Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  In 1978, while divorcing Judith, Jeremy Foster-Fell opened Beaumont Models. “He took my bookers and paid them twice what I was paying,” Judith says. “He told me, ‘Ellen showed me how to do it.’” Beaumont went bust in 1982, when its backer, Juan Zavala, was charged with stealing $2.6 million from Barclays Bank and the Small Business Administration, jumped $500,000 bail, and disappeared. Foster-Fell and his second wife, Barbara, also a model, then started an agency called L’Image. It was financed by Ed Feldman, a model’s husband and financial consultant who’d previously worked with Bernie Cornfeld’s IOS. Feldman, who still lends money to model agencies, freely admits that their relationship ended after he put Foster-Fell in the hospital by beating him with a mallet.

  Foster-Fell took a well-deserved vacation in Vancouver after that, but a year later he was back in New York and the agency business. Married to yet another model, he found yet another backer and bought the Foster-Fell name back from his first wife. Judith retired to the country “and never looked back,” she says. Jeremy took the company public—and then got fired. Four days later he was back in business, in partnership with Dick Robie, who owned John Robert Powers. That relationship ended in a lawsuit. Today Foster-Fell is on his fifth model wife and is still running Foster-Fell out of a dingy office in an unglamorous neighborhood.

  Back at the top of the business, Stewart Cowley and Barbara Stone had turned Stewart Models into a powerhouse. With Twiggy and the Ford rejects Veruschka and Marisa Berenson in their stable, the agency became what Stewart Cowley had always wanted. “Eileen’s bailiwick was Europe,” Stone says. “I’d done pretty good with her slop, her inability to spot good models. But I had to find more. So I turned toward the United States.”

  Lucy Angle had wanted to be a model from the moment she heard that George Harrison of the Beatles had married Patti Boyd. In January 1967 Angle celebrated her sixteenth birthday by moving to New York. By that December she’d appeared on the covers of Seventeen and Bazaar, but she worked mostly for Glamour and Mademoiselle. “They were proponents of the all-American thing that took over fashion in the seventies,” Angle says. Stewart’s models were in the forefront of that look.

  Cheryl Tiegs also arrived at Stewart in 1966. A farmer’s daughter from Minnesota, she’d spent a year in a trailer park in Wichita, Kansas, before her family moved to Alhambra, California, when she was five. Her father worked as a mechanic while studying to become a mortician. At a high school dinner she listened to a model agent give a speech and then joined his Pasadena agency. For four years she modeled part-time, posing for illustrations, department stores, and beach movies, earning little or nothing. Then she joined the Nina Blanchard Agency in Los Angeles.

  Modeling was a tiny business in L.A. in the sixties. Walter Thornton was the first agent to open there, and his license passed to one Dorothy Prebble, who had a modeling school. Mary Webb Davis ran that school for a while, then took over its offices and Prebble’s few models. Her office door was later immortalized on television’s 77 Sunset Strip, even though its actual address was 8532 Sunset Boulevard. Davis opened her agency there in 1947.

  Nina Blanchard was married to a New York television producer, and when his show went off the air, Blanchard and her husband bought a Midas muffler franchise in Phoenix. “I know how to split a manifold,” she says, “but I’ll tell you, you live in Phoenix a year and you’ll want to come back to your phony friends.” After a series of jobs in L.A. charm schools Blanchard decided to set up on her own in June 1961.

  She had one real model, Peggy Moffitt, and about a dozen pretenders. “I sent out a brochure and started getting calls. I knew ten of my thirteen girls couldn’t move, so I said they were all booked.” It being L.A., people decided she had to be the most exclusive agent in town.

  Tiegs came to the attention of New York editors and agents in 1964, after she appeared in a Cole of California swimsuit ad in Seventeen magazine. Julie Britt, an editor at Glamour, booked her sight unseen for a shooting in St. Thomas. For the next four years Tiegs worked for Glamour and ’Teen, winning covers and disproving the notion that a model had to live in New York to be successful. She’d gone from beach to big time.

  Finally, in 1966, Bob MacLeod, the publisher of ’Teen, convinced her to join Stewart Models. A former publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, MacLeod had battled with the Fords over model rates; he’d almost opened a Hearst model agency to compete with them. He believed Tiegs would be lost on Ford’s head sheet and was so sensitive she “could have easily been discouraged by less than a large amount of personal attention,” he says.

