PARK Magazine

“I knew what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t like the naïve
girl from Podunk that came in and got drugged at a party and
sold to the Arabs! I had my reasons, you know? I knew that
ultimately I was not going to be with this guy. But I didn’t know
how powerful he was, and so it was a little more serious and
involved than I ever expected it to be. But I walked into it
because he was an agent, because he could get me what I
wanted. At first it was a mistress kind of a thing because he
was still living with Lisa [Rutledge] when I met him. It was
very sudden. It was like, a decision he made, and then she
was just gone. He sent her home.”
Marie made her a star. “He was like God; he gave birth to
me. He decided that I was going to be ‘big shit.’ That’s what
he used to call me. Big shit. And he did it. “Suddenly there I
was in the middle of it all! At a very wild time, too. Everybody
was doing drugs. … He used to do coke in his office, on his
desk, with the windows open, right on the rue du Faubourg
St.-Honoré. He’d do it on the table in La Coupole; he didn’t
care. He was untouchable as far as he was concerned.
Their relationship and careers flourished for two years,
“then it got very cold,” Bolster continued. “We didn’t really
have sex all that often or really wild sex. He was always too
tired from running around. And he did so much blow. I think
that drugs had a lot to do with it, and the fact that he had as
much power as he did. He was overwhelmed by it. He took
advantage of it, and he really became sinister.”
Marie fell in with a new group of friends an “started not
coming home at night, Boslter said. “They were so promiscuous
it got to the point that our freezer was full of shots, the stuff
you take when you’ve got VD—a box of this in our freezer! I,
amazingly enough, didn’t get anything because I think he
gave himself his own shots! I’d walk in, and they’d be bending
over the kitchen table with their pants down, and Gérald
would jam them, and they would pay him for these shots!
Every now and then something like that would happen that
would make me sick to my stomach.
“We ended up with separate bedrooms because he was
seeing other people and I’m not stupid. I would find my clothes
walking around Paris. I approached him saying, ‘How come
so-and-so has my Azzedine dress on? I know that’s my dress
because it’s missing!’ I spent at least a year and a half trying
to catch him because he was so sneaky. He tried to make me
feel stupid. He would say, ‘But I spent the night in jail,’ or some
ridiculous story.” He gave her the nickname casse-couille,
which means ball breaker.
Just after Marie started seeing Linda Evangelista, Bolster
started to work more in America. “I was going to start going
back and forth between Paris and New York. I’d moved most
of my stuff there. I came back to get the rest of my stuff. They
didn’t know I was back in Paris. I got in the apartment. Gérald
was at work. Linda walked in, with a key. I couldn’t believe it.
I thought, Just the person I want to see. “I said, ‘So, what’s
going on? And she said, ‘Well, I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I
was so angry. I said, ‘I want you to get out until I get the rest of
my stuff packed up.’ It was pissing rain, and she said, ‘But I
don’t want to go wait in the rain.’ She was just beside herself.
She’s very whiny. I can’t stand her.”
On his return to their apartment , Marie “was threatening.
“He said no one would ever believe that I left him. The world
would think that he left me. He said, ‘You will never get away
with this! In New York you’d better take care, and don’t walk
past too many dark alleys.’ I sort of died when I left Paris. I lost
all desire to create, and New York didn’t help any, because it
was the nine-to-five grind, and it was so cold, and my apartment
there was the dingiest place. The truth is, I was so depressed
that I just couldn’t get up in the morning. Everything that I
enjoyed, anything to do with modeling made me think about
him, and I just wanted to forget about him. Modeling was my
life for six and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, and I loved
every second of it. I have to thank Gérald for that, but that’s
why I dislike him so much, because he took that away from
me. I have a completely different life now.
“I’m just amazed I survived!”
The publication of Model changed nothing. Both Marie
and Brunel remained in the modeling trade, the latter eventually
in a quiet partnership with Jeffrey Epstein. Their days of
reckoning were still decades away. Now that Brunel has met
his end, perhaps Gerald Marie has also begun to wonder how
much longer he can survive. P
Adapted from
Model: The Ugly
Business of
Beautiful Women.
Copyright © 1995
by Idee Fixe Ltd. All
rights reserved.
Courtesy of
HarperCollins.