a sentence. I said, ‘Me?’ And she said, ‘Yes, you have quite a presence!’ I didn’t quite know what that meant. But I said, ‘Boy, so do you.’

  “She made a face and went right back into the middle of her sentence. But as we were all filing out, she said, ‘You, come back.’ I was alone with her. She said, ‘So, what do you do? How long have you been doing it? Have you a book?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ She opened it up, and she stopped over pictures that Eileen had hated, that were taken by a wonderful photographer named Lee Kraft, and she said, ‘I’m sending you to Dick Avedon tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Oh, but I don’t think so. I’ve seen him several times.’ And she gave me this funny smile-smirk and said, ‘I think he will. You’re working with him tomorrow!’ It was an eight-page spread, still some of the best pictures ever taken of me, leaping in the air.

  “I became Dick’s great model after all the big couture girls died. Being with Dick was like being with another kid in the playground. Vogue would put out these huge tables with two hundred pairs of shoes and another table just piled with jewelry. Vogue was a huge, serious operation, but the studio was a wonderland of make-believe. Dick and I would plow through all these things and dress me up and tell each other stories. He would demonstrate little things past girls did with his own body, and he cross-pollinated all the girls. He would show me a foot movement of Shrimpton’s, and I’d do it my way. He’d show Twiggy something of Veruschka’s. And I’ve since seen Stephanie Seymour in a pose that I discovered.

  “What was funny was that Bazaar and Vogue worked together. Dick Avedon and Hiro shared a studio on Fifty-eighth Street, just around the corner from Bloomingdale’s, and Bazaar was on one side with Hiro, and Dick was on the other side for Vogue, and they had a common reception room. In those days the editors lived and died for fashion, and they would grab you physically if you tried to talk to a model from Bazaar. It was all this huge drama and fits, yelling and screaming and carrying on. It was high fashion. It was fabulous. There was even a fan club of fashion students outside. We didn’t know it then, but Steven Meisel was the head cheerleader.

  “Once I was in Vogue, that was that. I was off the junior board. The same month I came out on my first Vogue cover, November 1966, I had a Mademoiselle cover, which was a first. What did Ford have to do with it? All Ford did was take me on. They were a billing and booking service. And they charged ten percent, but it was well worth it.

  “I was twenty-two by then, so I was late getting started. I learned in the dressing rooms from the giant Germans. I would be sitting with Astrid Herrene, Brigitta Klercker, or Brigitte Bauer, or Veruschka, and I would watch them. We didn’t have makeup men. Those girls were all artists at doing makeup. I was constantly inventing and reinventing myself in makeup. I learned the hard way. If they had makeup men, they were leftovers from the fifties. They’d do a job, you’d think you looked horrible. Then you’d wait for the ad to come out, and you wouldn’t be in it!

  “I was continually awestruck. I was constantly seeing things that I had never seen before, like that red room. But I never lost my goal. I was in it for the money. I always tried to remember that, and I always tried to remember, when money started rolling in, that most people made in a month what I made in a week. Now, of course, I make it in a minute.

  “I had six jobs every day. Six photographers, six sets of hair and makeup, and ten suits from the ad agency who just wanted to see the models. Ten, twenty different people, five of whom were touching you. It’s a big mental strain. I remember this one photographer, one of the most extraordinary lames I’ve ever met. He didn’t know what he was doing. To make his pictures printable, barely, I had to tell him how to move his lights. I did the whole thing according to what I had been taught by the greats, but without telling him, of course, because photographers had this attitude. The worse they were, the less you could suggest to them. You had to do it without them knowing. I became a master at making them think it was their idea. So after going through all these hoops so we could get the picture, I remember him sitting behind his big eight-by-ten camera, saying, ‘No wonder Penn is Penn! He gets to work with models like you!’ He really was indignant, this guy. I never saw him again, and neither did anyone else.

  “I had done five, six Vogue covers before I did cata
logs. I had to learn. It took me months. They would cut the dresses apart on you and straight-pin them back on you, stuffed with toilet paper. They had giant eight-by-ten cameras, and you had to stand there with your face alive, but not moving for twenty minutes, in a walking position! If you moved anything, the dress would fall apart.

