Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  DICKINSON: “I took drugs like everybody else. You take a young girl. Most of these playboys only want to get in their pants, so they dangle coke in front of their nose, and inevitably, boom, the pants come off. I would do a couple lines, and then I’d just split. ‘Free blow? Why not! Later …’ And I was not ripping my clothes off and running around either. I mean, this comes out of like fag hairdressers’ mouths and then [people] believe it. Show me Polaroids; show me tapes. I wanna see ’em. Show ’em to me, and then I’ll gladly come clean, but I never did that once. I’m a Catholic girl.

  “Get it straight. I was the top, the number one model, top, top, top. I was offered Flashdance, but why would I want to do anything else? I sang at Studio 54 [in February 1982 because its owner] Mark Fleischman wanted to have an event, and he didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘Why don’t we help people? Alvin Ailey has no money; the company is about to close. I’ll sing.’ I knew a few tunes, I was hanging out with rockers. To make a long story short, I sang two songs. I bombed completely. The next day the press said, ‘Nice try, but stick to modeling.’

  “Right after that I just had it, so I went into rehab at St. Mary’s in Minneapolis. It was the show and everything else. I went to clean out for a month, detox, and then go back to work. It was just to recharge my batteries.”

  PILLARD: “I really loved that girl. She was every agent’s dream, a huge money-maker. She had an enormous drug problem, but she got herself fixed up. I was her partner in rehab. I’d forbid her to have a boyfriend without my approval. I was the only one who could control her. She’d say, ‘OK, agent.’ I brought her to every studio to show everyone what was happening. Then she became a bad girl again. But I had moved off the booking table, and I wasn’t handling her day to day anymore. She wanted to be handled by me, and I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ I was a little bit more than a booker by then. Things weren’t said, but I was more or less the director of the Elite division. With Janice, it was twenty-four-hour service, not nine to seven. She became pretty bad and blamed it on the fact that she couldn’t talk to me. Finally there were no more bookings. Nobody wanted to take a chance. Would she show up? Would she be abusive? I told her, ‘You threw your career to the dogs.’

  “One day Joe Hunter calls and says, ‘Send Janice Dickinson’s book to Ford.’ It was no longer a loss because Janice had ruined her name. It goddamn broke my heart, and I promised myself I’d never let that happen again.”

  DICKINSON: “I’m still exuberant. I’m still an extrovert. I won’t be challenged. If someone challenges me, then I’ll back them into a corner. Talk to me about fashion; talk to me about concept; talk to me about lighting; talk to me about makeup; talk to me about Yves Saint Laurent, about opening the show for Azzedine Alaïa for seven straight years, about being Gianni Versace’s favorite model. I mean, everybody wanted me: Valentino, Calvin Klein, Halston, Blass, Beene. Let’s talk about the greats, not the darkness and the evilness and the bullshit about model agents.

  “I represented hope for the ethnic girls, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, anyone with a darker image. They looked at me and knew that they, too, could be as beautiful as a blonde. Let me tell you something, no blonde ever had more fun than me. I am the queen of fun. I had a ball. I was young; I was rich; I was beautiful; I was intelligent. I leveraged my modeling to learn how to take photographs.

  “I don’t want to come off sounding so cocky, but I used to help a lot of people, too. I would help all these young models with their makeup, and show ’em how to walk, and tell them what to do, and give them money, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No one tells you stories like that. They don’t tell you that if there was a job for five hundred dollars, I said, ‘Charge six fifty,’ and they paid it. When it got to be eight hundred, a thousand, two thousand, twenty-five hundred, I was the one who set ’em up, so all those models can kiss my ass.”

  $2,500 A DAY

  A few nights before Elite opened in New York, Zoli Rendessy tossed one of his famous all-star parties. Apollonia von Ravenstein came with Ara Gallant, the hairdresser who counted Jack and Warren and Anjelica among his very best friends. Apollonia and Ara were a couple of the moment, but that didn’t mean they slept together. Indeed, after Zoli’s party Gallant headed off alone to the Anvil, a bar near New York City’s downtown docks, where the entertainment consisted of men fist-fucking other men. “I love the Anvil,” Gallant said. “Of course, it would be extremely embarrassing to be caught fucking there.”

