September 10, 2025 • 34 mins
Paul arrives in New York City, overwhelmed by its glamorous modeling scene. What he lacks in fashion knowledge he makes up for in confidence. He learns about the “model war” between John Casablancas, a powerful playboy model agent, and the matronly agency boss Eileen Ford. Paul begins his own battle against the titans.
Join the community at joincampsidemedia.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So Paul Fisher lands in New York City and checks
into what will be his home away from home, the
Wellington Hotel, all on Larry's dime. For a kid from
the valley, it might as well be a different planet.
I'm on Mars now. New York may not be Mars,
but it is planet Model. The women are impossibly tall
(00:31):
and thin. They're wearing miniskirts, big hoop earrings, super glam.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Every girl is six foot tall. Then they put on
their heels are six y three.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Paul's got alleged mobster Larry Lamb's money, and he's hitting
the most exclusive nightclubs in town for research.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
There's Andy Warhol over there, San right over there. Diana
Ross is right over there. I'm getting hit on by
what's her name, Grace Jones.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Now we couldn't confirm if Paul was hit on by
Grace Jones, but she's one of the most iconic models
of this era. Born in Jamaica, she has laser cut
features and is the master of the androgynous look. She's
insanely intimidating. She's probably best known for joining Christopher Walken
(01:18):
as creepy villains in the James Bond film A Few
to a Kill.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Your helicopter leaves in twenty minutes.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Oh, does that mean you're not saying the.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Night I'm going in the nightclubs going? Is that a
dude or a chick? Where am I?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's a swirl of androgyny, of sex. But Paul, as
we've learned by now, is a confident guy. He gets
dropped on Mars and thinks, yeah, I could fit in here.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I don't know what the hell. I had no clue,
less than no clue, but I did know modeling had
to do with girls, and if it had to do
with girls, I'm your man.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Paul doesn't even really know what a model is other
than a girl, some subspecies of an entire sex. He
doesn't know Schnell's last campaign.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I think we called a channel. I don't know what
anyone's talking about. It's not my world, not my world.
My taste changed, what turned me on changed, what I
got attracted to changed, everything changed. It was like you're
on the cover of that magazine and you're standing right
(02:32):
next to me, and I'm in a nightclub and there's
five of them, and there's in the middle of them.
As John Cassiblancus, Who the fuck is he?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Of course, the man in the middle of this tableau
is going to be an important figure for Paul, the
man who defines what a modeling agent was supposed to be,
the power and privileges such a man could have if
he plays his cards right.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
He was a handsomest shit Spanish guy. Everyone kissing the
fucking ring. I want that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
From I heard podcasts and campside media. I'm Vanessa Grigoriotis,
and this is Model Wars New York in the early eighties.
It smells like urine and money. It's a great place
to get mugged on the subway or to meet the
(03:31):
most gorgeous women in the world. It's grit and it's glamour,
and it's all mixed together. Now in the circles that
Paul wants to be in, the super glam circles, Larry
Lynd is nowhere to be found. Larry's money may help
Paul gain access to the modeling world, but he still
(03:52):
needs to make his own way. And at first, that
handsome Spanish guy that Paul saw in the club, the
one who looked like he was having a really fantastic time,
John Casablancis seems like the way because John Casablancas has
one of the biggest modeling agencies in town. John even
(04:14):
looks like a model. He's tan, long hair, He's got
this accent that's a little bit Spanish, a little bit French.
His father's wealthy. The money came from an ancestor who
invented a new kind of cotton spinning machine. Here's something fitting.
As a teen, he went to a Swiss boarding school
where he had a dalliance with a maid.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
The school had.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
Hired a new maid. Her name was Prisca.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
The school wrote his family a letter complaining about the affair.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Your son has betrayed our trust. He has betrayed everyone here.
We don't want to know him anymore. All letters of
recommendation are immediately suspended.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
So casablanc has had a mischievous past, sort of like Paul.
But in the late nineteen sixties, after a few years
of drifting, John decided to make his obsession with feminine
beauty into a career. He was going to open a
modeling agency.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
My logo was a phallic symbol. I loved it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
John called his agency Elite and encouraged his models to
stay out all night. He throw huge parties in trendy nightclubs,
giving guests a white shirt with his face printed on it.
He told the models they should show up in just
the t shirt. Here's Paul.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
His girls were sexy, his parties were sexy. Absolutely, he
was making love to Stephanie Seymour.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Now Stephanie Seymour at the time was sixteen years old,
So we don't want to celebrate his romantic prowess there.
What he was doing wasn't okay, although at the time
people overlooked behavior that we called criminal now and there
were people in town who didn't like John Casablancas at all,
(06:06):
people who dominated the modeling business and had for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
He was dating all the models while Jerry and Eileen
were grandma and Grandpa.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Jerry and Eileen Ford the old guard, the original king
and Queen of the New York modeling scene, although maybe
a lot of people viewed them less like a king
and queen and more like Grandpa and Grandma. John Casablancas again,
you know, the only things I.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Liked about it was that every now and then she
would get drunk and throw the shoes away, and then
she was human for.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
A while, Eileen and Jerry Ford thought modeling should be
a high toned job for staid, serious ladies. Jerry was
the numbers guy. Eileen was a scout. She was stern, magisterial,
a well groomed woman. Here's how Tom Han, who got
his start as a model in New York in the
late sixties and who will become an important figure to
(07:05):
Paul's story, explains Eileen and Jerry Ford they.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Had a reputation of being honorable and honest. When they
say they were going to do something, they got something done.
The whole thing was a very solid kind of agency,
was what you'd say at East Coast New York agency
would be. The modeling business really was just growing like
in infancy a period of time in the sixties and seventies.
(07:30):
It did exist before, but it didn't exist in the
way that was much.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
More accessible to people.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Eileen to make sure that you had a very solid,
good reputation for the girls and make sure the girls behaved.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Eileen pushed for fair contracts, and she tried to protect
her girls from predatory figures. She even invited them to
live at her sprawling townhouse on the Upper east Side.
Some models loved staying there, and others felt it was
a lot. They have to live with me because I
wouldn't let them live otherwise.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
Really, no, why because they're too young to live alone.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Isn't that terrific?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So you give a leg up in a lot of ways,
not only getting them work, but giving them supports, like.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Living in a convent, though it was like living with
the strictest aunt of all time. Here's Aaron O'Connor, a
former Ford supermodel, speaking in a documentary about moving in
with Eileen and Jerry.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
I got there and I was greeted by the butler,
and then after the butler came the maid, and then
finally I heard a bell tinkling in the background, and
I heard the voice before our eyes met each other.
