Jordan introduced Cleveland to Antonio. “And oh, boy, the world stood still,” she says. “But I was working with Manning, doing the collections. Then they took him off the job, and there was Antonio. Great God! This is as high as you can go in fashion. He asked me to come to Europe, and I packed my bag. This rag doll, no tits, was on her way to Europe.”
Her first stop was Milan, but she soon left to join Antonio and his group in Paris. “I went to stay with Antonio in an apartment on rue Bonaparte he lent to his friends,” Cleveland says. “No agency. I met Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Hans Feurer. But I was turning down covers because Antonio and Karl Lagerfeld were taking my life away. We worked together in St.-Tropez. I’d go to lunch on the beach in diamond collars, bracelets, rings, high-heeled shoes and a G-string.”
Meanwhile, Club Sept had been discovered. “You saw everyone there,” says male model Ingo Thouret. “Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Grace Jones. It was one big saloon of flirting. Everything was possible, and nobody had to say, ‘Are you straight?’ or, ‘Are you gay?’” Antonio was in the middle of it all. “He would find somebody he liked and make them,” Thouret continues. “He became the number one unpaid model scout in Europe. If Antonio called a designer or an agency and said, ‘You’ve got to see this one,’ people did.”
Antonio was always having affairs with his finds. He was seeing a male model when he met Jerry Hall (“this giant girl in a trashy outfit and huge cork heels,” says Ramos) at Club Sept, and she became his lover. “Antonio was with women and men,” says Ramos. “He liked Jerry’s Hee-Haw quality.” They all lived together in the bohemian St.-Germain district. “Jerry’s room was called the Corral,” says Ramos. “She knew every comic book in the room, and if you touched one, you were in trouble. She wore a new pair of panties every day and then tossed it in that room.” Antonio gave Hall a crash course in fabulousness. “He had all these fantastic books on fashion and glamorous Hollywood movie stars, and I used to study all those books and look in a full-length mirror and copy all the poses,” she says.
Ingo Thouret (left) and Pat Cleveland photographed by Rose Hartman
Ingo Thouret and Pat Cleveland by Rose Hartman
Ultimately Hall was replaced in Antonio’s affections. No one was exactly monogamous. “Pat Cleveland and Antonio used to disappear for days and lock themselves up with some boy they’d found,” says Ramos. “Pat was a bit of a nympho, and Antonio was, too.” Once, in Venice, Antonio and Juan gave Karl Lagerfeld a birthday party at Harry’s Bar. “Pat stripped naked on the tables,” showing everyone the heart she’d shaved into her pubic hair, Ramos recalls. Harry’s waiters scurried about, he continues, “pulling down the shades.”
Cleveland says she never had steady boyfriends. “I was married to my career. I had fun with the boys, and I stayed out of trouble. But finally I got real tired, and I had to go off by myself. I cut off my hair, put on my backpack, and went to Egypt dressed as a boy. That’s the kind of stuff you have to do.” Cleveland ended up moving to London, where she partied with the gay crowd and went out with Mick Jagger. While she was there, she met Zoli, and she joined up with him and returned to America, ending up in Los Angeles, where she tried acting and kept playing. “I had some nice boyfriends,” she says. “Jack, Warren, Ryan. All of them. Look, I grew up with the Pill. You took one, and you could have fun. So it was love ’em and leave ’em even when they tried to attach themselves to you. I’m very independent. I like to make my own scene. I don’t want to be anybody’s shadow.”
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Claude Haddad was finding more models. Gaby Wagner, who now runs the Zoom agency in Paris, joined Euro-Planning for several months, “until he stole so much money from me, I ran away,” she says. Though Haddad denies financial irregularities (“Elite don’t pay any commission,” he says. “I am white; they are black”), Wagner wasn’t the only one who felt ripped off. “Claude used people, and Antonio used him,” says Paul Caranicas, an artist who was part of their set. “We found out what a slime he was a few months later when he wouldn’t pay Jerry.” Haddad “never told me how much money I was making, and he never paid me,” Hall confirms. “I’d get the cover of some magazine, an ad for some gasoline company, and he would just give me a hundred francs when I would cry.”
