PARK Magazine

Karin
Mossberg
Helen
Högberg
queen Eileen Ford as his guardian angel. “Eileen took Jean-
Luc as her son,” said Jacques Silberstein. “She let him become
very powerful.” Some saw a flirtation between them. “Jean-
Luc made her feel girlish and desirable,” a model school
owner said.
“Not with my girls” was the motto of most agents who sent
models to Europe in the days when that meant dropping them
like raw meat into a tank of piranhas. Brunel seemed to honor
that pact with Ford. “I love Jean-Luc. I think Jean-Luc’s great,”
Christy Turlington said in 1994. “I stayed at his apartment all
the time, and never once did I ever see anything wrong, never
once did he treat me wrong.”
Finally, though, people began warning Eileen Ford that
her Paris partner was up to no good. Bonnouvrier told Ford
how Brunel was thrown out of a modeling convention in Las
Vegas after a drug party in his room. “She started screaming,
‘You’re jealous, he’s successful!’” Bonnouvrier recalled. “I said,
‘I’m not sure jealous describes my feeling. I’m talking about
drugs.’ She refused the evidence. She said, ‘He makes me
laugh.’”