And the first thing that she said to me was,
(08:45):
I can see I'm going to have to keep my
eye on you.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
At dinner, Aileen might tell you to have three, not four,
spears of asparagus, or to sit up straight if you slumped,
or scold you for getting home too late. When Jerry Hall,
one of Eileen's models, started dating Mick Jagger, the Fordes
gave her a midnight curfew.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
They were convinced it was an old house that I
had put creaks in the stairs so I could trap
them if they came home.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Trapping models coming home after curfew may have been easy,
but overall, trapping models was hard, as Eileen would soon
find as Casablancis intruded on her turf. At first, the
Fordes considered the young Casablancis an ally. Eileen obviously didn't
like or trust him, but she was a businesswoman, so
(09:48):
Paul says the two of them came to an understanding.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
There was a deal between Elite and ford and Eileen
and Johnny that says, listen. In New York, it's hard
to create models because there's not a lot of magazines here.
There's only like four or five. There's conyn Assen, there's
First Publications, so there's Vogue, there's Bizarre, there's Cosmo. There's
there's four or five. But in Europe, because of the
way you guys do your advertising, there's fifty magazines there.
(10:14):
So when you find a great girl in America, you
had only one choice. You had to she had to
create a portfolio. How do you create a portfolio? You
need the magazine pages. They're in those fifty different magazines.
From Paris, you go to any back, then you go
to any magazine stand in Paris. There's fifty freaking magazines.
So how do you create the portfolio? You send the
girl to Europe. Johnny has relationships with all those magazines.
(10:35):
He creates the resume for those girls.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And by the way, Ford sent them new models to
Casablancas to build out their portfolios. Then Casablancaz sent his
European models back to New York where the Fords would
set them up with high paying work in exchange for
a commission. It was good business for everyone, but John
had to make one big promise.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
According to Paul, they're only one deal, and Eileen had
was one written contract. One clause in the contract that
meant anything, you will never open up your modeling agency
in New York City.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
And then he went ahead and opened an Elite branch
in New York.
Speaker 5 (11:20):
I'm just doing one of the things that I think
are most popular here in America, which is competition, free competition.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
John Casablancas when he moved to New York and he
opened the Elite in New York, I mean he was
out to just rule the world, it seems, And I know,
Eileen was furious because he had such a horrible reputation
and to hear he was able to still have an
agency in New.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
York Castle Blancas didn't just come to New York, he
went after Ford's talent.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Suddenly, costap Blancus is coming in and trying to swoop
up everything and snow he's just steal the models from
other agencies, but steal the workers who worked at those
agentses by paying them huge salaries just to get them
to leave Forwards and to leave Wilhelmina and so forth.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
He poached Joe Sagami, the controller, and Monique Pollard, head
of the women's booking table.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
He opened up his agency with basically the stars of
the Fords that he's been creating in Paris.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
It just doesn't serve you well to be around that
atmosphere all day long and worry about your talent being
stolen or your booker's being stolen, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
It was just such terrible energy.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
John casablanc has really shifted the business in a way
that some people may say, oh, yeah, he was great,
but you know, from my point of view, he did
more to destroy the ethics and morality of the business
than any person I.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Know, ethics and morality in the modeling business. After casabank
has betrayed the Forwards and opened his agency in New York,
Eileen sent some people who had defected to his agency
a bible.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
An actual bible. Google it, and she underlined a passage
about Judas. And then she made her fatal freaking flaw.
She sued him, and the press got a hold of it.
No one in the world outside of Paris had ever
(13:14):
heard the name John Casablancas or elite modeling agency. No
one knew it. It was like a freaking freckle, a
bad pimple, And then everyone knew it. She sued his
ass and that made him famous, and then every other
model was like, well, if those five top models are
(13:35):
going over to mister Casablancas and he's out there partying
every night, and I'm seeing him over there at that
freaking table right over there at Cafe to back, and
this kid, oh shit. And then it was like the
floodgates opened and he offered the industry something else. Sex.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
What do you mean by that? Oh?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Sexy? Noess, sexy? No one more conservative? Shit party with
the girls, hang out at night. Let's that big party.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
And that's how John Casablancas set the table for Paul Fisher.
Picture Paul Fisher. He's got a jew fro, he's wearing
(14:24):
some cool jeans cut just right. Maybe he's got on
a vest and he's surrounded. But what he loves more
than anything in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
So we've got pictures of me with like six models
on the Ferrari.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Like Casablancas before him, Paul's goal is to pillage. He
figures the best way to get a slice of the
New York model agency pie is just roll up and
steal it off the windowsill piping hot.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I walked into the biggest modeling agencies in New York City,
Elite Ford, Wilhelmina, Click, and I pretended I was doing
a big ad campaign, and I would say to their agents, Hey,
by the way, how much how much money did you
make a week? And they'd say, oh, you know why,
I just know. I'll just come with that Curiousitywow, how
(15:19):
much how much you make? I make eight hundred bucks
a week? One thousand bucks a week, okay, I'll pay it,
two thousand bucks a week. I'll pay six months in advance.
I'll pay it cash, come with me, now leave this company.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
This was a brawl, just like the one John Casablancas
and Aileen Ford had had. In the industry, it's called
a model war. A model war is when two agencies
or more decide to pot bookers and models from the other,
both trying to take the other down. And Paul's pitch
worked just like it worked for Casablancas. Now Paul had
(15:59):
established agents with clients and connections, and even more valuable,
it gave him industry expertise, which of course it had
none of himself.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
All these different people, they would start to teach me
the industry. Oh, this is how catalogs works, this is
how this is how advertising works. These are who the
photographers are, this is a casting person, this is the magazines.
And I would just start to be a freaking sponge
and I would start to learn.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But Paul knew he needed a more senior mentor and
also someone with the experience to manage these agents.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
And who would oversee these agents.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Tom Han Tom, who you've been hearing from, had the
kind of track record that everyone in the industry took seriously.
He wasn't going to come cheap, but as we know
Larry Lynd had money.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Apparently the guys were funding all of this had a
lot of money to do it. I said, well, if
they got enough money, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Then Tom lived in LA but for the upstart Lend Agency,
my money was no object.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
You want me to come to New York. I don't
want to live there, but you know I'm willing to
do this. They want to meet my terms and I'll
do it.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And all you had to do is come into New
York three days a week and teach me the modeling industry.
