Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  On June 29, 1977, the Fords’ request for a preliminary injunction against Elite was denied. Ford’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, was on the attack when he deposed Casablancas a year later, accusing him of lying and then, late in the day, bringing up Elite’s association with two Swiss companies, Fashions and Models and Sococom-Inmod, that billed and paid models for work outside France. “Isn’t it a fact that these arrangements … were done for the purpose of evading French tax laws?” Cohn demanded. Twisting and turning, Casablancas insisted that wasn’t true. Though he admitted that models were paid outside France, he claimed he knew very little about the process.

  “You are just not going to give me a direct answer, are you?” Cohn said.

  “I’m giving you the answer I know,” Casablancas replied.

  Elite fought back in a document submitted to the court in August, in which its lawyer, Ira Levinson, charged that New York’s existing agencies were engaged in a monopolistic conspiracy to fix prices and commissions. Levinson was referring to actions taken by several agents in the early seventies, when they changed their corporate names (removing the word “agency”), returned their employment agency licenses to New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs, asserted that they were managers and not employment agents, and raised commissions. In 1972 the department subpoenaed Ford’s records, and the following year it scheduled a hearing to investigate Wilhelmina. “The principals of the major modeling agencies … agreed among themselves to raise commissions,” Levinson charged, claiming to have interviewed a witness who was present at the agents’ meeting where the decision was made. (Stewart Cowley confirms that the agents did make the move in concert. “No such conversation ever took place,” insists Jerry Ford.)

  The legal actions went on for several years. But after the Fords lost their case against Pillard in arbitration in 1979, they dropped the other actions, for reasons they won’t explain. Even without a legal resolution, it was already clear that Elite was the model war winner. Stars were banging down its doors, bringing with them bookings that paid the rent, the legal fees, and champagne bills.

  “Eileen controlled the industry, and then she didn’t anymore,” says Monique Pillard. “They’d ask me, ‘Who’s your PR?’ I’d say, ‘Eileen Ford.’ Models kept leaving, one after another.” What really lured them? Money was part of it, certainly. And so was John’s knack for promotion and publicity. In January 1978 he bound all his models’ composite cards into an oversize folder with detachable wall posters. It was a sensation. He’d already removed prices from all his promotional materials—making all rates negotiable—and announced he’d increased the day rate for stars to $1,500.

  Meanwhile, Jerry Ford was working to win models “reuse” payments for photographs, a more important change in the long run. “Rates were going up anyway,” he says. “It just came a little faster. The increased traffic between Paris and New York widened the market for top-notch models [and] created the world-class superstars. John would take credit for that. We felt we were laying the basis for that all along. There’s no question that they created a great agency, but we’re still here. We replaced the models who were purloined and slugged it out as well as we knew how.”

  Harry Conover, Jr., jokes that John Casablancas is his father’s reincarnation. But Casablancas is more: He invented a new way of marketing models. “He was a ruthless womanizer, and the girls loved it,” says Vogue fashion editor Polly Mellen. “He took a sleepy backwater business run by a dowager empress and turned it into Hollywood,” says photographer Peter Strongwater. “He was the first to use sexy pictures, naked bodies,” says booker Monique Corey. “You’d never seen that before.” “He made the girls known,” says Maarit Halinen. “People started to get interested. They wanted to know, ‘Who is this guy?’ Everyone was talking.”

  Casablancas boasts, “I said to models, ‘I’m going to sell you like women, I’m going to bring out the sex appeal and sensuality, and we’re going to make more money.’” The difference was simple, he says. “Ford was a prude, and I was not.”

  JANICE DICKINSON * MIKE REINHARDT * CHRISTIE BRINKLEY

  They are older now. Janice Dickinson’s toughness is no longer tomboyish. Mike Reinhardt is still boyish, but he’s gone gray. Christie Brinkley is no longer a lithe Sports Illustrated bathing suit girl. But in the mid-seventies they were the prettiest of the pretty, the fastest in the fast lane.

