The era of Vreelandian extravagance was over. The revolution she’d led broadened the audience for fashion and fashion pictures exponentially, but now the market for creativity was shrinking. What had been primarily an artistic exchange became an overtly commercial one. Magazines and advertisers were worrying about selling dresses now, not about creating great photographs for a fashion elite. So as the sixties ended, fashion photography changed once again. In Europe photographers like Jeanloup Sieff, Guy Bourdin, and Helmut Newton, who’d all started before Blow-Up and survived it, were in their heyday, shooting dark pictures as unforgiving as they were unforgettable, full of the violence and sex, the Thanatos and Eros, that suffused life in the late sixties and early seventies. But these individualistic, often uncontrollable photographers were edged, imperceptibly, out to the fringes by a new breed of compliant lensmen who only pushed the pay envelope.
New photographers—especially Mike Reinhardt, Gilles Bensimon, Patrick Demarchelier, Alex Chatelain, John Stember, and Arthur Elgort—were emerging in Paris as the leaders of what became known as the French Mob, specialists in 35 mm street photography, happy snaps that simply denied society’s downbeat mood. Though none of them alone was as influential as Avedon, Dahl-Wolfe, or Penn, together their impact was tremendous. New model agencies soon sprang up to serve them. Sympathetic gay men like François Lano and motherly figures like Eileen Ford, Dorian Leigh, Catherine Harlé, and Wilhelmina found themselves losing models to heterosexual male agents.
There was more work, so there were more models, but as their numbers increased, they lost the singularity that made the swans of couture seem so fascinating and irreplaceable. And the new models weren’t liberated women, either, even though they earned more, traveled more, and lived more freely. The genie of sex was out of the bottle. Models were touchable now. And the new breed of photographers and agents liked to have a feel for the merchandise. The good news was that “because they were interested in girls, their pictures were warmer,” says onetime photographer’s agent Jacques de Nointel. But more than ever, models were paper faces, commodities to be bought and sold until the next face came along. If they were infantilized before, they now stood to be traumatized as well.
As the seventies began, the center of photographic gravity shifted to Europe, where it was easier for aspirants to break into the business. They poured into Paris from all over the world, all with different stories told in a babble of languages. Shelley Smith came from America, Apollonia van Ravenstein from the Netherlands, Gunilla Lindblad from Sweden, Louise Despointes from the Caribbean. But despite their wildly varying looks and outlooks, they had one thing in common: They were citizens of the new Nation of Fashion.
SMITH: “I grew up in a not great family, not a lot of self-esteem, and so for me to go into modeling was great, because I considered myself a real ugly duckling. I went to an all-girls’ school in Orange, New Jersey. I never had a date; I never dated until I was in college. I wore braces. I was tall and skinny.”
RAVENSTEIN: “My brother Theo always looked at the magazines, back home, which was in the south of Holland. I think it was probably 1968, and we saw pictures of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. I was almost fifteen, and we were trying to find a way to get out of Holland and go into the world, so he said, ‘Plo’—which is my nickname; Plonja is my middle name—‘you can do it,’ and I said, ‘Well, all right.’ He made an appointment with the agent in Amsterdam, and the following week I was in Spain for a Dutch pattern magazine.”
DESPOINTES: “I came from Martinique. I was from a very protected and privileged family. My father had plantations. Then I took a secret trip to New York. We were staying in the French Embassy in Washington, and two of us, me and another young girl, got on a Greyhound bus, totally petrified, and came to New York. It was 1969. I was eighteen and a half. We were walking down the street, and Jerry Ford and some TV guy spotted me and said, ‘Are you looking for the Ford agency?’ I thought, Let’s go see what this is, and the minute we walked in it was ‘Go in that room! Get undressed! Pluck your eyebrows!’ I was fascinated.