And so he did. For a year. Tom would fly
into New York. We'd haven't picked up a helicopter at
wherever it was. JFK Orlaguardi or whatever. Treated him like
a freaking king. I had all this cash those days.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
PanAm had a flight. You could get off the plane,
you walk across into another room and got into a helicopter,
and the helicopter brought you into the city. So I
would automatically get off the flight from La, hop on
a helicopter which would drop me off on fifty ninth
Street Bridge and they would have a limousine pick me
up and take me to my office. Because I'd slept
on the plane all night and I can go right
to work and work there Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and
(17:48):
Friday I would fly back to La So I got
a lot of mile each other that PanAm club.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
And Tom would come in and he'd help me put
together the team. And because of Tommy and he had
such credibility when I stole those agents and having Tom,
I built a little modeling agency in New York City
for the Mobster.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
I didn't have any reason to think anything wrong about
because the tickets were paid for, checks were in the mail.
I got paid and I didn't question it because it
was coming from some people in Texas. I didn't know
anything about the people at all.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It was good in a way that Tom didn't really
know Larry. It just allowed Tom to methodically approach industry
contacts the way he wanted to, because Tom's approach was
a bit more measured than that of Paul. He was practical, unadorned.
He's that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
It wasn't difficult, you know, you just call up and
introduce yourself and just say I'm Tom. You know, I'd
like to talk to you about maybe a couple of
CEA and a couple of girls. You had to sort
of seek out through the advertising agencies what big jobs
were happening. And that's the kind of way you you said,
do your own source work. It's a lot of research
in those days. But there was a list of all
(19:00):
the photographers in New York at all the ad agencies,
So we just had to make phone calls all day
long to see what was going on. I had to
learn to speak the language that they understood, so how
they presented themselves. If their voice was modular and spoke
nicely and softly, and I would speak back.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
That way to them.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
If they were going a you know, how's it going there?
That kind of talk, I would have to change my
voice to that. You have to sort of match what
it is you're trying to zoom in on. You know,
you have to find new models all the time. And
that wasn't exactly a source. I mean there were modeling schools,
but you didn't pay attention to those. But I mean
I'd be walking down the street if I saw somebody
I thought was interesting, I'd stop them on the street
(19:40):
and say, are you interested in being a model? And
I remember I did find one guy one day and
he hardly spoke English. He was a steward, I believe
for one of the big airlines. He was Austrian and
he ended up becoming one of the biggest catalog models
in the world, and he hardly spoke English when I
met him. I had to drag the Australia to the age,
(20:00):
introduced them to people, got some pictures taken, and eventually
got a working visa form so he could stay in
America and work.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Tom knew he needed a strategy to get the Lind
Agency on the map quickly, and he decided representing the
children of celebrities would be a good Niche a lot
of them had the looks, plus their family names would
help get a lot of press.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
We got Susie Parker, who is a very famous Chanel model,
her daughter Georgia de la Salle.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Look at Paul learning to speak French already. The only
problem with Georgia de la Salle, who had modeled before
and for top photographers, was that as a fit for
the Lind Agency, she was busy going to Harvard and
she did not exactly speak alleged mobster.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
She could speak Sanskrit, which is a dead language, so
af you're showing you her brain power. And then as
she came there, I walked her over to Richard Avadon.
Steward walked in and he looked at her and put
on a stool and start taking pictures right away. So
her career just took off. She did it for a
few years, but then had enough of that went back
to her academics and her world of scholarly people. And
(21:07):
I believe she's in Germany now. I think she last
I had heard she was living in Germany and working
in Buddhist teachings and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Tom says. Lynde also worked with Eartha Kit's daughter Kit McDonald.
Eartha Kit, if you may recall, is the voice behind
Santa Baby, and she's the woman who played Catwoman on TV.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Well, I signed those girls into the agency. That was
great because it was all part of a plan to
get the marketing going with Warren Count Agencies. So it
wasn't like I got excited about saying, oh my god,
this is happening. I knew at the time that if
I did this and did that, then it would equal that.
So I was more like, I want to say, the
(21:53):
architect there, you know, and Paul was one of the
students who was learning to be.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
An architect in building the agency. Tom a psychology major,
saw beyond Paul's Girls, Girls, Girls persona.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
It was almost like he had been waiting all his
life to be in a world where he could suddenly
be accepted for who he was and be talked to.
You know, I think coming from la you don't really
feel like you have a lot going on when you
first go to New York. But once he was in
the scene, he was all rare and he was all gone,
and he was a lot of fun. Paul had to
(22:30):
learn to be the kind of agent he wanted to be,
but he also understood that there are boundaries and what
you don't cross and what you don't do, and he
was very diligent about that. He had to learn very
much in the beginning because if he got the reputation that,
you know, like a Johnny Johnny Coslak has had, there
would be no winning in that game. Ultimately you always
(22:53):
end up paying a bad price.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, Paul still has a few lessons to learn. He's
crazy with ambition, maybe just wants to be accepted for
who he was, and all that validation is just putting
more fuel on the fire. At the same time, Paul
(23:18):
is declaring a model war. Something is going on in
Paul's personal life that is extremely serious, extremely unglamorous. He's
doing blow and nightclub bathrooms, plotting his takeover of the
modeling industry, living the good life to the fullest, all
on Larry Lynn's dime. But Paul is only a New
York part of the time. Often he's back in LA
(23:42):
because he's got business there too.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It's always hard to talk about Deborah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Deborah is Paul's younger sister, just eighteen months younger, but
he's always been determined to protect her.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
I remember in junior high, in elementary school, dev was
very well built and she developed her body developed very early.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Paul and Dever's mom, Monica, remembers a time when Deborah
was assigned to be the hall monitor or something like
that for her elementary school class. She was holding the
door open for the kids as they filed past, and
one of her male classmates reached up and grabbed her breast.
Devor was so distraught that the teacher called Monica and
(24:29):
sent debr home.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
And she was in tears, and I was I decide myself,
of course, But the next day I said to the boys,
because they were still in school, I said, the next day,
you go down there. They knew who the boy was.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Monica watched her sons from the car as they waited
at the gate of the school for the kids to
file out. They knew this boy walked himself home.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
And they didn't say a word. They just went up
to him and they walked him through the gate, and
they knew where he lived. And they walked to him
side by side, and he was a little tiny, very
small for his age, very very small, and they never
said a word. The kid was shaking. He didn't know
what was going to happen. And as they walked up
the hill towards his house, fine, and I followed with
(25:22):
the car, so I knew what was going to happen.
My oldest son said to him, whatever his name was,
Sonny boy, or whatever, you ever touch my sister again.
My brother here, Paul will beat the shit out of you.
And Paul said, that's right, take a good look at me,
(25:43):
because I'll be following you. And the kid never bothered
Eborah again. But it was, you know, they were very
very protective of her.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Always, always, it wasn't many years later that the news came.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
He had Hodgkins disease at the age of sixteen years old.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
The diagnosis first came when Paul was in college at
UC Santa Barbara, and he'd break away from the dorms
on the weekends when Devor was getting chemo, sneak her
out the back of the hospital in her wheelchair. They'd
smoke joints together to help her with her nausea.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
She just was different and smart and creative.
