PARK Magazine

at things that are really important!” What’s important? Brunel
said that teenage girls shouldn’t be allowed to go to Paris by
themselves to model. “I’m against it, it’s crazy, it’s nuts,” he
said. “I don’t like having girls who are fifteen, sixteen. The only
thing they give you is trouble. You just have to mother them;
you just have to look that they’re fine. When that image of big
supermodels started, it gave hope. But it doesn’t work that
way. And what happened was a lot of agencies took too many
people that weren’t the right people. There were so many girls
with nothing to do.”
Brunel had heard all the stories told about him and brought
them up to deny them. “You’re going to hear I bring girls to
Roberta
Chirko
St.-Tropez,” he said. “I never took girls to
parties, to dinner, never, never.” But he
admitted to inviting girls to dinners with
his friends. “If I have a dinner, I don’t pay
any attention,” he said. “I’ve dined with
many girls from my agency, and then it
becomes like twelve, twenty people, but
the girls they can go whenever they want,
nobody’s going to bug them.”
Karins was “a business,” he went on.
“Otherwise, it would not last this long. Then,
you have my life. My life is not a story as
long as I don’t take young girls to serve either
my own, or … I mean, I don’t need those
doors to open,” he said, referring to the sorts
of men who would invite him places because
he might bring models along. “I know tons
and tons and tons, and I don’t want to see
them,” he said. “I don’t want to be invited
for a girl. How many times have I been invited
on a boat and this and that; I never said yes,
never, never, never.”
Brunel married model Roberta Chirko
the day before 60 Minutes aired. Though the timing was
curious, they’d been together for two years, he said. Others
added that she was so in love with him she’d stop girls on the
street and recruit them for Karins. Nonetheless, people talked.
“Jean-Luc married Roberta right after 60 Minutes to clean up
his image,” said an American model who worked in Paris. But
he hadn’t cleaned up his act, she adds. “He’d call her from
other girls’ beds and say, ‘I’m so lonely.’” And the night after
our interview, I ran into him in a nightclub, where his marked
agitation, and a friend with a bad case of sniffles made me
wonder. Later, Eileen Ford would tell me that 60 Minutes was
“the end” of Brunel for her.