Thing of Beauty (23 page)

Casablancas’ first agency ran into financial trouble. He opened a second, Elite, in 1970 with Elysee’s three best models. The new agency was to be smaller and more scouting-oriented than agencies had ever been. Before John Casablancas made searching for gorgeous girls a full-time job, most model agencies chose from whoever came through their doors or won their occasional contests.

With his reputation as a spotter and molder of new talent, Casablancas was prized by the top American agencies, which were run by women who did everything they could to make modeling appear to be a profession like any other. The Wilhelminas and Eileen Fords were just as happy to let someone else do the dirty work of “seasoning” young models: which often meant teaching those “valuable lessons” about what society really wanted from its beautiful women. A charming, flirtatious European man seemed a more appropriate person to supervise such instruction, far from the judging eyes of the American press or the girls’ parents.

For years, Casablancas’ relationship with agencies in other countries was typical of the way modeling people respected each other’s turfs. Then he toppled the system he had mastered by opening an Elite office in New York in May of 1977 and going into competition with the American agencies that had once been his sister operations. Casablancas hired the two top bookers and the financial controller from Eileen
Ford: her legendary response was to send each of them copies of the New Testament with Jesus’ words to Judas underlined in red. Elite lured away top models from all the agencies with promises of higher fees, lower agency commissions, guaranteed six-figure incomes and a freer working environment. And Casablancas’s methods were anything but maternal: one of the only agency heads who would regularly go dancing in the top nightspots, he did business wherever the models were. Stories began circulating of Ford and Wilhelmina girls going to Studio 54 and never coming back.

The first thirteen models that jumped to Elite cost Ford $500,000 in annual billings and Wilhelmina $400,000. So Willie and Mrs. Ford promptly sued Casablancas, setting off what would forever be referred to as the model wars after
New York
magazine used that title for its cover story, subtitled “How the Top Agencies Buy and Sell the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.” The article estimated that New York’s model agencies were grossing a combined $15 million a year. A career breakthrough for one of
New York’s
newest writers, Anthony Haden-Guest, “Model Wars” was the first even semi-serious look at the industry—which had always been viewed as frivolous at best and hardly worth the attention of financial reporters.

Eileen Ford hired Roy Cohn to sue Casablancas for $7.5 million and tried to get an injunction against her former staff members. Wilhelmina took another tactic, suing Casablancas for $4 million and then suing Iman, one of the models who had defected, to see if a court would uphold the standard, and vaguely worded, letter of agency as a binding contract. (A New York court eventually ordered Iman to return to Wilhelmina—by then a moot point, since she and basketball star Spencer Haywood were expecting a child and she couldn’t work.)

Besides the bruising of egos and the shifting of talent, Casablancas’ immediate impact in New York was to plant the idea that anything was possible. The hard and fast rules of the business—which had, for years, largely been determined by the women and gay men who controlled modeling in America—were being challenged by a lusty heterosexual male. “Perhaps we will have to hire a pimp,” Wilhelmina’s
husband Bruce Cooper coolly joked to
New York
, as if men who lusted after models had been unknown to him before Casablancas opened in New York.

And then, just six months after Casablancas had opened, the other high-heel dropped. If there had been any doubt before that modeling was, like everything else, about to lose its virginity (or illusion of virginity) in the seventies, the January 1978
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue put an end to it. The uproar caused by one picture of Cheryl Tiegs reinforced the new truth that the way
straight men
perceived fashion models would determine the future of the business.

Tiegs, a veteran
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
girl-next-door, posed in a one-piece fishnet suit rendered transparent when wet. And millions of American men went berserk for a shot far less risqué than those appearing regularly in the tamest of men’s magazines, or even in the women’s magazines purchased monthly by their wives and girlfriends. The picture became a best-selling poster and Tiegs made the cover of
Time
magazine—which confirmed her as the “girl of the moment” whether the modeling industry thought she was or not. Suddenly it seemed like prudish folly to scoff at the prurient interests of straight men toward fashion models.

