Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  That’s why he can’t understand Diane Sawyer. “This girl who interviewed me, could she swear that she never fucked people to succeed?” he asks. “I hate American people. I want to kick the American girls out of the business, because they are prostitutes, sex cash machines, whores. You are the most dirty people I met in my life. I’m not bitter. It’s a fact.”

  After dispatching Claude Haddad, 60 Minutes shone its light on Jean-Luc Brunel, a diminutive party boy who could always be counted upon to be at Les Bains, the most durable nightclub in Paris, at a table full of models and friends.

  Brunel says he grew up among the haute bourgeoisie in Paris. He started out in the public relations business, specializing in restaurants and tourism, and got into fashion, by arranging locations trips for magazines. He married a Swedish model, Helen Högberg, who was with Élysées 3.

  “We played gin together,” says Paris Planning’s Francois Lano, who appreciated Brunel’s taste, education, and gambler’s outlook on life. “Helen came with him to my flat, and we played all night long, with John Casablancas, too.” Brunel organized dinners where celebrities like Johnny Halliday and Omar Sharif met models. “One day he told me he wanted to work with me on public relations, just to be there,” Lano says. Helen Högberg came along as part of the deal. But when Gérald Marie arrived at Paris Planning, Brunel left. “He said, ‘It’s Gérald or me.’”

  Jean-Luc and Helen moved to Ibiza, where he opened a bar and restaurant called El Mono Desnudo—The Naked Monkey—with a few partners. “He had no money or at least not enough to support his tastes,” says someone who knew him well there. “If not for Helen, he would have starved.”

  Ibiza had long been a destination on the hippie trail. In the mid-seventies it turned into a refuge of decadent chic. Young British lords and ladies with heroin habits mixed with dethroned royals and Paris models. They all went to El Mono Desnudo. There were lots of women. “He had them all,” says Brunel’s friend.

  Gaby Wagner, the onetime Paris Planning model, was Helen Högberg’s friend. “I knew he was taking coke,” Wagner says. “I knew he was cheating on Helen. I traveled with her to Ibiza, and I went out with the crew at night, and I saw all these girls sitting on his lap.” But then Brunel ran afoul of some powerful people who gave him twenty-four hours to get off the island. “Whatever it was that he did, it was real bad,” the friend says. Borrowing money from one of his partner’s parents, Brunel ran.

  Divorced, he was looking for something to do in 1979, when another of his ex-wife’s friends, Karin Mossberg, asked him to work for her model agency. She needed a man around “because Claude Haddad had scouts like Dominique Galas and they were cleaning Karins out completely,” Brunel says. “Karin called me up and said, ‘As you’re going out a lot, and you know everybody, can you come and help in the agency?’” He says he agreed to give it six months and buy half the agency if things worked out. Two years later he owned the place.

  When Brunel arrived, Karins “was an empty shell,” he says. “Slowly the agency started to pick up. We developed the girls that nobody wanted! And I then got back all the girls that Karin loved who went to other agencies.” Brunel did know everybody, including some of the more interesting characters around modeling in Paris. And though he denies it, many modeling folk say that after he took over Karins, he started sharing his models with his friends. Where Gérald Marie operated “for himself,” says Jacques Silberstein, Brunel “operated for other people.”

  “Jean-Luc is considered a danger,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Owning Karins was a dream for a playboy. His problem is that he knows exactly what girls in trouble are looking for. He’s always been on the edge of the system. John Casablancas gets girls the healthy way. Girls would be with him if he was the butcher. They’re with Jean-Luc because he’s the boss. Jean-Luc likes drugs and silent rape. It excites him.”

  “I really despise Jean-Luc as a human being for the way he’s cheapened the business,” says John Casablancas. “There is no justice. This is a guy who should be behind bars. There was a little group, Jean-Luc, Patrick Gilles, and Varsano. He was the guy flying all the girls from Karins for the weekend to St.-Tropez. They were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks. Everybody knew that they were creeps.”