Speaker 7 (26:24):
And just just incredible, incredible, and just an incredible young woman. Yeah, incredible.
So I loved her. We all loved her.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Deborah was still sick when Paul was in New York,
partying like a madman, trying to get wind off the ground.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Because of my job, I had the flexibility to always
be there with her and to always care for her
with my mom. So I was there watching her little tushy,
taken her out of the Cedar side of Kansas Center,
put her on the freaking toilet. I was the one
who did all those things. I was always close to
Debora pre cancer, but then when she got cancer.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
You know, Nebra was fighting for her life in the hospital,
trying to stave off panic attacks as death lived.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
When she'd go to sleep at night being in the hospital.
You know how you wake up first thing in the morning,
That first second you're not sure.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Where you are.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Before you you know, two seconds in you realize. But
she'd say, she once told him that she'd wake up
and it was so quiet in the hospital that she
thought she was She used to think she was dead,
and it took her maybe ten seconds to realize she
wasn't dead. She was terrified of dying. She didn't want
to die.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Paul would sleep through the night in a chair in
her room.
Speaker 6 (27:53):
One day I came in and said, what are all
these chocolate papers on the floor.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
My sister would wake up in the middle of the
fucking night and she'd say, when I go to sleep
at night, Paul, I don't know if I'm gonna wake
up in the morning. And I said, I gotta I
know how to do it. Wait right there, And so
I went and I went in the Cino side of
cancer center, and I went into every fucking vending machine
and I bought like, like fifty chocolate bars. And then
(28:17):
I would take out the Hershey's and I would get
rid of the chocolate, and I would keep the silver wrapping,
and then I would take the silver wrapping and I
would put it into my sister Deborah socks, And I said,
all you got to do in the morning, wiggle your
fucking toes. And if you wiggle your toes and you
hear the crinkle of the hrshees, you'll know you're alive.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
For most people, having a sick family member means an
inability to focus on work on getting ahead in a career,
but for Paul it was the reverse. He's even more
driven because he feels life is short, and the more
he gets to know New York and the people working
for Cosablancas, for Eileen Ford, for everybody, the more he
(29:09):
feels like he can dominate. He's sure that all the
people he's hiring, all these people he's burning money on
so that they can teach him the modeling industry are
total garbage, except for Tom Han.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
They suck, They suck. They're good, they've created a couple
of molels before, but they're never going to get me
to be John Casablancas. They're never going to get me
in a position where I can go ahead to head
with Eileen Ford, for God's sakes, They're never going to
allow me to win this freaking game. They're never going
(29:42):
to put me on a map and make me the
most famous, powerful ALLI agent in the freaking world. That's
never gonna happen. They suck, they're cute, they're good, they're average,
but they're not the real freaking deal until I met
Sean Philippe Brandon or whatever his freaking name was.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
The reason Paul doesn't know the name of his most
prominent mentor in the modeling industry is that the mentor
himself was rather confused on the subject.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
And basically every time he come to see me, he'd
have a different accent and a different name. So one
day he'd he'd be like, he's an Irishman and I
can't do any accent, so I'm not going to do
it and sound like an asshole. But he was branding
the Irishman. Then he'd come in to be Jean Philippe,
the French photographer. Then he was Trevor from London, and
every time he'd come in with a different accent, a
(30:35):
different name, totally disheveled looking, and him and I would
sit up and he used to do this guy he
was my secret weapon. He used to work a click
and it was a scout. He'd discovered people like Uma
Thurman and a bunch of other big, freaking stars. But
he had a problem, and everybody in the industry knew
it was. Here was a freak.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
There were allegations of sexual impropriety with his subjects.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
A freaking pervert, but he knew the industry better than
anyone on the planet. My staff every time he walked
into the place, my staff would say, we're quitting. If
you have that guy in our place one more time,
we're quitting. So he'd have to come when they would leave,
and him and I would stay there till four o'clock
in the freaking morning. And he taught me everything. Paul.
Here's how the campaigns were, Here's how this works. Here's
(31:22):
who the top models are for the last twenty years.
Here's how Eileen Ford started. Here's how Johnny Cassabuencas came in.
This is what happened between the Aileen John Casawenka's wars.
This is where Johnny came from. This is how many
times he failed. These are the stars that each agency represents.
This is how you edit a picture. This is the
proper angle, this is the proper lighting. These are the
top ten photographers, these are the top casting people. He
taught me everything no one else. I mean, my team
(31:46):
didn't know a tenth of what this man knew. And
he just was he schizophrenic. I have no idea, I
don't care, I don't know, but to be honest with you,
I loved him, fucking loved him.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
A model who speaks Sanskrit, a sexual predator photographer with
an undiagnosed psychiatric condition, and a million dollars in rumored
mob money with zero financial oversight. Paul's really making his
way now. Larry Lynn did well giving Paul the benefit
(32:25):
of the doubt because lind Agency is ready to conquer
New York.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I would go to these things and it was like
you had to wear the smallest, tightest little dress, your
little black dress, and like you know, show your moves
and like you know, always show your legs, and that's
just how you are.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
We will go to Western Union once or twice a
week and come out of Wistern Union with you know,
eighty grand, one hundred grand, you know, we were you know,
forty run in our pocket each and walk back to the.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
House and he's spending all this money. We ain't making
a dime. He's right, but you can't be coming in
threatening to kill people.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
There was a shit to them in a fine way,
and I don't want to say shady and bad way,
but there was just something that seemed sneaky.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Bob, Dylan and Blurry lived together in the summers and
they sang on the streets with New York City somehow.
That's all next on Model Wars.
Speaker 9 (33:24):
Model Wars was a production of iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Model Wars was executive produced and hosted
by Vanessa Gregoriotis. Our senior writer was Michael Kenyon Meyer.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Julia K.
Speaker 9 (33:40):
S Levine was our producer and reporter. Our senior producer
was Lily Houston Smith, and our assistant editor was Emma Simonoff.
We had story and production help from Shoshi Schmulowitz, Ali.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Haney, and Blake Rook.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist
was Ewan Lei Tremuen. Sound design, mix and engineering by
Mark McCadam.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 9 (34:01):
Executive producers were Jennifer Bassett and Katrina Norbel. The show
was also executive produced by Rachel Winter and Campside Media's
Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, and Matt Share. If you'd like
to access behind the scenes content from Model Wars and
Campside Media, please go to join campside dot com. That's
j O I N C A M P s I
(34:21):
d E dot com. If you enjoyed Model Wars, please
rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks so much for listening.