To add insult to injury, the February 1978 issue of the short-lived women’s magazine
Viva
included a photo-story on Casablancas and his models entitled “Invasion of the Beauty Snatcher,” which doubled as a Fiorucci fashion section. Chris von Wangenheim did the pictures (the magazine’s fashion editor was Anna Wintour, who, a decade later, would be editor-in-chief of British and then American
Vogue)
and the opener showed Casablancas holding an unwrapped box containing a model in a tiny bikini. On the next pages, models Christie Brinkley, Rachel Ward and Anna Anderson starred in a send-up of the industry reaction to Elite. “People want to know why every model alive wants to join one of Johnny’s agencies!” read the final caption. “The parties,
mon petit chou
, the parties are not to be believed.” The powers that had been were not amused.

Largely because of Casablancas, the top ad rate for models had doubled in two years, to $1,500, and then soared to $2,000 after
Time
reported that figure as Tiegs’ day rate. And that day rate, which once covered all rights in perpetuity
to the shots from a sitting, now bought far less: generally three months’ usage in one medium, so if clients wanted to use an advertising picture longer or turn a print ad into a billboard, they paid again. One day’s work could now conceivably bring in over $10,000 in billings. Because of that, model loyalty and agency cash flow were more mutually dependent than ever. The next generation of top models would be walking down a whole new runway.

The work was coming more steadily to Gia now, and the photographers who seemed like such big deals the first time around were now just regular colleagues. She had a hard time taking it all seriously. When Gia wrote down the names her booker told her over the phone, she got the spellings as close as she could. There was designer “Norman Kamali” and photographer “Chris Vongheim.” And, for her first cover try at
Comopolitan
magazine—several different covers were usually shot for each issue of a women’s magazine—she would be working with “Scovollo.”

Francesco Scavullo was, without question, one of the most celebrated commercial photographers in America—although he was, to a large degree, best known for
being
best known. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood of Staten Island and later in Manhattan—where his father owned the Central Park Casino supper club—and began as a photographer’s assistant at
Vogue’s
studios. He worked mostly with Horst during the forties, and did his first photographs for
Seventeen
in the early fifties. He made his mark in magazine photography with certain innovative lighting techniques, pioneering an umbrella effect that created an unnaturally warm studio light and captured the look of the close-ups in old black and white films—like the Garbo movies he had been drawn to in his youth.

In the mid-fifties, Scavullo began working for
Harper’s Bazaar
during its creative heyday under art director Alexey Brodovitch. Unlike Richard Avedon, who left
Bazaar
after that period with Diana Vreeland and diversified his commercial and fine art work, Scavullo had chosen a path with less diversity and a stronger signature. In his work, he turned almost completely to studio portraits: the increasingly sexy cover shots for
Cosmopolitan
, where each year a little more
cleavage was visible, and elegant celebrity shots with his trademark lighting and strong hair and makeup statements. In his personal life, he became increasingly flamboyant and public. He was one of the first true fashion personalities and one of the first public men, along with Truman Capote, widely assumed to be gay.

Regardless of the freshness of his photographic eye, Scavullo had established himself as one of the first Beautiful People by positioning himself as the man one paid to be made beautiful. His unique position in the business was a combination of his considerable talent and his willingness to publicize and personify everything that went on in the making of a fashion photograph—the clothing selection, the make-over, the shooting, the pictures themselves and the gossip that filled the long waiting periods of a photographic day. He had also successfully exploited the need every magazine had to elevate its most creative talents to the status of “artist” and “genius” in its monthly world. He was the Picasso of the
Cosmopolitan
reader, his “Scavullo-ization” of subjects as distinct and significant as a cubist still life.