Apollonia van Ravenstein photographed by Bob McNamara
Apollonia van Ravenstein by Bob McNamara
Louise Despointes photographed by Serge Lutens for Christian Dior
Louise Despointes by Serge Lutens
“I joined Ford, but I was always in battles with Eileen. Now she’s the lady I respect the most. People hate Eileen because she wanted women to survive in a cutthroat business. But then we clashed right away. I had a strong mind, and I thought she was a dictator. She told me, ‘Do as I say!’ I said, ‘No, I’m me!’ I wanted to do interesting work. I didn’t want to blend in. She hated that.”
LINDBLAD: “I came to Paris in 1968. I was started by a woman in my town in Sweden named Kerstin Heintz. She was very respectable. She discovered many girls. She had me working for many Swedish magazines. She found me jobs, and she knew somebody in Paris who came to Sweden and he saw my book. I had a couple of tear sheets and some prints, and he liked what he saw. So he sent me to Paris, and I came to Paris Planning in 1968. It was during the student strikes. I thought it was very exciting. You had to walk to work, you’d arrive in a studio, and there was no electricity, nobody came! But I had a booking, so I said, ‘I’d better be there,’ and nobody else came, so I walked back home!
“The editors in France, most of them are horrible women. They’re jealous of the models. They all treat you like shit. They did it to all the new girls, American or Swedish. So you were not at all treated with respect here. In America I think they’re much nicer to you.”
DESPOINTES: “We all went to Max’s Kansas City. Everyone was there. I had no idea what was what. Then I met my chance, [photographer] Guy Bourdin. His girlfriend was a stylist. She thought I was refreshing. Guy took me back to Paris to do the collections for French Vogue, telling them I was a top model in New York when I’d never worked, except with [photographer] Arthur Elgort for American Girl, an awful kids’ magazine. We were all starting, trying to make it.
Gunilla Lindblad photographed by her husband, Jean-Pierre Zachariasen
Gunilla Lindblad by Jean-Pierre Zachariasen
“When I got to French Vogue, they knew something was fishy. They told me I had to have an agent. I went to Paris Planning because it was the only agency I knew. There was a sweet boy there named Patrick Demarchelier. He liked to test little girls. He said, ‘I’ll give her a break.’ So they booked a test and said, ‘Good-bye, get out.’ I said, ‘I can’t go. I’m working.’ The booker said, ‘For who?’ ‘Guy Bourdin for French Vogue.’ I thought she would fall off her chair. Then François Lano came out, saying, ‘Ahhh, Louise,’ and I had a contract and champagne right away.”
SMITH: “I was working on the college board of Lord & Taylor department store in New York City, and Diana Vreeland came in and discovered me. She said, ‘You are beautiful, and you owe it to the world to smile!’ She put her finger into my face and said, ‘Come to my office.’ The model editor, Sarah Slavin, sent me to photographers and to Barbara Stone. It was still the era of false eyelashes and stuff like that. I remember my first big picture for Vogue. My eyelash was on totally wrong. I knew nothing about this, and I came into Stewart after I did the shooting, and Barbara Stone looked at me and said, ‘I hope you weren’t photographed looking like that!’ It was so much easier later on when Way Bandy and all those wonderful people started to do makeup.
“I remember going on tests. There were always come-ons from the photographers, just about every one of them. There was never somebody who just wanted to take pictures. There was always a power play. If you wanted to get a copy of your picture, you had to come over at six and they wanted to have a drink with you. You just wanted to wash your hands and get your picture and go. It was very intimidating.”
RAVENSTEIN: “I left Holland after a month and went to Milan. You’re thrown into this arena, thinking people love you for who you are. There was some emotional disappointment and a lot of learning about human nature. I didn’t really feel that people cared about what I was like. They had to love to be with me because I was a gorgeous young woman, and tall and beautiful, and a lot of fun. But I did feel an emptiness inside, and a certain sadness, because there was such untruth, it was such a fake. It’s very overwhelming and terribly exciting, and it can be profoundly empty at the same time. I didn’t understand people, I didn’t understand what they were after, the promises they made.”
