PARK Magazine

INSIDE STORY
RUTLEDGE WAS OUT OF MARIE’S
LIFE—OUT OF PARIS ALTOGETHER,
IN FACT—AND CHRISTINE
BOLSTER, A CALIFORNIA BLONDE,
WAS IN. “CHRISTINE BOLSTER
WAS FIFTEEN,” SAID A FEMALE
MODELING AGENT. “GÉRALD
MARIE WAS REALLY A VERY
BAD MAN. FIFTEEN!”
love, and then they’re out of your life as fast as they got into
it. A brief encounter of the most odd kind.”
Two years later, Marie’s agency had surpassed Elite in
profitability, and Casablancas’ business partner secretly
offered Marie an equity stake in Elite and in 1986, he became
a one-third partner and director. “John was furious,” said
an Elite employee of that era. “He said, ‘He’s a sleaze. He
beats up girls. He rapes them. He takes coke.’”
Casablancas had long been a proponent of the theory
that models were raw stones that needed to be having sex
to become glittering diamonds. “European men are important
abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male
chauvinists,” he’d said. “That attitude … gives the model
an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable
quality.” Originally, that service was provided by the playboys
who surrounded the agents. By the time Marie joined Elite,
the sexual polishing process was more often conducted
in-house. “He’s a good lay, I’m sure of that,” said his former
boss “I’ve heard it from all of them.”
Marie said his first serious romance was with the Australianborn
model named Lisa Rutledge. They lived together for
five years and had a daughter, but domestic life did not
domesticate him. “Gérald wanted to fuck the girls,” said
Jacques Silberstein. “His way was, if you want to work, fuck
me.” Just before he made the move to Elite, Rutledge was
out of Marie’s life—out of Paris altogether, in fact—and
Christine Bolster, a California blonde, was in. “Christine
Bolster was fifteen,” said a a female modeling agent. “Gérald
Marie was really a very bad man. Fifteen!”
In fact, she was only fourteen when she came to Paris, began
sleeping with her agent, and ended up living with him for six
years, before another model, Linda Evangelista, did to her
what she’d done to Lisa Rutledge. “I stick pins into a voodoo
doll of him,” Bolster told me, launching into the tale of what
can hardly be called their romance. “I was fourteen and a half
Monica Belluci was discovered
by Jean-Luc Brunel
when I started modeling.” She was in Paris within days of
being discovered in California. “At first I shared an apartment
with two other models…Then suddenly I found myself moving
into an apartment that Gérald Marie paid for. It all started
about two weeks after I got there. You kind of get a feeling
when someone’s interested and you’re interested. So, I was
waiting for him to ask me to dinner, but I went into his office
one day after work, and he just jumped on me. There was no
way that he was going to get turned down. It was like I had no
choice!