Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Models S.A.’s Swiss owners would finance agency vouchers for half the commission. “When an agency needs money, [Models S.A.] asks for a percentage of the company,” explains Jérôme Bonnouvrier’s ex-wife Giselle. “They didn’t steal the company. But when François Lano needed money, they took advantage of him, took the company from him, and fired him.”

  Dollé and Marie had united against Lano. “Dollé said his time was over,” reports Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Dollé felt safe with Gérald Marie,” who replaced Lano as the company’s gérant (managing director). “Gérald wanted shares in the company,” says Lano. “I refused, and probably at that time Jean-Pierre and Gérald banded together against me. Jean-Pierre was created by me. Gérald Marie existed because of me. They threatened to leave. I told them the door was open. They proposed to pay me for the company, and I refused. I felt that even if they left, I was still François Lano, and I would have a hundred people knocking at my door, proposing what I wanted. I was really wrong.”

  Finally Marie and Dollé brought Lano an offer that he couldn’t refuse: Carlo Cabassi wanted to buy into Paris Planning. Models S.A. helped broker the deal. “They were all in it together,” Lano says. “They said, ‘If you don’t agree, Gérald Marie will leave and empty the agency’”

  In September 1981 Marie and Dollé moved the women’s division to new space on the fashionable Faubourg St.-Honoré, while Lano, Lanson, and the male models remained in the original Paris Planning offices. Lano’s splinter agency struggled along for eighteen months before going bankrupt in fall 1982.

  François Lano finally left the modeling business. “I was trusting, and I was disappointed,” he says. “I don’t know if I regret it, though, because if I was not naïve, I wouldn’t have seen the color of the sky and the sun. If the color of money was fantastically beautiful, maybe I would like it, too, but it’s not attractive to me. Money in the bank didn’t make me happy. I ended up with nothing. But I can say that I’ve kept my ideas, and no one can steal them.”

  Back in Milan, their investments in the modeling business were paying off for the playboys—in more ways than money. “The number of girls went to the thousands, and they were no longer just nice, educated girls, but girls from all kinds of backgrounds, mainly discovered in large discotheques,” observes Umberto Caproni. Once his generation of playboys had ruled the town. Now a new group of players was taking over Milan’s night life. They were known as figli di papà (Daddy’s boys). “Kids,” says Roberto Lanzotti, “so fucking rich.”

  It had long been a game. Now it was a war. “It became industrial and aggressive,” says Massimo Tabak. “You must have a good atmosphere at a table,” says Caproni. “Otherwise the girls get bored, and if the girls are bored, nobody wins anything. Who has the most beautiful girls, the happiest people? Whose table was more interesting and more fashionable? In my table I try to always have good-looking people, which was not the same with Cabassi, I must say.”

  Cabassi’s new status as an agency owner had changed the rules. “Having a big share in Riccardo Gay’s agency, he could have the girls go to his house without going to the clubs first,” says Caproni. And when Cabassi and his friends did go out, things sometimes turned nasty. One night Cabassi arrived at a fashionable club with a blonde on his arm and was greeted by a regular who said to no one in particular, “Some things are reserved for those with money.” Cabassi beat the man up and tossed him onto the street.

  What caused this radical shift in behavior was an important shift in fashionable society’s intoxicant of choice. Champagne was no longer the favored fuel. “Suddenly drugs are fashion,” says Giorgio Repossi. “Coke is fashion.” And with that, Milano per bene—the city’s good boys—became known as Milano per male. An ignoble spirit was loose in the world of models.

  The first casualty was Giorgio Piazzi’s reputation. Of all the agents in Milan, his had been the best. But then Piazzi discovered America—and more. “Giorgio discovered too much,” says Giuliana Ducret, who’d worked for him since 1972.

  Piazzi moved to New York at the end of the seventies. “He went to America because he found this beautiful girl and married her,” says his brother, Giuseppe. “He was going back and forth for two years.” He bought Hinchingham, a 314-acre 1774 estate on the Chesapeake Bay shore in Maryland and, early in 1982, opened something called the Model Workshop there. For $3,500 (sometimes billed against prospective earnings), girls got to spend a week there, working with flown-in photographers and stylists to develop their looks and their books. He was supposed to be recruiting for Fashion. “An absolute joke,” John Casablancas said.