  “Jean-Luc is a pimp and was a pimp,” says Dorothy Parker. “Before Karins, he took girls and sold them to agencies in Paris. I was in Ibiza with the daughter of a friend, fifteen years old, and he came to the table and wanted this girl.”

  Despite his bad behavior, Brunel led a charmed life. It couldn’t have been otherwise with Eileen Ford as his guardian angel. “Eileen took Jean-Luc as her son,” says Jacques Silberstein. “She let him become very powerful. Jean-Luc’s education impressed Eileen. He played the game well. He could be charming.” Some saw a flirtation between them. “Jean-Luc made her feel girlish and desirable,” a model school owner says.

  “Not with my girls” was the motto of most agents who sent models to Europe in the days when that meant dropping them like raw meat into a tank of piranhas. Brunel seemed to honor that pact with Ford. “I love Jean-Luc. I think Jean-Luc’s great,” says Christy Turlington. “I stayed at his apartment all the time, and never once did I ever see anything wrong, never once did he treat me wrong.”

  Finally, though, people began warning Eileen Ford that her partner in Paris was up to no good. Bonnouvrier told Ford how Brunel was thrown out of a modeling convention in Las Vegas after a drug party in his room. “She started screaming, ‘You’re jealous, he’s successful!’” Bonnouvrier recalls. “I said, ‘I’m not sure jealous describes my feeling. I’m talking about drugs.’ She refused the evidence. She said, ‘He makes me laugh.’”

  After leaving Brunel’s employ, Gaby Wagner set up her own boutique agency, Zoom, with the help of her friend, the lawyer Jean-Marie de Gueldre. One of her models soon left her for Karins. Not long afterward, the model called Wagner, “and she said, ‘Gaby, you have to pick me up here. I’m in this apartment and I’m scared and I took drugs.’ At eleven at night I got her out of the apartment of Karins.” Though Wagner wanted her to go to the police, the girl left for America. “I picked up the phone and called Eileen Ford and told her what was going on in Karins,” Wagner says. “I said, ‘This is something I’ve seen, and I can tell you this is absolutely true.’ She would not believe me.”

  The seven-month CBS investigation changed that. “Nobody in the industry wanted to talk,” says reporter Craig Pyes. “They were protecting their own interests. Nobody was protecting the girls.” John Casablancas told Pyes it was a major scandal, “a conspiracy of silence, greed, and fear,” and then declined to go on camera. But Eileen Ford agreed to an interview at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris during the October fashion shows and, by all accounts, walked into a sneak attack.

  Pyes had found two models called Courtney and Shari. On the show they called Brunel’s parties a “meat market … for the purpose of somebody wanting to take you home to bed.” Brunel was “the matchmaker … he’s got the girls.” And if a girl said no, she got no work. “I was personally proposed to … by Jean-Luc,” one said. “I laughed in his face, and I had no more appointments and I never worked.” Courtney and Shari were followed by another model, who was not identified. She said Jean-Luc had given her cocaine and taken it himself. “He’d always give me a little vial of cocaine,” she said. “He did that with all the girls.” Finally another unidentified model said Brunel gave her a drink at his house that made her pass out. She awoke the next morning in his bed, positive she had been raped.

  Before she showed the tapes of the girls to Eileen Ford, Sawyer asked her what she’d do if someone made those accusations. Ford said she wouldn’t believe it but would dump Jean-Luc if she did. Then Sawyer played the tapes. “That’s horrible,” Ford said. It was the first time she’d ever heard such accusations, she said. Sawyer told her the show had interviewed five models who said they’d been drugged by Jean-Lu
c. “For his sake, I hope you’re wrong,” Ford said. “I have certainly asked him never to have drugs around in front of my models.”

  Ford looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Unfortunately Jean-Luc Brunel was alive. “She was very concerned,” says Pyes. “She put on an incredible amount of pressure. She called with all kinds of stories, seeking to discredit us. She put all kinds of pressure on the girls who appeared through their agents, trying to get them to pull out.”

  “American Models in Paris” aired in December 1988. Within weeks screenings of bootleg copies of the show were held in Paris, and transcripts were circulated. Within months Ford cut off its relationship with Karins. Brunel’s scouting sources dried up—for a year. But unlike Haddad, Brunel survived and remains a power in modeling, the owner of Karins and a partner in an agency in New York.

