Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  They all knew it had gone too far. “Of course, people got bored with us,” Christy says. “We were bored with each other. We even thought about staging a fight on the runway.” (They didn’t.) But Naomi and Linda were fighting (“They always fight,” says Turlington. “And always have. It’s love-hate. Not even love, just me, me, me. They’re like sisters”). And Turlington was having arguments over money with Elite in Paris. “They were very slow in paying, and I wasn’t used to that,” she says. “Ford paid me immediately. So it was always uncomfortable because it’s my good friend’s husband that’s my agent, and I can’t call him up and scream like I can to my normal agent.”

  In spring 1991, after Ford opened a Paris branch, Turlington and Campbell both signed up. When Elite’s lawyers sent her a threatening letter in response, Christy got mad. “Linda knows everything that goes on with that agency,” Christy says. “She tries to stay on the outside, but she is in the middle. It’s her husband. Nothing was ever mentioned. If there is some kind of problem, they don’t have to make it a legal situation, they can call me. I will do my best to make it right. I felt hurt because of that.”

  A close friend of Christy’s thinks the breach was inevitable: “The infatuation boiled down to real people. They were a neat look, but that doesn’t make you best friends.” For months afterward they hardly saw one another. Later Marie said that his feelings had been hurt. “Christy was staying home with us, going to weekends,” Marie says. “We are really close friends, and when you help set her back into the market and [she] leaves you for whichever money deal she could have, you feel like someone shot you, bang [in] your head, and your wife’s, too.”

  For two days during Turlington’s shoot for Anne Klein late in 1991, Linda Evangelista was working in a studio next door with Steven Meisel, shooting ads for Barneys New York. On the first overlapping afternoon Meisel’s set was still humming when Christy’s shut down. Christy stuck her head in. “Turlie!” Evangelista cried when she saw her friend. “I didn’t see you for so long!”

  Catching up for several minutes, Evangelista told Turlington about her recent operation to repair a collapsed lung. She’d had to decide whether to recuperate with her husband or her mother, she confided, and she’d chosen her mother. It was a sign. By the next July, when French Glamour ran a spread on their villa in Ibiza, Gérald and Linda had already separated. “We are still married but we are no longer lovers,” Marie told an interviewer. “We decided one day to lead separate lives…. Linda is not a bird that you can keep in a cage…. We both needed more space and freedom…. She was only spending four or five days a month with me…. If you stay away from the person you love for three weeks … you get independent. You exist … as a single person…. Linda is one of the most beautiful women in the world but there are lots of others.” He was obviously quite pleased that she, like Christine Bolster, was staying with Elite. “I have loved Linda and kept her,” he concluded. “I haven’t lost her.”

  But he had. “Something happened,” says the head of a competing agency in Paris. “Linda didn’t believe the rumors. Then she walked out on him. He was destroyed.” The story went around that he’d hooked up with a booker at a third agency. “Maybe he needed a mother at that point,” the agency head snickers.

  The separation wasn’t made public for months, while gossip raged in fashion circles that Evangelista had taken up with actor Kyle MacLachlan, whom she met on Meisel’s set at another Barneys shoot. The talk was fed by Evangelista’s disappearance from fashion runways for several months. She finally reemerged in March 1993 at the Paris shows. That season she gave an interview in her suite at the Hôtel Ritz. “We separated in August and I started seeing Kyle after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I liked him. He was sweet, but I wasn’t looking then…. What went wrong? I haven’t got the words.”

  Christy got a famous boyfriend, too, dropping Roger Wilson and picking up with actor Christian Slater, then dropping him for Jason Patric. Turlington also became best buddies and something of a modeling mother to Kate Moss, the leading member of the post-Trinity generation.

