Of all the models who emerged in the early eighties, Bitten Knudsen had one of the worst reputations. She was a free spirit who one minute would be climbing the walls, and the next, collapsed in a heap on the floor, unconscious on drugs, and uncaring about who knew it. Bitten’s fantasy was to open a model agency called the Unprofessionals. Its motto? “Double rate if we show up,” Bitten says. “Triple rate if we step on the set.”
Tara Shannon’s reputation couldn’t have been more different. She was known as a consummate professional, a modeling virtuoso. Sitting down for lunch in a restaurant near her Manhattan apartment, Shannon wears studious frameless glasses that almost give her a schoolteacher’s look but can’t quite obscure the beauty lurking just underneath.
Today both models are in their late thirties and have gone on to other careers. Shannon has appeared on several television shows. Bitten makes films, lives in SoHo with a painter, and still sees lots of her friends from the old days—at least, those who are still alive. “I feel like I’m a warrior who survived the front lines,” she says, her voice slinking out from under a thick mane of white blond hair. “There weren’t any medals, but we were definitely out there with guns, shooting straight at the enemy.”
TARA SHANNON: “I was this flat-chested, skinny, blue-eyed, curly-haired little girl in Denver. I would take Cosmo magazines, paint tits on my chest like circles, and copy the poses. I loved Milly the Model comic books. I have my collection still. You would draw the hairdos and clothes, and mail them in, and they would give you a little credit in the comic. One of the tragedies in my life is that my mother never mailed the letters. It made me what I am today.
“I dropped out and left home when I was thirteen. I was living on my own in a hippie house. My first modeling job was Playboy. I was sixteen, and I was going to be a centerfold, but it was never published because I wasn’t girl next door enough. Which turned out to be what made my career. I wasn’t the girl next door.
“I really started when I was eighteen. I hustled, hustled, hustled, hustled. I went to the department stores, to the illustrators. I went to restaurants and said that I knew a clothing store that wanted to do tearoom modeling. And then I would go to the clothing store and say I know a restaurant that wants to do clothing modeling.
“I had so much drive to be a model. I would practice in the mirror with makeup, with my hair, with poses. I went to see photographers, and I was teaching them how to light, how to crop. I was getting locations. I would get my contact sheets, and my goal was to go from having ten percent of the shots be good to twenty to thirty to fifty to seventy percent. And I had all my newspaper ads, and I would take my ads and a pencil and I’d retouch them myself.”
BITTEN KNUDSEN: “I started in Denmark. I was fresh out of school, and I had a bunch of jobs. One was tutoring an actress who was an ex-model, and one day she sent me to her agency with her book. They said, ‘What if we take some shots with you?’ The next thing I knew I was flying off to Germany. I went with a photographer to shoot covers for sexy magazines. Dorothy Parker-Sed said I should stay there. She said, ‘You’re such a kid,’ and I became known as the Kid.”
SHANNON: “I wanted to get to New York. I got hooked up with this guy—my Svengali—who was a total asshole. I’d organized a troupe of disco-dancing models, and he was my dance partner. He had been in Dallas as a model, and he knew an agent, Kim Dawson. I broke up with him, and I went to Dallas in ’77.
“Kim sends me to Neiman Marcus for a go-see for a shoe shot. Whoever fits the shoe gets the job, and the shoe fit me. Cinderella. I am so thrilled. And shaking. Then she asks me to go to the Bahamas for Neiman Marcus. I’d never been out of Denver and Dallas. So I go to the Bahamas, to Mexico, to Thailand. I did shows, too. And I became the top model in Dallas, the highest-paid girl ever, five hundred dollars a day.
“Sometime they would fly in girls like Apollonia, and I would be beside myself. One time I went to Maine for a catalog, and Patti Hansen was coming! I mean, my God! And she got off the plane from Europe with a backpack, no luggage. And I just followed her wherever she went. We were in a small Maine village and she went to a store and she bought a pack of Haines men’s underwear and a pack of men’s T-shirts to wear and a big bag of potato chips. I was like Miss Anal Compulsive Professional Model with my little makeup kit, and I had never seen anything like her. I’d be taking notes, you know?”
