Shut up and starve

>> Montreal models go hungry as the fashion industry continues to obsess over skin and bones

By IAN HALPERIN

It is 9 p.m. on a Friday night. I drive slowly along Ocean Drive, south to north. To my right is the Atlantic Ocean. The Art Deco hotels in Miami's glittering South Beach are lit like cruise ships. Party animals jam pack the strip of sidewalk in front of them. Crowded around tables the size of Frisbees, people pose in a pageant of pretension. Everyone watches to see if everyone is watching.

At the News Cafe, Sophie Nolet--all six feet and 102 pounds of her--sits alone at a table smoking a cigarette. Dressed in faded black jeans and a loose black sweater, there is a trace of Bardot in her full lips and bed-ruffled bleached hair. But the resemblance goes no further. Although a year ago when I first interviewed her she denied any problem, Sophie had clearly shed more pounds than would be deemed healthy. The Montreal-born model's obsession with thinness is alarming.

Sophie agreed to be interviewed because she wants to set the record straight. She thinks young models should be aware of her story so that they can avoid going through the hellish experience that almost claimed her life.

Sophie developed anorexia shortly after she signed up with a South Beach agency in 1997. Then 14, she started out as a model amid high optimism. She was the toast of South Beach after doing photo shoots for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Sumptuously endowed, it was common to see Sophie on the catwalk wearing slit dresses and tops that slashed dangerously across the chest.

But that changed quickly. Emotionally she became a wreck because her agent kept pressuring her to lose more weight as the modelling industry was at the height of its "heroin chic" era. Sophie used hard drugs as a substitute for food. She did heroin daily, often only minutes before getting up on the catwalk. She would shoot up under her toenails to hide traces of track marks. Her makeup artist, Francine Gavin, spent hours using foundation to cover up the glitches on Sophie's body. Using pounds of makeup, Francine gave her a soft look and made her eyes seem even bigger. When she first began to lose weight, Sophie was praised by her handlers for her efforts, as is so often the case in this waif-obsessed era.

Forced famine

In the first six months of her illness, Sophie was suicidal and frightened. She had dark pools under her eyes, and she had gone from 118 to 90 pounds in less than a month. She dressed in layers and felt terrible guilt about anything connected with food.

In May 1999, something remarkable occurred. During a photo shoot in New York, Sophie went to her dressing room. Jeremy Stoker, the photographer standing outside her dressing room, heard a bang. When he opened the door he found Sophie on the floor writhing in agony. On the counter, Stoker found drug paraphernalia and a bag of cocaine. He called an ambulance. Sophie went from bad to worse. Her nervous condition weakened her resistance, and she caught colds and other infections repeatedly. Sophie's best friend, model Annik Vezina, flew to her bedside in New York. Vezina, whose younger sister Martine battled anorexia for years before she died in 1998, was terrified that another person close to her might lose her life. "I told her that if she didn't get professional help and check into an eating disorder clinic that she would wind up dead," Vezina recalls. "Sophie's condition had been deteriorating for quite some time. She always expressed fears about getting fat. She would tell me, 'I need to be thinner. I'm too fat.' I saw her break down and cry many times. Whenever I tried to persuade her to eat, she either refused, or would break down and cry while she struggled to force the food down to please me."

Sophie admits to feeling a curious gratitude for what she terms her nervous breakdown. Finally, she decided to get professional help. She became more confident as the days marched on. Her weight still has not stabilized and she's well aware of how easy it is to fall into a relapse. But she remains determined to make a full recovery. "I've spent eight months seeing psychiatrists and reading books about my disease," she says. "I don't blame anybody but myself. When I got involved in the modelling business I would walk down the street and see ads on billboards of skinny models like Kate Moss and Christy Turlington. I convinced myself that I needed to look like them in order to succeed. My agent kept telling me to lose more weight because it seemed that the skinnier I got the fatter my paycheque became. My agent supplied me with large quantities of drugs because he knew it would keep my weight down. He made me feel guilty if I was hungry. He often told me, 'In this business you have to famine to make sure your career feasts. If you're not thinner than the next girl, you won't get work.`"

Sophie feels that the therapy she had for anorexia wiped her mental slate clean and helped her to express the anger she felt about the state of the modelling industry. She still looks frail but the determination in her weak blue eyes is convincing. "I used to go days without even eating a slice of bread," Sophie says, shrugging coat hanger shoulders, hating the subject. "I missed the days when I grew up in Montreal pigging out at Lafleur's and partying without worrying about my weight. Even at my very worst, when I was 87 pounds, when to anyone in the street I looked horrific, there were people in the fashion industry who told me my weight loss was a good thing and that I should keep trying to lose more. I reached the stage where I thought I was going to die. I had no energy and could barely stand up. That's when I decided to get help and get therapy."