  “Vogue models were making around five hundred, six hundred dollars a week, maybe they’d get a four-hundred-dollar booking for some ad that was snobby enough for them, and they’d go out and buy an eight-hundred-dollar dress! I remember giving lectures in the dressing room about saving your money, about making money, about taxes. They hadn’t heard about taxes. We were in a fifty-three percent tax bracket. Before I bought anything, I would think to myself; ‘Ten percent to the agency, fifty-three percent to the government.’

  “I worked solid for the first year, and at the end of the year Williamson said, ‘OK, guess what? I think it’s time to go to Africa.’ And that’s what we did. Bob gave me great advice. There’s so much stress and strain, and you can be gasping for air so hard in this business that if you don’t just take off and forget it completely and rest and sleep, you lose your real face, you lose your spirit, you lose everything. Your smiles become fake. You’re so tired you have nothing to smile about. After the first two or three years I got to the position where I would be two months on, two months off. Bob was wonderful about making sure that happened. And for about sixteen years, every year we went to Africa, we went to South America, we went to Asia. I don’t think I would have made it without him.

  “I worked steadily for ten years. I started when I was twenty-two, and I signed my Revlon contract in 1974, when I was thirty-two. That was when Catfish Hunter came around. He signed a three-point-seven-five-million-dollar contract with the Yankees, and that started me thinking. I asked Williamson how to do it. Most of these things were my ideas, but I didn’t know how to go about setting them in motion. Williamson set them all up. He knew nothing about the modeling business, but he’s extremely intelligent and had enormous common sense.

  “Williamson told me to call Eileen and have her tell all my photographers—Dick, Penn, everybody—that I wouldn’t work for the day rate anymore. I wanted a contract. Dick got it instantly. He thought it was a great idea. He decided I should try for an exclusive contract, so I’d work only for Revlon and I’d get more money. So he started talking to Revlon and became a coconspirator in this. We did tests together that we showed [Revlon owner] Charles Revson. Revson hated me. Revlon used me my first year in the business but never again for ten years, even though I was the biggest star around. I had the gap in my teeth; I was short and sort of funny-faced. I wasn’t a Revlon swan.

  “Dick was very smart politically. He told Revson he had an idea, he wanted to give Ultima Two its own look, but he wanted a free hand. We did tests together, and he showed them to Revson, and Revson didn’t recognize me. He said, ‘Who is that?’ Dick said, ‘Lauren.’ I got a contract for three years. It was designed by Bob Williamson, and it became the basis of every contract that followed.

  “For the next eight years I worked for Revlon twenty days a year. Otherwise I was off making movies and traveling. I didn’t really care about modeling anymore. I was making five movies a year and making much more money than I had modeling. But the movies I was making weren’t the movies I was watching. And except for a handful, they became less and less enjoyable, and I learned less and less making them. So I was creatively unfulfilled. And I rarely modeled anymore. The jobs dried up after I hit forty. Finally I stopped looking at fashion magazines altogether. They hurt my feelings. I was getting older and older, and the girls were getting younger and younger.

  “Then two things happened at once. I was in Yugoslavia making my last movie when Jerry Ford called about the Barneys ad and I said no. He called five times, and I kept saying no. He insisted, and Steven Meisel took the pictures. I’d been spending a lot of time alone. One Sunday I was sitting in an Indian restaurant, reading the Times, and there was this full-page ad of this beautiful woman—not a girl—and I didn’t recognize that it was me. Then I did, and I felt like I’d been punched in the heart. Meisel was the first photographer I’d worked with in years who didn’t try to shoot me as if I were a young girl. After that I got stopped by women on the street who said, ‘Thank you, we’ve been invisible for a decade.’

  “Then my leg got broken in an accident, and for four months I was in bed, and I was on crutches for five months after that. Everything stopped. I was by myself—no radio, no TV—in a fishing cottage in Montauk, Long Island. I dreamed, I thought, and I read. Bob would come on weekends and bring groceries. I realized that my life had gone out of control, and I hadn’t liked it in a long time. The distractions in New York are limitless, and for years I’d gone out every night and never faced myself. My best movie, American Gigolo, was made when I was thirty-eight, and I started to study acting at thirty-nine. The parts were getting worse and worse while I was getting better and better. My creative energy was eating me alive.

  “By your mid-40s, if you haven’t resolved your childhood problems, quiet desperation takes over, and in my case it wasn’t so quiet. Nothing was ever cemented down for me. My life had had too many extremes. I had made Bob responsible for so much of my life I no longer felt I owned it. We drifted in different directions. So I sat down and decided to face myself. I changed a lot.