Campsite Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So Paul Fisher lands in New York City and checks
into what will be his home away from home, the
Wellington Hotel, all on Larry's dime. For a kid from
the valley, it might as well be a different planet.
I'm on Mars now. New York may not be Mars,
but it is planet Model. The women are impossibly tall
(00:31):
and thin. They're wearing miniskirts, big hoop earrings, super glam.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Every girl is six foot tall. Then they put on
their heels are six y three.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Paul's got alleged mobster Larry Lamb's money, and he's hitting
the most exclusive nightclubs in town for research.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
There's Andy Warhol over there, San right over there. Diana
Ross is right over there. I'm getting hit on by
what's her name, Grace Jones.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Now we couldn't confirm if Paul was hit on by
Grace Jones, but she's one of the most iconic models
of this era. Born in Jamaica, she has laser cut
features and is the master of the androgynous look. She's
insanely intimidating. She's probably best known for joining Christopher Walken
(01:18):
as creepy villains in the James Bond film A Few
to a Kill.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Your helicopter leaves in twenty minutes.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Oh, does that mean you're not saying the.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Night I'm going in the nightclubs going? Is that a
dude or a chick? Where am I?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's a swirl of androgyny, of sex. But Paul, as
we've learned by now, is a confident guy. He gets
dropped on Mars and thinks, yeah, I could fit in here.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I don't know what the hell. I had no clue,
less than no clue, but I did know modeling had
to do with girls, and if it had to do
with girls, I'm your man.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Paul doesn't even really know what a model is other
than a girl, some subspecies of an entire sex. He
doesn't know Schnell's last campaign.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I think we called a channel. I don't know what
anyone's talking about. It's not my world, not my world.
My taste changed, what turned me on changed, what I
got attracted to changed, everything changed. It was like you're
on the cover of that magazine and you're standing right
(02:32):
next to me, and I'm in a nightclub and there's
five of them, and there's in the middle of them.
As John Cassiblancus, Who the fuck is he?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Of course, the man in the middle of this tableau
is going to be an important figure for Paul, the
man who defines what a modeling agent was supposed to be,
the power and privileges such a man could have if
he plays his cards right.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
He was a handsomest shit Spanish guy. Everyone kissing the
fucking ring. I want that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
From I heard podcasts and campside media. I'm Vanessa Grigoriotis,
and this is Model Wars New York in the early eighties.
It smells like urine and money. It's a great place
to get mugged on the subway or to meet the
(03:31):
most gorgeous women in the world. It's grit and it's glamour,
and it's all mixed together. Now in the circles that
Paul wants to be in, the super glam circles, Larry
Lynd is nowhere to be found. Larry's money may help
Paul gain access to the modeling world, but he still
(03:52):
needs to make his own way. And at first, that
handsome Spanish guy that Paul saw in the club, the
one who looked like he was having a really fantastic time,
John Casablancis seems like the way because John Casablancas has
one of the biggest modeling agencies in town. John even
(04:14):
looks like a model. He's tan, long hair, He's got
this accent that's a little bit Spanish, a little bit French.
His father's wealthy. The money came from an ancestor who
invented a new kind of cotton spinning machine. Here's something fitting.
As a teen, he went to a Swiss boarding school
where he had a dalliance with a maid.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
The school had.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
Hired a new maid. Her name was Prisca.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
The school wrote his family a letter complaining about the affair.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Your son has betrayed our trust. He has betrayed everyone here.
We don't want to know him anymore. All letters of
recommendation are immediately suspended.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
So casablanc has had a mischievous past, sort of like Paul.
But in the late nineteen sixties, after a few years
of drifting, John decided to make his obsession with feminine
beauty into a career. He was going to open a
modeling agency.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
My logo was a phallic symbol. I loved it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
John called his agency Elite and encouraged his models to
stay out all night. He throw huge parties in trendy nightclubs,
giving guests a white shirt with his face printed on it.
He told the models they should show up in just
the t shirt. Here's Paul.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
His girls were sexy, his parties were sexy. Absolutely, he
was making love to Stephanie Seymour.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Now Stephanie Seymour at the time was sixteen years old,
So we don't want to celebrate his romantic prowess there.
What he was doing wasn't okay, although at the time
people overlooked behavior that we called criminal now and there
were people in town who didn't like John Casablancas at all,
(06:06):
people who dominated the modeling business and had for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
He was dating all the models while Jerry and Eileen
were grandma and Grandpa.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Jerry and Eileen Ford the old guard, the original king
and Queen of the New York modeling scene, although maybe
a lot of people viewed them less like a king
and queen and more like Grandpa and Grandma. John Casablancas again,
you know, the only things I.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
Liked about it was that every now and then she
would get drunk and throw the shoes away, and then
she was human for.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
A while, Eileen and Jerry Ford thought modeling should be
a high toned job for staid, serious ladies. Jerry was
the numbers guy. Eileen was a scout. She was stern, magisterial,
a well groomed woman. Here's how Tom Han, who got
his start as a model in New York in the
late sixties and who will become an important figure to
(07:05):
Paul's story, explains Eileen and Jerry Ford they.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Had a reputation of being honorable and honest. When they
say they were going to do something, they got something done.
The whole thing was a very solid kind of agency,
was what you'd say at East Coast New York agency
would be. The modeling business really was just growing like
in infancy a period of time in the sixties and seventies.
(07:30):
It did exist before, but it didn't exist in the
way that was much.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
More accessible to people.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Eileen to make sure that you had a very solid,
good reputation for the girls and make sure the girls behaved.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Eileen pushed for fair contracts, and she tried to protect
her girls from predatory figures. She even invited them to
live at her sprawling townhouse on the Upper east Side.
Some models loved staying there, and others felt it was
a lot. They have to live with me because I
wouldn't let them live otherwise.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
Really, no, why because they're too young to live alone.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Isn't that terrific?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So you give a leg up in a lot of ways,
not only getting them work, but giving them supports, like.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Living in a convent, though it was like living with
the strictest aunt of all time. Here's Aaron O'Connor, a
former Ford supermodel, speaking in a documentary about moving in
with Eileen and Jerry.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
I got there and I was greeted by the butler,
and then after the butler came the maid, and then
finally I heard a bell tinkling in the background, and
I heard the voice before our eyes met each other.
