PARK Magazine

INSIDE STORY
“She proposed to me that I work with her,” Marie
said. “I didn’t know a thing, frankly. But I knew
how to look at a girl, how to talk to her. I think
[the head of Paris Planning, a competing model
agency in Paris] heard about me. He was in the
middle of a kind of war with John Casablancas,
and he proposed that I work with him.”
That competitor didn’t like what was happening
in modeling. “The work was different, more
aggressive and much more money-looking,”
he said. Casablancas also slept with the girls.
“giving new services,” another competitor, the
late Jérôme Bonnouvrier, smirked.
A street fighter by temperament, Marie learned
to charm but didn’t make it a habit. His new
boss “was too much of a gentleman for the
concert that was playing at the time,” he said.
Rough around the edges, Marie was a road
show John Casablancas and soon earned the
nickname Chevalier de Longue Queue, or Knight
of the Long Tail, a not-so-subtle reference to
Gerald Marie with ex-wife his sexual prowess. “He was the stud,” said
Linda Evangelista photographer Jacques Silberstein.
By all accounts, Marie changed his women
as often as the sheets on his bed. Said
Bonnouvrier, “He’s funny, but he’s a pimp who
GERALD MARIE
fucks the girls.” He didn’t deny it. “I’m not an angel,” Marie
said. “But I’m very picky about the women I date, and I don’t
In the wake of the rise of Elite agency founder John Casablancas,
a new breed of agent rushed into the model trade. love women, and I think we’re just acting normally. The
work by quantity. We are men in the business of women. We
The most successful by far was Gérald Marie. At least, woman at a model agency is using another kind of charm,
that’s what he calls himself now. In the beginning he used an playing mommy, sister, confidante.”
aristocratic name, Gérald Marie de Castellac. “I didn’t want For what? “Money,” Marie said.
to work under my name at the time,” he (sort of ) explained. Those were different times. Models who met Marie then
“I didn’t know what was possible, and at the time everybody saw nothing particularly sinister or sexist about him. “He was
was working under a different name. Maybe I was stupid or the cock of the court,” said model Gaby Wagner, “Of course,
crazy enough to say I was going to work and invent myself he wanted to screw me.” He would tell new models that they
another personality, another system. I didn’t have anything would get editorial work if they slept with him. “I’d just go,
in common with myself, so I worked with that a little bit and ‘Fuck you,’” Wagner said.
I dropped it.”
Another model said, “he was like a kid in a candy store,
Though some people who have worked with him believe awed at finding himself in the position to sleep with all these
he was an orphan, Marie has said he is the son of a hospital girls.” He struck her as “somebody you could fuck for work,”
administrator. He apparently grew up near Marseilles and she said. “It was the only time I ever compromised myself, but
entered show business as a go-go dancer on local television, it didn’t seem so serious. I liked him.” Their interlude lasted
or at least that’s what he told one of his many model lovers a few weeks. “I never loved him, and he never loved me. And
who marveled at his bedroom acrobatics. Marie said that as funny thing, I don’t think he got me any work.”
a student he promoted ballroom dance concerts. “It worked “He was an episode in everybody’s life,” said another of
quite well, and through that I started to meet a lot of girls Marie’s model lovers with a tolerant sigh. “His persistence
because they followed the bands, and some of them happened amused me. He is relentless to the point of being humorous
to be models,” he said. He fell in with an older woman, and and I had nothing better to do for the day. There’s a hundred
she offered him a modeling agency. They called it Modeling. thousand guys like that in Paris. They’re nurturing, madly in