  The daughter of a television producer, Christie Brinkley started high and rose higher. In the early eighties she was probably the world’s top model, earning $350,000 a year working for Chanel, Cover Girl, MasterCard (“You’re so chic …”), and Water Pik. Her boyfriend was champagne heir Olivier Chandon. They met at Studio 54. The celebrity club’s co-owner Steve Rubell introduced them. When People magazine wrote them up, Christie said her only problem with Chandon was his hobby: driving race cars. That hobby killed him not long afterward, when he raced off a track in Florida and crashed into a canal.

  Brinkley met singer Billy Joel on St.-Barthélemy in 1983. Just divorced, he was also on the rebound. Though they were something of an odd couple, the squat singer-songwriter from Long Island and the ultimate California blonde made beautiful music together. She licensed her name for a line of sportswear, appeared in calendars, on posters, and in his “Uptown Girl” video. They married in 1985, had a daughter, Alexa Ray, nine months later, and moved into a huge ocean mansion in Amagansett. Christie fumbled as a television personality but won ribbons riding cutting horses. Then, in 1994, in the space of a few short weeks, she almost died in a helicopter and announced her split from Joel and her engagement to Colorado-based real estate developer Rick Taubman (whom she went on to marry that Christmas). What happened? “I was searching for honesty,” she said.

  At the same time Janice Dickinson was giving birth to her second child, a daughter she almost named Diva, presumably after herself. She was certainly the most operatic character ever to grace a fashion page. Janice claimed that Savannah Dickinson, as the child was finally named, is the daughter of actor Sylvester Stallone, and even he took credit, but then DNA tests proved him wrong. A tattooed California biker later told reporters that he was the father. Then Dickinson revealed she was pregnant again and again said Stallone was the father. She miscarried and next hooked up with the publisher of Vogue.

  This was all nothing new. Dickinson wasn’t always at the center of a storm; she was the storm from her first photo sessions in 1974 until she entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in 1982. “Totally, totally, totally nuts,” says Polly Mellen. “Big, big, big heart. Incredible body. And all that noise? Hoo-hah, forget it!” Her affair with Mike Reinhardt was legendary, and its aftermath provocative.

  Dickinson took to taking her clothes off wherever she could. Once she did it in a Roman fountain. “We were coming back to the Grand Hotel after dinner, and she was having a fight with Mike,” remembers Lizette Kattan, an editor of Italian Harper’s Bazaar. “At a certain point she took her clothes off and went swimming in the fountain, completely naked. Mike was out of his mind because he didn’t know how to stop her. She really stopped the traffic. Then the police came, and they finally had to send somebody to the hotel to get a towel to wrap her up.”

  Then there was the time designer Calvin Klein took a planeload of top models to Japan. “Janice, Iman, Debbie, Apollonia, Kelly Emberg, Jeff Aquilon, Nancy Donahue, you name it, everybody of that era was on one plane,” recalls model Tara Shannon. “We met at Calvin’s, and they handed out sheets that said, ‘If you get drunk or have drugs, see ya. We don’t want to have nothing to do with you.’” So on the plane the models took everything they were carrying. “Quaaludes, coke, pot, everything,” Shannon says. “That was a pretty wild flight, man. I have a picture of Janice opening her shirt right in the middle of the plane.”

  Nowadays, it is Dickinson taking the pictures. After Reinhardt, she moved to Italy in 1985 and had a romance with a rich young Italian. In 1988 she moved to Los Angeles, married Simon Field, a music video p
roducer, and had her first child. Today, at thirty-nine, working as a photographer, she is still larger than life and louder than that.

  One dark, one light, Dickinson and Brinkley were the two poles of modeling at the turn of the eighties. But they had two things in common: They were both among the first stars at Elite Models, and they both slept with Mike Reinhardt.