  Cheryl Tiegs on her first magazine cover in 1966

  Cheryl Tiegs, courtesy Teen magazine

  Her image was goody-goody California blond—healthy, if a little vapid; enthusiastic, if not terribly interesting. She promoted that image with a vengeance. “I would show up on time, and I would work late if people asked me to, and I would care for the people that I worked with,” Tiegs says. “I don’t mean to be saying this to puff myself up. I hope it doesn’t sound like that. But if they believed in [their product], then I was going to get on the bandwagon and help them out with it. That’s what we were all there for. And I worked closely with people like Cover Girl for many years and had long-term relationships and cared about them and their families.”

  By 1967 Tiegs was one of the country’s top junior models. She had seventy covers on her résumé and earned as much as $3,000 a week. That year, she moved in with an advertising executive named Stan Dragoti, whom she married in 1970. She also appeared for the first time in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, working for an editor named Jule Campbell.

  Campbell came from Glamour magazine, where she’d been the accessories editor, under model turned editor Betty McLauchlen Dorso. Campbell joined SI in 1959 and put together its first swimwear spread in 1964 as an accompaniment for a travel story on a Mexican resort. Campbell didn’t like New York models. “They were skinny, skinny, skinny,” she says. “I wanted girls with meat on ’em, so I never booked top models. I discovered my own. I looked for girls who led a sportif life.”

  By 1968 Stewart Models was challenging Ford’s preeminence. “We were the best in the world for a while there,” Stewart Cowley says. Though Stone had attracted a group of top models, including Tiegs, Susan Dey, Randi Oakes, Sigourney Weaver, and Lois Chiles, television was the key to his agency’s ascendance. Cowley had moved aggressively into the commercial business and opened a talent division to get its models into television and movies. More important, though, while Stone ran the agency, Cowley put together the first successful model search promotion since the Miss Rheingold contest.

  “I’d watched Miss America get top, top ratings,” Cowley says. “I’d go down to Atlantic City to interview the contestants. They all wanted to be models, but they were a bunch of bimbos. So I thought, what if we had a show with girls who really could be top models?” Cowley’s first Model of the Year contest aired live in prime time in 1967 on CBS. It was known as Stewart’s Folly, he says, until it won a huge audience share. In 1968 the winner was a recent high school graduate named Cybill Shepherd, who quickly became one of Stewart’s top models. For the next two years it seemed that Shepherd and Tiegs had a lock on Glamour’s cover. Then, in 1970, Shepherd met director Peter Bogdanovich after he saw her on a cover, and she went off to star in his film The Last Picture Show.

  Stewart Cowley of Stewart Models with his Model of the Year, Cybill Shepherd (second from right), and runners-up in 1967

  Stewart Cowley and Cybill Shepherd, photographer unknown, courtesy Stewart Cowley

  In 1969 Stewart International Productions, Inc., went public, selling its stock on the open market and offering to buy European agencies like Paris Planning. (Ford tried to go public, too, “but the market fell apart and, happily for us, we didn’t,” says Jerry Ford.) Within a year Stewart’s billings and earnings had gotten clobbered by the shaky economy. He also had legal problems. CBS had dropped its option to air a third Mod
el of the Year pageant when it was sued by a man in Miami who claimed Cowley had stolen his contest idea. Although Stewart Models remained in operation until 1982, from then on Cowley’s attentions were so diverted, and he was involved in so much litigation, that he came to be known in the business as Suin’ Stew.

  Barbara Stone was frustrated. “We were number two,” she says, “I wanted to knock Eileen Ford’s block off, but there was not the money to make the last thrust and really spend to almost buy girls in Europe and set them up in apartments here. Another factor was that I had a husband and a life. The Fords never had dinner without three or four models and photographers. They didn’t have a life.” And there was another, internal problem at Stewart Models. “I just couldn’t stand Stew Cowley anymore,” Stone says. He was obsessed with his lawsuits. “I can’t blame him,” she adds. “He worked very hard to pull that contest off.”