  Embarrassment may have been the last taboo, but discretion was out of fashion.

  “Me with four men?” says a Wilhelmina model of the era. “Sure.”

  With uncanny synchronicity, Studio 54 had opened a few weeks before Elite, and it quickly became a symbol of the revival of recession-plagued New York. It was also a symbol of the prevailing social ethic of libertinism, dissolution, and the quest for easy gratification. Drugs—especially cocaine and the soporific Quaalude—were given away like candy by the club’s co-owner Steve Rubell and consumed by all and sundry. Semipublic sex took place regularly in the club’s balcony and basement.

  The rules of acceptable conduct had changed. The exotic and unspeakable had become the new norm. The models, agents, and photographers who joined the dancing sea of celebrities were central figures in a new society—the first, perhaps, since the fall of Rome to declare so openly and in such numbers that sin was in. They all believed they were special, and Studio’s exclusionary door policy reinforced that notion. Above morals, above ethics, and especially above those kept waiting outside, Studio’s denizens were modern Olympians, inhabiting a special world of notoriety. And the wages of their sins were astonishing. Each new excrescence brought them more celebrity, more reverence, and more money to fuel their shenanigans.

  The addiction to pleasure was international, and models were in the vanguard of the pleasure seekers. Thanks to John Casablancas, models had become rootless mercenaries, traveling the world in search of bigger bucks. In the late seventies no one earned more than Cheryl Tiegs, whose day rate hit $2,000 in 1977. Although many assumed that her husband, Stan Dragoti, was running her career, Tiegs insists she was in charge. “I pretty much did it myself, for better or for worse. I certainly made mistakes along the way. But I was very much a long-term thinker.”

  Tiegs downplays the importance of her January 1978 appearance—in a fishnet bathing suit that bared her full breasts—in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. “It’s a sweet little picture, that’s it,” she says. But in fact, it was a major coup, adding the powerful appeal of the pinup picture to modeling’s arsenal of promotional gimmicks.

  “It was our last day of shooting on the Amazon River,” recalls SI’s Jule Campbell. While Walter Iooss, Jr., was shooting a young Brazilian model, “Cheryl was waiting in the boat, getting impatient because we weren’t using her,” Campbell recalls. “I told Walter to get a picture of her and send her back to the hotel. She got in the water, but she was annoyed, and she was just standing there to get it over with.” Back in New York, Campbell decided against using the picture but showed it to her editors just in case they liked it.

  They did. And the response was overwhelming. The magazine’s swimsuit extravaganza had always been the second best-selling issue of the year, just behind its Super Bowl special. “That year I beat the Super Bowl,” Campbell says. “They had posters of the photograph in Times Square the next day, and we had to sue to stop it. We got letters from outraged mothers, librarians, priests telling me I was going straight to hell. We never turned back. And Cheryl’s career took off after that.”

  Two months later Tiegs appeared for the second time on the cover of Time and was featured in its competitor, Newsweek, the very same week. “Where else could I go from there?” she asks. “It was time to move on.” In rapid succession she posed in a pink bikini on a poster that knocked Farrah Fawcett-Majors off the walls of the rooms of several million adolescent American boys, announced a deal to write a book on beauty, and signed what was
reported to be a $2 million contract to appear on ABC-TV.

  “My whole world turned upside down, and I certainly noticed the difference,” she says. “Whatever I did was recorded on the cover of the New York Post. I wasn’t in as much control as I would have liked. I didn’t know how to stop it. The media kind of threw me for a loop.”

  Tiegs won’t talk about what happened next. Indeed, she answers questions about the next three years of her life with stony silence. But just as her career hit the stratosphere, her marriage to Dragoti ran aground, and she became the first victim of the new, heightened interest in models. In 1978 the New York Post and its competitor the Daily News were locked in tabloid combat. Gossip items were part of the ammunition they used in their war, the more scurrilous the better. Tiegs got caught in the crossfire.

