Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances by Scott Brown

Author:Scott Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Legislators - United States, Brown, Legislators, Political, General, United States, Personal Memoirs, Scott, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780062015549
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-02-20T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Jumping Out of Planes

Modeling in the early 1980s was all about the “go-see.” Go-sees were interviews where hopeful candidates crowded into waiting rooms, trying to look completely nonchalant, while clutching their glossy-photo portfolios and waiting to be called. Inside, casting directors looked through the images and said things like “Take off your shirt” or “Put this on.” It was the heyday of Interview and GQ magazines, where men strutted around with their jackets slung over their shoulders and the powerhouse agencies like Wilhelmina, Elite, and Ford ran the business, deciding who was the next big thing and the next new face. I started with the Sue Charney agency, and within a few months, I had signed with Wilhelmina. The modeling business back then was a funnel system; all the young, good-looking hopefuls were dropped into the same vast container and only a few were pushed through the narrow stem to come out on the other side. I usually ended up at go-sees with the same group of men. Most of us were regular guys, usually athletes, in shape, with decent looks. Sometimes the wheel rotated in our favor; sometimes it didn’t.

Right around the start of 1983, I went on a go-see for Jordache jeans. Jordache had vaulted to superstardom in the designer jeans market in 1979 by producing a commercial with an apparently topless woman galloping on a horse amid breaking waves. It was too hot for network television, but in the era of Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, that only made it more attractive to potential customers. By the early 1980s, the three names stitched across most fashionable rear ends were Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jordache. Now Jordache was looking for a new face for its ads, on TV and in print. The contract was for $20,000 and I made the cut. Within weeks, I had a billboard looming in Times Square, in full view of the discount Broadway tickets booth, the glinting neon lights, and the parting sea of taxicabs. And I had filmed a commercial. I was rich, or as rich as I had ever been. I left the cockroaches of lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village behind and started living in a hotel suite at Fifty-eighth and Park with a bunch of actors and models. Each day, unseen maids came in and tidied up our beds and picked up our towels off the floor.

I took acting lessons—because all models really wanted to get out of modeling and into Broadway or film roles—went to my law classes, and ran around so that I could be seen at the same clubs as Christie Brinkley and Linda Evangelista. The 1990 ad campaign for Canon cameras, “Image is everything,” was about eight years too late for the New York modeling scene. When I was sent on a go-see for a golf company, I B.S.-ed my way into convincing them that I could actually play golf and spent a weekend in Bermuda, wearing golf clothes and shanking the ball out of the sand traps.

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