  “He had an idea that for whatever reason didn’t work out,” says Giuseppe. “Maybe it was too early.”

  “Giorgio was still the owner [of Fashion Model], but he was living [in New York],” says Ducret. He left his second wife, a model named Jan Stephens, and took up with another model, who became his third wife. He’d first seen her four years before when she signed with Ford at age sixteen. They got reacquainted when she came to Hinchingham to gussy up her portfolio. Though he and his second wife were embroiled in a bitter divorce, the younger girl seemed to give Piazzi a new lease on life. He was profiled by People magazine. “I am going to be the new starmaker,” he vowed.

  In spring 1982 Giorgio Piazzi appeared in Milan, scooped up several bookers, and took them to Maryland. That’s where Ducret realized that Piazzi had developed a taste for cocaine. “My husband came for two weeks, and one night, he said, ‘Giulie, I’m much younger and I’m always tired, and they are always so alive!’ I said, ‘You never hear when they go behind the tree and go sniiiiiifff?’”

  On that same trip Ducret came to New York for Piazzi’s fortieth birthday party, where Debbie Dickinson jumped out of a cake in a bikini. Beforehand they’d stopped at Piazzi’s suite at the Hotel Tudor, a depressing six-hundred-room establishment near the United Nations that rented tiny staff rooms to aspiring models at cut rates. As many as thirty girls as young as fifteen lived there at any time.

  Arriving at the Tudor, Ducret “started laughing, and I never stopped,” she says. “It was the image of the playboy suite: bad taste, but rich, mirrors all over, huge bathroom and someone poking a spoonful of cocaine under your nose. It’s the first and only time that I had cocaine, and I went HACHOO! and the whole thing went flying.”

  The Tudor was owned by a friend of Piazzi’s, Steven Silverberg, who hoped that Piazzi would help him turn the hotel into a fashion hangout like Milan’s Arena or Grand hotels. Briefly it became a sort of New York annex of the Fuck Palace, with unshaved Italians hanging out trying to pick up young girls. In fall 1983 several agents and models familiar with the scene in the hotel gave interviews to a local newspaper, the East Side Express. The resulting story “Terror at the Model Arms,” quoted models telling of men entering their rooms with passkeys at all hours; of thefts and a rape; of a model who was beaten so often she earned the nickname Blond and Blue; of cocaine parties in Silverberg’s eight-room penthouse suite; and of a whole catalog of mind games played by Piazzi and Silverberg as a prelude to invitations to the Model Workshop.

  “They would call you down to see your portfolio and rip you apart verbally,” said a twenty-one-year-old Foster-Fell model from the Midwest. “They’d say, ‘Don’t you know how to dress? Why do you sit with your mouth like that? You’re a fat slob. No one will book you.’ They were always doing coke down there.” And offering it to the girls. “I couldn’t believe the whole scene,” she concluded. “The hotel is depressing enough without them hassling you.”

  The director of security at the hotel, an ex-cop, turned a blind eye to what was happening. “Any girl who mentions it is foolish,” he said. “If they don’t like it, they should leave. I don’t think girls should be allowed to be here at that age. They should be home with their parents. A high percentage of them aren’t even models. They don’t make a pimple on a model’s nose.”

  Silverberg, today a real estate investor, denies that he eve
r took drugs, saw drugs, or had any business dealings with Piazzi. “I don’t have any memories of problems with any guests,” he says. “We stopped with models because they invited men and friends to the rooms. It didn’t work out.” Silverberg admits that some models got mad at Piazzi and adds that he had reason to be angry, too. “We thought we were going to get publicity from Giorgio staying in the hotel. We didn’t get any except bad publicity. I said, ‘That’s it. I don’t want you staying in the hotel.’

  “Giorgio’s like a big kid,” says Silverberg. “He’s not a bad fellow. Maybe people thought he was drunk. Maybe he told people they couldn’t be models. Maybe he was rude. At the time I was single, I went out with girls. Maybe I made a wrong judgment trying to attract fashion people. Maybe you’d assume I was flamboyant, but I was just trying to be a host. They were nice girls. If I spoke to anyone, I was more a concerned father figure.”