DESPOINTES: “Guy Bourdin trained me. He was like a father to me. He was a peasant from Normandy, so like a fox, he could see everything. He had a mind of his own. He made me have my own opinions. He sent me to museums to see paintings. At our first job he had a ballet barre, up off the ground, and I had to climb up on it in high heels. I had to do it a hundred fifty times for one shot. He wanted to see what I had in my belly. He called me Shirley MacLaine. He’d say, ‘Shirley MacLaine would not do that. She would stand on this bar until she died because she had to be the best.’ He liked perfection. You could think he was a sadist, but he wasn’t. People say it was misogyny, but it wasn’t. He was not nasty to people he cared for, but there were very few. He would make me walk through glass, but I understood that was his work, his vision.
Shelley Smith photographed by Bill King for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar
Shelley Smith by Bill King, courtesy Harper’s Bazaar
“For the first two years Guy forbade me to work with others. I was booked by [photographer] Sarah Moon for Elle, and I told Guy and he locked me in the studio. My booker called, and he answered with a handkerchief over the phone and pretended he was shooting. I was banned from Elle. But there was always something happening with Guy. It was always ‘get the picture.’ I was lucky. I worked with exceptional people. Most of them have disappeared.”
SMITH: “I graduated from college in 1971. I went to Europe, and I was going to go in the Peace Corps; but an editor at Elle saw me on the street and sent me to Suzy Parker’s sister. I thought it would probably be a good thing to do and easier than the Peace Corps, and I’d love to stay in Paris. So I waltzed over to Dorian Leigh and hooked up with her.
“She was not a good person to be a model agent or a caretaker of women. She would have dinner parties and invite you to meet men. If you told her you were hungry and you wanted money, she’d be having dinner with somebody rich, and she’d bring you along. A model can always get a free meal at the best restaurants, if you can suffer through these insufferable dinners! You didn’t even have to go dancing with them afterwards. They were ugly, boring people who wanted pretty girls at their table. But I didn’t want to eat dinner with these creepy guys.
“I think Dorian wanted everybody to live the life that she lived as a model, but if you’re really a good agent, like Eileen Ford, you want the model to stay at your house and go to bed at night so you’ll look great for the job. I went to Dorian in tears, and I said, ‘I cannot pay my rent,’ and she said, ‘Darling, have a drink,’ and she popped a bottle of champagne and said, ‘This will soothe you.’ Dorian drank, and she lived like a princess, and it was on our money.
“You would go in once a week, Friday from one to three, and you’d be standing in line to get your money, and there’d be this long wait. There were all these models from Sweden or America. I was one of the only ones who spoke French because I had studied it in school, and I wasn’t going to let them screw me, so for weeks at a time I’d go in there and do all the translating and say, ‘I need my money.’ Finally you’d get a check, but it would be a cheque barré, and you could not cash it unless you were a French citizen. To this day Dorian has a ton of money of mine. I think she screwed everybody around her and brought everything down on herself.”
RAVENSTEIN: “I was in Milan three months. Then Auro Varani [who printed composites for models] and a male model named Georges and me, we went from Milan to Paris in winter in a sports car. There was a lot of talk about me. I was with Simone [d’Aillencourt at Models International] for a short amount of time, but it was very difficult to get your money. I used to go stand on the table and demand my money. That experience was so bad that I decided to go to Morocco with this Dutch friend. So we took the boat to Casablanca, and we took buses and hitchhiked around. A Dutch photographer who worked for Marie Claire was there, and being Dutch girls, we visited her house in Marrakech. She was doing an issue for the London Sunday Times on henna. I had henna in my hair, on the inside of my hands with a rabbit motif, my feet, my forehead, my breasts, and we did beautiful pictures, and that put me right back into the business again after maybe five months. Back in Paris, I joined François Lano, and I was with him forever. I met a photographer Jean-François Jonvelle and I moved in with him. All you did was meet photographers. Who else could I get to meet? I never went to the supermarket!”