Tara Shannon in Patrick Kelly’s autumn 1989 fashion show in Paris, photographed by Dan Lecca
Tara Shannon by Dan Lecca
Bitten Knudsen photographed by Robert Graham
Bitten Knudsen by Robert Graham, courtesy Bitten Knudsen
KNUDSEN: “Giorgio Piazzi heard about me, came to meet me, and I went to Milan for six months. I rented a room in a pensione with another Danish girl. We worked all week and went to castles on weekends. It was the beginning of the era of the hustling dinner whores in Milan. The girls were so broke they needed the playboys to buy them meals. I was always in a relationship, so I was never up for grabs. Milan was like organized crime, but the real crime was how naïve American girls are at eighteen! Danish girls have level heads. Playboy behavior got on our nerves. We would go to Nepenta after dinner and make fun of them—greasy Italians disco dancing and working the room.
“But at least Italians are artistic about their approach. The French are true dogs. John Casablancas was a dog. I’d actually met him in Denmark at a trade show where I was working for a designer. He kept following me around, and I was not interested. I said, ‘Who is that creepy guy? Tell him to stop.’ I don’t think all men are dogs. But most of them are. Alex Chatelain was a bulldog. I remember him getting tacky on a trip. Peter Beard is into what he calls living sculpture, a girl willing to be flattered into action. He goes for his type, and he’s very straightforward about it. He’s an honest dog.
“Giorgio Piazzi would protect me, because I was the Kid. He made sure I came to his house to eat. I wanted to come to America to study with Lee Strasberg. So Piazzi introduced me to Eileen Ford in Milan. I met her again in Denmark, and then I came to New York in 1977.
“Eileen arranged everything, and she had me modeling immediately. On my first day I rested a few hours, and then I worked nonstop. I was really pretty lucky; the timing was just right for my look. Some girls work really hard for it. I didn’t. In the beginning people said I was too blond, just like they said Janice was too Polynesian. We’d say, ‘Forget it. It’s not about that. It’s about opening up the looks.’
“I met Strasberg and started studying with him, but I wasn’t disciplined enough. The classes were so emotional it took me days to calm down, so I quit. I was spoiled already. Now I could kick myself, because he’s dead.”
SHANNON: “Everybody had come to Dallas and seen my book. Bruce Cooper told me girls made ten thousand dollars a month in New York. I was like, whoa! So finally, after a year, I went to New York. Before I left, I had my eyes done because I had puffy, fat bags. Honey, I tried everything, I knew every makeup trick, lighting trick, everything. I slept with pillow, no pillow, stayed up, slept a lot. Nothing worked. So I got my eyes done, I got my SAG card, I got my AFTRA card before I went to New York. I was a professional. I wasn’t going to waste my time when I got there.
“I visited all the agencies in one day. Eileen Ford says, ‘I’m going out for a manicure. I’ll be back in an hour; wait for me.’ I don’t think so. I go to Johnny Casablancas. ‘Oh, no, no, no, darrrling, honnnney, it is about sex with the photographers, you cannot be so businesslike, you know, you must be a woman….” I don’t think so, Johnny. So then I go to Wilhelmina, and she says, ‘Honey, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get you an apartment, put your money in the right bank, bang-bang-bang.’ She was my kind of girl, so I went with Wilhelmina, and she got me a place to stay, and I immediately started my life with catalog modeling because Wilhelmina cut deals with the catalog houses. If they used all her models, she would give them a much cheaper rate.
“It’s 1978. Milan and Paris are beckoning. Gérald Marie from Paris Planning sees me in New York. He tells [photographer] Francois Lamy about me. Lamy liked redheads, so I get a direct booking to Italy. I’m wearing Valentino, and I have more hair and makeup put on me than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m eating it up, man. I thought this happened to all the girls, getting a direct booking. And then I kept getting direct bookings, and I start doing all the runway shows. This is before you were allowed to be in Italy legally. You’d get chased; they’d stop you at the border; they’d take your money; it was all cash.
“The print girls were pretty, you know, dumb. They were just corn-fed, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but Nancy Donahue, Kim Alexis were not internationally savvy. The show girls were from these incredible countries, and they came from good families. They had rich husbands and clothes and a savvy that you get from working with the top designers around the world and hanging out in Monte Carlo doing benefits for Princess Caroline. Everybody spoke five languages. I was kind of a little pet, the jester, the mascot, in awe of everything.