And the first thing that she said to me was,
(08:45):
I can see I'm going to have to keep my
eye on you.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
At dinner, Aileen might tell you to have three, not four,
spears of asparagus, or to sit up straight if you slumped,
or scold you for getting home too late. When Jerry Hall,
one of Eileen's models, started dating Mick Jagger, the Fordes
gave her a midnight curfew.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
They were convinced it was an old house that I
had put creaks in the stairs so I could trap
them if they came home.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Trapping models coming home after curfew may have been easy,
but overall, trapping models was hard, as Eileen would soon
find as Casablancis intruded on her turf. At first, the
Fordes considered the young Casablancis an ally. Eileen obviously didn't
like or trust him, but she was a businesswoman, so
(09:48):
Paul says the two of them came to an understanding.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
There was a deal between Elite and ford and Eileen
and Johnny that says, listen. In New York, it's hard
to create models because there's not a lot of magazines here.
There's only like four or five. There's conyn Assen, there's
First Publications, so there's Vogue, there's Bizarre, there's Cosmo. There's
there's four or five. But in Europe, because of the
way you guys do your advertising, there's fifty magazines there.
(10:14):
So when you find a great girl in America, you
had only one choice. You had to she had to
create a portfolio. How do you create a portfolio? You
need the magazine pages. They're in those fifty different magazines.
From Paris, you go to any back, then you go
to any magazine stand in Paris. There's fifty freaking magazines.
So how do you create the portfolio? You send the
girl to Europe. Johnny has relationships with all those magazines.
(10:35):
He creates the resume for those girls.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And by the way, Ford sent them new models to
Casablancas to build out their portfolios. Then Casablancaz sent his
European models back to New York where the Fords would
set them up with high paying work in exchange for
a commission. It was good business for everyone, but John
had to make one big promise.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
According to Paul, they're only one deal, and Eileen had
was one written contract. One clause in the contract that
meant anything, you will never open up your modeling agency
in New York City.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
And then he went ahead and opened an Elite branch
in New York.
Speaker 5 (11:20):
I'm just doing one of the things that I think
are most popular here in America, which is competition, free competition.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
John Casablancas when he moved to New York and he
opened the Elite in New York, I mean he was
out to just rule the world, it seems, And I know,
Eileen was furious because he had such a horrible reputation
and to hear he was able to still have an
agency in New.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
York Castle Blancas didn't just come to New York, he
went after Ford's talent.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Suddenly, costap Blancus is coming in and trying to swoop
up everything and snow he's just steal the models from
other agencies, but steal the workers who worked at those
agentses by paying them huge salaries just to get them
to leave Forwards and to leave Wilhelmina and so forth.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
He poached Joe Sagami, the controller, and Monique Pollard, head
of the women's booking table.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
He opened up his agency with basically the stars of
the Fords that he's been creating in Paris.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
It just doesn't serve you well to be around that
atmosphere all day long and worry about your talent being
stolen or your booker's being stolen, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
It was just such terrible energy.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
John casablanc has really shifted the business in a way
that some people may say, oh, yeah, he was great,
but you know, from my point of view, he did
more to destroy the ethics and morality of the business
than any person I.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Know, ethics and morality in the modeling business. After casabank
has betrayed the Forwards and opened his agency in New York,
Eileen sent some people who had defected to his agency
a bible.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
An actual bible. Google it, and she underlined a passage
about Judas. And then she made her fatal freaking flaw.
She sued him, and the press got a hold of it.
No one in the world outside of Paris had ever
(13:14):
heard the name John Casablancas or elite modeling agency. No
one knew it. It was like a freaking freckle, a
bad pimple, And then everyone knew it. She sued his
ass and that made him famous, and then every other
model was like, well, if those five top models are
(13:35):
going over to mister Casablancas and he's out there partying
every night, and I'm seeing him over there at that
freaking table right over there at Cafe to back, and
this kid, oh shit. And then it was like the
floodgates opened and he offered the industry something else. Sex.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
What do you mean by that? Oh?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Sexy? Noess, sexy? No one more conservative? Shit party with
the girls, hang out at night. Let's that big party.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
And that's how John Casablancas set the table for Paul Fisher.
Picture Paul Fisher. He's got a jew fro, he's wearing
(14:24):
some cool jeans cut just right. Maybe he's got on
a vest and he's surrounded. But what he loves more
than anything in the world.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
So we've got pictures of me with like six models
on the Ferrari.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Like Casablancas before him, Paul's goal is to pillage. He
figures the best way to get a slice of the
New York model agency pie is just roll up and
steal it off the windowsill piping hot.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I walked into the biggest modeling agencies in New York City,
Elite Ford, Wilhelmina, Click, and I pretended I was doing
a big ad campaign, and I would say to their agents, Hey,
by the way, how much how much money did you
make a week? And they'd say, oh, you know why,
I just know. I'll just come with that Curiousitywow, how
(15:19):
much how much you make? I make eight hundred bucks
a week? One thousand bucks a week, okay, I'll pay it,
two thousand bucks a week. I'll pay six months in advance.
I'll pay it cash, come with me, now leave this company.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
This was a brawl, just like the one John Casablancas
and Aileen Ford had had. In the industry, it's called
a model war. A model war is when two agencies
or more decide to pot bookers and models from the other,
both trying to take the other down. And Paul's pitch
worked just like it worked for Casablancas. Now Paul had
(15:59):
established agents with clients and connections, and even more valuable,
it gave him industry expertise, which of course it had
none of himself.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
All these different people, they would start to teach me
the industry. Oh, this is how catalogs works, this is
how this is how advertising works. These are who the
photographers are, this is a casting person, this is the magazines.
And I would just start to be a freaking sponge
and I would start to learn.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But Paul knew he needed a more senior mentor and
also someone with the experience to manage these agents.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
And who would oversee these agents.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Tom Han Tom, who you've been hearing from, had the
kind of track record that everyone in the industry took seriously.
He wasn't going to come cheap, but as we know
Larry Lynd had money.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Apparently the guys were funding all of this had a
lot of money to do it. I said, well, if
they got enough money, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Then Tom lived in LA but for the upstart Lend Agency,
my money was no object.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
You want me to come to New York. I don't
want to live there, but you know I'm willing to
do this. They want to meet my terms and I'll
do it.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And all you had to do is come into New
York three days a week and teach me the modeling industry.
And so he did. For a year. Tom would fly
into New York. We'd haven't picked up a helicopter at
wherever it was. JFK Orlaguardi or whatever. Treated him like
a freaking king. I had all this cash those days.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
PanAm had a flight. You could get off the plane,
you walk across into another room and got into a helicopter,
and the helicopter brought you into the city. So I
would automatically get off the flight from La, hop on
a helicopter which would drop me off on fifty ninth
Street Bridge and they would have a limousine pick me
up and take me to my office. Because I'd slept
on the plane all night and I can go right
to work and work there Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and
(17:48):
Friday I would fly back to La So I got
a lot of mile each other that PanAm club.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
And Tom would come in and he'd help me put
together the team. And because of Tommy and he had
such credibility when I stole those agents and having Tom,
I built a little modeling agency in New York City
for the Mobster.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
I didn't have any reason to think anything wrong about
because the tickets were paid for, checks were in the mail.
