Haughty, Naughty: a ‘Model’ Word

Let’s free associate.

The word “President” shows up in a news headline. You expect treaties, speeches, campaigns.

“Nobel Prize winner”: research, breakthrough, genius.

Now, “model.” Glamorous, sexy. Or self-destructive, anorexic. And maybe victim, as in “Model’s Face Slashed in Razor Blade Attack,” “Playboy Model Shotgunned by Ex-Husband.”

Linda Sobek was a cheerleader, a former Raiderette. Blond and a blonde, adjective and noun. A born-again Christian--so much the better, spiritual leavening to the glossy 8-by-10 spice. And a model, a calendar model. In the alchemy of news, Linda Sobek’s is the story that turns Linotype lead into gold.

Making a career on her looks qualified Linda Sobek as the epitome of womanly success, which can be different from a successful woman. Models are exquisitely silent, and pliant in their silence; they can be anything a viewer wishes them to be. It is why Leno can joke about two models getting trapped underwater and surviving by sucking the air out of each other’s heads, for we never know what is in those heads. Not for a minute would anyone wonder what--or even if anything--was going on in astronaut Sally Ride’s head, or writer Sandra Cisneros’.

“Model” has become the American rank of “princess,” the exalted designation of one who makes news without actually being newsworthy. Of late, the health of Anna Nicole Smith, a young woman of freakish mammary glands, was the subject of worried news accounts. Super models get far more coverage than super colliders.

The word “model” has always had flex to it, from the haughty to the naughty. Hazel Morse, Dorothy Parker’s sad-case short story heroine, was a model, and “a large, fair woman of the type that incites some men when they use the word ‘blonde’ to click their tongues and wag their heads roguishly.”

But the word has lately become positively elastic. Find it in tiny ads for “figure models” and “lingerie models” or even “lingerie modeling theaters,” code words for “naked.” An Oxnard “modeling agency” was a front for prostitution. The legit modeling agencies don’t want that kind of business in business, any more than the AMA wants Dr. Frankenstein hanging out his shingle.

Women are kidnaped and raped and murdered here with tidal regularity without their photos dominating the airwaves for even two minutes, much less two weeks. But there is that word, model. “Teacher slain” doesn’t free-associate so alluringly in L.A.

That brings us to Southern California, to the grail of the big break, to the deathless answer of the abused street mime, the kid-beset super hero, the pratfalling studio-tour comedienne: What, and give up show business?

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The Models Guild of California’s Better Business Bureau plaque hangs on an acoustic tile wall so thin you can practically feel the vibes from the psychic reader next door. The staff ran over there to recruit models when the casting call came seeking Russian types.

The rest of the walls of the Hollywood modeling and talent agency are taped over with pictures of made-its and wanna-bes. Some are the flawless human beings that make a visitor sit up straighter in a leather-backed director’s chair, and self-consciously and surreptitiously pull a wayward strand of hair back into place.

And some look gratifyingly like the rest of us. In the requests for casting types--the “breakdowns” that come over the fax machine, from casting reps for McDonald’s or Coke or Sony or the Virginia state lottery--they want models and actors in wheelchairs, with bald spots, hairy shoulders, gray hair, a smoker’s wrinkles, Latino, black, Asian, and once, “NO blondes.” And once, “a Christian.”

Pamela J. Roberts splays out photos like fanning cards, and there are overweight women and plain women, aging men with receding hairlines and advancing bellies . . . the better part, in fact, of the 350 people in her files.

These requests for unbeautiful people represent the most profound change in Roberts’ career as a model and agency owner, and she’s owned this agency for nine years.

Sure, clients want Sandra Bullocks and Brad Pitts and a “large eyelid area.” But when the Texas family moved here for work for their model-son and model-father, it was the mom-looking mother, a therapist, whom Roberts booked first.

She’s been too busy to hear much about this poor Linda Sobek; what kind of work did she do? “Oh, bikini shots,” she said. “I don’t like the hot-rod thing” or the calendar thing or the swimsuit thing.

Roberts made the dean’s list in psychology, and she has a little speech for the willing girls who come in here, sometimes new and naive. Don’t go to a photo shoot alone. You don’t have to socialize; if they want to talk to you, they call your agent. Any creep with a phone can call himself a producer--you don’t have to be seen in a bathing suit to read a script.

They wish they all could be California girls. Surely those very young hookers Roberts sees on Hollywood Boulevard had bigger plans. So, too, have many young women who have fallen for a guy with a camera and a line, “you look like a model,” and ended up raped or dead.