“So I’m doing shows and photos. I get a thousand a show. I put it in a Swiss account. It was a day trip. They took a bunch of girls to Switzerland; you opened up your account. I asked the other girls. Dalma and Iman, whatever they did, I did. They were smart.
“I met all the playboys. They’d pick you up from the airport and drive you into town so you didn’t have to take a taxi. If you had a job in another town, it would be like a convoy taking the girls to the job. You’d go out to dinners with them. It was commerce. All the other big girls were going, so I was going to go, too. ‘Cause they were top model hounds, those guys. You wouldn’t get a ride from the airport unless you were up there. They were into being in our presence. It wasn’t sleeping with us, although I’m sure that helped them score extra macho points.
“Nobody got in my pants. I’m an American guy kind of girl. Europeans never held an ounce of attractiveness to me. They tried. Oh, they tried. There was weekends in the country, but nothing happened. That little one—what’s his name?—the really little rich one: Umberto Caproni! Oh, Umberto, I loved him. That guy didn’t have a broom up his ass; he had a two-by-four.
“Gérald Marie was my agent in Paris. He was with a model named Lisa Rutledge, and they had a baby. I didn’t have a boyfriend, and one day Gérald is gone somewhere, and we decided we were going to go out. We go to Champs-Élysées to a photo booth and have our pictures taken. And then we walked down Avenue George V, and who do I see coming out of the Hôtel George V? Jack Nicholson. I’ve got to do something. So I say, ‘Jack, what are you doing in Paris?’ I’ve never met Jack Nicholson in my life. Lisa’s from Australia. She doesn’t know who he is. So he looks me up and down, he looks Lisa up and down, and he says, ‘Uh, ladies, I’m going to a little party if you’d care to join me.’
“So we go around the corner to this apartment, he rings the doorbell, and who answers the door but Roman Polanski. Oh, shit. We walk into a room full of fourteen-year-old blondes. We’re too old, and we’re looking at each other like, we’ve got to get out of here. Someone brings out a joint. Lisa doesn’t smoke pot. She’s a mom. But I smoke. I love to smoke. And all of a sudden I have to lie down. I feel really ill. I come out of it in two minutes. But there are other girls passed out, you know? Very nasty. We’re out of here. We head to the elevator, and Jack says, ‘What are you doing?’ So we kidnapped Jack Nicholson.”
KNUDSEN: “I did it all. I was at Studio 54 on opening night. You grow up really fast. I was out of control and rebellious right from the first. America has all these taboos about sex that didn’t exist in Scandinavia. I was staying at Eileen Ford’s house, and I was invited to my first New York party. I had a see-through pink silk jump suit, and Eileen went, ‘Aaaaach! You can’t go outside like that.’ I was used to topless beaches!”
SHANNON: “Until that time I was very naïve. I was very scared of people. I didn’t go out. I wore no makeup, glasses. I had this big secret to hide. I was from the wrong side of the tracks. Then I started noticing something going on in the studios. People kept going to the bathroom in groups. And I wasn’t invited. I felt very left out and abandoned, which was plugging into my childhood issues ‘cause I came from a one-parent home. So I started putting two and two together, and I finally kind of weaseled my way in at one point, and I saw that this was important. I needed to be a part of it really badly, ’cause my life was about getting to the other side of the tracks.
“So I transformed myself. I took off my glasses, borrowed an outfit from Bill Blass, bought some cocaine, hired a limo, and I went to Studio 54. And this was my coming-out party. Everyone was like, Tara? Wow! I had cocaine, and I was very popular. Suddenly I’m hanging out with the rich and famous. I get the rock star boyfriend, one of the first. Hamish Stuart from the Average White Band. Oh, he was so cool. I’d met him in Denver. And then, when I was in New York, I called him, and we got engaged.”
KNUDSEN: “Drugs were a really big part of fashion, especially at the top. I remember a shooting for Vogue. People at the studio said, ‘Take this powder. It’ll be good for the shot.’ Cocaine really ruled. It got crazy all over. Dark circles under my eyes became something of a trademark. Your weakness can become your strength once you find it.
