Christine Bolster photographed by Jake Crain
Christine Bolster by Jake Crain, courtesy Christine Davi
Some of that turns out to be true. Bolster is, indeed, married—to actor Robert Davi, best known for his portrayals of craggy-faced villains in films like Die Hard and License to Kill—and the mother of two children. They live in a suburban house near Los Angeles. And Christine Davi does indeed seem very happy. At least, until Gérald Marie’s name is mentioned. Then her face clouds, and her voluptuous yet stick-thin frame tenses visibly.
“I stick pins into a voodoo doll of him,” she whispers, launching into the tale of what can hardly be called their romance.
“I was fourteen and a half when I started modeling. We lived in Palo Alto. I was riding my bicycle one day, and I got pulled over by this white Jaguar. I thought, Oh, God, another schmuck, but this guy was a talent scout at a place called American Models. They were a little shady, but that’s nothing that shocks anybody anymore. They were having a contest. The prize was to go to Paris. I ended up winning, and that was the last I heard of them. Five days later I was on the plane to Paris with a list of agencies, by myself. I left California for three months, but I didn’t go home again for a year and a half.
“The first agency on my list was Paris Planning, and they took me, right away. François Lano had just exited. It was all just sort of settling itself. Gérald took me. It was like, ‘Here’s your Plan de Paris, and your list of go-sees,’ and I still had my luggage. At first I shared an apartment with two other models, one who did OK for herself and another, I forget what her name was, who was there for three weeks and then she was gone. Disappeared.
“I had long hair, and Gérald sent me to cut it. My first job was with Italian Vogue. I’d been there three days. I go to Italy, I come back, I have go-sees the following day, a job the next, and it progressed. It was so sudden; it happened so fast. Overnight I was in incredible demand. I was overwhelmed. A few days before, I’d been riding my bicycle to school!
“Then suddenly I found myself moving into an apartment in Les Halles that Gérald Marie paid for. It all started about two weeks after I got there, at the agency actually. I was very surprised. You kind of get a feeling when someone’s interested and you’re interested. So I was waiting for him to ask me to dinner, but I went into his office one day after work, and he just jumped on me. I was so shocked. There was no way that he was going to get turned down. It was like I had no choice!
“I knew what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t like the naïve girl from Podunk that came in and got drugged at a party and sold to the Arabs! I had my reasons, you know? Because things were going so well, and he believed in me, and that’s really important when you’re young, to have someone really have confidence in you. I was smart. I knew that ultimately I was not going to be with this guy. But I didn’t know how powerful he was, and so it was a little more serious and involved than I ever expected it to be. But I walked into it because he was an agent, because he could get me what I wanted.
“At first it was a mistress kind of a thing because he was still living on rue Boissière with Lisa [Rutledge] when I met him. Lisa was working and doing well. It was very sudden. It was like, a decision he made, and then she was just gone. He sent her home. They had already had their daughter. I don’t know if they were married. There are some things that I couldn’t get ahold of and I didn’t care about at that point. Later on I would have been a little more interested in that.
“I stayed in rue Boissière after Lisa left. It was an incredible apartment, but it was costing him forty thousand francs a month, so he decided to get rid of it. Then we found a place on rue du Bac. It was an old apartment, with high ceilings, hardwood floors. He had a bathroom built for me there. It was a bedroom before, and its bathroom became the shower, with shower heads coming down from everywhere. The bathtub was in a box that had trees coming out of it. They built a big vanity out of small pieces of glass that took up the entire wall, all lit up.
“I got a Swiss bank account pretty fast. They wanted to make sure you were going to make money. They avoided taxes. I didn’t pay. They filtered all your money up through the agency and cleaned it. They were very careful about the girls they chose. They tried to act like they picked you to have [a Swiss account] because you were intelligent and it would be a wise thing to do. They really played this big game with their heads, which is what the Europeans are famous for anyway.
