NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/alt/supermod/1643

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From: [e-mail] (Paul Gallagher)
Newsgroups: alt.supermodels
Subject: Article about Cosmo covers
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Date: 9 Nov 92 19:26:01 GMT
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How does anybody get to be a Cosmo cover girl? (Cosmopolitan magazine)
 Gardner, Ralph, Jr.
 Cosmopolitan  v210 p98(4) June, 1991

     A scout for a New York modeling agency spotted sixteen-year-old Paula
Abbott working at a sproting-goods store in a mall in Montgomery, Alabama.
A few weeks later, Linda Cox, COSMO's art director, got a call from Louise
Roberts and Douglas Asch, the heads of the agency Paris/USA, who said,
"Boy, do we have a girl for your!"

     Cox was understandably skeptical. People phone COSMO all the time to
rave about some undiscovered beauty they sighted getting off the crosstown
bus or swimming laps at the local pool. Helen Gurley Brown, COSMO's editor
in chief, fields a few of these calls. Usually, they come from high-powered
types who believe the public would benefit greatly if their "daughters,
girlfriends, wives, even ex-wives" graced COSMO's cover, says Brown. She
used to do the diplomatic thing, telling her helpful friends that Francesco
Scavullo, the photographer who has shot almost every COSMO cover since
1965, had complete jurisdiction over selecting the cover girls. Now she
just tells the truth: "I explain that the girls are the creme de la creme
of professional models, and it's very unlikely that we would choose
somebody who isn't already a top model."

     Paula's eventual COSMO cover, the Christmas 1988 issue, helped rocket
her modeling career forward. "People can make a lot of money in modelling,
but not usually their first year," says Douglas Asch. "Paula made an
enormous amount of money her first year."

     This Southern stunner's leap to fame was virtually unprecedented. "She
hadn't worked in Europe," Linda Cox notes. "She'd hardly worked at all."
Most first-time COSMO cover girls have modeled extensively in Europe, where
a "buzz" has developed about them. "If a girl is working in Europe and
getting to be a star, there's an underground network--hair and makeup
people, photographers, modeling-agency reps--who put out the word," Cox
explains. "When she comes to New York, people are waiting for her arrival.
Claudia Schiffer was that way. So was Linda Evangelista."
     Sean M. Byrnes, Francesco Scavullo's stylist and editor, tells a
different story about Schiffer, the Brigitte Bardot look-alike and Guess?
jeans girl. If there's anything Byrnes takes more seriously than selecting
the seductive outfits the models wear on COSMO's cover, it's discovering
the girls themselves. "I saw a snapshot of Claudia on the beach in some
French or German magazine," says Byrnes, who indicates the photo wasn't
much larger than a postage stamp. "I tore the picture out, sent it to
agencies, and said, 'Get me this girl!'"

     Eileen Ford complied, and several weeks later, Schiffer, escorted by
her boyfriend, arrived at the Manhattan carriage house where Francesco
Scavullo lives and keeps his studio and art gallery. She was everything
Byrnes had hoped for--and more: an angelic face, perfect hair and legs,
and, gushes Byrnes, "She had an incredible bust." ("It's just a perpetual,
perennial, primordial pleasure to look at the bosom," says Helen Gurley
Brown, explaining why cleavage always gets star billing on her covers.
"There's no question that everybody likes looking at bosoms--especially
women. You compare yours. You don't necessarily feel envious, but you
decide how you stack up against whomever you're looking at.")

     "Claudia was the kind of girl the world needed--a tall, beautiful
blonde," says Byrnes, who decked her out in the champagne-colored Thierry
Mugler dress she wore on the December 1989 cover. "We hadn't had one since
Christie Brinkley."

     Some might disagree that the classic blonde went on the
endangered-species list between Brinkley's debut in the 1970 s and
Schiffer's in the late 1980s. Still, Byrnes, who's worked with Scavullo
since 1971, does hold bragging rights to having discovered both.