DESPOINTES: “Finally I started to feel very locked in with Guy Bourdin. I wanted to do something else. I wanted to catch Helmut Newton. I’d met Serge Lutens, and I wanted to breeze. I worked for [Newton’s wife, photographer] Alice Springs for Jean-Louis David and I made myself up the way I knew Helmut would like, and he saw me in the mirror and he booked me. I was small, but I was strong, and I stood up to him, and he liked that and he didn’t like that, so we battled a lot. Guy had a tendency, once you were out of his circle, you were out. So when I saw him again, I was dirty, because I was working with other people.
“Helmut was German and very straight. His fantasies were only in his pictures, not in his private life at all. Then he had a heart attack. He started to feel bad in Mexico. We were on a trip with another model named Emanuelle Dano. Later his wife told me we put him through hell. We threw knives at dinner. We took drugs. We got shot at. We had fun. Hey, we were girls in the sixties.
“Emanuelle was my girlfriend for a while. We went together. It was a big love story. But I only knew her for four months. She was murdered by her upper-class French boyfriend. One of her eyes was plucked out, her legs were broken, and she was burned with cigarettes. Her death was really unnecessary. She called me that night to go out, but I was married, and my husband put pressure on me. Two days later she was found in her apartment. Her father was a government minister, so it was totally covered up. I went to the funeral. It was ‘Emanuelle has gone back to God,’ like nothing had happened!
“Models started to feel badly treated when the hooligans came in. François Lano might have been a wild kid, he liked to party a lot, but he was not a vicious person. This was a new crowd. Men who dreamed about this world. All these guys came in and used drugs and sex to get girls. The important photographers had removed themselves. How many girls could Guy, Helmut, and Serge use? The new photographers had to create their own models. But they couldn’t compete with genius. They brought in mediocrity. It became a game of money and power in 1973, 1974. Instead of getting their power through genius, they got it through girls. A top model is like a diamond to them, power in their hands. They went out with every new model in town. This macho thing is pretty French. To exist, you have to have every girl. It became a nuisance, so boring, so fake.”
SMITH: “The photographers were hitting on everybody. Mike Reinhardt always had a model girl, but I thought he was pretty nice about it. Patrick Demarchelier was always pretty classy, too. Alex Chatelain was always saying, ‘I’m too fat, but would you go out with me anyway?’ That’s why I have such great things to say about Arthur Elgort, because he would never hit on me. He just didn’t think that he could! Artie Elgort got his start in Paris just hanging out with the models. He was this little schleppy kind of guy, and he’d stand by Paris Planning and take pictures as models came out.”
LINDBLAD: “I was happy. I was making money. I was doing catalogs, I was working for magazines, and finally after about two years, in early 1970, I decided to go to New York. Of course, it was all planned between François Lano and Eileen Ford. He was working with Eileen. He had also started to work with Wilhelmina; but I had met Eileen before, and I decided to work with Eileen. And that’s when it started.
“I had an appointment with Vogue and Jean-Pierre [Zachariasen] had an appointment with Glamour in the same building on the same floor. It was the time of Diana Vreeland, of course, and I had my appointment with Sarah Slavin, and she came out and said, ‘You have your book?’ Jean Pierre had this enormous book, too, so she said, ‘Oh, you’re a photographer. Can I have your book?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, I didn’t come here to see you! I’m going to Glamour.’ So finally I said, ‘Jean Pierre, give her your book.’ She took the two books, and I was called in, and there was Mrs. Vreeland. She was so scary-looking in her bright red wool. She came and took me in her arms and said, ‘I could eat you!’ Three days later we had fifteen pages together.
“A couple of months later we had this trip to Fiji. Before leaving, Jean-Pierre was called into the offices of Diana Vreeland, and she said, ‘Jean-Pierre, you’re going to Fiji now, and you’re going to have all these dresses. I want close-ups. I want to feel the clothes. I want to feel the texture. I don’t give a damn about the landscape!’ It was twenty pages, no makeup artist, no hairdresser, no assistant to the editor. It was just Jean Pierre, me, and the editor, and the editor was like sixty-five years old. She didn’t do anything. She was not at all interested in fashion. She preferred to look at the birds. And there we were, and the first thing Jean-Pierre did was he stepped on his light meter!”