“Even though we were all crazed, the work was still the focus. When people are in altered states, it’s all about the vision. We were a continuation of the sixties. You had to expand the borders. And you couldn’t have that look unless you could walk the plank. Style is perverse, always. Part of the glamour is the decadence, being able to swim in deep water.
“I did lots of jobs with Bill King. He hired me at the beginning and shaped my career. Bill was a bad boy, always waiting for something to break out. He’d turn on his big fans and wait to see what happened. He booked me with Jerry Hall, and she would flip her hair in my face to cover it in every picture. Each time she did it, I threw some confetti in the fan so it would blow right in her face. It stuck to her, and she’d have to run off the set and fix it. Bill liked that.”
SHANNON: “I switched to Elite in ’79 ’cause I wanted more of that editorial work. I liked that. I’d started to wake up a little bit. Monique Pillard called me. She wanted me. But I had signed a contract with Wilhelmina. So how do you get out of the contract? Monique called Johnny in. He says, ‘Tara, what you must do is tell her that it is like a love affair, it is over. Don’t say that you want more editorial, don’t say you want the room painted pink, ‘cause they’ll say OK. Just say it’s time.’ And I said those things to Wilhelmina, and she gave me the contract, and I walked out. John wasn’t an issue. He likes the younger girls. I had no use for John, really. I wasn’t dumb enough to fall prey to his magnificence.”
KNUDSEN: “There was a lot of laughing. Everything was fun. Location trips were like going to camp. You could get away with even more. You ran the risk of being sent home on the next plane, but that’s what editorial work was about. In St.-Barth we’d open the hotel bars after they’d closed, mix drinks, and wake people up. One time we were on the beach, rolling joints and drinking all night, and the next thing we knew, the sun came up, and we were right in front of the client’s room, trying to hide the bottles! On hot days we’d jump in the water with the client’s clothes on, and they’d freak out. One time I was doing a photo in a boat, and I rocked it till it sank. The client gave me such hard time! Then he used the picture for a double spread.”
SHANNON: “Excuse me—you put a fourteen-year-old on Wall Street, unchaperoned, what do you think they’re going to do? This is a bunch of big unchaperoned babies getting away with murder. Nobody put any boundaries up. The fallacy that models are stupid I think comes from their being fifteen years old. It’s your job when you’re fifteen to be stupid. You’re putting these children in these adult situations and then making fun of them? Oh, please don’t get me started. I saw a girl faint twice at a booking. She hadn’t eaten in days ’cause she was trying to lose the baby fat.”
KNUDSEN: “I met Janice Dickinson on a shoot at Mike Reinhardt’s house in the Hamptons. She was wild, but it’s funny, her reputation was all that people focused on, and there was a very nice, exposed child inside.
“It becomes a duel. As bad as you are, that’s how good you can be at your job, and that fascinates people. How can this girl get away with this? We all behaved like superbrats. Sometimes I do things just for shock. People don’t get that it’s a joke. You just do it to get a reaction. We were all young, and that’s how we dealt with our situation. It’s a big risk to put yourself out there.”
SHANNON: “Oh, Janice. She’s like a flame, and you’re the moth. You’ve got to go to her, and you get burned, you can’t help it. I would seriously say that she has a chemical imbalance, and that if she got medication, it would really help her. I mean in the most loving way I say that. But she’s fucking brilliant. She’s a brilliant model, the best ever, I think. She will be talked about for as long as modeling exists. She was good to me. She really would teach the girls, man. Here’s how you do it, you just tell those guys to fuck off. Grrrrrr.”
KNUDSEN: “Gia was my best girlfriend. She was just beautiful. When she was first starting out, we did a job in the south of France with Helmut Newton. He said, ‘Throw on the red lips and the bad eyes!’ Helmut had Gia and I be girls, and the two other models were dressed as guys. One of them was Swedish, and she’d been a real bitch to me when I was starting out. So Gia sent roses to her room with lipstick all over the card, and then she called and said, ‘Let’s have some fun.’ The girl broke out in a rash. Gia and I were like lion cubs having fun. We got a reputation because we didn’t hide anything. We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties. So many! We were both constantly on trips, which I think saved my life, because you don’t do drugs when you travel. Except when I traveled with Gia. We brought a whole medicine kit.
“Gia was the peak. She pushed the borders right to death.”
