Back at Rotti’s apartment at the Principessa Clitoris, Terry was furious. “I had done some party scenes,” she admitted, but never with six men at once. Then Rotti turned on her, demanded the return of an engagement ring and necklace he’d given her. He went to bed. She sat up doing a crossword puzzle, snorting coke, drinking vodka, and brooding. At 5:00 A.M., she went looking for a battery-operated video game in Rotti’s closet. She found more coke and a chrome-plated five-shot Smith & Wesson Chief Special .38-caliber pistol. “It was irresponsible of Giorgio to leave a gun and bullets around his house,” says Pucci Albanese. “He is the only one to blame for what happened. You cannot get stoned and go to bed with a girl you’ve only met two or three times and leave a gun around.”
But he had. And now Terry decided to “straighten things out” with D’Alessio. “I only wanted to frighten him,” she said.
D’Alessio was at home with a model named Laura Royko when his phone rang. It was Terry, but she called herself Diane and asked if she could come over. Stopping along the way to sniff coke from Rotti’s fake Vicks inhaler, she reached D’Alessio’s apartment and found Royko drunk and her tormentor sniffing coke. Turning some down, she went to the bathroom and did some of her own. When she returned, the suave D’Alessio asked if she’d have sex with him. With that, she pulled out her gun and started shooting the six-foot-three playboy at point-blank range. Two of her five shots hit him—in the head and chest. Royko, hiding in another room, started screaming. After failing to calm her, Terry ran back to Rotti and woke him up. It was 7:30 A.M. Rotti checked his gun, found five empty cartridges, and quickly hustled Terry to the airport, where he put her on a flight to Switzerland.
Upstairs Carlo Cabassi got the news from Laura Royko. He sent a servant, who returned to inform him that D’Alessio was lying on the floor. Rushing to his friend’s side, Cabassi heard “the death rattle” and saw “on the table a paper carton with cocaine,” he later testified. “I threw the cocaine in the toilet.” He said he wanted to protect his friend’s memory. Milanese authorities later charged that Cabassi also took D’Alessio’s diary.
Later that day Terry Broome was arrested in Zurich’s Bahnpost Hotel and immediately confessed that she had shot D’Alessio “because he treated me in a vulgar way.” After months of imprisonment and questioning, a court-ordered psychiatric study said that she was impaired on drugs at the time of the shooting. Nonetheless, eleven months later she was indicted for premeditated murder. Cabassi, Rotti, and Caccia were also charged with various offenses, the most serious that Cabassi had obstructed justice by stealing D’Alessio’s diary.
Broome’s trial was held in June 1986. It was a public sensation, and Milan’s newspaper, Corriere della Sera, printed daily transcripts. The three playboys were described as “pallid and a little fat.” They refused to look at Terry, who was confined in a steel cage throughout the trial. With her mother and sister in court, Broome took the stand and said, “I confirm that it was I who killed Francesco.” Cabassi called his friend “a little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Tennis players at D’Alessio’s club said that the gestures he’d made at Terry were a nervous hand twitch. D’Alessio’s father called his son “a gentle boy, always lucid, all there, nice.” Rotti testified in dark glasses, his shirt open to reveal a chest full of gold chains. “Do you consider this a normal way to live?” the judge snapped at him.
“These are people who use women as objects and display them like trophies,” Terry’s lawyer said in his plea for mercy. “She is more destroyed than the other person.” The jury apparently agreed, finding Broome guilty of voluntary homicide—a lesser charge—after eight hours of deliberation. She was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. “I’ve met better people in prison than I met outside,” she said. Cabassi, acquitted of obstruction of justice, received a suspended sentence of twenty-one months for cocaine possession. Rotti was also convicted on various charges and received a suspended sentence.
Terry Broome photographed while being extradited to Italy in 1984
Terry Broome, Matteini/SIPA
Outside the courtroom Donna Broome proved she’d learned something about agentry in her years as a model. “You want to speak to Terry?” she asked a reporter. “If you really want to, you have to pay. Money. We have lots of expenses. Terry needs things. There are already a pair of offers being considered. Call my boyfriend. Speak to him…. Money for the exclusive. Otherwise, nothing.”
