The Life Of A Male Model

How do you want me? The life of a male model
He played the field with a host of Vogue cover girls in the Eighties, but what happens to the world's hottest male model when the looks start to fade? Gaby Wood meets Bruce 'the Incredible' Hulse

* Gaby Wood
* The Observer, Sunday 11 January 2009

In preparation for my meeting with Bruce Hulse, the 56-year-old former male modelling star once inevitably known as 'the Incredible Hulse', I received a series of brief emails, one of which read: 'Sounds good. We hang out.'

Since he is not in fact of Eastern European extraction, I came to think he was either a terrible typist or borderline Neanderthal - the latter conclusion somewhat bolstered by his description of himself as a 'silverback'. (Turns out he was referring to his hair.) Much later, after I'd travelled a good way round the world to have lunch with him, he took me to a peaceful lakeside shrine where, standing in front of a sign that read 'Quiet please meditation in progress' he loudly told me about the 'wild daytime monkey sex' he currently enjoys with his wife. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I heard about Andie MacDowell, Paulina Porizkova, Tatjana Patitz, Elle Macpherson and all the other models he 'banged the bejesus out of', as he puts it, in the 1980s.

You might say that Hulse embodies the idea that 'sex sells': he has devoted his life to a practical exploration of that notion, both as salesman and consumer. A favourite of photographer Bruce Weber and über-designer Calvin Klein, Hulse was the chiselled, muscular, heavily oiled and mainly nude protagonist of high-end fashion ads for years. Among the first to fall for the image he was hired to promote was Hulse himself.

'In a world where sex sells,' he explains, 'you have this alternative universe of these supersexy beings that have been hand-picked and thrown together on these shoots all over the place. It's a very bizarre world, and a very sexy world - we were young, we were crazy and we were all having sex. What else would you be doing? You're frickin' Zoolander and there are eight girls walking around in their lingerie!'

We are sitting in a Japanese restaurant near his home in Pacific Palisades, California. Dressed in jeans and a ribbed black jumper, he is silver-haired and sparkly eyed, and looks like someone's rather handsome dad, which he is. He and his wife of 15 years (Katrina, also a model) have two kids: 12-year-old Cade and five-year-old Halsey. Hulse wears a Canon Powershot around his neck, with which he intermittently takes photos like a tourist, even though he and his family come to this restaurant all the time. He takes one of the laughing gold Buddha at the door. Later, he will take one of me looking distinctly unmodel-like next to some swans. This is his new métier - getting behind the camera as his model bookings dwindle to around two a month. He also manages a former model-turned-fighter, coaches his son's baseball and soccer teams, and is contemplating a new career in PR. But first, he has written a book (with the help of a ghost writer or two). Not the book he meant to write - How to Succeed as a Male Model - nobody wanted that. Instead, he wrote a memoir, creatively titled Sex, Love and Fashion: A Memoir of a Male Model, in which he traipses from one 'explosive physical connection' to the next, in a pre-Aids (or so they thought) game of sexual musical chairs. 'It's a business now,' he explains. 'Back then it was one big party.'

Evidently, the modelling world was small. 'It wasn't six degrees of separation but two,' Hulse says. 'I mean, when the book came out I had old male model buddies call me up and go: 'Dude. A lot of overlap here. A lot of overlap.' But the good thing is, it was sort of like a tight-knit family. Dysfunctional, promiscuous, incestuous, but tight knit - and very forgiving.'

It all started when the boy from a Philadelphia suburb - a surfer, lifeguard, basketball player and college dropout who had dreams of becoming a psychologist - met a cosmopolitan French teenager at a three-day meditation conference. She became his girlfriend, and knowing something of the fashion world (her father owned a shop on Madison Avenue) she encouraged him to earn a little extra money by modelling. Before he knew it, Hulse was in Paris, staying the night at an agent's apartment and being woken by the sounds of the other two male house guests having sex.

As Hulse himself asks rhetorically, 'Who would want to be a male model, unless you were gay?' After all, most of the men around him were gay; all of the men who recognise him in the street are gay; many of his poses were lusciously, not to say flamboyantly homoerotic; when I ask him what it feels like to be a gay icon he replies that he is flattered. But to those who see the memoir as an elaborate cover-up for someone wanting to shut the door a little more firmly on his closet, Hulse insists that he is not gay, and never considered he might be. 'Know how you know whether you're gay or not?' he asks. 'When you masturbate, what are you thinking about? If a supposedly straight guy is alone, masturbating, thinking about penises, he's gay,' he says assertively. 'I mean it's obvious...'