  “The Barneys ads had made me understand that it wasn’t just me who’d been hurt by fashion ads. I understood it was a historical, societal problem and that if I quit movies and went full tilt back into modeling, I could be of use and keep the wolf from the door. Until then nobody was interested in us. This was a historical fact for hundreds of years: As soon as they were out of eggs, women were out of business. Those pictures showed you could be good-looking and sexually attractive after forty. I finally understood that it wasn’t just me who’d become invisible in the eighties. It was my whole generation, and none of us liked it very much, and we did not want to go quiet into that good night.

  “Ever since the feminist revolt women have gone into every profession except what may be the most important one. They’d had absolutely no control over the physical image of women. Most photographers only shoot girls, and when they see a woman, they don’t know what to do. So I started calling every editor I knew. British and German Vogue got it first and did wonderful stories about me and that idea. After that there was no stopping us. I spent the next two years talking and working. I found you could change your life. It’s a tall order, but it can be done. I also met Luca Babini, a wonderful Italian photographer who liked women, and we fell in love.

  “I’ve never been prouder of anything in my life than I have been of these last three years. Models are the physical mirror of femininity. They should come in all sizes, shapes, and ages, and now they do. If my two careers mean anything, it’s that. I found a way not just to get what I wanted out of it—to educate myself and see the world—but also to be of use to everybody else. I think maybe I helped make what seemed to be the most superficial profession into one that’s important.”

  $120 AN HOUR

  “The sixties were about personalities,” Diana Vreeland wrote in her autobiography, D. V. “It was the first time when mannequins became personalities … these girls invented themselves. Naturally, as an editor, I was there to help them along.”

  Richard Avedon had just finished photographing and editing the entire April 1965 issue of Bazaar—with Jean Shrimpton on the cover—by himself and, after twenty years, was renegotiating his contract. “I felt they should treat me well, and they were very rough about it,” he says. Nonetheless, he shook hands with Hearst on a new ten-year deal.

  “Your contract should be ending,” Vreeland said when she called him that night. He said he’d just made a new deal. She countered, “Will you at least hear what we have to say?” Two days later Avedon met with Alexander Liberman. Condé Nast’s president, Iva Patcévitch, flew in from Europe to clinch the deal, and w
ithin days Avedon signed and collected an unprecedented million-dollar advance. “Then I vomited for about two weeks without stopping,” he says. “I learned everything at Bazaar, and now I was going to ‘the enemy camp.’”

  The loss of Avedon marked the end of Bazaar’s creative preeminence. Under Vreeland, Vogue rose inexorably and “took first place,” Alexander Liberman says. Within months fashion stylist Polly Mellen joined Vogue, too, and found herself at the red-hot center of the decade. Exotic was the new norm. Vogue became home to Edie and Andy, Courrèges and the Kinks. Irving Penn shot faucets dripping Harry Winston diamonds. Bert Stern shot Marilyn Monroe in the nude. Where just a moment before, “clothes were totally structured, you wore a hat and gloves and smoked, and it was all about gesture,” says Polly Mellen. Suddenly fashion loosened up. “The flower children, the new culture, were coming forward,” she adds. “It was all parties, drugs, and madness, and the girls who chose to be part of it were the girls who were booked. Everything became more eccentric, more strange.”

  Exotic-looking society girls like Ingrid Boulting, Penelope Tree, and Marisa Berenson became stars of the moment, thanks to another Vreeland innovation: She published their names in the magazine. Berenson, the daughter of a diplomat and granddaughter of the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, was born in New York and raised in Europe. She started modeling in 1964 as “a young, up-and-coming debutante” studying decorating in London, she says. Her first photographs were taken by David Bailey for British Vogue. “From then on I worked for Vogue practically every day of my life,” Berenson says. “My career literally took off.” She worked with every great photographer of her time, including Avedon, Newton, Stern, Jimmy Moore, Sokolsky, Beaton, and Henry Clarke. “I was a cover girl,” she says. “I was lucky. I didn’t find myself beautiful. I was a baby, the child of Vogue.” Berenson modeled until 1970, when she met Luchino Visconti, who cast her in his film Death in Venice and launched her on a new career as an actress.