00:00:02
Speaker 1: Campsite Media.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: 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 and thin. They're wearing miniskirts, big hoop earrings, super glam.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: Every girl is six foot tall. Then they put on their heels are six y three.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Paul's got alleged mobster Larry Lamb's money, and he's hitting the most exclusive nightclubs in town for research.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: 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.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: 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 as creepy villains in the James Bond film A Few to a Kill.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: Your helicopter leaves in twenty minutes.
00:01:25
Speaker 4: Oh, does that mean you're not saying the.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: Night I'm going in the nightclubs going? Is that a dude or a chick? Where am I?
00:01:34
Speaker 2: 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.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: 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.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: 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.
00:02:10
Speaker 3: 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 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?
00:02:43
Speaker 2: 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.
00:02:56
Speaker 3: He was a handsomest shit Spanish guy. Everyone kissing the fucking ring. I want that.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.
00:04:36
Speaker 3: The school had.
00:04:37
Speaker 5: Hired a new maid. Her name was Prisca.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: The school wrote his family a letter complaining about the affair.
00:04:45
Speaker 5: 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.
00:04:54
Speaker 2: 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.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: My logo was a phallic symbol. I loved it.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: 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.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: His girls were sexy, his parties were sexy. Absolutely, he was making love to Stephanie Seymour.
00:05:42
Speaker 2: 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, people who dominated the modeling business and had for a long time.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: He was dating all the models while Jerry and Eileen were grandma and Grandpa.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: 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.
00:06:36
Speaker 5: Liked about it was that every now and then she would get drunk and throw the shoes away, and then she was human for.
00:06:43
Speaker 2: 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 Paul's story, explains Eileen and Jerry Ford they.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: 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. It did exist before, but it didn't exist in the way that was much.
00:07:34
Speaker 3: More accessible to people.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Eileen to make sure that you had a very solid, good reputation for the girls and make sure the girls behaved.
00:07:43
Speaker 2: 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.
00:08:03
Speaker 6: Really, no, why because they're too young to live alone.
00:08:06
Speaker 2: Isn't that terrific?
00:08:07
Speaker 1: So you give a leg up in a lot of ways, not only getting them work, but giving them supports, like.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: 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.
00:08:23
Speaker 4: 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, I can see I'm going to have to keep my eye on you.
00:08:52
Speaker 2: 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.
00:09:14
Speaker 6: 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.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: 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 Paul says the two of them came to an understanding.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: 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. 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. He creates the resume for those girls.
00:10:37
Speaker 2: 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.
00:10:57
Speaker 3: 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.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: And then he went ahead and opened an Elite branch in New York.
00:11:20
Speaker 5: I'm just doing one of the things that I think are most popular here in America, which is competition, free competition.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: 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.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: York Castle Blancas didn't just come to New York, he went after Ford's talent.
00:11:47
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: He poached Joe Sagami, the controller, and Monique Pollard, head of the women's booking table.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: He opened up his agency with basically the stars of the Fords that he's been creating in Paris.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:24
Speaker 3: It was just such terrible energy.
00:12:28
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: 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.
00:12:54
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:13:52
Speaker 2: What do you mean by that? Oh?
00:13:54
Speaker 3: Sexy? Noess, sexy? No one more conservative? Shit party with the girls, hang out at night. Let's that big party.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: And that's how John Casablancas set the table for Paul Fisher. Picture Paul Fisher. He's got a jew fro, he's wearing 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.
00:14:34
Speaker 3: So we've got pictures of me with like six models on the Ferrari.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: 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.
00:14:57
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: 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 established agents with clients and connections, and even more valuable, it gave him industry expertise, which of course it had none of himself.
00:16:10
Speaker 3: 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.
00:16:26
Speaker 2: But Paul knew he needed a more senior mentor and also someone with the experience to manage these agents.
00:16:34
Speaker 3: And who would oversee these agents.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: 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.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: 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.
00:16:55
Speaker 2: Then Tom lived in LA but for the upstart Lend Agency, my money was no object.
00:17:02
Speaker 1: 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.
00:17:08
Speaker 3: 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.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: 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 Friday I would fly back to La So I got a lot of mile each other that PanAm club.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: 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.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: 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.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: 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.
00:18:39
Speaker 1: 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 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.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: That way to them.
00:19:18
Speaker 1: 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 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, introduced them to people, got some pictures taken, and eventually got a working visa form so he could stay in America and work.
00:20:07
Speaker 2: 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.
00:20:21
Speaker 3: We got Susie Parker, who is a very famous Chanel model, her daughter Georgia de la Salle.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: 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.
00:20:44
Speaker 1: 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 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.
00:21:17
Speaker 2: 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.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: 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 architect there, you know, and Paul was one of the students who was learning to be.
00:21:58
Speaker 2: An architect in building the agency. Tom a psychology major, saw beyond Paul's Girls, Girls, Girls persona.