I got paid and I didn't question it because it
was coming from some people in Texas. I didn't know
anything about the people at all.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It was good in a way that Tom didn't really
know Larry. It just allowed Tom to methodically approach industry
contacts the way he wanted to, because Tom's approach was
a bit more measured than that of Paul. He was practical, unadorned.
He's that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
It wasn't difficult, you know, you just call up and
introduce yourself and just say I'm Tom. You know, I'd
like to talk to you about maybe a couple of
CEA and a couple of girls. You had to sort
of seek out through the advertising agencies what big jobs
were happening. And that's the kind of way you you said,
do your own source work. It's a lot of research
in those days. But there was a list of all
(19:00):
the photographers in New York at all the ad agencies,
So we just had to make phone calls all day
long to see what was going on. I had to
learn to speak the language that they understood, so how
they presented themselves. If their voice was modular and spoke
nicely and softly, and I would speak back.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
That way to them.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
If they were going a you know, how's it going there?
That kind of talk, I would have to change my
voice to that. You have to sort of match what
it is you're trying to zoom in on. You know,
you have to find new models all the time. And
that wasn't exactly a source. I mean there were modeling schools,
but you didn't pay attention to those. But I mean
I'd be walking down the street if I saw somebody
I thought was interesting, I'd stop them on the street
(19:40):
and say, are you interested in being a model? And
I remember I did find one guy one day and
he hardly spoke English. He was a steward, I believe
for one of the big airlines. He was Austrian and
he ended up becoming one of the biggest catalog models
in the world, and he hardly spoke English when I
met him. I had to drag the Australia to the age,
(20:00):
introduced them to people, got some pictures taken, and eventually
got a working visa form so he could stay in
America and work.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Tom knew he needed a strategy to get the Lind
Agency on the map quickly, and he decided representing the
children of celebrities would be a good Niche a lot
of them had the looks, plus their family names would
help get a lot of press.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
We got Susie Parker, who is a very famous Chanel model,
her daughter Georgia de la Salle.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Look at Paul learning to speak French already. The only
problem with Georgia de la Salle, who had modeled before
and for top photographers, was that as a fit for
the Lind Agency, she was busy going to Harvard and
she did not exactly speak alleged mobster.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
She could speak Sanskrit, which is a dead language, so
af you're showing you her brain power. And then as
she came there, I walked her over to Richard Avadon.
Steward walked in and he looked at her and put
on a stool and start taking pictures right away. So
her career just took off. She did it for a
few years, but then had enough of that went back
to her academics and her world of scholarly people. And
(21:07):
I believe she's in Germany now. I think she last
I had heard she was living in Germany and working
in Buddhist teachings and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Tom says. Lynde also worked with Eartha Kit's daughter Kit McDonald.
Eartha Kit, if you may recall, is the voice behind
Santa Baby, and she's the woman who played Catwoman on TV.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Well, I signed those girls into the agency. That was
great because it was all part of a plan to
get the marketing going with Warren Count Agencies. So it
wasn't like I got excited about saying, oh my god,
this is happening. I knew at the time that if
I did this and did that, then it would equal that.
So I was more like, I want to say, the
(21:53):
architect there, you know, and Paul was one of the
students who was learning to be.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
An architect in building the agency. Tom a psychology major,
saw beyond Paul's Girls, Girls, Girls persona.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
It was almost like he had been waiting all his
life to be in a world where he could suddenly
be accepted for who he was and be talked to.
You know, I think coming from la you don't really
feel like you have a lot going on when you
first go to New York. But once he was in
the scene, he was all rare and he was all gone,
and he was a lot of fun. Paul had to
(22:30):
learn to be the kind of agent he wanted to be,
but he also understood that there are boundaries and what
you don't cross and what you don't do, and he
was very diligent about that. He had to learn very
much in the beginning because if he got the reputation that,
you know, like a Johnny Johnny Coslak has had, there
would be no winning in that game. Ultimately you always
(22:53):
end up paying a bad price.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, Paul still has a few lessons to learn. He's
crazy with ambition, maybe just wants to be accepted for
who he was, and all that validation is just putting
more fuel on the fire. At the same time, Paul
(23:18):
is declaring a model war. Something is going on in
Paul's personal life that is extremely serious, extremely unglamorous. He's
doing blow and nightclub bathrooms, plotting his takeover of the
modeling industry, living the good life to the fullest, all
on Larry Lynn's dime. But Paul is only a New
York part of the time. Often he's back in LA
(23:42):
because he's got business there too.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It's always hard to talk about Deborah.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Deborah is Paul's younger sister, just eighteen months younger, but
he's always been determined to protect her.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
I remember in junior high, in elementary school, dev was
very well built and she developed her body developed very early.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Paul and Dever's mom, Monica, remembers a time when Deborah
was assigned to be the hall monitor or something like
that for her elementary school class. She was holding the
door open for the kids as they filed past, and
one of her male classmates reached up and grabbed her breast.
Devor was so distraught that the teacher called Monica and
(24:29):
sent debr home.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
And she was in tears, and I was I decide myself,
of course, But the next day I said to the boys,
because they were still in school, I said, the next day,
you go down there. They knew who the boy was.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Monica watched her sons from the car as they waited
at the gate of the school for the kids to
file out. They knew this boy walked himself home.
Speaker 6 (25:00):
And they didn't say a word. They just went up
to him and they walked him through the gate, and
they knew where he lived. And they walked to him
side by side, and he was a little tiny, very
small for his age, very very small, and they never
said a word. The kid was shaking. He didn't know
what was going to happen. And as they walked up
the hill towards his house, fine, and I followed with
(25:22):
the car, so I knew what was going to happen.
My oldest son said to him, whatever his name was,
Sonny boy, or whatever, you ever touch my sister again.
My brother here, Paul will beat the shit out of you.
And Paul said, that's right, take a good look at me,
(25:43):
because I'll be following you. And the kid never bothered
Eborah again. But it was, you know, they were very
very protective of her.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Always, always, it wasn't many years later that the news came.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
He had Hodgkins disease at the age of sixteen years old.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
The diagnosis first came when Paul was in college at
UC Santa Barbara, and he'd break away from the dorms
on the weekends when Devor was getting chemo, sneak her
out the back of the hospital in her wheelchair. They'd
smoke joints together to help her with her nausea.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
She just was different and smart and creative.