“I got completely screwed over. I never really had much money because it all went into this bank account. It was siphoned off and invested, and when I wanted to buy a house when I was seventeen, I suddenly couldn’t come up with the thirty-thousand-dollar deposit, and I said, ‘Well, where’s my money? I’ve supposedly got two hundred thousand dollars in Switzerland. Where is it?’ Gérald said it takes six months to get any money out of Switzerland. They were making interest on everybody’s money.
“I didn’t speak a word of French when I got there, but I picked it up very fast. When it has to do with your life, when it’s survival, you really pick it up. I always pretended that I couldn’t speak French, but I understood everything, which was great, because at these business dinners they would say things about you. Gérald had dinner with some very shady people, and I understood all the business dealings, and he didn’t know that I understood. What Gérald didn’t do! He had his fingers in everything you could imagine. Agents aren’t supposed to be clean, so it’s normal, but they do a lot of really sick things, the good ones.
“At first I felt really strong, and I was passionate for taking pictures. I loved taking photographs. I’d never gotten up at five in the morning before—and I couldn’t now if you paid me a million dollars—but I did, every day. I would do anything to get where I had to be. It was my life. I ate, slept, drank, breathed modeling—not to the extent that I was only living on water and lettuce, but I went to every single business dinner, every dinner Gérald had with editors and clients.
“He was like God; he gave birth to me. He decided that I was going to be ‘big shit.’ That’s what he used to call me. Big shit. And he did it. He was so sure of himself. He could sell anything to the client. I was so amazed. He would have the client begging him for a girl. He used to turn down jobs, and I would say, ‘But I wanted to do that,’ and he’d say, ‘Just wait, they’ll call back.’ And he’d ask them for some ridiculous amount of money, and they would call back and pay. I would tell him, ‘I want an Italian Vogue cover,’ and sure enough, the week after, I had it, which was the biggest thrill of my life. We were sort of helping each other, and we were both aware of that. He’s making me a star, and I’m making him a star. It went hand in hand.
“Suddenly there I was in the middle of it all! At a very wild time, too. Everybody was doing drugs. We were going straight from work to the night clubs. Gérald was thriving. He was starting to build up momentum. He’s an incredible agent, one of the best in the world as far as I’m concerned. I have a lot of respect for him—that way. But he was not very discreet. He used to do coke in his office, on his desk, with the windows open, right on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. He’d slide his credit card across his nose, and he’d go right out and meet clients like that. He would laugh, and he’d be wiping his nose. He’d do it on the table in La Coupole; he didn’t care. He was untouchable as far as he was concerned.
“It was nonstop. It was night and day and continuous. I would do two jobs a day. He worked me until I was almost dead, and then he would book me out for two weeks and send me somewhere and make me rest. He had to keep his investment sound. I was run-down, and I was doing some drugs. Just cocaine; I never got into anything else.
“My parents came to Paris to meet Gérald. He flew them there, which was awkward, because my father looks like my younger boyfriend and Gérald looked ten times older. It was also very awkward because my father gets feelings about people, and he didn’t like Gérald right away! I was at this point still enamored of him. Gérald got them out of there as
fast as he could. Gérald had asked me to marry him at one point, and I discussed it with my parents, and my father said, ‘No way. You can’t marry the guy. He’s a sleazebag.’ They talked me out of it, thank God. I never met his parents. I didn’t know if he even had parents. I never even talked to his mother on the phone, which is odd after five years!
“I would say we were happy and together for about two of the six years I was in Paris. Then it got very cold. We didn’t really have sex all that often or really wild sex. He was always too tired from running around, which always made me stop and think. And he did so much blow. There was a point when I stopped. I was still with him, but I’d had it. I liked having control over myself. It started to have control over me. It was there all the time. I don’t remember a day that I’d open my eyes that there wasn’t a plate on the mantelpiece.
“I was very spoiled in a way. I got the highest-paying jobs, I got the best jobs, and he made sure I got good treatment at the studios. They were all intimidated. All the other girls were having to deal with slimebags, but no one went near me, ever. He put out the word, ‘This is mine—don’t even think about it.’ I was basically his fiancée. I had a ring.