  Naomi Campbell hasn’t been so lucky in love. After being linked to Eric Clapton, she hooked up with U2’s Adam Clayton for a long engagement that finally led them to alter their plans. Then, in November 1993, Monique Pillard and John Casablancas faxed a letter around the world about her. “To Whom It May Concern,” it read. “Please be informed that we do not wish to represent Naomi Campbell any longer. No amount of money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed on our staff and clients. All who have experienced this will understand.”

  Those in the know said Campbell had at last made one demand too many—for a room at the sold-out Four Seasons Hotel in Milan during collection week. “Buy a first class hotel? Fuck you,” said Roberto Lanzotti, who works closely with Elite. “I don’t need that. I get rid of Naomi in the middle of the collections. I don’t want to represent her anymore. She was a pain in the ass. Forget it. It’s too much.”

  The members of the Trinity all continued to have healthy careers, but their modeling moment was over.

  On the last day of Christy’s shoot for Anne Klein, she headed next door to Meisel’s studio to say good-bye to Linda before flying to her next job. There she spied Lauren Hutton, the original contract girl, and the photographer quickly shot a roll of pictures of the three women. Christy pinched Linda. Lauren screamed and mugged. Then Turlington ran for the door, her floor-length pea coat cradled in her arms.

  “Bye,” she called to Evangelista. “I’ll call you.”

  “Really?” Evangelista answered. “Turlie? Aren’t you going to be cold?”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Christy replied, throwing her coat around her shoulders.

  “It feels like Paris used to feel,” Linda said wistfully as Christy turned to leave.

  Outside, a silver town car was purring at the curb. Christy glanced up to the windows of Meisel’s studio. A strobe light flashed once, and again, behind the dirty glass. And then Christy Turlington clambered into her car and was gone.

  VERONICA WEBB

  Veronica Webb’s favorite model is the artist William Wegman’s weimaraner, Fay Wray. Webb’s reverence for her profession is but one of the things that sets her apart. Her verbal skills (displayed in Paper and other magazines and on various Fox television shows) also make her an uncommon mannequin. It is a mark of her accomplishment, and of the changing condition of models, that those things come before these: She is black in a white woman’s world; nonetheless, she’s scored a contract with Revlon.

  Veronica is waiting backstage at a Todd Oldham fashion show, shopping a Sotheby’s catalog. There’s a Picasso drawing she wants. She can afford it. Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell come by, followed by Lifetime cable and Good Morning America. “Clash of the camera crews!” Veronica exults. Hers is just behind—but of course—led by Albert Maysles for HBO.

  She eyes a man standing next to her critically. “I wish you were a movie star,” she tells him. “That way I’d have a full model’s accessory kit.”

  She sets herself apart from modeling’s top cat pack. “Because it’s a youth-driven industry, it’s at once fantastic and terrible,” she says. “It’s intimidating—like going to the bathroom in high school with popular girls—only you’re not one of them.” She smirks. “You grow out of that.”

  She has been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. “He says a monster is whatever throws off your ideas of harmony, scale, and reality.” A hairdresser approaches, comb at the ready. “We now begin to prepare the monster.”

  “I was born in Detroit in the blizzard of 1965. The first nickname I ever had was Snowflake because my mother was trapped in her car and a police car got stuck trying to get her out and another police car had to come and push the first police car out so she could get to the hospital. And that’s how little Veronica came to be.

  “I grew up in a working-class neighborhood. Most of the people had emigrated from the South in
the thirties, forties, and fifties to work in factories. My father was an electrician at the tank division at Chrysler, and my mother was a nurse at Detroit General Hospital. They’d both done twenty years in the Army.

  “I thought about fashion all the time. I remember looking at magazines when I was very young. They showed women doing whatever they wanted. Nobody was telling them to wash the dishes, mow the lawn, don’t say this, don’t do that. It was soothing looking at women who had freedom. That’s what fashion represents to me: freedom. I didn’t intellectualize it then. I was seven. But eventually I figured out what it was that appealed to me.