SMITH: “I wasn’t in Paris that long. Maybe a year. I would go to Milan. Milan was a very lonely place for models. All the models stayed at the same hotel, the Arena. We would hang out with each other, but it was a very lonely place, because I didn’t do any of those dinners [that Italian playboys and agents arranged almost nightly]. I guess there’s a part of me that just didn’t quite fit into that. But Milan was great because you got paid cash. You’d love Milan and Germany because there, sitting in your little letter box at your hotel, was cash!
“I met Eileen Ford through Paris Planning, and she said, ‘I’d love to have you.’ So I didn’t go back with Barbara Stone because I’d always heard that Eileen was the best agent. She’s very eccentric and up and down, but I tell you one thing, Eileen was so loyal to her models. She knew something that most agents don’t know. If you support the talent, you can get anything you want from anybody else. When I came from Europe, I’d had all my stuff sent back via shipping cargo. She drove me three hours to the Pan Am place to get my stuff. Unless somebody was really late all the time or really messed up on the job, she supported you.”
LINDBLAD: “We moved back to Paris in the end of ’72. We’d been crossing the ocean quite a few times. We had a son then; that’s why we came back. That’s when Elite opened. I did not know John Casablancas before. I’d been very happy with Paris Planning before, so when we moved back here, I went to Paris Planning. John had already approached me, but I wasn’t so sure. He went to Jean-Pierre, and Jean-Pierre told me. I did not like that. If he would have come straight to me, I probably would have been charmed and said, ‘Sure, OK, let’s try.’ But finally Paris Planning made such a mess of things that I went to John. I would say out of twelve girls, there were four girls who were really, really top. Me, John’s girlfriend, and a few others. He raised all our prices.”
DESPOINTES: “Everything changed in 1976. By then I was only working with Serge Lutens. I was his muse. We laughed and worked and spoke about other things than fashion. We went out and were wild, and we scared everyone. I always had a black veil on. We set the studio on fire and shot pictures of Nero and Pompeii. We were children in a bubble without reality and created our own world and [our client] Dior paid the bill. It was a good laugh.
“Around that time John Casablancas proposed to me in a nightclub to come with Elite. He was with Patrick Demarchelier. But when everyone went to him in the early seventies, I stood by François Lano. Then John Casablancas started a war with Paris Planning and François Lano brought [agent] Gérald Marie in. François was gay. He couldn’t take girls to bed. He needed someone like Gérald to balance things out. Gérald has changed now; he’s gained class. But at that time he was a little prick. I couldn’t stand the guy. I left Paris Planning because of him and went to an agency called FAM. Finally I quit in 1979 and opened my own agency called City. I was a model who had managed her own career, and I didn’t sell out.”
RAVENSTEIN: “I came to America in March 1973. In Rome I’d met Eileen Ford and someone from Stewart, and I preferred Stewart and I went with them. Then I went to Wilhelmina for a couple of months, and then I found Zoli. I was so attracted to him as a friend, and he stayed a great friend for the rest of my life. The American agents would all go to a dinner for Zoli in Rome. It was the only time you could get them together without fighting.
“I loved America. I never really looked at the culture too much; I just lived within it. I was so excited about the city, about the people, about the work, about the music, about life. I became very friendly with Andy Warhol. I got a cover for Interview magazine, and I was the model of the minute or the year or whatever.
“The bad stuff was always from drugs, but at that time it wasn’t ugly, it wasn’t looked at so bad. It was just, you had a good time and you felt really good. It hadn’t turned negative. It was a very mind-enlarging, exciting time for me, some acid trips here and there. I don’t really feel that it touched me in a negative way. I did yoga to balance myself, to find myself. But it can become pretty ugly, and it did.”
LINDBLAD: “Sometimes when you were booked on trips, they booked three girls, one serious like me and two others who would enjoy some fun. I was there to work and nothing else, so it was a difficult situation because you would have the photographer and the models and the hairdressers all sniffing coke. They were in their own world, and I felt very much left out. I didn’t like the scene at all because I wasn’t into drugs.