  Hinchingham closed in 1984. The girls Piazzi trained weren’t loyal to him and went off to other agencies. He “lost everything,” says Giorgio Repossi. The prevailing wisdom was that he’d gone off the deep end too late in life. “He was destroyed,” says Repossi. “He lost his mind.” Piazzi also lost his agency in Milan. He’d brought in two partners, Paolo Roberti, an accountant, and Lorenzo Pedrini, an ex-model, beginning in 1980. They were backed by a clothing factory owner and real estate investor named Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio. The source of his funds was a mystery to modeling folk. “How he made money I don’t want to know, or if I know, I don’t want to say, OK?” says Ducret.

  “The legend is that Piazzi was out eating and drinking, and he said, ‘I want to sell my company,’ and Sant’Ambrogio was there,” says Giorgio Repossi. Pucci Albanese confirms that. “Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio proposed to help,” he says. “He liked to be surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world. It’s not hard to understand his preferring them to carpenters and electricians.” According to his brother, Giuseppe, Piazzi left New York. “At this point adventure was his dream,” his brother says. “He went to the Caribbean and then on to Venezuela, the Amazon, and then he went back to Anguilla again.” There, having lost all his money in a failed gold mine, he became the chef in a restaurant owned by Silverberg (who’d sold the Tudor in 1987). The restaurant closed after Piazzi moved away. He now lives on St. Maarten, where he runs a small importing business. “Giorgio Piazzi never touched drugs until he got here,” says Jerry Ford. “He made a total mess of himself, but deep down he’s decent.”

  With Piazzi gone, an era ended in Milan and the Cabassi/Gay clique came to dominate its modeling business. “Being a nice guy doesn’t make you a winner,” says Umberto Caproni. “The bad guys were getting ten times more results, not in quality but in quantity. I was getting nothing, but I don’t regret it. I’d had my chances, and I played fair. You cannot win them all.”

  Naturally Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio had a model girlfriend. Donna Broome, whom he met in London in about 1979, was a full-bodied dark-haired girl who’d started modeling as a child. She moved to Milan in the early eighties. “When I first arrived, I went out with one guy, and soon I was getting calls day and night from people I never heard of,” Donna told a reporter years later. But when she hooked up with Sant’Ambrogio, she was protected from that sort of thing. She worked regularly and had what passed for a settled existence.

  Broome was one of the five children that Air Force Sergeant Bill Broome and his wife, Alice Thompson, raised on air bases all around America. She had a tough childhood. Her father “expected his kids to obey like his soldiers and not ask why,” Donna has said. Her younger sister, Terry, always felt he picked on her more than the others. Finally Terry ran away from their home in Greenville, South Carolina, when she was fifteen and was raped by two bikers. Her parents made clear their belief that she’d brought it on herself. Married at eighteen for less than a year, Terry then moved to New York, trying to follow in Donna’s footsteps. Terry joined Ford in 1978 but was mostly interested in cocaine and the bottle of scotch she drank each day. She tried suicide in 1980 and fled home to South Carolina in 1981 but missed the fast lane. Donna Broome meanwhile moved to Milan, and soon gave Terry a plane ticket and the hope she could revive her career in go-go Milano.

  At twenty-six, though, she was too old to start over, and she wasn’t pretty enough. The day after she arrived at the Principessa Clothilde, she lost a thousand dollars—all her money—to a pickpocket. “From that moment, it was all downhill,” Donna said.

  Patrizia Piazzi, an ex-model who worked with her husband, Giuseppe, at Fashion Model, says, “Terry had been very unfortunate in life. So Donna asked me if I could help her, if I could use her, and I told Donna that it was very difficult. Terry was basically hanging out in Milan, and then she got caught up in this terrible world.” Her brief sojourn in Milano male ended about ten weeks later.

  Terry later said that before she arrived, she knew about the systematic abuse of striving models in Milan. Agents wouldn’t send a girl’s portfolio out “until they did whatever these men wanted them to do,” she said. “I heard of a couple of cases in which these men threatened to throw acid in the model’s face. One time, they threatened to throw a girl in the river.”

