Luckily, my friend Amalita called and explained it all to me. Explained why terrific women are often alone, and not happy about it, but not exactly desperate about it, either. “Oh honey,” she cooed into the phone. She was in a good mood because she’d had sex the night before, with a twenty-four-year-old law student. “Everyone knows that men in New York make great friends and lousy husbands. In South America, where I come from, we have an expression: Better alone than badly accompanied.”
5
Meet the Guys
Who Bed Models!
There was just the slightest stir as “Gregory Roque,” the conspiracy filmmaker, slipped into the Bowery Bar on a recent Friday night. The auteur of such controversial films as G.R.F. (Gerald Rudolph Ford) and The Monkees, Mr. Roque was wearing a tatty tweed jacket and keeping his head down. Surrounding him was a swarm of six young women, new models with a well-kno
wn modeling agency. All of the girls were under twenty-one (two were as young as sixteen), and most of them had never seen Mr. Roque’s films and, frankly, couldn’t have cared less.
Functioning like two small tugboats in keeping the swarm moving and intact were the modelizers, Jack and Ben—two self-employed investors in their early thirties—men of nondescript features, save for the buckteeth of one and the stylish spiky haircut of the other.
At first glance, it looked like a merry group. The girls were smiling. Mr. Roque sat in a banquette, flanked by his beauties, while the two young men sat in the aisle chairs as if to ward off any unwelcome intruders who might try to talk to Mr. Roque or, even worse, steal one of the girls.
Mr. Roque would lean toward one or another girl, engaging in snippets of conversation. The young men were lively. But it wasn’t quite as charming as it appeared. For one thing, if you looked closely at the girls, you could see the boredom pulling down their features like old age. They had nothing to say to Mr. Roque and even less to say to each other. But everyone at the table had a job to do, and they were doing it. So the group sat and sat, looking glamorous, and after a while, they got in Mr. Roque’s limousine and went to the Tunnel, where Mr. Roque danced dispiritedly with one of the girls and then realized he was bored up to his eyeteeth and went home alone. The girls stayed for a while and took drugs, and then Jack, who had the spiky haircut, grabbed one of the girls and said, “You stupid slut,” and she went home with him. He gave her more drugs and she gave him a blow job.
That sort of scenario is acted out just about every night in New York, in restaurants and clubs. There, one invariably finds the beautiful young models who flock to New York like birds, and their attendants, men like Jack and Ben, who practically make a profession of wining and dining them and, with varying degrees of success, seducing them. Meet the modelizers.
Modelizers are a particular breed. They’re a step beyond womanizers, who will sleep with just about anything in a skirt. Modelizers are obsessed not with women but with models. They love them for their beauty and hate them for everything else. “Their stupidity, their flakiness, their lack of values, their baggage,” says Jack. Modelizers inhabit a sort of parallel universe, with its own planets (Nobu, Bowery Bar, Tabac, Flowers, Tunnel, Expo, Metropolis) and satellites (the various apartments, many near Union Square, that the big modeling agencies rent for the models) and goddesses (Linda, Naomi, Christy, Elle, Bridget).
Welcome to their world. It’s not pretty.
THE MODELIZERS
Not any man can become a modelizer. “To get models, you have to be rich, really good-looking, and/or in the arts,” says Barkley. He’s an up-and-coming artist, and he has a face like a Botticelli angel, framed by a blond pageboy haircut. He’s sitting in his junior loft in SoHo, which is paid for by his parents, as are all the rest of his expenses, his father being a coat-hanger magnate in Minneapolis. That’s good for Barkley, because being a modelizer isn’t cheap—there are drinks at clubs, dinners, cab expenses from one club to another, and drugs—mostly marijuana, but occasionally heroin and cocaine. It also takes time—lots of time. Barkley’s parents think he’s painting, but he’s too busy spending his days organizing his nights with models.