Speaker 7 (26:24):
And just just incredible, incredible, and just an incredible young woman. Yeah, incredible.
So I loved her. We all loved her.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Deborah was still sick when Paul was in New York,
partying like a madman, trying to get wind off the ground.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Because of my job, I had the flexibility to always
be there with her and to always care for her
with my mom. So I was there watching her little tushy,
taken her out of the Cedar side of Kansas Center,
put her on the freaking toilet. I was the one
who did all those things. I was always close to
Debora pre cancer, but then when she got cancer.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
You know, Nebra was fighting for her life in the hospital,
trying to stave off panic attacks as death lived.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
When she'd go to sleep at night being in the hospital.
You know how you wake up first thing in the morning,
That first second you're not sure.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Where you are.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Before you you know, two seconds in you realize. But
she'd say, she once told him that she'd wake up
and it was so quiet in the hospital that she
thought she was She used to think she was dead,
and it took her maybe ten seconds to realize she
wasn't dead. She was terrified of dying. She didn't want
to die.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Paul would sleep through the night in a chair in
her room.
Speaker 6 (27:53):
One day I came in and said, what are all
these chocolate papers on the floor.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
My sister would wake up in the middle of the
fucking night and she'd say, when I go to sleep
at night, Paul, I don't know if I'm gonna wake
up in the morning. And I said, I gotta I
know how to do it. Wait right there, And so
I went and I went in the Cino side of
cancer center, and I went into every fucking vending machine
and I bought like, like fifty chocolate bars. And then
(28:17):
I would take out the Hershey's and I would get
rid of the chocolate, and I would keep the silver wrapping,
and then I would take the silver wrapping and I
would put it into my sister Deborah socks, And I said,
all you got to do in the morning, wiggle your
fucking toes. And if you wiggle your toes and you
hear the crinkle of the hrshees, you'll know you're alive.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
For most people, having a sick family member means an
inability to focus on work on getting ahead in a career,
but for Paul it was the reverse. He's even more
driven because he feels life is short, and the more
he gets to know New York and the people working
for Cosablancas, for Eileen Ford, for everybody, the more he
(29:09):
feels like he can dominate. He's sure that all the
people he's hiring, all these people he's burning money on
so that they can teach him the modeling industry are
total garbage, except for Tom Han.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
They suck, They suck. They're good, they've created a couple
of molels before, but they're never going to get me
to be John Casablancas. They're never going to get me
in a position where I can go ahead to head
with Eileen Ford, for God's sakes, They're never going to
allow me to win this freaking game. They're never going
(29:42):
to put me on a map and make me the
most famous, powerful ALLI agent in the freaking world. That's
never gonna happen. They suck, they're cute, they're good, they're average,
but they're not the real freaking deal until I met
Sean Philippe Brandon or whatever his freaking name was.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
The reason Paul doesn't know the name of his most
prominent mentor in the modeling industry is that the mentor
himself was rather confused on the subject.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
And basically every time he come to see me, he'd
have a different accent and a different name. So one
day he'd he'd be like, he's an Irishman and I
can't do any accent, so I'm not going to do
it and sound like an asshole. But he was branding
the Irishman. Then he'd come in to be Jean Philippe,
the French photographer. Then he was Trevor from London, and
every time he'd come in with a different accent, a
(30:35):
different name, totally disheveled looking, and him and I would
sit up and he used to do this guy he
was my secret weapon. He used to work a click
and it was a scout. He'd discovered people like Uma
Thurman and a bunch of other big, freaking stars. But
he had a problem, and everybody in the industry knew
it was. Here was a freak.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
There were allegations of sexual impropriety with his subjects.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
A freaking pervert, but he knew the industry better than
anyone on the planet. My staff every time he walked
into the place, my staff would say, we're quitting. If
you have that guy in our place one more time,
we're quitting. So he'd have to come when they would leave,
and him and I would stay there till four o'clock
in the freaking morning. And he taught me everything. Paul.
Here's how the campaigns were, Here's how this works. Here's
(31:22):
who the top models are for the last twenty years.
Here's how Eileen Ford started. Here's how Johnny Cassabuencas came in.
This is what happened between the Aileen John Casawenka's wars.
This is where Johnny came from. This is how many
times he failed. These are the stars that each agency represents.
This is how you edit a picture. This is the
proper angle, this is the proper lighting. These are the
top ten photographers, these are the top casting people. He
taught me everything no one else. I mean, my team
(31:46):
didn't know a tenth of what this man knew. And
he just was he schizophrenic. I have no idea, I
don't care, I don't know, but to be honest with you,
I loved him, fucking loved him.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
A model who speaks Sanskrit, a sexual predator photographer with
an undiagnosed psychiatric condition, and a million dollars in rumored
mob money with zero financial oversight. Paul's really making his
way now. Larry Lynn did well giving Paul the benefit
(32:25):
of the doubt because lind Agency is ready to conquer
New York.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I would go to these things and it was like
you had to wear the smallest, tightest little dress, your
little black dress, and like you know, show your moves
and like you know, always show your legs, and that's
just how you are.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
We will go to Western Union once or twice a
week and come out of Wistern Union with you know,
eighty grand, one hundred grand, you know, we were you know,
forty run in our pocket each and walk back to the.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
House and he's spending all this money. We ain't making
a dime. He's right, but you can't be coming in
threatening to kill people.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
There was a shit to them in a fine way,
and I don't want to say shady and bad way,
but there was just something that seemed sneaky.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Bob, Dylan and Blurry lived together in the summers and
they sang on the streets with New York City somehow.
That's all next on Model Wars.
Speaker 9 (33:24):
Model Wars was a production of iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Model Wars was executive produced and hosted
by Vanessa Gregoriotis. Our senior writer was Michael Kenyon Meyer.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Julia K.
Speaker 9 (33:40):
S Levine was our producer and reporter. Our senior producer
was Lily Houston Smith, and our assistant editor was Emma Simonoff.
We had story and production help from Shoshi Schmulowitz, Ali.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Haney, and Blake Rook.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist
was Ewan Lei Tremuen. Sound design, mix and engineering by
Mark McCadam.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 9 (34:01):
Executive producers were Jennifer Bassett and Katrina Norbel. The show
was also executive produced by Rachel Winter and Campside Media's
Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, and Matt Share. If you'd like
to access behind the scenes content from Model Wars and
Campside Media, please go to join campside dot com. That's
j O I N C A M P s I
(34:21):
d E dot com. If you enjoyed Model Wars, please
rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks so much for listening.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.