00:22:08
Speaker 1: 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 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 end up paying a bad price.
00:22:56
Speaker 2: 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 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 because he's got business there too.
00:23:44
Speaker 3: It's always hard to talk about Deborah.
00:23:46
Speaker 2: Deborah is Paul's younger sister, just eighteen months younger, but he's always been determined to protect her.
00:23:54
Speaker 6: I remember in junior high, in elementary school, dev was very well built and she developed her body developed very early.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: 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 sent debr home.
00:24:31
Speaker 6: 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.
00:24:52
Speaker 2: 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.
00:25:00
Speaker 6: 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 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, 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.
00:25:53
Speaker 2: Always, always, it wasn't many years later that the news came.
00:26:00
Speaker 3: He had Hodgkins disease at the age of sixteen years old.
00:26:04
Speaker 2: 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.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: She just was different and smart and creative.
00:26:24
Speaker 7: And just just incredible, incredible, and just an incredible young woman. Yeah, incredible. So I loved her. We all loved her.
00:26:37
Speaker 2: Deborah was still sick when Paul was in New York, partying like a madman, trying to get wind off the ground.
00:26:44
Speaker 3: 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.
00:27:08
Speaker 2: You know, Nebra was fighting for her life in the hospital, trying to stave off panic attacks as death lived.
00:27:17
Speaker 6: 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.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: Where you are.
00:27:28
Speaker 6: 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.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: Paul would sleep through the night in a chair in her room.
00:27:53
Speaker 6: One day I came in and said, what are all these chocolate papers on the floor.
00:27:57
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:28:45
Speaker 2: 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 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.
00:29:22
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: 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.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: There were allegations of sexual impropriety with his subjects.
00:31:00
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:32:03
Speaker 2: 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 of the doubt because lind Agency is ready to conquer New York.
00:32:33
Speaker 3: 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.
00:32:42
Speaker 8: 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.
00:32:53
Speaker 3: 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.
00:32:59
Speaker 1: 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.
00:33:06
Speaker 2: 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.
00:33:24
Speaker 9: 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.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: Julia K.
00:33:40
Speaker 9: 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.
00:33:50
Speaker 2: Haney, and Blake Rook.
00:33:52
Speaker 9: Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist was Ewan Lei Tremuen. Sound design, mix and engineering by Mark McCadam.
00:34:00
Speaker 2: iHeart Podcasts.
00:34:01
Speaker 9: 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 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.
Speaker 1: Campsite Media.
00:00:09
Speaker 2: 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 and thin. They're wearing miniskirts, big hoop earrings, super glam.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: Every girl is six foot tall. Then they put on their heels are six y three.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Paul's got alleged mobster Larry Lamb's money, and he's hitting the most exclusive nightclubs in town for research.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: 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.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: 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 as creepy villains in the James Bond film A Few to a Kill.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: Your helicopter leaves in twenty minutes.
00:01:25
Speaker 4: Oh, does that mean you're not saying the.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: Night I'm going in the nightclubs going? Is that a dude or a chick? Where am I?
00:01:34
Speaker 2: 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.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: 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.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: 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.
00:02:10
Speaker 3: 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 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?
00:02:43
Speaker 2: 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.
00:02:56
Speaker 3: He was a handsomest shit Spanish guy. Everyone kissing the fucking ring. I want that.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.
00:04:36
Speaker 3: The school had.
00:04:37
Speaker 5: Hired a new maid. Her name was Prisca.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: The school wrote his family a letter complaining about the affair.
00:04:45
Speaker 5: 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.
00:04:54
Speaker 2: 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.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: My logo was a phallic symbol. I loved it.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: 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.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: His girls were sexy, his parties were sexy. Absolutely, he was making love to Stephanie Seymour.
00:05:42
Speaker 2: 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, people who dominated the modeling business and had for a long time.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: He was dating all the models while Jerry and Eileen were grandma and Grandpa.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: 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.
00:06:36
Speaker 5: Liked about it was that every now and then she would get drunk and throw the shoes away, and then she was human for.
00:06:43
Speaker 2: 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 Paul's story, explains Eileen and Jerry Ford they.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: 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. It did exist before, but it didn't exist in the way that was much.
00:07:34
Speaker 3: More accessible to people.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Eileen to make sure that you had a very solid, good reputation for the girls and make sure the girls behaved.
00:07:43
Speaker 2: 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.
00:08:03
Speaker 6: Really, no, why because they're too young to live alone.
00:08:06
Speaker 2: Isn't that terrific?
00:08:07
Speaker 1: So you give a leg up in a lot of ways, not only getting them work, but giving them supports, like.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: 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.
00:08:23
Speaker 4: 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, I can see I'm going to have to keep my eye on you.
00:08:52
Speaker 2: 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.
00:09:14
Speaker 6: 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.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: 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 Paul says the two of them came to an understanding.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: 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. 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. He creates the resume for those girls.