SHANNON: “Men never gave me anything. I made my own money. I never dated a guy for money, I never dated a guy for drugs, I had my own, you know. I always had my own coke. I didn’t accept it. It was part of my obscure feminism.”
KNUDSEN: “I always knew how to deal with men. I never understood professional affairs, even though photographers have always done that and a few girls work the couch better than they do. But somebody always gets hurt. I mean, who’s working who?
“But I didn’t know what a hustler was. I was very open and ready to be used. After I got my own apartment, I always had people living with me, tapping my bank accounts, using my drug dealers. You’re making thousands and thousands of dollars, and you’re constantly working and being flattered, and you’re not emotionally mature, and you almost feel that you need to strike a kind of balance.
“When I was eighteen, a guy almost killed me. He called himself Dean Avedon, but that wasn’t really his name. He was a bastard. He nearly tore my heart out. It got so crazy the police came to my door and he was behind me with a knife at my back. I said everything was OK, and they believed me. I was winking at them, but they went away, and then the guy tortured me for hours and hours. I started thinking of the scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Peter O’Toole is tortured. So I said, ‘I know you’re going to kill me, but can I have one last wish? Can I watch this movie?’
“He said yes, and it saved my life. Lawrence is riding through the desert and the guy fell asleep. I snuck out. All I had was my coat. I borrowed five dollars from the doorman and went to Bill King. He ran a bath, cleaned my wounds, and called Jerry Ford. The Fords had a house in Connecticut then, and Jerry took me there for a couple of days. A few days later the guy came back. Where do you think he’d been? In Milan, picking up another girl! He ended up working for a model agency. He died a couple years ago.
“After that I didn’t want to stay in my apartment anymore, and I moved into a new flat. But I was nowhere! I was definitely on the skids. My career was going a little bit down. I owed drug dealers money. I was surrounded by rock and rollers who were feeding me substances, and my ego was getting out of hand. I was breaking down from too much stress, too much work, too much drugs, too much everything. That Christmas was the first when I didn’t go back to Denmark. I called my father, but I kept it real brief.”
SHANNON: “I was a real isolator. And when I got into my drug bit, I isolated even more. When I was in Paris, my favorite thing to do was go to the Maison du Caviar on Place de la Madeleine and sit there and write and drink champagne and have different caviars and smoke cigarettes, day after day after day. I was tired, man. I was working thirty shows a week. It was rough. Iman would be vibrating, hung over, coked out. They all were at one point or another. You’d get there on a Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday you’re doing all the shows, you’re not eating, you’re all right, though. Thursday things start getting a little hairy, you’re getting tired, you start bursting into tears. Thursday night, time for the vultures with the cocaine. You’re so tired. You’re really lonely, and you know—boom!
“People would drink, do a hit, and go on the runway. I never would do that. And then sure enough, as the years went by, I started going on the runway a little stoned. Just a glass of champagne to loosen up. And then one time I nearly fell over on the runway, I was so drunk.
“I have a good rep, but I went through a really rough time. At one point I’d been around the world in nineteen days or something. You get off a plane and nobody meets you; you go to a hotel where you don’t know anybody; you go to a booking where you don’t know anybody. Everybody wants, everyone’s got a vested interest, and then while everyone else goes home to sleep, you’re on another plane. And you’ve got a husband who’s an asshole on top of it, who’s destroying you psychically, and nobody says, ‘What would be good for you?’ Nobody ever says, ‘Take a vacation, you’re looking like you could use a little moral support, something.’”
KNUDSEN: “I’d been with Ford for three or four years when Jerry and Eileen called me in and said they wanted me to go into detox. When you’re doing it, that’s the last thing you want to hear, so I said no. I was being an asshole. Then Eileen heard a rumor that I was going to Elite, and she called my parents and started a family feud. She said I was doing a lot of drugs, it was a matter of days before I died, and I needed my family. They didn’t know Eileen is cuckoo. My mother had a nervous breakdown! But my father said he’d just spoken to me, that I’d been talking about new management, and he had the feeling this was a trick. She just wanted to send me home because if she couldn’t have me, then Johnny couldn’t either.