The agency wasn’t entirely useless. “I met Helmut Newton through them,” she says. “We bought all these leather clothes and whips and chains, and I was throwing my hair and cracking a whip for Photo magazine, and at the end of the day I started to cry. Helmut said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I said, ‘I think this is pornography.’ And he said, ‘No, this is art!’ And I said, ‘But I really want to do fashion,’ and he said, ‘OK, if that’s what you want,’ and about a week later he booked me to do the cover of French Vogue, and I worked with him quite steadily for years.” Within two years Hall was a star. “At one point I was on the cover of every magazine in Paris,” she says. “I was taking Paris by storm.”
Thus Antonio’s set became celebrities, so it was inevitable that rumors would start flying around them. One of the most durable concerned the shah of Iran, who was said to have a procurer in Paris who would offer models money, furs, and jewels to fly to Iran for weekends of sex and Pahlavi. Jerry Hall is said to have gotten a fur that way. “It’s very exciting, but it’s not true,” says Hall, who has heard the story. “I bought it with cash. I saved up my money in a shoe box, and a whole gang of friends went with me to Revillon. A lot of girls were very jealous about that fur coat. And people did say, ‘Who bought that for you?’ I think that’s where that story came from.”
In 1974 Hall met Eileen and Jerry Ford in Paris, “and they invited me to come and live with them in New York,” she says. “I was working a lot with American Vogue and Richard Avedon and Irving Penn and Scavullo.” She also worked with Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, who booked her to pose for his band’s fourth album cover and then moved her into his house on London’s Hanover Square. Despite her problems with Claude Haddad, Hall stayed with Euro-Planning until 1977. “I left them because I did this Opium perfume contract for eight years for the entire world, and they only gave me a thousand dollars!” she says. “Claude was very bitter when I left. He said, ‘I made you a star. Then you left me!’”
He wasn’t the only man she left. She soon abandoned Bryan Ferry for Mick Jagger. By that time modeling had lost its allure for her. “Paris was so exciting,” Hall says. “They weren’t trying to sell clothes. It was more artistic; it was entertaining; you were creating something. When I went to New York, I started doing all this catalog stuff, making really good money, working every day, but you had to be there exactly on time, and they didn’t like you to chat; you had to hurry up and get on the set, and then you had to do sixteen pictures. You couldn’t do anything different; you couldn’t do anything artistic; you couldn’t make the skirt look better. Somehow it was sort of killing. I just got very, very bored.”
Jerry Hall and Antonio Lopez photographed by Norman Parkinson
Jerry Hall and Antonio Lopez by Norman Parkinson, courtesy Hamilton Photographers Limited
By 1975 Antonio and his crew had abandoned Paris, too. Though they returned often, they shifted their base back to New York, where “the gay scene blossomed and attracted Antonio back,” Ramos says. “Also, the attitude was changing in Paris. Lagerfeld was getting into his eighteenth-century phase. Everything was about money and houses and socialites. It got boring and heavy. There was no more room for us.”
Paris was no longer a place for artists. “It was a new age,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Agencies managed by playboys were new.” In 1972, suffering from throat cancer, Catherine Harlé went into semiretirement and turned her business over to her nephew Bonnouvrier and his mother. Tichka moved from Models International to Paris Planning to Euro-Planning to New York. Stéphane Lanson quit Euro-Planning, too, and formed his own agency in 1974.
Claude Haddad’s reputation was starting to catch up to him. “He was serious ba
d from the start,” says an American model who often went out with him and his friends, pretending she didn’t speak French. “They were greasy, like pimps, hustling, it was gross,” she says.