  That December Tiegs was reportedly spotted necking with tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis at a birthday party for Steve Rubell at Studio 54. Not long thereafter she flew to Kenya with photographer Peter Beard to narrate an American Sportsman Special documentary based on Beard’s book about African wildlife, The End of the Game. Five months later, en route to the Cannes Film Festival, Dragoti was arrested at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, with about an ounce of cocaine, wrapped in aluminum foil, taped to his back and thirty more grams of the stuff in his suitcase. In July, after he was fined almost $55,000 and given a suspended sentence of twenty-one months in jail, Dragoti said he’d started sniffing the stuff after he learned that Beard and Tiegs had begun having an affair in Kenya. “I was very depressed,” he said, “and needed something to take away the pain.”

  Peter Beard had been involved with models for twenty years before he met Cheryl Tiegs. In 1958 the Yale student and photography buff was a patient in New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery when Suzy Parker was wheeled into the next room following the train crash that killed her father. “Seeing her and the various people who came in to see her was my first entrée to the world of what Diana Vreeland called the beautiful people,” Beard says.

  Out of college in the early sixties, he began taking fashion and beauty photographs for Vogue. Alex Liberman sent Dorothea McGowan to him for one of those sittings. Beard says, “I hate clichés, but she had star quality. It’s a certain inner light that emanates from some people. Dorothea couldn’t take a bad picture. A photographer is basically a parasite on his subject matter.”

  Beard remained with McGowan for several years, until he went off on a shoot with Veruschka and a German model, Astrid Herrene. “Dorothea got totally bent out of shape because Astrid and I were having a bit too much fun together, so to speak,” says Beard, who subsequently married and divorced socialite Minnie Cushing and dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill.

  After a while, Beard says, he came to hate fashion, “a horrible, shitty little industry governed by phonies. Harper’s Bazaar was by far the better magazine. Vogue had all the money and the boredom and a very confused collection of social-climbing people who were ruining the creative process. They ruined Bert Stern; they ruined William Klein with their lack of vision. All the great photographs were put on a shelf.”

  In 1975 Beard went to the Sudan, where he discovered Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, the daughter of a diplomat and a gynecologist. She was a student at the University of Nairobi when Beard spotted her on the street with Kamante, the majordomo of Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa. “Iman was dead anxious to get out of Africa,” he says. That October Beard brought her to Wilhelmina and called a press conference to introduce his discovery to the fashion world. He claimed he’d met her on Kenya’s northern frontier “because it’s not very interesting to meet somebody on Standard Street in a disgusting tourist town like Nairobi,” he says. The reporters at the press conference embellished Iman’s tale further. Newsweek called her “a Somali tribeswoman … part of a nomad family in the East African bush.”

  “They made up a lot of lies that we didn’t think of,” Beard recalls gleefully. He and Iman were never an item, although “everyone thought we were,” he continues. “It was just mutual admiration. Everyone immediately realized the delicacy, strength, and poise of this African woman. She hadn’t forgotten how to walk. She’d not been spoiled by the galloping rot.” Though she had a hard time at first (“The Black Panthers were after her,” Beard says), Iman soon became one of the top models of her time. She was once reputedly paid $100,000 for appearing in a single fashion show.

  Iman married basketball star Spencer Haywood in 1978. One year later, while playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, he became a cocaine casualty. Though he later said that his wife never knew his full involvement with drugs, as a glamorous couple in L.A., he recalled, they went to parties where silver plates of cocaine were served like hors d’oeuvres. But Iman’s world was at least as drenched in drugs as Haywood’s. “I shot doubles with Iman and Janice Dickinson,” says one photographer, “Janice would come here, and if I was out of coke, she wouldn’t do the shot. Everyone got so fucked up Iman couldn’t get into a pair of pull-on pants.”

  Iman photographed by Anthony Barboza

  Iman by Anthony Barboza

  In the mid-eighties Iman and Haywood divorced, and she turned to acting. She is probably now best known as a tireless crusader for her native Somalia, and as the wife of glam rocker David Bowie, whom she married in 1992. That same year she lost custody of her daughter, Zulekha, to Haywood, who, ten years after kicking drugs, now renovates housing for low-income inner-city families.