“There was a photographer who was one of the bigger sleazeballs in the business. He and his wife would pick up girls together. He had me cornered once. It was ‘If you don’t do this, you will never work, you will never model.’ I told him to get lost, and I told Gérald, and he disappeared. I think that Gérald had something to do with that. He blackballed him.
“Gérald was like a mini-mafioso boss, but in the modeling world. He would get calls in the middle of the night, and he would hear something that someone said about him, and he would say, ‘This one is never going to work again.’ His ego couldn’t handle anyone saying anything about him that was negative or that he didn’t want to hear. He wanted everyone to do what he said. He could say, ‘Do this with this person by this day,’ and it would happen!
“People were very, very nervous to be around me. Certain hairdressers who were dealing with Gérald on another level were very intimidated by me. The girls felt very threatened, too, I’m sure, because I was the queen mother. It made me feel really strange, because I was nice enough. I was quiet, but I would stand up for something if it wasn’t right on a booking or someone was treating a model badly, and I would tell a client to go fuck themselves if I was really unhappy. And Gérald would back me up. He would turn it around so it was the client’s fault, but girls were very wary of me.
“So I didn’t have any friends, and he wanted it like that. I was isolated from everyone except clients. I always felt like there was a million eyes watching me, because he knew everybody, and he spoke to everybody at every job I went to. I couldn’t do anything without him knowing. Even shopping. You know when you’re just in a bad mood and you want to buy something? He would know the next day exactly how much I spent, what I got, even if it was hiding in the back of my closet. I felt like I was being followed all the time. Probably was! Who knows? I was sixty-three hours a week in the air, traveling, working, going to Milan and Germany. I was on trips, and he was having a great time! He was always out at the Palace, Les Bains, all those big hangouts, constantly. If I was working or I wasn’t in town, he would go.
“He’d changed. I think that drugs had a lot to do with it, and the fact that he had as much power as he did. He was overwhelmed by it. He took advantage of it, and he really became sinister. Eventually I started to get a mind of my own. We had a friend named Jean-Marie Marion who was going out with my girlfriend Elle MacPherson, before she met Gilles Bensimon. Jean-Marie was a male model. He was older, rode a motorcycle, very promiscuous guy. He hung around with Gérald. Gérald started not coming home at night.
“They were so promiscuous it got to the point that our freezer was full of shots, the stuff you take when you’ve got VD—a box of this in our freezer! I, amazingly enough, didn’t get anything because I think he gave himself his own shots! I’d walk in, and they’d be bending over the kitchen table with their pants down, and Gérald would jam them, and they would pay him for these shots! Every now and then something like that would happen that would make me sick to my stomach.
“We ended up with separate bedrooms in rue du Bac because he was seeing other people and I’m not stupid. I would find my clothes walking around Paris. Europeans are very discreet about that stuff. But I knew. I approached him saying, ‘How come so-and-so has my Azzedine dress on? I know that’s my dress because it’s missing!’ I spent at least a year and a half trying to catch him. I was just dying to catch him because he was so sneaky. He tried to make me feel stupid. He would say, ‘But I spent the night in jail,’ or some ridiculous story, and Jean-Marie would call and say, ‘Yes, it’s true,’ and back him up on it. I know they discussed it. He told me at one point, ‘You will never leave me; I will leave you.’ And I said, ‘We’ll see.’
“Things finally started to slow down. I couldn’t leave. I was literally stuck there because I was doing very well, and I really enjoyed what I was doing, and he told me I couldn’t leave him [and if I tried] he would make sure that was the end of me. But I was obviously getting bitter, because I was starting to know, and he was lying to me. I never liked anyone to think I was stupid, so I started to talk back to him. I was speaking French a little bit, and he was surprised. Jean-Marie had little pins that he wanted to stick in Gérald sometimes, but [he did it] through me, so that he wouldn’t get in trouble. He would teach me slang that there’s no way any American would know, and I would practice and then say it, and Gérald would be like, Where did you learn that? The first thing Jean-Marie taught me how to say was the most disgusting thing I’d heard in my life. ‘Blow it out the veins of your ass.’ I said it to Gérald at a dinner with the girls from Italian Vogue, and he turned red and then white. You didn’t do that stuff to him. My nickname, by the way, was Casse-couille, which means ‘ball breaker.’