Refugees from his agency, Euro-Planning, turned up at Christa before it closed. “They said the guy would take money from his pocket and pay them cash,” Jacques Silberstein recalls. “He tried to brainwash them as if he was the guru Claude. He had an incredible apartment, girls all around like a harem. Swedish girls. They were quite naïve. They were good meat for the hunters.” Finally Stéphane Lanson couldn’t take it anymore. “When I realized Claude Haddad was behind me purely to go with the girls, I told him, ‘It’s the girls or me,’” Lanson says. “He told me, ‘It’s the girls.’ I said good-bye, we went to court, I sold him the name Euro-Planning, and I took back Stéphane Lanson.”
Lanson’s agency survived only three years. “I’m an artist,” he says. “I’m not good for accounting. I owned Stéphane Lanson one hundred percent because after Haddad, I didn’t want anybody else but me! But you have to support girls before they make you money, and I was giving too much away. I went bankrupt in 1977.”
Élysées 3 slid out of business, too, after John Casablancas and about a half dozen of his biggest models left his brother, Fernando, there. John launched Elite Models with “some of the best models of the time,” says Jeanette Christjansen. He signed up most of the French Mob’s women, plus British photographer Clive Arrowsmith’s girlfriend, Ann Schaufuss; Barry Lategan’s wife, Lynn Kohlman; François Lamy’s wife, Ingmarie Johanssen; and Paris Planning’s Emanuelle Dano. But Casablancas soon realized that his all-star concept had a fatal flaw. “We didn’t want it to grow at first,” says Jeanette. “After a while he realized he had to create the stars of tomorrow.” But he couldn’t easily bring in new girls to replace his original dozen when their careers began to fade. “I was a little bit their prisoner,” he says. “Elite was a private club.”
Money wasn’t Casablancas’s only problem. Two of his original Elite models died before the agency got on its feet. Paula Brenken killed herself jumping out a window. And it was Casablancas who discovered the body of Louise Despointes’s ex-girlfriend Emanuelle Dano. “We had a booking for her; we called her for two days,” he recalls. He finally went to her home. “She’d been partying,” he says. “She was a girl who was always excessive. She was really, really living it, drinking tequila from the bottle, whatever. It was a whole bunch of people, and apparently they played some games which became rough, because she had traces of some very wild games. I think they were fooling around in a car, and she jumped or was thrown out, and that’s how she died. And then they brought her back to her apartment.” Casablancas says he knows who was with her but won’t reveal their names. “It was obviously not anybody who tried to kill her,” he says. “It just went bad, and they were not interested in an inquiry that would reveal that the daughter of a ministre d’état was living this way.”
Despite—or perhaps because of—incidents like that, Elite became the hot model shop in town. “The clients loved it,” says Casablancas. “They always love the little guys. This is why I always expect my clients to betray me now. There is this irresistible attraction towards the new thing. I say this without bitterness. It’s what fashion is about.” The girls talked up the service they were getting from John and Christine Lindgren, a booker who’d come with him from Élysées 3. More models followed.
In the wake of Casablancas, a new breed of agent rushed into the model trade. Claude Haddad was one. But the most successful by far has been Gérald Marie. At least, that’s what he calls himself now. In the beginning he used an aristocratic name, Gérald Marie de Castelbajac. “I didn’t want to work under my name at the time,” he (sort of) explains. “I didn’t know what was possible, and at the time everybody was working under a different name. Maybe I was stupid or crazy enough to say I was going to work and invent myself another personality, another system. I didn’t have anything in common with myself, so I worked with that a little bit and I dropped it.”
Though some people who have worked with him believe he was an orphan, Marie has said he is the son of a hospital administrator. He apparently grew up near Marseilles and entered show business as a go-go dancer on local television, or at least that’s what he told one of his many model lovers who marveled at his bedroom acrobatics. Marie says that as a student he promoted ballroom dance concerts. “It worked quite well, and through that I started to meet a lot of girls because they followed the bands, and some of them happened to be models,” he says. He fell in with an older woman, and she offered him a modeling agency. They called it Modeling. “She proposed to me that I work with her,” Marie says. “I didn’t know a thing, frankly. But I knew how to look at a girl, how to talk to her. I think François Lano heard about me. He was in the middle of a kind of war with John Casablancas, and he proposed that I work with him.”