“Frankly, I’m kind of confused about this whole model thing,” Barkley says. He’s pacing around his loft in leather jeans, shirtless. His hair is just-washed and his chest has something like three hairs on it. Models love him. They think he’s hot and nice. “You’ve got to treat them just like regular girls,” he says. Then he lights up a cigarette and says, “You’ve got to be able to roll into a place and go right up to the hottest girl there—otherwise, you’re finished. It’s like being around dogs, you’ve got to show no fear.”
The phone rings. Hannah. She’s doing a shoot in Amsterdam. Barkley puts her on the speaker. She’s lonely and she’s stoned. “I miss you, baby,” she moans. Her voice is like a serpent trying to crawl out of its skin. “If you were here right now I’d have your ding-dong down my throat. Aaaaahhhh. I love that so much, baby.”
“See?” Barkley says. He talks to her, raking his fingers through his hair. He lights up a joint. “I’m smoking with you now, baby.”
“There are two kinds of modelizers—those who are closing the deal, and those who aren’t,” says Coerte Felske, author of Shallow Man, a novel about a man who chases models.
Leading the pack are the supermodelizers—men who are seen with the likes of Elle Macpherson, Bridget Hall, Naomi Campbell. “There are guys like this any place models congregate—Paris, Milan, and Rome,” says Mr. Felske. “These guys have status in the world of modeling. They can pick off models like clay pigeons. They burn ’em and churn ’em.”
But not all modelizers are high profile. In Manhattan, a necessary stopping-off point for young new models, just being rich can be enough. Take George and his partner, Charlie. On any given night of the week, George and Charlie are taking a group of models, sometimes up to twelve, out to dinner.
George and Charlie could be Middle European or even Middle Eastern, but in truth they’re from New Jersey. They’re in the import-export business, and though neither is thirty yet, they’re each worth a few million.
“Charlie never gets laid,” says George, laughing, spinning around in his leather swivel chair behind a large mahogany desk in his office. There are oriental carpets on the floor and real art on the walls. George says he doesn’t care about getting laid. “It’s a sport,” he says.
“For these guys, the girls are a trophy extension,” confirms Mr. Felske. “Maybe they feel unattractive or are blindly ambitious.”
Last year, George got a nineteen-year-old model pregnant. He knew her for five weeks. Now they’ve got a nine-month-old son. He never sees her anymore. Here’s what she wants: $4,500 a month in child support, a $500,000 life insurance policy, a $50,000 college fund. “I think that’s a little excessive, don’t you?” George asks. When he smiles, the tops of his teeth are gray.
WILHELMINA GIRLS
So how does a guy get into George’s position? “The girls travel in packs,” explains Barkley. “It’s a very closed group. The models hang out in posses and live in groups in model apartments. They don’t feel safe unless they go out together. It’s intimidating to a guy.
“On the flip side, it works to your advantage, because if there are twenty models in a place, the one you want is not going to be the most beautiful. You have more of a chance. If there’s just one, she’s the most beautiful, and she can work it. When you go up to one in a group of four or five, it makes that girl feel like she’s better than the other girls.”
The trick is meeting one girl. The best way is through a mutual friend. “Once a guy has access, once you get validated by one of the girls,” says Mr. Felske, “then the guy gets beyond being an ordinary Joe.”
Three years ago, George was at a club where he ran into a girl he knew from high school who was with a booker with an agency. He met some models. He had drugs. Eventually, they all went back to the models’ apartment. He had enough to keep them going until seven in the morning. He fooled around with one of them. The next day, she agreed to see him again, but only if all the other girls could come, too. He took them all out to dinner. He kept going. “That was the beginning of the obsession,” he says.
George knows all of the model apartments now—the places where, for five hundred dollars a month, a new model gets to sleep in a bunk bed in a cramped two- or three-bedroom apartment with five other girls. But he’s got to keep up, because the girls come and go all the time, and you have to stay close to at least one girl in the apartment.