00:10:37
Speaker 2: 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.
00:10:57
Speaker 3: 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.
00:11:11
Speaker 2: And then he went ahead and opened an Elite branch in New York.
00:11:20
Speaker 5: I'm just doing one of the things that I think are most popular here in America, which is competition, free competition.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: 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.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: York Castle Blancas didn't just come to New York, he went after Ford's talent.
00:11:47
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: He poached Joe Sagami, the controller, and Monique Pollard, head of the women's booking table.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: He opened up his agency with basically the stars of the Fords that he's been creating in Paris.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:24
Speaker 3: It was just such terrible energy.
00:12:28
Speaker 1: 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.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: 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.
00:12:54
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:13:52
Speaker 2: What do you mean by that? Oh?
00:13:54
Speaker 3: Sexy? Noess, sexy? No one more conservative? Shit party with the girls, hang out at night. Let's that big party.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: And that's how John Casablancas set the table for Paul Fisher. Picture Paul Fisher. He's got a jew fro, he's wearing 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.
00:14:34
Speaker 3: So we've got pictures of me with like six models on the Ferrari.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: 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.
00:14:57
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: 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 established agents with clients and connections, and even more valuable, it gave him industry expertise, which of course it had none of himself.
00:16:10
Speaker 3: 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.
00:16:26
Speaker 2: But Paul knew he needed a more senior mentor and also someone with the experience to manage these agents.
00:16:34
Speaker 3: And who would oversee these agents.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: 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.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: 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.
00:16:55
Speaker 2: Then Tom lived in LA but for the upstart Lend Agency, my money was no object.
00:17:02
Speaker 1: 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.
00:17:08
Speaker 3: 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.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: 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 Friday I would fly back to La So I got a lot of mile each other that PanAm club.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: 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.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: 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.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: 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.
00:18:39
Speaker 1: 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 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.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: That way to them.
00:19:18
Speaker 1: 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 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, introduced them to people, got some pictures taken, and eventually got a working visa form so he could stay in America and work.
00:20:07
Speaker 2: 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.
00:20:21
Speaker 3: We got Susie Parker, who is a very famous Chanel model, her daughter Georgia de la Salle.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: 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.
00:20:44
Speaker 1: 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 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.
00:21:17
Speaker 2: 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.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: 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 architect there, you know, and Paul was one of the students who was learning to be.
00:21:58
Speaker 2: An architect in building the agency. Tom a psychology major, saw beyond Paul's Girls, Girls, Girls persona.
00:22:08
Speaker 1: 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 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 end up paying a bad price.
00:22:56
Speaker 2: 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 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 because he's got business there too.
00:23:44
Speaker 3: It's always hard to talk about Deborah.
00:23:46
Speaker 2: Deborah is Paul's younger sister, just eighteen months younger, but he's always been determined to protect her.
00:23:54
Speaker 6: I remember in junior high, in elementary school, dev was very well built and she developed her body developed very early.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: 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 sent debr home.
00:24:31
Speaker 6: 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.
00:24:52
Speaker 2: 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.
00:25:00
Speaker 6: 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 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, 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.
00:25:53
Speaker 2: Always, always, it wasn't many years later that the news came.
00:26:00
Speaker 3: He had Hodgkins disease at the age of sixteen years old.
00:26:04
Speaker 2: 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.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: She just was different and smart and creative.
00:26:24
Speaker 7: And just just incredible, incredible, and just an incredible young woman. Yeah, incredible. So I loved her. We all loved her.
00:26:37
Speaker 2: Deborah was still sick when Paul was in New York, partying like a madman, trying to get wind off the ground.
00:26:44
Speaker 3: 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.
00:27:08
Speaker 2: You know, Nebra was fighting for her life in the hospital, trying to stave off panic attacks as death lived.
00:27:17
Speaker 6: 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.
00:27:25
Speaker 3: Where you are.
00:27:28
Speaker 6: 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.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: Paul would sleep through the night in a chair in her room.
00:27:53
Speaker 6: One day I came in and said, what are all these chocolate papers on the floor.
00:27:57
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:28:45
Speaker 2: 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 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.
00:29:22
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: 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.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: There were allegations of sexual impropriety with his subjects.
00:31:00
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:32:03
Speaker 2: 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 of the doubt because lind Agency is ready to conquer New York.
00:32:33
Speaker 3: 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.
00:32:42
Speaker 8: 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.
00:32:53
Speaker 3: 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.
00:32:59
Speaker 1: 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.
00:33:06
Speaker 2: 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.
00:33:24
Speaker 9: 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.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: Julia K.
00:33:40
Speaker 9: 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.
00:33:50
Speaker 2: Haney, and Blake Rook.
00:33:52
Speaker 9: Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist was Ewan Lei Tremuen. Sound design, mix and engineering by Mark McCadam.
00:34:00
Speaker 2: iHeart Podcasts.
00:34:01
Speaker 9: 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 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.