A year later, in an appeal, Broome’s sentence was reduced and Caccia was given amnesty. Terry was released from prison and returned to America in 1992.
Today many modeling professionals dismiss her as a wannabe and a victim. “She was not a model,” says Giorgio Sant’ Ambrogio. “And this accident changed nothing. The same things happened all over the world, but when it happens in the model business, it’s news. Anywhere else nobody gives a shit. Ten years ago drugs were used like cigarettes. If something changed, it’s that drugs aren’t in anymore. Twenty years ago elite people used drugs. Now drugs are used by my butler and maid.”
“It was just a scandal, not a change,” says Riccardo Gay.
But in fact, Broome was a watershed. Milan’s playboy high life had been laid low. “They were like slobs, they were getting careless and sloppy, and it was not funny anymore,” says John Casablancas. “You know how these situations with drugs usually degenerate. It starts as a casual, sexy, trendy thing to do, and it ends up being vulgar. I saw Cabassi go from funny to disgusting. I think they felt they were above the law and above ethics. I avoided these people like hell. But probably this thing saved a lot of lives with those Milano per bene boys.”
In truth Milan had stood up and said no to the rot. “Public opinion stood on Terry’s side against this bourgeoisie type of life,” says Giuseppe Piazzi. “Terry became a hero,” adds his wife, Patrizia. “The Terry Broome affair pointed a finger at something that had been evolving for a long time.”
“Terry paid a price for a lot of victims in Milan,” Donna Broome says. “She was the one who exploded. In a way it straightened the whole city out. There was a big difference in the way people looked at models and treated models afterwards.”
Carlo Cabassi, for one, never wanted to see another model again. Following the shooting of his tenant and friend D’Alessio, he divested his interests in both the Paris Planning and Riccardo Gay agencies. “The lawyers suggested Cabassi get rid of his shares,” says Massimo Tabak. “At this point it’s easy for Mr. Gay to get the shares back—probably for nothing.” John Casablancas agrees with Tabak’s analysis. “Every time I see Riccardo, he’s collected a few more hundred million lire to sell his agency. Then I come back six months later, and whoever bought the business is out and he bought them for peanuts. It’s his specialty to sell his agency to people, fuck everything up, get the agency back, rebuild it, and then resell it. I think that he’s done that four times.” With the proceeds he settled down with a new wife and children.
“That was a time of life that hurt Riccardo very much,” says Pucci Albanese. “He’s very, very Catholic now.”
Paris Planning Faubourg St.-Honoré outlived François Lano’s Paris Planning agency—but not by much. Its partners were fighting even before Cabassi quit. The ubiquitous lawyer Jean-Marie de Gueldre says Dollé found himself in the middle of a conflict between Marie and Cabassi. The problem? “Cabassi invests and Gérald spends,” de Gueldre says. “So after two years they decided to separate.”
Cabassi sold his share in Paris Planning for a reported $300,000 to a woman identified as Joan Forbach, about whom little else is known by those few who are even willing to talk about her. “She never got the papers we call a statut in France, which proves who the partners are in a firm,” says Servane Cherouat. When she realized, she telephoned Jérôme Bonnouvrier, “hysterical,” and claiming her money had been stolen, he says. Finally, after six months of fighting with Gérald Marie, she put her stake in the agency up for sale and began writing accusatory letters “to everyone
in Paris, even the president of France,” says Paris Planning’s lawyer, de Gueldre. “I got phone calls from my bank administrators, telling me that she said I was the king of sex and drugs.” She also apparently alleged that model agencies in Paris were systematically avoiding taxes through their Swiss agencies.
“It was a very troubled time,” says Bonnouvrier. Dollé and Marie “were fighting over everything,” he adds. “Gérald was taking more and more power, and he started to do the same thing François Lano did,” says Gaby Wagner, then a Paris Planning model. “He started taking the Concorde, went on vacation, had houses on the company, invited people.” Finally Dollé “didn’t want to work there anymore,” says Cherouat. He started yet another agency but kept his share of Paris Planning.
