Supermodels stripped bare of their pretensions
Reality television regularly throws up some extraordinary ‘stars’, but few as extraordinary or starry as Carole White. In The
Model Agency, Channel 4’s award-winning documentary of four years ago, White smoked, swore and bullied her way through seven episodes of high fashion and low cunning.
As the founder and boss of Premier, one of fashion’s leading agencies, she was partly responsible for creating the supermodel phenomenon of the Nineties and, even smarter, was quick to spot when it was over.
Now she has written her memoirs, which turn out to be as punchy as her television appearances. Her language is frequently fruity (this is not a book to give your 14-year-old daughter, or your maiden aunt) and on page, just as on screen, she doesn’t seem to have a pause or a delete button. Instead, she lets it all pour out – the tantrums, the frocks, the champagne, the lawsuits, the old, tired size-zero debate. And then there is her stable of beautiful models, as sleek and inhuman as racehorses and worth double the money.
White says her big breakthrough came in 1990, when she managed to get Naomi, Cindy, Christy and Linda – aka ‘ the Supers’ – to appear together in George Michael’s Freedom video.
The only model to turn her down was Claudia Schiffer, who seemed to thinkthe$100,000 fee wasn’t enough. Even without Schiffer, the video was a ‘mesmerising’ success and consolidated the idea there was a master-race of super-beauties who turned everything they touched to gold.
That doesn’t mean the Supers weren’t ‘a pain in the arse’, as White puts it. In one of the funniest sections she sets out some of the dottier ‘ Supermodel Commandments’ that she has come up against. Like the time a girl landed in Milan and said that the only thing she would eat for supper was llama curry. Or the girl on a first-class flight who was so upset her egg had been boiled for too long that she summoned the pilot from the cockpit.
White paints a picture of appalling behaviour. She once had to call a doctor in the early hours of the morning for a faked appendicitis (the girl was hung over and clutching the wrong side of her stomach); another time she arranged a ‘mercy dash’ to Mauritius to rescue a model who swore her boyfriend was about to kill her. White sent her own brother, Chris, but when he touched down on the island, he was met by the girl in a sunny mood who told him to get a move on because there was a boat party she wanted to attend.
Amazingly, none of this seems to have fazed White, who claims that she loves a challenge. And the proof, really, is in the way she has been able to lead her agency through several economic depressions, unhappy alliances and mergers. The most recent challenge has been the influx of impossibly tall, beautiful girls from Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. With a surplus of ‘nameless’ girls able to strut down the catwalk making a sack look stylish, White reckons that the age of the ‘Supers’ is gone for good.
If it’s a familiar face you’re after to shift your perfume or make-up line, you’re better off using an actress such as Charlize Theron, who comes with a ready-made following. What makes this book irresistible reading is that White is prepared to open up about her less-than-stellar moments. There’s the fact, for instance, that she turned away a 16-year-old Kate Moss for being too short and quirky.
Or the time she was called to a court in The Hague to give evidence against one of her former clients, Naomi Campbell, over the question of whether the supermodel had accepted ‘blood diamonds’ from Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia. White was repeatedly called a ‘liar’ in court, and it was claimed she was simply trying to bolster her position in a separate lawsuit against Campbell for outstanding royalties. Suffice to say that Campbell, who once called White ‘mum’, has not spoken to her since.
In the end, though, it’s not White’s bravery in offering to appear at a Hague war crimes tribunal that makes the biggest impression, it’s the fact she is prepared to paint herself in print as quite so ghastly. Put simply, this egotistical, ruthless, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed 65-yearold doesn’t care what we think about her, which makes her – and her extraordinary account of life at the sharp end of high fashion – all the more delicious.