It is a bit, I say.

'But that's the psychiatric definition.'

Before long, Hulse was discovered by Bruce Weber, who wanted him to meet a 'buddy' of his: 'Calvin - Calvin Klein,' he said, as if the designer were 007. (Hulse was hired, but a body double was substituted for the crotch shots - clearly, he still can't help feeling slightly miffed.) And not long after that, success was already going to his head. 'I felt like a mythic hero channelling the spirits of the ancient Greek gods,' he writes. 'I had never felt more beautiful or more loved... I mean, I was Hulse, I was Bruce Hulse, one of the top 10 models created by Bruce Weber...' It seemed like a matter of weeks before he was getting so sloshed on Greek islands that his eyes couldn't focus on the lens. In an attempt to romance Andie MacDowell, he dimmed the lights by throwing his T-shirt over a lamp, thus setting fire to it.

When he met Patti Hansen, then the new Mrs Keith Richards, one of the first things she said to him was: 'Nice ass!' His reply? 'Thanks. That's because I screw a lot.' And he did. Not only was there his French girlfriend back in New York, there were encounters on every photo shoot and at every stop along the way; as he says, 'the girls always seemed to need suntan lotion rubbed in somewhere'. There were Swedes and Americans and Asians. There was Sophie, whose garter belt made him hop on a flight to Paris only to be ignored. There was Paulina, who asked him to visit her in her hotel room on his girlfriend's birthday; he was in charge of picking up the cake, but swung by the hotel on his way to the party. Paulina was wearing next to nothing, and the cake got squashed in the passion that ensued. Then there was Tatjana, who ruthlessly made him down shots of Jose Cuervo before seducing him. There was Cindy Crawford, who wasn't complicated enough, and Helena Christensen, in whom he wasn't interested either. There was Elle Macpherson, who he met when he was so depressed and libido-less they were both surprised when they finally managed to have sex. And on and on: by the time Katrina met him, he was such a player that a friend of hers warned her off him by making the sign of the cross. But he says he has been faithful to her for over a decade and a half. 'You know,' he says unconvincingly, 'I'm a sensitive soul. I wasn't designed mentally to be the guy out there sleeping with a lot of girls.'

I ask if he ever counted how many women he'd slept with.

'Oh, Jesus,' he says with relish, 'I did. I wouldn't reveal that number.'

Did he ever wonder what it would be like to sleep with a normal woman?

'What do you mean?' he asks, 'I slept with normal women - I slept with stylists and make-up artists and... but you can't write about everything!'

Right, I say, so how many was it?

'Like I say,' he smiles, 'I'm not talking numbers. But it was quite a few.'

Who was the best? I ask.

Clearly, this line of questioning is not fitting in with Hulse's 'karmic' desire to appear sensitive. 'That's a typical male question,' he says. 'Guys ask each other that question all the time when we get together - of all these gals, who was the best? If you could have one night outside of your marriage, no strings attached, who would you relive that night with? That's a question men ask all the time. And that men only reveal to each other. If you were a guy I would tell you. I'm sorry.'

You're so sexist, I say. How about the number? Tell me the total number instead.

'It's not about numbers,' he says, in a gloating tone that suggests it is.

Hulse likes to think of himself as above many of the shenanigans that went on in the Eighties. For example, he went off cocaine use early, after a bad day in Palm Beach, waiting for the sun to set so they could catch the light for an unspecified fragrance commercial. While others were having group sex in the co-ed bathrooms at Studio 54, Hulse was 'more of a one-on-one sort of person'. Though friends of his would return from Miami saying they'd been 'fuckin' Madonna', he never did. And though it may seem like he was 'an asshole' at times, unlike many in his orbit he never, ever, gave girls drugs in order to get them into bed.

Still, he wouldn't want you to think he's boring. 'I'm very adventurous as far as sexual positions are concerned,' he volunteers. 'I mean, these girls, they'd been with some pretty knowledgeable guys. They brought a lot to the table.'

