Still, there’s a free-flowing supply. “It’s easy,” George says. He picks up the phone and dials a number.
“Hello, is Susan there?” he asks.
“Susan’s in Paris.”
“Oooooh,” he says, sounding disappointed. “I’m an old friend of hers [in truth, he’s known her for two months], and I just got back into town myself. Damn. Who’s this?”
“Sabrina.”
“Hey, Sabrina, I’m George.” They chat for about ten minutes. “We’re thinking about going to Bowery Bar tonight. Getting a group together. Do you want to come?”
“Ummmm. Sure, why not,” Sabrina says. You can practically hear her thumb pop out of her mouth.
“And who else is there with you?” George asks. “Do you think they might want to come too?”
George hangs up the phone. “It’s actually better if there are more guys than girls when you go out,” he says. “If there are more girls, they get competitive with each other. They get quiet. If a girl is seeing a guy and she lets the other girls know, it can be a mistake. She thinks the girls she’s living with are her friends, but they’re not. They’re girls she just met who happen to be in the same situation. Girls try to steal guys all the time.”
“There are a lot of bambis out there,” says Mr. Felske.
George says he has a system. “There’s a hierarchy of sexual availability in the model apartments,” he says. “Wilhelmina girls are the easiest. Willi tends to get girls who grew up in mobile homes or the East End of London. Elite—they have two apartments—one uptown, on 86th Street, and one downtown, on 16th. They keep the nice girls in the uptown apartment. The girls in the downtown apartment are ‘friendlier.’ Girls who live with Eileen Ford are untouchable. One reason is that Eileen’s maid hangs up if you call.
“A lot of these girls live between 28th Street and Union Square. There’s Zeckendorf Towers on 15th. And a place on 22nd and Park Avenue South. The older models who work a lot tend to live on the East Side.”
A MODELIZER GLOSSARY
Thing = a model
Civilian = women who are not models
“We talk about it all the time, how hard it is to go back to civilians,” says George. “You never meet t
hem or make an attempt to meet them.”
“It’s easier to get a model into bed than it is to get a civilian with a career to put out,” says Sandy. Sandy’s an actor with brilliant green eyes. “Civilians, they want stuff from guys.”
THINGS DISSECTED
Thursday night at Barolo. Mark Baker, the restaurateur and promoter, is throwing one of his special parties. Here’s how it works: The promoters have a relationship with the agencies. The agencies know the promoters are “safe”—i.e., they’re going to take care of their girls, entertain them. In turn, the promoters need the modelizers to take the girls out. The promoters don’t always have the money to take the girls out to dinner. The modelizers do. Someone’s got to feed them. The modelizer meets someone like Mr. Roque. Mr. Roque wants girls. The modelizers want girls and they also want to hang out with Mr. Roque. Everyone is happy.
Outside, on this Thursday night, there’s pandemonium on the sidewalk. People pushing, trying to get the attention of a tall, mean-looking guy who could be part oriental, part Italian. Inside, the place is jammed. Everyone is dancing, everyone is tall and beautiful.
You talk to a girl with a fake European accent. Then a girl from Tennessee who just returned from a trip back home. “I was wearing bellbottoms and platform shoes, and my old boyfriend said, ‘Carol Anne, what the hell are you wearing?’ And I said, ‘Get with it, honey. This is New York.’”
Jack slides by and starts talking.
“Even if they’re dumb, models are very manipulative. You can split them into three types. One: The new girls in town. They’re usually really young—sixteen, seventeen. They go out a lot. They might not work that much, they want something to do, they need to meet people, like photographers. Two: The girls who work a lot. They’re a little older, twenty-one and up, they’ve been in the business for five years. They never go out, they travel a lot, you almost never see them. And three: The supermodels. They’re looking for a big-time guy who can do something for them. They’re all obsessed with money, maybe because their careers are insecure. They won’t even look at a guy who has less than twenty or thirty mil. Plus, they have the ‘big girl’ complex: They won’t hang out with any girl who’s not a top model, and they ignore other models or bitch about them.”
You go down to the bathroom with Jack and hang out in the men’s room. “By the time they get to be twenty-one, these girls have tons of baggage,” says Jack. “They have a history: Children. Guys they’ve slept with. Guys you don’t like. Most of them come from broken homes or fucked-up backgrounds. They’re beautiful, but in the end, they don’t do anything for you. They’re young. They’re uneducated. They have no values, you know? I prefer the older ones. You have to find one without baggage, and I’m on the search.”
GET ONE, GET THEM ALL
“The trick is to get one big girl—like a Hunter Reno or a Janna Rhodes,” says George. “These are girls who have done covers in Europe. If you get one, you can get them all. At a nightclub, you pay attention to the older girls. They always want to go home early because they have to get up and work. You walk them out to a cab, being a gentleman, then you go back in and attack the young ones.”
“These girls just want to be comfortable,” says Mr. Felske.
“They’re so young. They’re just finding their way in a grownup world. They’re not fully developed, and they meet these guys who know all the tricks. How hard can it be?”
Back in the loft, Barkley opens a bottle of Coke and sits on a stool in the middle of the room. “You think, Who’s prettier than a model. But they’re not so smart, they’re flakey and fucked up, they’re a lot looser than you think. It’s way easier to screw a model than a regular girl. That’s what they do all the time. It’s the way regular people are when they’re on vacation. They’re away, so they do things they wouldn’t normally do. But these girls are away all the time because they travel from place to place. So that’s what they’re like all the time.”