  Then Cowley had a heart attack. Stone went to the hospital and, with his doctor’s permission, she says, offered to buy the agency from him. “Her contract was up,” Cowley says. “She demanded the presidency and a lot more money.” Cowley was already angry with her. “She liked girls like Veruschka, who did prestige work,” he says. “The catalog girls were money machines, and she said she couldn’t stand them.” Two of them had left and gone to Ford. Then there was the matter of Stone’s expenses. Models would stay with Stone and her husband. “I got a bill every Monday for several hundred dollars for rooms, dinners,” Cowley says. “I was paying Barbara Stone’s rent!” So when she issued her ultimatum in the hospital, Cowley says, “We let her go.”

  When she told him she was starting her own agency, Cowley sued to stop her. Her contract had a restrictive covenant, barring her from competing for two years and calling for arbitration to settle disputes. At the end of a summer of negotiations Stone won the right to open in exchange for her agreement not to steal any Stewart models for a year. “I thought that was the kiss of death,” Stone says, “but I stubbornly opened anyway,” and exactly one year later ten of her models jumped over from Stewart to the new Stone Models.

  Despite the high-powered models who joined her, Stone soon went out of business. Her first year operating without models had hurt her, and she never really recovered. “I had a huge apartment,” she says. “Dick and my son hated girls living there, walking around in bra and panties. I’d throw parties for four hundred people. But I couldn’t do anything creative without a million dollars, and everyone who wanted to inject money wanted to inject the models, if you get what I mean. I got out before I went berserk. I was too easily hurt, I think. I didn’t have the hard skin Eileen Ford had.”

  The final blow was delivered by Cheryl Tiegs. After three years of semiretirement, reading and playing tennis in L.A. while Stan Dragoti entered the movie business, Tiegs returned to modeling in 1972. “I’d gotten thin and fit and looked older,” Tiegs says. “I went into high fashion. I just started accepting more jobs and realized that it was fun after all.”

  Julie Britt had gone to work at Harper’s Bazaar, and Tiegs started working there. In July 1971 Hearst hired James Brady, then the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, and installed him over Nancy White as Bazaar’s publisher and editorial director. “Nancy saw the handwriting on the wall and resigned within a month,” says Brady. He dubbed his Bazaar “the thinking woman’s fashion magazine,” brought in new editors and topical writers, and squeezed out art directors Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, both of whom ended up at Condé Nast, as did their replacement, Rochelle Udell. Brady even hired a Richard Nixon look-alike to pose in an early fashion layout and ran a photo of Faye Dunaway with unshaved armpits. “He was a daily journalist,” says an ex-Hearst editor. “He was not visually astute.”

  “The magazine had leprosy,” says another editor of that time. “No one wanted to come near it. It was too weird. The turmoil in the country was present in all the pages.” Hearst’s powers were appalled. “It was fun on the one hand and ominous on the other,” Brady says. “As we were number two in a two-horse race, I thought I had a license to change.” But sixteen months after he started, Brady was fired by letter. It said a new team—headed by Anthony Mazzola, a Hearst art director—would be taking over.

  Mazzola remade Bazaar as a celebrity fashion magazine. He favored saccharine blond models, Hollywood starlets, and themed issues like “Forty and Fabulous” or “The World’s 10 Most Beautiful Women” (staffers called them “The Old Bag Issue” and the “Ten Most Available”). The models Mazzola favored were given featured treatment, and Tiegs was one of the first.

  Soon she had contracts with Cover Girl and Virginia Slims cigarettes. Everything was fine until the mid-seventies, when Tiegs and Stone had what both refer to without elaboration as “a personal difference.” Tiegs was in Rome, modeling the collections, when she joined Ford. “I just walked up to Eileen and talked to her,” she says. “It was as easy as that.” Then she adds cryptically, “It didn’t come as any surprise that [Stone] shut down.”