  Jean-Luc Brunel receives a visitor warmly in an office he shares with Karins’s director, Ruth Malka, whose power grew after the 60 Minutes broadcast. “After CBS Ruth stood up and said, ‘I’m in charge,’” reports Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “She’s now a partner.”

  Brunel is, as advertised, a charmer, small, with hollow, Gallic features, a broken nose, long, wavy brown hair, and a slightly dangerous air, softened by a blue cashmere sweater and a pair of tortoise-framed glasses. “I’m no saint,” he says by way of introduction. “But I never messed with the girls of the agency, and not one girl left me. That’s the big difference between Claude and I.”

  He readily allows for another difference: that he had a problem with cocaine for half a decade. “I admit it,” he says. “So, big deal! I never did it in the day. I was not mixing it; it never happened in the agency. I did it as an experiment. Fine, it lasted maybe a bit longer than it should. I started to do it for a few years, and then I stopped it; it was ruining my life.”

  Brunel says he’s lived the night life in Paris since he was a teenager and admits that models have passed through his bed. “You get laid tonight with a model, is that a crime?” he asks. “I don’t understand why people go into your personal life, what you do yourself, and to yourself, and they don’t look at things that are really important!” What’s important? Brunel believes that teenage girls shouldn’t be allowed to go to Paris by themselves to model. “I’m against it, it’s crazy, it’s nuts,” he says. “I don’t like having girls who are fifteen, sixteen. The only thing they give you is trouble. You just have to mother them; you just have to look that they’re fine. When that image of big supermodels started, it gave hope. But it doesn’t work that way. And what happened was a lot of agencies took too many people that weren’t the right people. There were so many girls with nothing to do.”

  Like Haddad, Brunel feels the 60 Minutes report was unfair for singling out Paris agents. “It was exactly the same in America,” he says. “If I’d had a daughter, I wouldn’t have sent her to New York. It was a hundred times worse at Studio 54 than at Les Bains.”

  Brunel has heard all the stories that go around about him and brings them up to deny them. “You’re going to hear I bring girls to St.-Tropez,” he says. “I never took girls to parties, to dinner, never, never.” But he admits he does invite girls to dinners with his friends. “If I have a dinner, I don’t pay any attention,” he says. “I’ve dined with many girls from my agency, and then it becomes like twelve, twenty people, but the girls they can go whenever they want, nobody’s going to bug them.”

  Karins is “a business,” he goes on. “Otherwise it would not last this long. Then you have my life. My life is not a story as long as I don’t take young girls to serve either my own, or … I mean, I don’t need those doors to open,” he says, referring to the sorts of men who would invite him places because he might bring models along. “I know tons and tons and tons, and I don’t want to see them,” he says. “I don’t want to be invited for a girl. How many times have I been invited on a boat and this and that; I never said yes, never, never, never.”

  He found out about the 60 Minutes investigation after Diane Sawyer had interviewed Eileen Ford, who called him. “She was horrified,” he says, “and then they called me to see me, [but] when I heard how they were doing it, I refused to see them.” Brunel says he tried, but failed, to stop the show from airing. Afterward, he says, he was treated like a pariah.

  Brunel married model Roberta Chirko the day before 60 Minutes aired. Though the timing was curious, they’d been together for two years, he says. Others add that she was so in love with him she’d stop girls on the street and recruit them for Karins. Nonetheless, people talked. “Jean-Luc married Roberta right after 60 Minutes to clean up his image,” says an American model who worked in Paris. But he hadn’t cleaned up his act, she adds. “He’d call her from other girls’ beds and say, ‘I’m so lonely.’” Though they’ve since broken up, Chirko is still with Brunel’s agency in New York.

  Despite his outraged innocence, Brunel thinks 60 Minutes did a good job. “60 Minutes is 60 Minutes because they’re good,” he says. “A good journalist knows what people want. You just have to catch the moment. It came at the right time.” He knows things had gotten out of hand. “60 Minutes, it was like the end of something,” he says.