Disorder chic

According to California nutritionist Dr. Mark Hunt, today, anorexia nervosa afflicts about one of every hundred female adolescents in North America, a majority of whom may never recover fully. Between 10 and 20 per cent will eventually die from the disease. About two million people, mostly women, cut and burn themselves compulsively in pursuit of an illusory sense of control and many millions suffer from bulimia.

Yet it is by no means uncommon for teenage girls already suffering from eating disorders to be approached in the street by model agency scouts. British model Lucy Cope, 15, says that she was approached by two top model agencies. At the time, Cope was anorexic, weighed 90 pounds and was a patient at a hospital for eating disorders. Another British model, Lucy Stanley, 5'8" and 125 pounds, couldn't find an agent because she was told she was too heavy. At the time she was suffering from anorexia and bulimia. "At one agency I was told, 'with a bum that size you won't get anywhere'. Another said my hips were way too fat. I lost several pounds and I looked like a maniac. My cheeks were hollow, my eyes had sunk into my face and my skin was terrible. How can that be considered beautiful?"

Tina Gosselin, a 13 year old from Quebec City, recently started psychological treatment to help overcome the anorexia that developed after she caught a stomach bug before a fashion show at Place Bonaventure. Her weight dropped by more than 30 pounds; she was frightened that food would upset her stomach. Fear of food has now earned recognition and is known as Food Avoidance Emotional Disorder (FAED). "Tina was told by her agent to keep thin, but she never became too obsessed about her weight," says her father Alain Gosselin. "The problem was that after she caught a bug she became afraid to eat, especially before work. She's getting better now, but I would never let her model again. The stress got to her and she lost control of herself. I blame myself because I let her get involved in this business at too young an age. I wanted her to make lots of money because our family was not in good financial shape. I had lost my job and my wife is physically handicapped which made it impossible for her to get work. I quickly realized that I made the biggest mistake of my life letting Tina sign on with a model agency. Nobody that young is ready to be in a seedy business like that."

Psychology of starving

Fashion scout Vincen Lopiccola admits he has been instructed by his bosses to knowingly recruit girls with eating disorders. Lopiccola says that he has never seen an agent or magazine editor turn down models because they looked too emaciated. "I can't figure it out for the life of me," he says at his South Beach office. "Personally I prefer girls with big asses and big tits. Just look at the beauties of yesteryear--people like Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day--they all had some meat on them. The so-called beauties of today look like they're rejects from Ethiopia. And the most amazing thing is that the agents will do anything to fuck these girls who are strung out on heroin and haven't eaten a proper meal in weeks."

"There's no doubt that the trend to use spaced out and unhealthily thin models has not died down," says well-known South Beach fashion photographer William Daley. "I have a scale in my studio and every model who I photograph is weighed before a photo session. If the model is even a pound over the weight their agent pro-mised I'm forced to send them home."

Former Montreal model Marie-Jose Bilodeau experienced crippling depressions and symptoms of untrammelled energy when she first started to model in 1995. The genesis of her anorexia is a familiar story. She says her New York agent insisted that she lose 25 pounds if she wanted to get work. Bilodeau, 5'9", 126 pounds, did not look like she needed to drop any weight. Desperate to get work and be accepted in fashion circles, Marie-Jose embarked on a three-month period of self-imposed starvation and self-deprivation. When she hit the 100-pound mark that her agent requested it wasn't good enough. Every time she weighed herself she felt she had to be thinner than whatever she currently weighed. When she was 77 pounds she realized her physical condition wouldn't hold up much longer. She became desperate for a cure. A model friend of hers told her about a procedure called a leukotomy, an operation in which connective fibres are cut, severing the connection between two different areas of the brain. Some medical experts claim that a leukotomy can help treat anorexia and suicidal depression. Bilodeau scheduled her operation for April 1997. Fortunately, however, she went for a second opinion after reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly by a New York doctor who insisted that there was no clinical data that a leukotomy was a good option for anorexia victims. Another model who was anorexic was mentioned in the article. She died from complications four weeks after undergoing a leukotomy. Just last month, British former child star and singer Lena Zavaroni underwent a leukotomy and died. Zavorini, 35, weighed less than 60 pounds. She became anorexic at age 13, around the time when she rose to fame and fortune.

Bilodeau cancelled the operation and began psychotherapy. Three years later her weight is back to normal and she has started to rebuild her life. "I'm back in school studying to be a nurse," she says. "I advise any young girl to stay in school and not to do what I did. I almost died. There's so much pressure on models today to be thin. I know several who weren't as lucky as me and didn't survive. It's unfair that models are forced to look a certain way. Everybody starts to look the same. There's many beautiful girls who aren't skinny who should be on the covers of Vogue and Elle instead of the pencil-thin girls we've become accustomed to seeing." lll

Ian Halperin is the authour of Shut Up and Smile, Supermodels: The Dark Side (Ogo Books, Los Angeles).