  After Tiegs left, “I lost the heart one needed to continue” is all Stone will say. “A few months before she closed, Barbara and her husband came to see me about merging Stone and Mannequin,” says Gillis MacGil. “But I discovered she was less than truthful about her financial condition. She was out of business two weeks later.” Stone called the Fords and gave them a day to buy her out. The next morning she met with one of Ford’s attorneys, the closeted homosexual Roy Cohn, who’d become a power in New York in the days since he started his career as a pit bull lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy. “He was the most disgusting human being that ever existed,” Stone says. “He had frogs on his desk and looked like he’d come out from under a rock himself. It was a boring meeting, so I wandered around and came to a hall into a connecting town house and there was this boytoy in bed wearing satin underpants.” When Ford agreed to take over and pay off her models, Stone left the business, never to return.

  All through the sixties one modeling agency stayed apart from the pack. Paul Wagner, a handsome blond onetime male model, opened the Paul Wagner Agency in the Brill Building in 1957. “You wouldn’t say he was a nelly, but he was flamboyant, a mad queen who knew how to run a business,” says Dan Deely, a booker who later worked for him. The same year he opened, Wagner met a teenager, Zoltan Rendessy, who was known as Zoli. “I had a lover,” Wagner says. “I came home one night and found the two of them flying around my apartment like naked wood nymphs.”

  Zoli had come to America from his native Györ, Hungary, as a refugee of World War II. He was the child of an Hungarian Army captain who was estranged from his wife, a dance instructor. She, Zoli, and his older sister, Livia, left their hometown a few hours before Russian troops took it over in 1945. “They hid the three of us among the luggage in the back of a bus,” Livia Rendessy Oliver recalls. Zoli was raised in Austria and London, attended boarding schools, and he and his mother followed Livia to Alabama, where she’d settled with an American husband, in 1956. Soon, though, their mother got a job in New York and brought Zoli there. He was fifteen years old and “a rebellious young man,” says his sister. “He wanted the good life, and my mother, who’d gotten a job in a cafeteria, couldn’t give it to him. He probably didn’t want to tell my mother what he needed.”

  The night he met Zoli, Wagner ordered him and their mutual lover out of his apartment. But when they met again soon afterward, Wagner says, “Zoli and I seemed to have bonded.” They went to New Orleans together, returned to New York, and moved in together. Wagner needed help in his agency, so he gave the young man a job.

  Wagner booked only women until 1964, when he went to England, saw what was happening there, and signed up a bunch of long-haired men on his return. “Everyone thought, ‘This man’s crazy,’” Wagner reports. “But in less than six months all the stores got mod clothes and wanted long-haired male models. In less than a year I controlled ninety percent of the men’s photographic work in New York. The Fords laughed. Barbara Stone laughed. While they laughed, I was
making money.”

  He started to operate in a grand manner. Wagner’s office had red flocked wallpaper, a French desk, and a gold cigarette lighter in the shape of an angel that played music each time it was flicked. “The staff bought him a Persian lamb coat, and he bought a white Afghan hound to go with it,” remembers Vickie Pribble, who joined him after leaving Ford. “He’d play records and sing and dance. The girls were so elegant, always swathed in fur. One of them came in with nothing underneath and would flash us. Sinatra was dating all those girls. I think that’s where the fur coats came from.”

  Zoli and Wagner were part of the social avant-garde. In January 1966 Zoli was arrested along with about thirty friends when police raided a marijuana party in his East Fifty-fifth Street penthouse apartment. “Smelling marijuana fumes, the patrolmen searched and found—in addition to a rug, a bed and a blaring hi-fi set, the only furniture in the apartment—several marijuana cigarettes, 15 pep pills and some loose marijuana,” The New York Times reported the next day. “They were on cloud nine and did they stink!” one of the arresting officers announced when the happy crowd of girls with Sassoon haircuts and boys with beatnik goatees was brought in to be booked for disorderly conduct. Zoli was charged with maintaining a premises for the use of narcotics.

  By the late sixties Wagner wanted to be a singer more than an agent and began absenting himself from the agency as he started his new career. “Every time I tried to step away to work in Vegas or whatever, I was pulled back by some trauma,” he says. “I was tired of it. Next thing I was off to Europe. I was away a long time.” In his absence Wagner put Zoli and another executive in charge of his two divisions, booking models like Richard Roundtree, Pam Huntington, Christina Paolozzi, Geraldine Frank, and Cheyenne. But soon Wagner’s employees grew disenchanted. Dan Deely, who’d worked in the men’s division, left for Wilhelmina in 1968 to open a men’s board there.