  Craig Pyes of 60 Minutes brushes off Brunel’s and Haddad’s denials, even though French authorities apparently never pursued the matter. “Hundreds of girls were not only harassed but molested,” Pyes says. “We’re talking about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch.” Nearly two dozen models talked to CBS, repeating the sexual allegations about Haddad and Brunel. Five others claimed they’d been drugged by Brunel or his friends. Independent witnesses also confirmed key details of the stories told by the models who appeared on the air. Pyes adds that two of the models he investigated ended up hospitalized with ongoing, severe psychological problems. One claimed she’d been drugged by Brunel’s friends, and the other was involved “in a sordid party scene,” Pyes says. “I spoke to the parents of both girls.”

  It was natural to wonder—and many did—why Eileen Ford hadn’t done the same. “Didn’t you know?” Ford employee Iris Minier asked her boss shortly thereafter.

  “Girls always say things,” Ford replied with a sigh.

  “She really did have a heart,” Minier insists five years later. “She’d heard. She just didn’t believe it. If she had, she would’ve cut his balls off.” Indeed, she’d already cut off Claude Haddad, as she told Sawyer on the air. She wouldn’t deal with him anymore, and “he knows why,” she said righteously. “I don’t think he behaved properly. I know he didn’t. It’s just so reprehensible, just so appalling that some old sleazebag would come along and touch a girl.” Unless it was her sleazebag, that is.

  Even after 60 Minutes aired, Ford didn’t believe what had been said about Jean-Luc. That November Minier moved to Paris to be Eileen Ford’s “eyes and ears,” she says. Her brief was to handle scouting throughout Europe—and to ask questions about Brunel. “I told Eileen it was serious,” she says. “She went to the girls and heard for herself. She couldn’t deny it anymore. She pulled her girls out of Karins.”

  “We knew Jean-Luc was on coke, and I knew he liked young girls,” says Jerry Ford, but Brunel had sworn he’d stopped taking drugs in 1987. Ford says that only once did they hear of an attempted rape, and the girl involved “absolutely denied it.” But after she returned to New York, Eileen Ford called one of the girls who appeared on 60 Minutes and asked her why she’d kept the story to herself. The girl replied that she was afraid.

  “That,” Eileen says, “was the end of us and Jean-Luc.”

  The Fords had ended up at odds with Dorian Leigh, Simone and José Benazaref, John Casablancas, and now Jean-Luc Brunel. The obvious solution was to open Ford in Paris, but Eileen and Jerry didn’t want to own foreign agencies. “It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do,” Jerry says. “A little out of laziness, a little out of an appreciation of how difficult it is to run a remote office.” And the Fords seemed to think that they could rest on their laurels. “We were strong enough to s
urvive a real assault—John Casablancas and all the outriders,” Jerry says.

  The Fords hadn’t sat still in the years since the model wars. They and their children had traveled the world, vigorously promoting their Face of the 80s contest. Renee Simonson, the contest’s 1981 winner, earned more covers than any model except child star Brooke Shields. In 1983 Ford started boards for older models, meant to appeal to aging baby boomers. It was a pioneering move and a bit ahead of prevailing attitudes, even Eileen’s. “I don’t want to look at a magazine and see an old trout like me,” she said. In 1984 they launched a venture to open Ford Model Schools, only to dissolve it three years later. But their move into the runway arena that same year was a hit.

  It was around this time of expansion that a question arose: Who would run Ford after Eileen and Jerry retired? Though all the children had worked at the agency, “there was an outspoken desire on their part not to be involved,” says Jerry. Eldest child, Jamie, and youngest, Lacey, had bailed out of the dynasty. Easygoing Billy Ford took charge of publicity and promotion. But only daughter Katie seemed to have the interest and drive required to move Ford into the future. “I was really pleased when she decided to come into the company,” says her father. “She’s tough, calm, and almost unforgiving in her decision making.”

  Eileen and Jerry Ford with their children Katie (left), Bill, and Lacey Ford in 1984

  The Ford family by Dan Brinzac, New York Post