Luckily John Casablancas’s old school chum Alan Clore wanted in. He bought into Paris Planning, but it turned out to be an empty shell. “Clore bought an agency that was not worth anything,” says Giselle Bonnouvrier.
In summer 1985 rumors were rife that Gérald Marie was about to start his own agency. He came to New York and talked to Monique Pillard and a top booker at Wilhelmina about opening a New York office. Then came a surprising offer. Ever since John Casablancas had moved to New York in 1977, Elite’s Paris operation had suffered. “The heart, the soul of Elite had left,” says Francesca Magugliani. “By 1983 there was nobody running the place.”
Two years later Paris Planning had surpassed Elite in profitability. “Gérald had very few models; but they were very good, and he asked any price he wanted,” says Francesca. “He had no expenses. His structure was very good; he had very good bookers who he paid a hell of a lot of money, all young, ambitious. Alain Kittler got drift of this.”
Seeking to shore up their Paris operation, John Casablancas’s principal partner soon found himself in the surprising position of talking to their sworn enemy. Kittler and Marie first met on Ibiza, an island off Spain where Elite’s backer owned property. “We started talking about this business,” Kittler says. “I saw that we had the same idea on the management and general direction, and so we met again in Paris, in September, and I officially asked [for] Gérald[’s hand] in marriage sometime in October.” Kittler offered Marie an equity stake in Elite.
Initially Casablancas was outraged. “I knew too much about the guy that I didn’t like,” he says. “But he was a good agent. So we had some lengthy conversations, and I told Gérald that there were two things that I would not accept from him as a partner. A lot of girls were complaining that he was rough, that he wasn’t nice, that he used his position.” Somehow, Casablancas’s objections were overcome.
One night during the negotiation Casablancas called Elite’s office on the Champs-Élysées from New York to talk with Francesca Magugliani. “At the end of the conversation he said, ‘How would you feel about working with Gérald?’ I said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Why?’ He said, ‘I was just asking.’” Francesca remembered the time that Elite New York’s Monique Pillard had received Gérald Marie in her office. “John was furious,” says Francesca. “He said, ‘If models see Gérald in Monique’s office, they could think we have something to do with him. He’s a sleaze. He beats up girls. He rapes them. He takes coke.’ That was one year before!”
Early in 1986 Gérald Marie became a one-third partner and director of a restructured and recapitalized Elite Paris, relocated in large new offices on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Francesca wasn’t the only one upset by Marie’s arrival. “We nearly had a nervous breakdown,” says April Ducksbury of London’s Models One. “Gérald had the most horrible reputation—just a ruthless little barbarian. John had the ideas, the creativity, the charisma. John gave the glamour to the whole thing. Gérald was a poor imitation and not a nice person. We wouldn’t want to send our models there. We knew that we couldn’t work with him. But John knew that he was another John.”
“Clearly, they hired Gérald to replace John, and John was brilliant with that,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “He didn’t interfere. That was the comeback of Elite in Paris.”
There was some sensitivity surrounding Marie’s arrival, however. “To mix all the employees, all the models, everything all of a sudden, that might be dangerous,” Kittler admits. So Marie was given his own division, dubbed Elite Plus, and quartered in a room of its own. Its assets consisted of all of the models and several bookers from Paris Planning-Faubourg St.-Honoré. To raise the money to buy his stake in Elite, “Gerald sold a shell to Alan Clore: the name Paris Planning and the space,” says John Casablancas. “But the company was totally empty, gutted by Gérald,” says Olivier Bertrand, a onetime garment executive who briefly tried to resurrect it. In the six months that followed, Clore lost FF 2 million. “Clore wanted girls,” Bertrand continues, “and that’s part of the reason the girls left. God knows what else was happening.” When Bertrand forced the issue, Clore shut the company down.
With a financial settlement, Bertrand opened Success, now the top men’s agency in Paris. Indeed, all the children of Paris Planning (and of Elite, Harlé, Models International, and Euro-Planning) were opening agencies of their own. Henceforth they would spring up like mushrooms after a rain. Of the pioneers of modeling, only Eileen and Jerry Ford remained, and more and more they were seen as anachronisms—still powerful but irrelevant. The past was dead. Few models knew or cared who Dorian Leigh or Lisa Fonssagrives were. Says booker Marcella Galdi, who left Riccardo Gay and opened her own agency, too: “Certain moments, when it’s finished, it’s finished.”