Scavullo was well liked among the models, even though some of the agencies (and his fellow photographers) regarded him with awe and disdain. “For
Cosmo
covers, they just take someone who already has some public acceptance, push the boobs together, fluff the hair and put on a little more makeup than usual,” said one agent. “It’s more of a drag queen kind of parody look rather than glamour or high fashion at all. It’s more of a joke to the business. The rest of the joke is the assumption in New York that the
Cosmo
look is the look that America buys, that all the women in America would rather look like
Cosmo
than
Vogue.
And in my travels, I must admit, I find that there is some truth to that.”

While editor Helen Gurley Brown made the final decisions, Scavullo had far more control over who got on
Cosmo’s
cover than any other photographer did with a major magazine. At other fashion publications, several photographers might do cover tries each month, and shots from editorial sessions sometimes became covers. At
Cosmo
, they only chose from the cover tries Scavullo did for them: he had an exclusive contract for all twelve issues.

And the magazine was only one of the ways that Scavullo’s favor could lead to immediate mass exposure. He also had a wide variety of other top editorial and advertising clients, and a waiting list of people willing to pay $10,000 for private portraits. He often credited Andy Warhol for opening up his worldview during the sixties, and he had obviously learned Warhol’s lessons well: he had made sure that a Scavullo portrait was the required souvenir of everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame.

He did this by functioning as more than just a photographer. He really was “mad about women,” in a way only someone who didn’t sleep with them could be. And unlike other photographers—who felt that when a model got too big, she distracted attention from the true artists of the trade—Scavullo was perfectly happy to publicly gush over whichever model was of the minute. It was, in fact, difficult to find a major magazine story about a beautiful woman that didn’t include an assessment of her appeal from Scavullo.

All his name-dropping aside, Scavullo had both the inclination to be kind and loyal when others might be brutal and the power to make that goodwill mean something. He gave second chances and, perhaps because he was operating with a less modern sensibility, he was as likely to discover a new talent as he was to rediscover someone who had reached whatever-happened-to status.

Scavullo’s studio was in the first floor of a building on East Sixty-third Street: he lived on the upper floors. The studio was run by Sean Byrnes, a handsome young man who had come into Scavullo’s life in 1974 and had quickly become much more than a typical photographer’s assistant or studio manager. Byrnes was credited, in everything emanating from the studio, as fashion editor, styling editor, beauty editor or photo editor. It was an unusual relationship—most assistants took the demanding jobs for a year or two as stepping stones to something else—but a successful one. Since Scavullo had to take so many pictures and give more interviews than all the other photographers in New York combined, having a permanent right-hand man seemed prudent.

Scavullo was quite taken with Gia. It was his job to be quite taken on a fairly regular basis, but Gia was different.
She did not fit into any of the usual model categories that the other girls did.

“I was mad about her,” Scavullo recalled. “She was very candid in front of the camera. She wasn’t stylized, she didn’t pose. She was like an actress in front of the camera. You got a million pictures that had her head in them. She had her own little way of modeling. She jumped around, you couldn’t set your lights and you couldn’t hold her still. You had to let her go, you couldn’t direct her.

“When I first worked with her, I said, ‘Oh, my god, this is like a new colt.’ My assistant was running with the light. ‘Uchh,’ I said, ‘this is going to be
work.’
But then I realized how to work with that and I didn’t want to tame her down, I wanted her to move around. There are very few models who do that and do it well. With most models who move around, you get bad stuff. With her, you got wonderful stuff … it was like you got candid pictures of her and they were
divine.
There is something she had … no other girl has got it. I’ve
never
met a girl who had it. She had the perfect body for modeling: perfect eyes, mouth, hair. And, to me, the perfect attitude: ‘I don’t give a damn.’ So she threw the clothes away, which I
loved.
It was a challenge to photograph her, to follow her.”

Gia told her mother all about that first session. “I remember the first time she went to Scavullo,” Kathleen Sperr said. “A lot of times they prepare lunch for you. So Scavullo had quiche and Gia said, ‘Oh great, that’s my favorite dish. My mom makes the best quiche in the world.’ And I said, ‘Gia, when somebody like
Scavullo
is serving you quiche, you don’t tell him that your mom’s is better.’