He is also proud that he has no embarrassment threshold whatsoever. 'It's little bit like the porn industry,' he says, stating the by-now patently obvious, 'I don't embarrass easily.' For instance, he recalls, 'when I'd go on Victoria's Secret shoots the girls would always try to make me hard. I'd be in these little silk panties. I'd be the guy in the shot and they'd always be rubbing up against me. But I never found it embarrassing. I'd be like: Stop the shoot! Got a woodie!' Unconsciously, he illustrates this by putting hand way up somewhere near his chest.

Another of his favourite tricks was this: 'I learned this from the male model Rick Edwards,' he offers by way of preface, as if the technique he is about to describe were so fine it should not go uncredited. 'I'd be there with Steven Meisel or whoever, all the money and the ad people are there, some beautiful girl's posing and I'd rip out the loudest fart you ever heard. The whole room would stop! And you're just sittin' there like nothin's happened!'

Hulse beams at the recollection.

Good times, I think. Good times.

Many women live by their looks - consciously or not, and often unwillingly. It's fairly safe to say though that far fewer men live by them, and only a tiny number do so exclusively. When I ask Hulse where he thinks he'd be had he not looked the way he does, he says: 'I'd be a very wealthy man now. Very few male models retire as millionaires.' He regrets that he was a 'lazy-ass slacker surfer, going: "whoo-hoo! I'm good-looking, I don't have to do anything except show up and collect the money".' Now that he's in his 50s, with two young children, he's having to think about what to do next, 'because I don't care how good-looking you are, it's gone. The castle's made of sand.'

Yet unlike a woman in his position, he doesn't seem overly concerned about losing his looks. When I mischievously ask him for his beauty tips, he cites exercise, good food, then struggles to think of anything else other than maybe the occasional shower. 'I've never used deodorant,' he says, offering a tiny bit more information than I needed to hear. Meanwhile, women feel the need to groom themselves to death. There's something galling about the fact that Hulse's beautiful wife, who I meet in passing later on, is forced, by contrast, to fret over her barely wrinkled face and so-called 'turkey neck'. One can't do much about the internal inequality of the sexes, but it's interesting to see that even a man who has made a career out of his beauty - who should by rights have become a male Norma Desmond - still feels perfectly confident when that beauty begins to fade.

The thing that makes Hulse's book both slightly sad and marginally more appealing than it would be otherwise is that Hulse understands the nature of the illusion he was once so invested in. 'As heady as it was, you're always embarrassed to say you're a male model,' he tells me. 'I'm embarrassed by that identity to this day. It implies that you're a dumbass. You know, I've got all these super-successful friends - they're lawyers, they're corporate execs...' Of course, he adds, they're all fascinated by his career. 'First thing they want to know: Did you meet Elle Macpherson?'

Hulse takes me on a tour of his neighbourhood - geographically dramatic (between the mountains and the ocean), socially glamorous yet constitutionally laid-back, it is home, he says, to many former models. We walk through the garden where he meditates, visit the PR firm he's thinking of joining, and stop by the modest home with stunning views where his wife and daughter are hanging out in the kitchen.

When I ask him if it's true (though of course I am making this up) that Ben Stiller's male model character Zoolander is based on him, he says boyishly: 'I wish! I love that movie!' I suggest that it must be hard to negotiate one's fame as a model because, in contrast to actors, who are famous for doing something, models are all image, yet Hulse replies that the opposite is true. Often actors look uncomfortable in their skin, whereas 'models, we're Zoolanders: we understand we're nobody'.

Hulse says he's praying that Stiller makes Zoolander II: he's got the whole script in his head.

What happens? I ask.

'Oh, you know, it would be the son of Zoolander. He's older and he has a kid and his son wants to be a male model. And he says, OK, son - sort of like Rocky when he makes the comeback? - I'll show you the ropes.'

Hulse's own son, however, has no desire to be shown those ropes. 'My son says: Dad, you're so dumb! How can you be a male model? Look at you - you're an old man!' If there's a tinge of sadness there, Hulse wipes it away immediately: 'He busts my buns, which is what a guy would do. I find it hilarious.' Then he adds, for emphasis: 'I love it. If he was looking up to me, I would be so distraught.'

• Sex, Love, And Fashion: A Memoir of a Male Model is published by Crown, £16; his blog is brucehulse.com