THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505050503
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines
MODEL
The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
MICHAEL GROSS
William Morrow and Co. 524 pp. $25.
THE BEAUTY TRIP
KEN SIMAN
Pocket Books. 175 pp. $14. (paper)
AT LEAST two fascinating books could be written about modeling: a) a probing look at the inner workings of this odd, ephemeral business; and b) a juicy expose of those at the top - with plenty of pill-popping and prurience. Michael Gross has tried to do both in Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women and has done neither very successfully.
The chapters on the history of modeling bog down in page after weary page of bygone agency wars, who stole which model from whom, which photographers rose and fell, and laundry lists of names of people barely characterized.
And the chapters on the models themselves are not exactly brimming with shocking tabloid revelations. They suggest that young girls - often as young as 14 - who are suddenly earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and jetting around the globe are frequently exploited by legions of lecherous admirers or run off the rails under their own steam.
In the 1940s and '50s, they succumbed to drink; in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, to hallucinogens, cocaine and AIDS. Some agents and photographers have a penchant for leaping in bed with the girls. Some of the girls aren't averse to trading sex for success. Some of their parents look the other way and pocket the proceeds.
This is hardly stop-the-presses stuff. A thin line has always separated the glamour of high-fashion modeling from the demimonde of porn and prostitution.
The news about which models and agents survive is equally unsurprising. The ones who tend to business outlast those who embrace the fast-lane lifestyle of late nights, promiscuity, heavy drugs, abusive men and spendthrift ways. Cindy Crawford is the latest in the line of no-nonsense pros who show up on time and ready to work, who don't dissipate their moment in the limelight with a chaotic private life.
Lauren Hutton was a pioneer in making herself more than just an anonymous day laborer by garnering an exclusive contract for representing a product. Cheryl Tiegs, Christie Brinkley and others became cottage industries earning a piece of the action by producing their own calendars and lines of fashion and beauty products.
Many less disciplined models went through fortunes and ended up broke and forgotten. And even some of the most successful suffered from an occupational hazard - sleazy men. A surprisingly high percentage of models seem to marry losers. One of the saddest cases that Gross recounts is of Wilhelmina, an all-pro model smart enough to start her own agency but stupid enough to saddle herself with an abusive alcoholic.
Marilyn Monroe once said poignantly that it was very hard to be simply a thing. You catch some of that in Model. Many women leave the business while still in their prime because they are burned out or brain-dead, because they can no longer bear being treated like cattle or gazing soulfully into the cold, glassy stare of the camera.
So many crash and burn that the stories of models who find a place after modeling are especially welcome - Lee Miller, who learned photography from surrealist Man Ray, for instance. But because Gross is on a forced march through every agency and model since the Gibson Girls, no single story gets more than superficial treatment. Several thin books may be buried under the accumulated weight of this 500-page duffel bag of facts, but they can't get out. Too bad.
The contrast with Ken Siman couldn't be more stark. His brief book is a series of funny, evocative, voyeuristic snapshots of stops on The Beauty Trip. He visits a male strip club, a New Jersey Barbizon model agency, Arthur Elgort shooting Naomi Campbell, a plastic surgeon and so forth. The prose in the Gross book is lumpen and gray; Siman writes vividly and personally. He's a young novelist (Pizza Face) hooked on the fashion scene.
Afflicted with a monstrous case of acne as a teen, he has a special edgy appreciation for the other extreme - beauty worth paying to see. He says feelingly that ``the hallways of high school may be the only courtroom of beauty harsher than a three-way-mirror in a fluorescently lit dressing room.''
He's enthralled that the beauty business is part real-life fairy tale in which girls can still be ``discovered.'' Riding a bike today, the toast of Paris tomorrow. But he's smart enough to realize it's also part freak show. He likes both parts and writes with disarming freshness and candor.
Siman is compulsively quotable. When he meets Elaine Ford, the grand dame of model agents, he notices she has red nails ``so sharp I wish I had an itch.'' He finds Ford to be all business: ``She doesn't fantasize about turning ugly ducklings into swans. Her job is to turn swans into paid swans.'' Siman says ``the eighties were for plastic surgery what the sixties were for sex and drugs.''
Siman has actually given some thought to beauty. ``Beauty is more a privilege than a power. It's the privilege of getting paid to have your picture taken,'' he writes, ``of having strangers want to please you, of having access to fame and wealth. That might sound trivial, but it's not.''
Siman also reflects on the changing image of beauty. Why is thin in and Rubensesque amplitude out? ``Relative fleshiness is valued when it reflects wealth and health,'' he writes. ``In Western society today, it symbolizes sloth and poor health. This will not change unless there's a famine or it somehow turns out that a breakfast of bacon, sausage and buttered toast dunked in egg yolks is nutritious.''
As far as these two books are concerned, thin is also beautiful. Siman's The Beauty Trip is less than a quarter the length of the overweight Model, but it's beautifully put together. It also has a lot more on its mind.
- MEMO: Keith Monroe is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by FABIAN BARON
Jacket photo by BERT STERN
Photo
ARNE SVENSON
Ken Siman presents a series of bright, funny snapshots about fashion
in ``The Beauty Trip.''
by CNB