François Lano didn’t like what was happening in modeling. “The work was different, more aggressive and much more money-looking,” he says. Casablancas denies it, but Lano says Elite made special commission deals to lure his stars away. “John was the first to do that,” Lano says. “‘Come with me, you will pay nothing.’ If the girl was not interested, he would say to the boyfriend, ‘Arrange something for me, and I’ll give you some money.’ It’s not dishonest, but it wasn’t right.” An American photographer who worked in Europe adds that Casablancas paid bounties to photographers who steered models to him. Casablancas also slept with the girls. “John Casablancas was giving new services.” Jérôme Bonnouvrier smirks. “Lano had to do something.”
Casablancas says his success was also a concern for the Fords. “I’m a not bad-looking guy who is having a lot of success with personal relationships with the models, so I’m a nuisance in the sense that they send models to Paris Planning and to other agencies and they end up with me. It’s a small agency; we’re very prestigious; we’re demanding higher prices. We’ve already begun to have all the characteristics of what Elite is about. Eileen and Jerry, who had slammed the door in my face at the time of Élysées 3, now came and said, ‘It’s embarrassing for us. You’ve got ten of our girls, and we don’t have a relationship with you.’ I said, ‘All you’ve got to do is give me the girls yourselves.’ So we started a relationship. It was a big deal for me. I was a young guy, and these were the kings of the business.”
The European agents all felt like pawns of the Fords. In Paris “Eileen enjoyed the game of divide and conquer,” says Bonnouvrier. “It kept the situation under control. She was here every two months. It was an obsession. But she made a major mistake. Suddenly she turned from Lano to her new toy, Elite.”
A solution came to hand when Gérald Marie called Lano, who offered him a job. “I liked the way he was,” Lano says. “He was pushing. He was attracted by beauty. He knew how to speak about girls and make you want to buy them. When I took him, it was not against John. I needed fresh blood in managing. But when I came back to the agency and told everyone I’d made a deal for Gérald, everybody immediately said, ‘If Gérald comes, we’ll leave.’ I told Gérald, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Instead Lano hired Fabienne Martin, a German-speaking student who’d gone to school with one of Dorian Leigh’s daughters. She created a new department called Covers “for top girls, because of Elite,” she says. Her stars were Susan Moncur, Louise Despointes, and another favorite of Newton and Bourdin’s, Wallis Franken. “Fabienne was like John the Baptist,” says Steve Hiett. “She was the first to promote soulful, poetic-type girls.” But the times weren’t ready for her approach.
“The scene became totally different,” says photographer Guy Le Baube, who started shooting fashion in 1970. “Before, the girls were older, more mature; they wore glasses and read books. Some of them had Ph.D.’s. The level of conversation was much higher. Now people who have nothing to say make pictures. They are like monkeys, greedy for success. So they imitate success; they look like success, without havin
g it. Fake emotions are their hallmark. Modeling brings the worst out in you if you don’t have the background to elevate it.” And the new models were looking for flash, not the careful, creative guidance Fabienne Martin was offering. “I tried to do my best,” she says, “but I wasn’t that strong. There were some wonderful girls there, but it was nothing compared to Elite.”
Then Marie called Lano again and said he was shutting Modeling because Elite had snatched two of his top earners, Lena Kansbod and Anna Anderson. This time Lano hired him. A quarter of Paris Planning’s girls weren’t working. “I posed this as a challenge,” Lano says. “He worked like a dog. He worked all day alone, calling photographers, protecting the models. Each time he took a new girl, he would drop another one who was not doing well. He said, ‘Try another agency because I don’t know how to manage you.’ He built completely his own department. Then I gave him charge of all the women’s division.”
Lano was an excellent teacher, and Marie was a quick study. A street fighter by temperament, he learned to charm but didn’t make it a habit. “François was too much of a gentleman for the concert that was playing at the time,” Marie says. “When a model said she was leaving, he would take her to lunch, offer her a ring or pearls to say good-bye. François was a different generation. My goal was to catch Elite.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 34