     "Christmas, years ago," he says, "I was in Bloomingdale's, and I saw
these two glowing blondes going into the ladies' dressing room. I went in
right after them." Byrnes, who'd never let a little thing like decorum come
between himself and a COSMO-cover candidate, handed the women his business
card (so what if they appeared to be mother and daughter?) and implored
them to call him. A month later, the younger woman did. She said her name
was Christie Brinkley and that she'd recently returned from France, where
she'd been doing some modelling. She agreed to drop by, and Scavullo
photographed her for the June 1977 cover, wearing a racy purple Norma
Kamali bathing suit.

     Most models don't find themselves featured on the cover as
effortlessly as Brinkley did. Several a day make the pilgrimage to
ScavulloHs studio, sent over by their modeling agencies, and wait anxiously
as Byrenes browses through their books, occasionally making flattering
comments. But rarely does he make any commitments on the spot. He stores
the top prospects in his memory bank, and when he finds a dress he is
certain will show off their assets to maximum effect, he invites them back
for a photo session with Scavullo.

     Every model remembers her first visit to the carriage house, a
portfolio tucked under her arm. "I was terribly nervous," says supermodel
Paulina Porizkova, who did her first shoot with Scavullo at seventeen years
of age. (Today, she holds the record for COSMO covers, with twelve to her
name.) "Doing a COSMO cover was a dream for me at that age, and Scavullo
was a huge photographer. When I came for a 'go-see,' he was so nice, but I
was shaking."

     These days, when supermodels like Porizkova and Cindy Crawford sit in
the makeup room, swathed in white terry cloth robes, having their faces
painted for as long as six hours, they feel as relaxed as if they were
lounging around in their own downtown lofts.

     Why does it take so long for a girl to be camera ready when she's
already got flawless skin and cheekbones? It seems that everybody involved
in putting together a cover look--hairdresser, makeup artist, manicurist,
stylist--is indulging his or her own creative fantasies, a very
time-consuming activity.

     "Who needs another picture of a laughing sixteen-year-old in a
T-shirt?" says Kevyn Aucoin, considered one of the top makeup artists in
the business. He is applying foundation to Cindy Crawford's face with the
deliberation of Monet painting a water lily. "If I'd seen a magazine cover
with a girl who looked like my next-door neighbor back in lafayette,
Louisiana, I wouldn't have wanted to come to New York City. I moved here
because of the fabulous-looking people I wanted to meet."

     A certain amount of time is also consumed by industry gossip. At one
point. Crawford offers her assessment of a hot young newcomer who doesn't
completely measure up. "She has four hairs, and two of them are split," she
remarks.

     If the model and makeup man are utterly relaxed, the same cannot be
said of Francesco Scavullo, who tries valiantly to occupy himself--phoning
in a dinner order of organic free-range barbecue chickens and fretting over
the sidewalk outside, which the city is planning to demolish as part of
some misguided urban renewal project--until the model is ready to be
photographed. A prickly perfectionist who has humidified air pumped into
his studio and who sticks to a strict macrobiotic diet, Scavullo stresses
that these sessions are called "cover tries" because there's no guarantee
that the results, no matter how beautiful or well-known the model, will
ever appear on COSMO's cover.

     "I reject two or three a year," says Helen Gurley Brown, who has final
approval of the covers. "They are rejected because something doesn't
work--the girl or the hair. It's one of those undefinable things." Recent
tries that were turned down include Christy Turlington (who did make it to
this month's cover) and Stephanie Seymour.

     "COSMO is one of the most difficult covers to do," says Scavullo,
sitting in his dazzling marble, leather, and glass living room above the
studio, as he waits to shoot Crawford. "Not only do the girls have to have
the most beautiful faces and bodies, but they have to look fresh."

     To complicate matters further, each month's cover is a different
color. The reason is simple: to selll magazines. More disastrous than a
model with a hair out of place would be an issue that languished on
newsstands because readers mistook it for the previous month's copy.

     The clothes must match that month's color. Sean Byrnes is perpetually
on the hunt at designers' showrooms, tracking down glamorous numbers in the
right shade of green, red, pink. He contends that his role as COSMO-cover
shopper qualifies him as something of a fashion arbiter. "I think the image
of the COSMO cover girl has affected fashion across the board," he says.
"We started showing breasts--now it's fashionable to show breasts." His
biggest challenge is to reinvent the COSMO girl twelve times a year.