  “I wanted to be an animator. I loved comic books. That’s another thing that appeals to me about being a model. My job, when I’m being photographed, is to fill up a frame, which is exactly what you do with an animated character. And comic books are about the sort of person who comes from a mundane place, someone who doesn’t know they have any extra ability but they’re very curious, nerdy, disenfranchised, have a heavy fantasy life and then suddenly they’re put into a fantastic situation, and they discover they have superpower.

  “Models have control over their looks, and most women don’t. It’s very hard to get yourself together, to get the appearance we’re conditioned to want and have fantasized about having. Imagine waking up in the morning and having someone there to do your hair, your makeup, sewing you a brand-new outfit all night, giving you music to get you into the mood as you go from child to supervixen. So modeling is sort of a dream come true, even though it only lasts for thirty seconds.

  “I went to art school. It was an excuse to get to a big city. I came to New York because it looks so good in the movies. All the opportunities, they’re all here, all the doors, all the offices, all the avenues. I knew I was pretty, but I didn’t think I was glamorous or beautiful. It’s like a creek and the Rio Grande. There’s a big difference.

  “I was working as a cashier in a store in SoHo in the early eighties, and all these people came in, makeup artists, agents, hairdressers, and they all said I should be a model. At that time, though, no models looked like I did, so I didn’t really think it was possible. I certainly don’t look like Kelly LeBrock.

  “I didn’t know that the market was opening up. But I went to an agency called Click, and I started working. I did six or seven jobs, for Bruce Weber, for Mademoiselle and Seventeen, a press kit for Agnès B. I made a little money. I didn’t have a bad start. But you go through that money very quickly because you’re setting up a business and it takes awhile to turn a profit.

  Veronica Webb photographed by Peter Lindbergh

  “Every time I went into the agency, I’d hear people on the phone, talking to Paris, girls calling from Paris, and I had always wanted to go to Paris. I didn’t know how long this would last. If it would just be like a summer job, I didn’t want to lose the opportunity. So I arranged for Click to get me an agency there, and I went off to Paris with a hundred dollars, three shirts, three sweaters, two pairs of shoes, three pairs of pants, and two skirts. I thought I’d stay at least long enough to make the money to buy a ticket home.

  “Paris was frustrating and beautiful. I used to sit on the curb and cry at the end of the day because I couldn’t speak any French. I’m very dependent on language, and I stepped off the plane and I was rendered an imbecile. But Paris opened my eyes. I learned so many things about aesthetics and craftsmanship and dedication. France looks good; it feels good; it smells good; it tastes good. French people make two-thousand-dollar cashmere bathrobes. They don’t mess around.

  “I sort of invented this look for myself. I cut my hair really short, in a bowl cut, and I drew on these really big, long, thick eyebrows, and I went to see Peter Lindbergh, and he got really turned on. He started booking this little character I had created. We were doing Italian Vogue, French Vogue, and Marie Claire, going to Arabia and Brittany and doing all these amazing pictures. And when they came out, Azzedine Alaïa came looking for me.

  “I couldn’t speak French and he can’t speak English, but I met him, and he had this rack of dresses and he had me try them on. He was holding my wrist like he was taking my pulse, having this whole conversation with me, very slowly, and I couldn’t understand. The only thing I got out of this initial conversation with Azzedine was to put my hands in my pockets.

  “Azzedine is very paternal. I started to spend a lot of time with him. Azzedine always works. He is constantly working, drawing, sewing, cutting, creating, fitting, thinking. We’d watch TV and he would fit things on me and he would teach me words in French. I got a little blank book and I would write down words every day, and then I started putting words together into sentences, and when I didn’t have the words, I would make them up by putting ez or ique on the end and making it sound French.

  “Eventually I moved into Azzedine’s house. I lived there about a year. Azzedine was like my second father. When a boyfriend left me or when my father died, or when I was trying to do something artistically and it didn’t work, he was one of the people I called and cried to.