CHRISTINE BOLSTER
Gérald Marie had conquered Paris. It was his town now—not John Casablancas’s. His reputation as a sexual athlete had, by all accounts, also surpassed the prodigious legend of Elite’s founder. By the early eighties Marie was no longer just bouncing from model to model in a manner that stunned even the jaded bed-hoppers of Paris; now he also always had a model to call his own. If before, he’d alluded to work in exchange for sexual favors, by his last days at Paris Planning he’d upped the ante. He promised his girlfriends he’d make them stars. And he did it, too.
Casablancas had long been a proponent of the theory that models were raw stones that needed work to become glittering diamonds. “European men are important abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male chauvinists,” he’d said. “That attitude … gives the model an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable quality.” But in Casablancas’s day that service was provided by the playboys who surrounded the agents. By the time Gérald Marie joined Elite, the sexual polishing process was more often conducted in-house. “He’s a good lay, I’m sure of that,” says François Lano. “I’ve heard it from all of them.”
Marie says his first serious romance was with the Australian-born model named Lisa Rutledge. They lived together for five years and had a daughter, but domestic life did not domesticate him. “Gérald wanted to fuck the girls,” says Jacques Silberstein. “His way was, if you want to work, fuck me.” Some models left Paris Planning for Fabienne Martin’s agency FAM, claiming that “if they were not having sex with him, he wouldn’t take care of them,” Martin says. “I don’t know whether it was true or not. Some girls could say that because they’re not good enough, or they’re not doing well, or they just say [it] because he’s a flirt.”
Two internal Elite memos dated June 3, 1986, indicate that similar rumors quickly became a concern to Marie’s new partners at Elite. The first, from Trudi Tapscott, head of Elite’s new faces division in New York, to Casablancas, detailed charges leveled against Marie. Carré Otis (who later gained fame when she married and broke up with actor Mickey Rourke) said she was “sick of Gérald and all the drugs and all the women,” and charged that he would call her “at all hours of the night [4:00 A.M.],” asking her to come see him.
“It wasn’t only Carré Otis; everybody was complaining,” says an Elite executive. Casablancas sent Tapscott’s memo on to Alain Kittler and Marie. In a cover note he expressed astonishment at this “very disturbing turn of events
,” “a very nasty business and exactly the type of thing we do not need to have at Elite…. This type of rumor must cease at once,” he concluded, “and I ask Gérald to be extremely cautious in the future.”
But Marie wasn’t being careful. Indeed, by American legal standards, he was committing statutory rape on a regular basis at that time. Just before he made the move to Elite, Lisa Rutledge was out of Marie’s life—out of Paris altogether, in fact—and Christine Bolster, a California blonde, was in. Rutledge moved to New York in 1985. “I just left,” she says. “It was a mutual decision. Our relationship was over.”
“Poor Lisa was a fantastic girl,” says Servane Cherouat. “Gérald Marie was really a very bad man. I saw Gérald ask a girl to take a line [of cocaine]. All the people at Paris Planning with Gérald smoked joints and laughed at me because I didn’t want this. One day I saw a terrible girl, awful, and Gérald said, ‘Make a three-year contract at thirty thousand francs a month.’ Eight days later he said, ‘Cancel it.’ I told him to discuss it with her father. Gérald Marie took girls on only to go to bed with them. Christine Bolster was fifteen. Fifteen!”
In fact, she was only fourteen when she came to Paris and began sleeping with Gérald Marie. She ended up living with him for six years, before another model, Linda Evangelista, did to her what she’d done to Lisa Rutledge.
“She is very happy!” Marie says when asked about Bolster. “She is very happily married, she has two kids, and she’s very balanced, very organized. She’s a woman with a lot of charm and a lot of temper. She told me at the time she was modeling because I was a model agent. She was never crazy about modeling. She was only doing the pictures she liked to do with Peter Lindbergh and people like that. I was with Christine for a long time until I met Linda. That was when it stopped. The day we quit being together she quit the business; she went back to California.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 46