  Christie Brinkley photographed by Patrick Demarchelier

  Christie Brinkley by Patrick Demarchelier

  Janice Dickinson photographed by Marco Glaviano

  Janice Dickinson by Marco Glaviano

  Sitting in his sunlit studio atop Carnegie Hall, Reinhardt, fifty-six, gives a rueful smile, shakes his curly graying head, and asks his current wife, Tammi, how many models preceded her in his life. “We’re all three years and three months apart in age,” she replies. “Minty is forty-two, Janice is thirty-nine,” and that’s not to mention Bernadette, Lisa Cooper, Renata, and Ely. Reinhardt jealously protected his women. “I introduced Janice to Mike, and I never worked with her again because he was so jealous and insecure,” says colleague Alex Chatelain. “Anytime I worked with any of his squeezes, he made sure they didn’t show up. But I really like him a lot.”

  Reinhardt’s fashion career stalled in the eighties. People said he’d burned out after too many models, too many drugs, too many late nights at the club he opened on Long Island. In fact, he was shooting cigarette and liquor ads, he says. But when he broke up with his last wife, he admits, he went on a bender. It wasn’t until the late eighties that he pulled out of his tailspin, stopped smoking marijuana for the first time in a quarter century, met Tammi, and started shooting fashion again. In 1994 he even signed a long-term contract with Elle magazine.

  Two souvenirs of his heyday hang on the wall of Reinhardt’s apartment. One is a drawing of Reinhardt, Patrice Casanova, and a North Beach Leather model, all passed out on a bed at 3:00 A.M. The other is a picture Mike shot in a mirror of himself, Christie Brinkley, and his best friend and next-door neighbor Pierre Houlès, sitting at a shoeshine stand. The trio are laughing and smiling. They wouldn’t be for long.

  CHRISTIE BRINKLEY: “I grew up in California. I used to make my own magazines. I’d cut pictures out and put them together my way. I remember seeing Cybill Shepherd and Susan Dey and knowing their names. But I was really sort of more into the art direction aspect of it. I wanted to be an artist. I was for sure going to go to Paris, live in a garret, and paint. I moved to Paris to study art when I was eighteen and I fell in love with Jean François Allaux, a very well-respected political cartoonist; but he got drafted. We had this military service kind of relationship until he was out of the army.

  “I lived in a chambre de bain with no telephone or bathrooms. It was so charming. The toilet was two flights down; the telephone was about a block and a half away. I had a little dog, and he had distemper. So I went to the phone to call the vet, and this guy, Errol Sawyer, this kind of loud, crazy black American photographer, said, ‘Oh, there you are! I spotted you one day at the telephone office, and I was hoping I would see you again because I’ve got a job, and the clients are looking for a girl just like you. Would you be interested? This is my address. I don’t have a telephone, but if you could just drop by.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, but thank you, I’m flattered, good-bye.’ But I took his address, and I put it in my pocket.

  “A couple days later I bumped into a friend, a French girl who knew what was going on in Paris, and she was talking about lines that different guys were coming up with. I happened to have the same jacket on with the piece of paper in it, and I found the paper and said, ‘Listen to this one, a photographer, looking for a girl just like me.’ She said, ‘I’ve seen that name in magazines. He’s for real!’

  “I’d spent my last penny on vet bills. I was broke. I worked as an illustrator, but I didn’t have a working permit, so I was grossly underpaid. But I was determined to make it on my own, and I thought maybe I should swing by this guy’s place. If he really is legitimate, then I can do one job and see what it’s like. And I went by, and he said, ‘Can you run home and put on something nice?’ I had this dreamy Cacharel dress, and I put that on, and I pulled this knit cap over my head, and he took me to a park and took some pictures, and then he took them to Johnny Casablancas, and he said, ‘Bring her in.’ I was really scared. I thought, ‘I’m not model material.’”

  JOHN CASABLANCAS: “Errol Sawyer was a scout on our payroll. He saw Christie in a post office, brought her to the agency. It was kind of funny because another agency was trying to get her, Élysées 3, my brother, and he was kind of pissed off because she came to us. It was one of the rare times we competed for a new model.”

  BRINKLEY: “I didn’t know Errol was a scout. He just took those pictures, and then he took me out another day. I think he said the job had fallen through.