“I think the sanest people in all this business are the models. The photographers and the editors and the agents are much more bizarre than the models. If you think that the girls are taken away from their homes, they come to a new country, they get so much money! For me, coming to France was weird. I didn’t speak French. I was warned about the French men. I was scared. I did not get involved. I was doing my job. I didn’t need all this. It’s not my cup of tea. My friends were not going crazy. It was the generation after me, five or six years later.
“Turning thirty, that was the hardest part. I was really at the peak of my career. I was not really prepared to do something else. Suddenly I realized it’s not going to be like this the rest of my life. My whole way of seeing things changed. Finally I knew I had to quit one day. The work started to slow down in ’86, ’87. I still wanted to die with my boots on, but finally it sort of ended by itself because we decided to move back to Paris and open a shop in ’89. After that, I worked very little, because in France they don’t like older girls. It was not hard quitting.”
SMITH: “The crazy disco years were definitely going on when I was in the business. There was a lot of snorting and stuff going on. I was always a little bit on the outskirts. I talked dirty. That was my kick because I was never allowed to use four-letter words growing up.
“I didn’t do drugs, but I saw them, and I kind of felt out of it in a way. I remember Bill King. He had this studio on lower Fifth Avenue, and he had a studio on one side, and on the other side he had an office or another room, and if he really liked you, he’d invite you to the office, and I know now it was to do drugs, and he invited me in there, and I realized that it was to do drugs, but I just didn’t want to do it.
“A very famous model—I can’t name this person, it’s too destructive—was in the men’s room of a disco, shooting nude pictures of various modes of sexual contact with a bunch of men. I had a really good friend who was a lawyer, and the pictures came to him. Well, what happened was that Bill King had taken the pictures, and Bill King’s assistant stole the pictures, and Bill King went to this friend of mine who was an attorney to try to recoup them, because it was obviously potentially scandalous.
“Bill got a real kick out of pictures of people going wild. He’d spray water, and he’d put a fan on full force, and every picture was wildly energetic, and he got his kicks almost out of exhausting you. It wasn’t the picture; it was watching you get exhausted. It all had some strange overtones. I think the drugs were a way to control the models.
“Bill was gay like crazy. There was some pathology there with women, but I have to say that I never did that stuff with him and he was always wonderful with me. I have half a dozen Bazaar covers with him, and he was terrific.
“But I was pretty bored with modeling. Your mind never really had to be there. It’s probably better not to be too smart if you’re a model. You’re going to get tired of it a lot faster. Or you get to be too independent, and you have your own ideas about things and want to make your own image rather than accept what’s dealt to you. So at the end of the seventies I came out to L.A. to do a television series called The Associates. I kept doing television series that didn’t last. Then I had a tragedy in my life. Four and half years ago I got pregnant, but about a week before he was due, I had an ultrasound scan, and the doctor said there was something terribly wrong. I was rushed to the hospital, and gave birth to my son by cesarean, and he had an extremely rare genetic disease, and he survived only for three days. He wasn’t here very long, but he just absolutely turned my life around. I was in therapy, and the therapist kept saying to me, ‘You should be a therapist,’ and I went back to school and I started studying psychology.
“Originally I wanted to work with people who had losses. But my husband and I started trying to get pregnant right away, and I began experiencing infertility, which was shocking to me, because a year earlier I had gotten pregnant right off the bat. I started to think that I could help people who were infertile. I woke up one night and said ‘egg donors.’ And that expanded into a surrogacy program, which I run with my husband. I get calls from Australia, Germany, from people who want me to help them get babies! Now I have the greatest job in the world!
“So much opportunity ended in so much tragedy in modeling. I think the world has to build these images of beautiful people. We fantasize that if you look perfect on the outside, your life must run perfectly on the inside. But I always saw beauty as a mask and a trap. I mean, I see this now. I certainly didn’t see this when I was twenty. You’re revered and rewarded for being beautiful on the outside, and nobody wants to know too much more than that. And when that beauty starts to fade, where do you go with your life?”