HAVE I SAID TOO MUCH? by Carole White . (Century £20) Does Carole White’s name sound vaguely familiar? It is probably because you saw her in The Model Agency, Channel 4’s 2011 fly-on-the-wall documentary series about Premier, which she founded in 1981. Her colleagues’ affectionate nickname for her was ‘The Witch’. Fag in hand, with a voice like a corncrake, a vocabulary that would make a navvy blush and a skin tanned to the texture of a Prada handbag, she made Ab Fab’s Patsy and Edina look like maiden aunts. And her new autobiography confirms that the real world of high fashion is more outrageous than any TV drama. Supermodel, Linda Evangelista (pictured), was one of the internationally renowned models on Premier's books in the Eighties . As a teenager in the Swinging Sixties, Carol had a brief career as a Lucie Clayton model, but gave it up because she felt self-conscious in front of the camera. At 19, she took up with an unsuitable boyfriend (she admits to a weakness for handsome bad boys) and became pregnant with her daughter Simone. Having met a more suitable chap, she married him and landed her dream job as a booker at her former model agency, Lucie Clayton. The marriage didn’t last, but the job did. Leaving her daughter in Kent with her parents (‘I didn’t get to see much of my poor little Simone at that time’), Carole flung herself into a bohemian world of models, rock stars and endless wild parties. Just before Christmas 1981, Bobtons, the King’s Road agency where she had been working, went bust, leaving ‘about 20 worry-faced models currently without representation’. Ten days later, with £10,000 loaned by her brothers, Carole signed up the Bobtons girls and Premier was born. A week after that, Eileen Ford, the tough doyennne of the New York modelling world, swept into the office to take a look at the new upstart agency, and suggested they do business. ‘It was like meeting Maggie Thatcher’, Carole recalls. ‘Her hair was honey-blonde and stiff and she was very straight-talking . . . We were officially on our way.’ The Eighties saw the rise of the supermodel, and, with Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell on its books, Premier was ‘really rocking’. In 1990, after Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz appeared together on the cover of British Vogue, Premier brokered the deal for the models to appear in George Michael’s ‘Freedom’ video, in which they lip-synched the lyrics. It wasn’t all glamour, though. ‘Those top girls could be difficult’, Carole recalls. ‘They liked to test people to see if they could magic up whatever crazy request they might have that day/hour/second . . . I saw it as a challenge.’ The list of ‘challenges’ posed by her supermodels ranged from the truly bizarre, including peremptory demands for sex toys, llama curry and an urgent supply of ‘special green candles from Tibet that were something to do with a witch doctor that had special energy’, to the mundane: persuading them to get out of bed, or trying to ensure they were no more than three hours late for their auditions. The more you read, the more nightmarish the task of dealing with these highly-strung freaks of beauty sounds. But even after so many years, Carole still seems captivated by the excitement of finding the next new face. ‘When they’re really special . . . they’re like thoroughbred horses,’ she writes. ‘They sort of quiver.’ She claims not to believe in regret: ‘But I’d say turning down Kate Moss was probably the closest I came to one.’ The future supermodel came to the Premier offices ‘and I stupidly said: “No, she’s too short for me,” and off she trotted . . . I know, shoot me now!’ She is unrepentant about the hedonistic excesses of the Nineties when, as she puts it, ‘the industry was full of nutters’, remarking cheerily that ‘it’s a very good job camera-phones weren’t around’. And her views on the size zero debate are trenchant: . ‘Why does modelling have such a bad rep? I think . . . it’s probably because there are so many overweight people in this country. It’s like we want to mollycoddle anyone who isn’t thin.’ Have I Said Too Much? isn’t an easy read — and not just because of Carole’s abrasive views and attention-deficit prose style, which reads as though she had dictated her book in 30-second bursts between phone calls. Still, in a world of elaborate artifice, there is something rather refreshing about someone who simply doesn’t care that her nickname is ‘The Witch’. You might not like her by the end of this book, but you can’t help admiring her — just a bit.
Carol White is the co-founder of Premier Model Management . She started the company in 1981 with a £10,000 loan from her brothers . In the Eighties Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell were on her books .