Agent Provocateur

He used to campaign on behalf of the Yanomami Indians, until he found he could make more money looking after Caprice, Stacey and Gabrielle.

The Observer, January 2002

At 4pm on a Wednesday in a modern office in Wandsworth, south London, there is nothing left to do but call Caprice, the blonde model. ‘Hi it’s me!’ says her PR manager Ghislain Pascal. ‘How are you? You sound out of breath. Um, a couple of things… You know the phone thing I was talking about? There’s a meeting next week with the company. They’ve been looking at pictures of you – the famous Maxim cover, obviously, with the tape across the boobs, and the other one that’s at the top of my stairs, the one used in the Ilford calendar…’ (Caprice is about to have her breasts featured on the fascia of a cellphone.)
‘And FHM is out – it looks amazing, some of your best pictures. Not the cover so much, but the inside pictures are nice. The cover’s not as nice – they’ve put in a fake background, put in a fake beach and all that kind of stuff. The inside pictures are full length, head to knee, a blue-and-white bikini with your hair hanging over your boobs. It looks great, but they’ve put in a fake beach!’ (The top-selling men’s ‘style’ magazine FHM has Caprice and five of her friends on the front of its November issue, accompanied by the cover-line: ‘Six ladies, one island, and five square inches of cloth’. Except there was no island.)
‘And I spoke to Maxim today, so we’re just sorting out what’s happening for the January 2002 cover – they’re going to come back to me. And that’s about the size of it. No, I’m chasing the show, but nothing’s happened. There are only so many phone calls I’m going to make. There’s no point flying around the world at great expense.’ (Caprice has been lined up to present a TV show about celebrity sex symbols.)

Ghislain Pascal talks to Caprice twice a day when she’s in LA, and more when she’s in London. He also spends many hours each day talking to, or on behalf of, his other clients: Tamara Beckwith (LA party correspondent of OK! Magazine); Stacey Young (model, sometime television presenter, married to pop singer Paul); Amanda Stretton (car and bike fan, television presenter, ‘the new Murray Walker’); Jacqueline Gold (pouting head of the Ann Summers sex shop and Knickerbox chains); Shebah Ronay (broadcaster, film critic for the News of the World , granddaughter of Egon); and some bloke called Ed Sanders. ‘I look after the beautiful people,’ he told me on the way back from a film set where Caprice had been advertising pizza. ‘I increase their profile, I help them earn money, and that’s how I make my money.’

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