  In fall 1979 Cheryl Tiegs signed the largest cosmetics contract ever written with Cover Girl, which reportedly agreed to pay her $1.5 million over five years. The following summer she signed another major contract with Sears, to create her own line of clothing. The ongoing soap opera in her personal life was apparently no problem for the Middle-American catalog house. It was announced that Dragoti would shoot her commercials, and Beard was slated to photograph her print ads.

  Dragoti was seen out and about with Zoli’s Jan McGill and Ford’s Lisa Taylor before he finally sued Tiegs for divorce at the end of 1980. It became final the next May, and Tiegs immediately married Beard in Montauk, Long Island, where they took up residence. In spring 1982 they split up. He went to Kenya. She went out with—if the tabloids were to be believed—hockey’s Ron Duguay, tanning’s George Hamilton, Superman’s Christopher Reeve, and an unidentified man she was spotted passionately kissing on the street. By the end of 1983 Tiegs was seeing her future third husband, actor Gregory Peck’s son Tony, a boy-about-town ten years her junior.

  What happened? Peter Beard can’t say. Their 1984 divorce agreement—signed after reports of extramarital affairs, changed locks, clothes thrown out windows, and bitter disputes over Beard’s Montauk property—forbids either of them to talk about the other. Jerry Ford says Beard was the problem. “I like Cheryl a lot, and Peter was a real shit to her,” he says. “He let everyone know that he thought she was the stupidest woman in the world. He’s a little crazy. His is not an everyday kind of brain.”

  Others say drugs were the problem. “Cheryl was doing coke before anyone,” says a magazine editor who knew her well. “She was heavy on it. At the wedding in Montauk they handed out silver vials.” Then there are those who say Tiegs was attracted to danger. “Women just go crazy over Peter,” says model Bitten Knudsen. “He’s very rustic. They want this adventurer. It’s a turn-on to try and tame this wild man.”

  Tiegs addresses the subject of the turn of the eighties carefully. The tabloid stories “hurt a lot, because a lot of it was not true,” she says. “A lot of it was true, but I didn’t wish it to be published. Even if it were true, it’s none of their business.” Was she promiscuous or a coke user? “I wasn’t, but to even deny it gives it credibility,” she says. “What can one say if somebody calls you an elephant? You know you’re not an elephant, but if they’re going to see you that way, that’s their problem. There were times that I stayed up too late, but that was, maybe, the worst of it.” Sears didn’t care, she continues. “
So I was out at a disco, what could they say? I wasn’t home needlepointing, but that was none of their business, as long as I did my job. And I certainly never did anything that would ruin my reputation. I’ve read in the tabloids I’ve had an affair with Muhammad Ali; I’ve read I was up in a spaceship with aliens; I’ve read all kinds of things. That doesn’t make it true.”

  Today she is happy and healthy, a mother and wife, who also happens to design and manufacture a vast range of products like eyeglasses, fine jewelry, watches, socks, hosiery, and shoes aimed at the people she says she understands best, Middle Americans. Sitting on the back porch of her house overlooking the Pacific Ocean in California, looking back at her heyday, she says she has no regrets. “A world opened up [to me] during that period of time,” she says. “It was a period of my life when I let go and lived for the moment. If I hadn’t, I think I’d be sorry. It was a big leap in a career, in my life, that I took very quickly, almost too fast, but that’s the way it happened.”

  Surviving the recession at the start of the seventies, Wilhelmina became the hottest shop in town, working with several agents in each European city, holding its own model conventions, and signing up models like Patti Hansen, a Staten Island teenager who’d been discovered at a hot dog stand, Shaun Casey (who became an Estée Lauder contract face), Pam Dawber, who went on to television fame as Mork’s Mindy, Juli Foster, who was discovered waitressing, and Gia Carangi, a Philadelphia teenager whose wild ways and sultry looks made her a favorite of photographers from Francesco Scavullo to Chris von Wangenheim, who specialized in pictures that captured the madness of the disco era.