Who’d be a model agent? Part den mother, part ball-breaking deal clincher, you toil in the trenches working with beauty, illusion and perception, a trinity so transitory that they make fashion look like a solid proposition, and then a handful of grainy phone snaps showing a skinny girl apparently snorting lines of cocaine appear, threatening two decades of collaborations with Corinne Day, Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber, Lucian Freud, Chuck Close and Takashi Murakami.
Twelve days ago Sarah Doukas, MD of Storm and probably the most famous model agent in the world, opened The Daily Mirror and came face to face with every agent’s worst nightmare. Her most famous client — the model with more iconic images to her name than any other, a seemingly indestructible career that had been carefully cultivated over 18 years and was still generating around £4 million a year, and a myth that seemed to define a generation — had apparently gone into freefall.
Extraordinarily, Doukas had no inkling that the pictures existed, let alone that they were about to hit the papers. “I was horrified, mortified,” she says, still looking shell-shocked and badly in need of some sleep (she says she hasn’t averaged more than four hours a night since the story broke). “I called Kate immediately. She was gutted, absolutely devastated. I read it over the phone to her and the avalanche started almost immediately.”
Much of that avalanche thudded on to Doukas’s diminutive shoulders, some of it supportive, some abusive and so threatening that her IT man forbade her to look at her laptop before he’d had a chance to edit it. In person, it’s impossible not to like Doukas. I’ve known her professionally for 20 years and in a tough business she has always struck me as exceptionally down to earth, straightforward and kind. But there are two questions here. Why was it that she had no idea that something so potentially catastrophic was about to break in a national newspaper about her star client; and how could she or Moss have been remotely surprised by this story, given that rumours had been circulating about Moss’s drug consumption for years?
“Rumours?” repeats a red-eyed Doukas (she looks like a woman who’s been on the rack). “Look, Kate has always been an unbelievably private person. I’ve never seen the side of her that they’ve written about. She’s always gone to work every day. You couldn’t sustain an excruciating schedule if there was a serious problem. And her schedule has been really tough. The past three or four years there’s been almost more business than I could deal with on my own which is why I hired two more people to help. Of course, I read the papers, but I didn’t believe most of it and I didn’t feel it was my business to probe. I certainly wasn’t going to say: ‘So, is it true about the three in a bed stories?’ It’s not my place to discuss those things.
“We’ve spoken to one another every day for 18 years, but there are some things I know I can never discuss with her. We’re close (so close that Doukas gave this interview at the behest of Moss, who is abroad, ‘safely’ away from England), but when you’re an agent there’s a line.”
So what — on behalf of the millions of parents with aspiring models for daughters — is an agent’s role? “Would I turn a blind eye with a younger model? Absolutely not. Would I take steps to deal with it? You bet — as far as I can. I’ve got three daughters of my own, aged 8, 13 and 25, and like any parent I’d be worried to death if they said they wanted to be models. And if I ever heard that there were sleazy men handing out free drugs I’d bloody kill them. There are endless pep talks in this business, and I’m probably more active (in that department) than most, whether it’s to do with eating disorders, drugs or not being able to cope.
“The most vulnerable time is the bloody shows. That’s why I hardly ever send any girls to Milan (where the shows are taking place this week). I’m terrified of the place. I’ve got two young ones out there now, aged 16 and 17. Some agents would just let the models’ Italian representatives deal with them, but I make sure they go with chaperones. As Kate did initially, but she’s a 31-year-old woman for heaven’s sake. She has always handled herself very well.”
Apart from losing it with the press last week in New York when she repeatedly told them to f*** off? “She was trapped in a hotel room with every one calling her to feed her the latest revelation. It’s not surprising that for once she snapped.”
As for not scenting wind of the Mirror scoop — Doukas says that in the past she has always known when a story about one of her models is about to break, but this one was executed with the utmost secrecy. It’s clear that Doukas adores Moss and that, having discovered her at JFK airport all those years ago, when Moss was 14, she feels like her proxy mother. “This past weekend particularly, ” Doukas rolls her eyes ruefully. “I think my three girls would say Kate’s like my fourth daughter.” Not that Doukas ever discusses Kate’s antics with Linda, Kate’s real mother. “That would be a breach of trust. Kate wouldn’t be happy”.
Both women appear to have serious concerns about Moss’s relationship with Pete Doherty, although Doukas says she broached the subject with Moss infrequently. “When somebody’s in love with someone like that, they’re not going to listen to anything anyone else says.”
But hang on Sarah, I say, apart from any moral issues, this was a question of image, which was spiralling rapidly downhill, and that is your area. “Things did accelerate with Pete,” acknowledges Doukas, “but in terms of their relationship it was still early days.” She looks palpably relieved that they’re not together currently. “He’s here and Kate’s not in the country. But for the future — I can’t say.”
Evidently, whenever people become commodities, the role of their brokers is not an easy one. It’s possible that Doukas’s affection and admiration for Moss, combined with a distrust of the red-top newspapers, lulled her into a sense of security that she regrets. When I ask if she wishes she’d played things differently, she doesn’t reply that she would have taken a firmer line with Moss. What she rues is not responding to the press furore earlier. “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. I let the story go on for too long without answering it. No one realised how much this would snowball.”