“I was growing up. I wanted to get a grip on my business. And I had to clean up to prove that my parents were right to stand behind me. I went to Elite. At my first meeting with Casablancas, we were talking about my percentage. Monique Pillard was standing behind me, making signs, trying to send him messages. I didn’t want them to talk over my head, so I made them turn the lights out. The first thing I did was get totally straight because I didn’t want them telling me what to do. I wanted to make it clear who worked for who. I wanted to understand everything that was happening to me.”
SHANNON: “I made it to the fucking top, and there was nothing there. Nobody was home. I started going out with Tony Peck after I broke up with Hamish. He’d seen me on The Merv Griffin Show. So now Tony starts teaching me how to do cocaine, like I didn’t know. And this man can do cocaine, holy moley! I’m going out to dinner with Gregory Peck’s friends, Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore, Jimmy Stewart, Billy Wilder. Gregory was a great guy, a very humble guy. I knew that I didn’t like Tony, but I was digging hanging out with all these people that all the other girls were wanting to be with. That was the surprising thing for me. I got to the other side of the tracks, and I looked at these people, and they had no values, and it was bizarre. I started seeing stars, rich people, how they treated their wives. I started hearing the gossip. How this producer’s wife was a hooker, and I just got very disillusioned. Everything that I had worked for was all a sham. I was like a deer. I ran away to Paris. And I broke up with Tony on the phone.”
KNUDSEN: “It was healthy to make the change. Monique lifted my career back up. A lot was happening. I moved in with a guy in the rock and roll business, and I hired his business manager. He wouldn’t allow me to do anything. I stopped doing coke and started a whole new thing. That’s when I found out how messed up everything was. For a long time I wouldn’t open my mail unless it was from Denmark. I had boxes of official letters from the IRS. I owed them so much money!”
SHANNON: “I lost a lot of money, I don’t know where it went. I don’t know what I did with it. I remember taking it out, but that’s about it. I took a lot of limos for a while, and I did pay for my own cocaine. And I was so generous. I spent a fortune. I was never a big money-maker. But I made millions and I spent millions.
“Luckily I saved a lot. I could have saved a lot more.”
KNUDSEN: “Even after I cleaned up, I still had a ‘bad reputation.’ But really, it was just pranks. When Carol Alt came into the business, she was a real bitch. She changed really fast, and now she’s supercool and we’re really good friends, but at first, she was very religious. We went on a trip to Barbados together where there were only a certain number of rooms. I didn’t want to share, but I had to. So I went out and got stoned, came back and put a sheet over my head and burst into the room going, ‘Wooooo, it’s the Antichrist!’ I wanted them to separate us.
“Elite turned out to be a bit of a dud. You couldn’t get away with it anymore. In the mid-eighties the new girls pulled everything back and became more commercial. They showed up on time. They smiled at the client. We’d pumped the rates up, but when the money got to a certain point, they wanted more professionalism, and the creative side was cut back. There were less nervous breakdowns for the editors, I guess.
“I started traveling to Hawaii and California and Australia, and I studied acting for a couple of years. I’d commute to New York for special jobs. Elite just sort of fizzled out for me because I wasn’t in New York. I also started learning to shoot films, and that took me to Australia and Bali. Somehow a rumor started in New York that I’d died, and my booker at Elite repeated it! That didn’t seem very good to me, so around 1987 I went back to Ford, speaking only to Jerry, because every time Eileen saw me, she would throw up her hands. My father wasn’t happy that I went back with her. But I’d always felt bad about leaving. And I really liked my booker, Rusty Zeddis. She handled all the brats. She really worked with us. She sincerely cared. Talking to her was very grounding. She’d make you feel professional even when you weren’t.”
SHANNON: “I go to L.A. I’m going to be an actress. I didn’t have a clue. And I get out there, and I pretty much hit my bottom, you know, drinking and drugging. And then I get sober, and then everything took on a new priority. I went back to New York, and I started finding another way of living, a whole other way.”
KNUDSEN: “I moved to Malibu, California, fell in love, started surfing, started doing ads for More cigarettes, Clairol, Revlon. Before that I’d always been an editorial hound. I liked the creative side of the business. I made plenty of money, but if I’d done more commercial work, I could’ve made even more.
“In 1993 I was starting to get antsy. Everyone told me to call Bryan Bantry. He was starting to book people from my time for jobs where they wanted more mature models. He says, ‘As bad as she was, that’s how good she is now.’”