     "It's all about not being ashamed to wear makeup or fancy clothes,"
says Kevyn Aucoin. "We really do them up." Chimes in Crawford, "The idea of
the cover is just to look fabulous."

     If only the celebrities who occasionally grace the magazine's cover
shared Crawford's enthusiasm. "Models are used to being dressed," Scavullo
observes," but if a celebrity comes in, it's a combination of what we think
is right and what she thinks is right."

     The problems arise--as they did when Cher accepted Helen Gurley
Brown's cover invitation--when a celebrity's need for control clashes with
Scavullo's and Byrnes' desire to do them up. You'd think the last woman to
make a fuss about showing cleavage and other parts of her sculpted anatomy
would be Cher, a well-known exhibitionist who didn't think twice about
presenting an Oscar while sporting little more than a spangled body
stocking. Unfortunately, the morning she showed up to be photographed by
Scavullo was the morning she decided to experiment with her image. Instead
of the stunning black confection designer Bob Mackie had whipped up
especially for the occassion, Cher insisted on a demure white lace dress
that hid not only her bosom but every other one of her legendary curves. "I
think Helen was disappointed," Scavullo says, "She wanted a sexy dress."

     "The whole thing was bad news," Byrnes says. "You have to let
celebrities have a lot of say."

     Raquel Welch also created a crisis whe she posed for a cover in the
seventies--mainly because her she had her own notions about whether or not
her extraordinary physique should be wedged into a top Byrnes had
commissioned Charles Jones, a famous corset designer, to make for her. The
garment was a high-fashion bra intended to showcase the sex goddess in all
her glory--a revolutionary concept in the pre-Madonna era.

     "From the dressing room, I hear these gasps and screams," Byrnes
remembers. "Unfortunately for us, Raquel did not find the bra very
flattering." Luckily, Welch's boyfriend at the time, a designer, had a few
suitable outfits, which the phenomenally endowed screen siren was pleased
to pose in.
     No such misfortunes befall Cindy Crawford the morning of this
particular cover shoot. She emerges wearing a white bustier and white lace
stretch pants, both encrusted with beads--the sort of outfit that would
cause multivehicle accidents and rubbernecking delays if the megamodel
decided to don it outdoors. "After working for seven years, I'm used to
seeing myself different ways," she says nonchalantly as she wafts into the
studio.

     A few Polaroids are taken to get a sense of the composition and
lighting. Oribe, the hairdresser, runs his comb through Crawford's mane of
brown hair one last time. And then comes the magic moment. Francesco
Scavullo, perched on a small stool beneath the brilliant white
umbrella-hooled studio lights, starts shooting away.

     Crawford subtly changes her expression and body language with each
click of Scavullo's camera, radiating at least twelve different auras of
sexiness on each of the thirty rolls of film used. "It's a competition,"
Byrnes says gleefully as he watches Crawford work. "They all want to outdo
each other. If Claudia's on the cover, Linda wants to outdo Claudia. And
Cindy wants to outdo everybody."

     Byrnes thinks Scavullo has clinched the cover photo by his fifth roll,
but Scavullo doesn't show any emotion until several rolls later. "Very
beautiful," he says as Cindy strikes a pose that would strip the finish off
a Mercedes. His praise starts to come at every pop of the strobe, sounding
like an incantation. "I like that [pop]; beautiful like that [pop]; your
body is beautiful like that [pop]; hold that [pop]; great like that [pop]."

     Scavullo's flattery has an electrifying effect on Crawfold. "As great
as everybody else said it looks, I especially felt it when Scavullo got
excited, saying something once every click," Crawoford explains when the
session, which took less than a half-hour, ends. "He's been shooting COSMO
covers for so long."

     For their work, the models, some of whom--like Crawford and Paulina
Porizkova--have multimillion-dollar contracts with cosmetics companies,
receive a trifling five hundred dollars. But the rewards aren't about
money. "It's the ultimate glamour cover," Porizkova explains. "When people
on the street ask you to autograph something, it's usually the latest COSMO
cover."

     "I get calls about doing films," Crawford notes. But the supermodel's
main motive for doing another COSMO cover has less to do with furthering
her career than filing her scrapbook. "It's fun to have a really sexy COSMO
cover," she says. "You do it for yourself."

         COPYRIGHT The Hearst Corp. 1991