  “I was very big, athletic, let’s face it, on the fat side. But my spirit of adventure said, ‘See what it’s like.’ So I went in, and Mike Reinhardt was there, and a bunch of other photographers, and they all said, ‘Oh, where’d you hide her? I want to use her. A job in Morocco, a glamorous ski trip.’ I’m thinking, ‘Morocco? Ski trip? This is incredible!’ But the first job I did was the cover of Parents magazine. I’m thinking, ‘Modeling, beautiful clothes,’ and they hand me this yellow bikini, and I was absolutely scared to death to walk out of the dressing room.

  “I was very reluctant in the beginning. I didn’t call myself a model. I still considered that I was a struggling artist. I did a couple jobs, and then I got a check, and then I packed up and I left town. The agency was pretty upset, but I think that the fact that I had suddenly appeared on the scene, done a few jobs, created a minor buzz, and disappeared was good. The agency said, ‘She’s booked, She’s unavailable,’ and people thought, ‘Wow, she’s working a lot. We’ve got to have her!’ Because when I returned, there were jobs all over the place. I would go to jobs in Germany, where I would have a room with a bath, which was quite a luxury, and all the great rolls and bread that they’d bring up in the morning.

  “In the meantime, Mike Reinhardt went back to New York and told Eileen Ford about me. And right away Eileen started calling, and so did Nina Blanchard. They were all anxious to get me back to America. But I just kept saying, ‘I love Paris.’ Basically I was waiting for Jean François to get out of the army. He and his artist friends didn’t really approve of this job. So I was being very low-key about it. I was very reluctant to really grasp it as a job. It was better-paying than waitressing. I wasn’t making the money back then that I made once I got to America, but I thought it was an exorbitant amount, and I was trying to spend it as foolishly as I possibly could. I would buy plane tickets for friends, and we’d go off places. I was also eating better.

  “I came back to L.A. to see my family. Nina Blanchard took me to lunch at Chasen’s. We’re sitting there, and somebody comes over to the table and says, ‘Nina, where have you been hiding her? I want to book her for our commercial.’ It was for Yucca Dew shampoo in Arizona. Five minutes later somebody else comes over. Noxzema. A few minutes later somebody else comes over. Max Factor perfume. I also met Eileen Ford on that trip. She was in Palm Springs, vacationing with her family, and she asked me to come over to her house and bring my book. I remember her saying, ‘This is dreadful, lose this, lose that,’ pulling things out. I was so nervous because she was a legend. So I went back to Paris, Jean François got out of the army, and we decided to go to New York for two months. We knew that he’d get work, too.

  “We really started enjoying the energy, and Jean François was working and I was working and two months became years. One of the earlier jobs I did was for a hair salon’s window. They were pushing shoulder-length frizzy hairdos. I thought modeling meant that you get a new look, so I was really into it, but they chopped off my hair and permed it and I looked like Bozo the Clown. It was fine for that picture, but the next day it wasn’t even hairlike. So I bought a bunch
of berets. I was wearing one when I met Jule Campbell of Sports Illustrated. She said that beret was the reason she liked me, because I looked like I had so much attitude, and she booked me for a Sports Illustrated trip to Can-cun. I had no idea that Sports Illustrated was becoming prestigious. But with those pictures and the Glamour covers, I never had to knock on doors or do go-sees. I never really became part of the modeling world either. The second my work was over, I’d be out the door, I’d come home, and Jean François and I would be painting or sculpting.”

  MIKE REINHARDT: “I was with Barbara Minty four years. I lived over Carnegie Hall and used it as a studio, too. The first time I saw Janice was before she went to Paris. I was leaving on a trip, I was preoccupied, and she never let me forget that.”

  JANICE DICKINSON: “Mike was so incredibly rude. He was a total narcissist. He would just stare at himself in the mirror. I remember saying, ‘Excuse me, I’ve been sitting here for about ten minutes, will you have a look at my book?’ He goes, ‘Not today,’ and then he walks away. I was hurt and I thought to myself, What a rude prick. I’ll get him someday.”

  REINHARDT: “She couldn’t get a photographer to test her, and one night she was walking in the rain, and she met a man who obviously took a fancy to her and gave her a ticket to Paris.”