  “I love to understand an outfit and to bring it to life. That’s what my job really is. Designers make these clothes, but they can’t wear them, in the street anyway. You get there, you see what they’re proud of, what they’re afraid of, and they’re looking at you to put that thing on and bring it to life. It must be the same for a playwright, hearing his words for the first time. Will it play in Kansas?

  “I spent two years in Paris, and then I came back to New York. I felt deeply dissatisfied because for the most part models don’t create anything. You don’t have a product you can hold up and say, ‘I did this.’ You’re in a collaboration that isn’t driven by your intelligence or your imagination.

  “I took a month off, and I thought about what I wanted to do. I decided to try acting. The fantasy of being in a movie or on the stage is interesting to most people. I spent two years in acting class. While I studied acting, I also produced theater for children uptown at the Harlem YMCA. It centered me. It gave me somewhere I had to be every day. And I couldn’t just smile and get by. You couldn’t fool people with makeup and lights. You had to do it every day without anyone there to prop you up.

  “Then I met Spike Lee, and I did the movie Jungle Fever. That was sort of a turning point in my career. It affirmed that I could do something else. Because it’s a very scary thing, modeling, you can get hooked on this life. Very, very hooked on this life. It’s hard to imagine working in a store or going to an office every day again. But I realized that acting wasn’t for me. The work isn’t right for me. I didn’t want to assume someone else’s personality.

  “[Gossip column items about a romance with Spike Lee] really upset me, but then I realized the lion was out of the cage. Either I can run from it, or I can stick my head in its mouth. And it’s become a very nice pet. I got famous, and fame is currency. It’s not hard currency, but you can trade that shit on the open market like nobody’s business.

  “I came back in 1991. While I was gone, the whole business changed. The whole world’s imagination [was] captured by models. It was planned. Of course it was a plan. I wasn’t in the war room. I don’t know exactly whose plan it was. And I really didn’t think it was going to work. But none of those girls are stupid. You would never catch them not looking fabulous, not dressed, not up-to-the-minute, not being that thing. And we all have to thank them, because they did raise rates and the profile of the job.

  “I’d never imagined that people could become so interested in models. It was very eighties. There was such a rush of attention and excitement. A lot of the other models felt: Oh, my God, can I compete? Can I be shiny enough? Will anyone notice me? My feeling was, Versailles was occupied by different kings and queens, but Switzerland was always Switzerland. It’s quiet and works well.

  “I was still frightened when I came back. I didn’t know what would happen. This business has been really, really, really good to me. It was like I’d never been away. Nobody punished me, or st
uck me in the corner, or pretended they didn’t know me. It was grace. Not my personal grace. The grace of God. Major concept.

  “Karl Lagerfeld really helped me a lot. A lot. I spent a lot of time in the studio with Karl, and he really paid attention to my ideas and who I was as a person. And Karl put me in his advertising. Before that there was no advertising, ‘cause advertising did not exist for blacks. At least not until maybe two or three years ago, when miraculously, Revlon happened. There was a Time magazine cover, after the 1990 census, on the browning of America. You must serve your consumer! You must serve your market! That census made a lot of companies respond.

  “The great thing is, it’s just given to you. I have no credentials except for having shown up and lived the life. But the catch is, you can wake up and not be able to do it anymore. The problem is, you don’t own it. You can never own it, and it can be taken away from you at any moment. Someone could throw hot coffee in my face. Some designer can say he doesn’t like the way I look. Some magazine can decide that’s horrible. Every four years a new generation comes up. And another generation is getting ready to happen right now. It’s just very, very, very fragile. There’s no sense of security.

  “Beauty is a fleeting thing; fashion is a changing thing. It makes the world go ’round. But you have to protect your soul. So at the end of the day I’m not defined by modeling. I’m not going to go home and cry because I didn’t get the outfit I wanted or because someone was in the makeup line ahead of me and I didn’t feel like I got the attention I deserved.