  Yet she immediately got involved with Claudio Caccia, an insurance broker who knew Sant’Ambrogio. Within a few days Caccia took her to an overnight party at Carlo Cabassi’s villa in Casorezzo, between Milan and Novara. Model Shaun Casey frequented the place after Riccardo Gay introduced them, and she and Cabassi had a brief affair in 1982. She describes him as wealthy, very important, very funny, and “over my head.” She says: “He had bodyguards and huge dogs. Everything else in his house was dead. He was a hunter. There were tusks, skins on the wall, major killings.” There was also cocaine, Terry said. “Enough to be offered to everyone.”

  She and Caccia went to the party with Francesco D’Alessio, a rich kid who’d been abandoned by his mother at age two. He was the son of Carlo D’Alessio, Italy’s king of the horses, the owner of a hundred thoroughbreds and the head of the breeders’ union. Francesco grew up a rake and a gambler who played bridge with Omar Sharif and went to the races with Alain Delon. D’Alessio had married a model, and they had two daughters before she left him in 1983. He’d already started taking cocaine and became “a zombie,” in the words of Giuliana Ducret, doing coke until 11:00 A.M. and sleeping until 7:00 P.M. in the apartment he rented from Cabassi, who lived upstairs on Milan’s Corso Magenta.

  The night he met Terry Broome, D’Alessio entered her bedroom in Cabassi’s villa while she was dressing and asked her to have sex. Her refusal didn’t stop him from sharing his coke with her and Cabassi. Later that night he fondled his crotch while watching her. She proceeded to go to bed with both Cabassi and Caccia.

  D’Alessio asked to join the ménage but was rebuffed by Cabassi. D’Alessio had a problem Cabassi could recognize. Since his separation D’Alessio had taken to ritually humiliating women. He’d beaten his wife in a nightclub and punched an American model who’d refused to sleep with him. “He was a jerk, terrible with girls,” says Giorgio Repossi. He was certainly terrible with Terry Every time he saw her over the next two months, he would yank his crotch. He told his friends she’d taken on six men, not two, at the weekend orgy and that she might be a lesbian. “He would masturbate in front of people, call me a whore and a bitch in public, and tell people he was going to rape me,” Terry recalled. “At one party he came up behind me and threw himself on top of me, pinning me to the floor. He was a vicious sadistic type…. I would never think of going to bed with someone like that.”

  But Terry wasn’t exactly genteel herself. After she got drunk one night and ripped into Caccia with her nails and teeth, she found herself passed off to Giorgio Rotti, a pudgy jewelry store owner who drove around in a Mercedes, stored the cocaine he served at parties in an emptied can of beer, and manufactured the little spoons, vials, and straws that were necessary accoutrements for hip cokeheads.

  She’d become a toy to be p
assed from hand to hand. “I sold my soul to them for drugs, and they treated me like a prostitute,” she said. Terry Broome was “fucking everybody,” a friend of Rotti’s agrees. “She had no work, so she started living the life. She got lost. Rotti gave her a fuck. If you didn’t get lucky, you gave her a fuck.” Though Rotti told her he’d heard the rumors she was a lesbian, he had her move in with him in June. Within a week he was financing her test pictures, giving her jewelry, and taking her to meet his parents, introducing her as his fiancée. “I understood that she was a girl who needed love,” Rotti later said.

  Late in June Broome spent several coke-fueled days and nights with Rotti. They used five grams in three sleepless days and nights and showed no signs of letting up. On the third night of their run Terry and Rotti met Donna and Sant’Ambrogio at Caffe Roma, a bar owned by Beppe Piroddi, another playboy. When Francesco D’Alessio walked in, they got up and left for Nepenta.

  D’Alessio was in a particularly foul mood. The day before he’d called his wife in Rome, begged her to come back, and been rebuffed. Now he turned up again at Nepenta. After he approached Broome’s table and feigned masturbating again, Terry fled to the bathroom. D’Alessio approached Rotti and Sant’Ambrogio. “Why, when the girls go out with Rotti, don’t they want to fuck me anymore?” he asked. Rotti and D’Alessio almost came to blows before the party broke around 2:00 A.M.