“He never laid a finger on me. And I did everything to deserve it, because I couldn’t stand looking at him by that point, which was hard, because it’s very exhausting to hate someone, you know? You have the same business, the same interests, and I basically had all of his friends like Peter Lindbergh and André Rau, who was Lindbergh’s assistant at one point before he started to become a photographer. He was Linda Evangelista’s first boyfriend and Gérald’s best friend.
“I went on Linda’s first trip with her, which I thought was kind of strange because she had longer hair and a long skinny nose and glasses, and I thought she was such a dog and André was the most disgusting person in the world, German, full of pimples, fat and greasy and slimy. I could never understand what she saw in him. But he was a photographer. She knew what she wanted, and she was going to get it, too.
“I’d started to work in America. I didn’t have an American agency for a long time, and then I went with Eileen. She got me bookings, a couple of commercials. I was with them for about a year, and then I went with Elite just as the transaction was happening in Europe with Elite Plus and Paris Planning. I remember first meeting John Casablancas at the collections in Rome in 1985 at a dinner. John and Gérald were enemies. They were in competition for having the reputation for being a womanizer, and they were in competition for having the best agency. Gérald always said that he was going to be bigger and better than John Casablancas.
“I was going to start going back and forth between Paris and New York. Gérald got me an apartment there. I’d moved most of my stuff there. Unfortunately I had a lot of Erté pieces that he kept. They weren’t there when I came back to get the rest of my stuff. They didn’t know I was back in Paris. I got on a plane myself. I finagled Monique Pillard to give me an advance to get a ticket back, and there was no way he could find out that I had arrived. I got in the apartment. Gérald was at work. He didn’t know I was there, and I was digging through the closet, and I found photographs of him and Linda on vacation with Cookie [Marie’s daughter by Lisa Rutledge]. He didn’t try to hide them
. They were just in a box in a closet.
“I just thought, Finally. It was such a relief that I’d finally caught him. I’d put up with so many of his stupid alibis because he had three people vouching for him. I always hated his friends for doing that. I hate it when people kiss ass and then turn around and they’re bad to you. Finally I had proof. And ten minutes after I found them, Linda walked in, with a key. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Just the person I want to see.
“I said, ‘So, what’s going on? And she said, ‘Well, I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I was so angry. I said, ‘I want you to get out until I get the rest of my stuff packed up.’ It was pissing rain, and she said, ‘But I don’t want to go wait in the rain.’ She was just beside herself. She’s very whiny. I can’t stand her. She waited outside for hours, and then she went to the agency and she told him I was there. I was trying to get everything else that I had there. I ended up staying two days. I’d been there for years!
“When he came home that evening, I had the door locked. He knew I was leaving because Linda had told him I was packing. He was pounding on the door. His ego was tremendous. He said no one would ever believe that I left him. The world would think that he left me. He said, ‘You will never get away with this! In New York you’d better take care, and don’t walk past too many dark alleys.’ He basically threatened me. He slept in the hallway that night, because I wouldn’t open the door. I was scared, too. I didn’t know if he had a gun or what he was going to do. I knew a lot of things he did at this point. I’d sat in on a lot of the dinners that he didn’t think I understood.
“I sort of died when I left Paris. I lost all desire to create, and New York didn’t help any, because it was the nine-to-five grind, and it was so cold, and my apartment there was the dingiest place. I fell in love with someone on the rebound in New York. A model. He listened to every trouble that I ever had in five years. I sobbed and I wept, and he listened, which is what I really needed, because I had no one to talk to. I was guarded and I felt safe because I moved in with him right away, like after six days.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 47
