Scarred
Not long after she made her trek from Texas to New York, Marla Hanson saw her modeling career end at the hands of a razor-wielding thug. Six years later, the cuts on her face have healed, but the emotional wounds remain.
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“For Marla, everything was black and white then,” Dara Kratzer, a roommate from those days, said recently. “She didn’t think we ought to listen to rock and roll. I had a guitar, and we would sing praise songs. We would go for long walks, and one time it got dark and scary. She said, ‘If we sing real loud, everything will be all right.’”
Hoping to earn enough money to attend the University of Texas at Austin, Marla took a job as a salesclerk at a Fredericksburg gift shop called the Peach Tree. There she met a jewelrymaker with the rakish name of Jeep Collins, a business partner and the brother of one of its owners. Jeep was a nice-looking, blue-eyed man in his early thirties, the divorced father of a little boy. Jeep and Marla’s romance was steamy, and it centered on religion. Marla took him to her church, and he took her to his. Eventually, he decided that the “right” thing for him to do was to reunite his family; so he did. Jeep reconciled with his ex-wife and later remarried her. Marla was devastated. (“He was the love of my life,” she says. “An intellectual cowboy.”)
In early 1983 Marla was waiting tables at a German restaurant in Fredericksburg when a friend from Bible college called and said she could get her a job in Dallas as a receptionist. Marla jumped at the chance to move. In her first few months in Dallas, she pursued a license to sell financial securities, changed her mind, quit her job, and enrolled in real estate school. She also worked as a cocktail waitress at a succession of fashionable places—the Fairmont Hotel, the Mansion on Turtle Creek, the Stoneleigh P., and Abio’s—earning the first decent money of her life. True, she was no good at it; she spilled drinks and continually got the names of highballs confused. And she was always frazzled from lack of sleep, late getting from her day job or her classes to the night shift. Inevitably she got fired. But wealthy customers flirted with her, and she flirted back. She always kept their business cards. As soon as she got her real estate license, she told them, she wouldn’t hesitate to call.
Once she got settled in Dallas, Marla fell in love with a medical student from Fort Worth. She was still going to church then—some Sundays to Catholic mass with her boyfriend, others to a Bible congregation in DeSoto. But she wasn’t happy. She was reproved by her religious elders for working in a bar. Her romantic relationship was troubled—on again, off again. And she was breaking into real estate just before the boom went bust. “I didn’t have the right last name,” she says. “I didn’t go to SMU, and I drove a Honda. Plus I looked like I was twelve years old.” Billy Bob Harris, a flamboyant stockbroker who would soon go to prison for insider trading, helped her get a job with a top real estate firm, but she made very few sales.
When her boyfriend moved to Cleveland, the relationship withered away, and Marla entered a heady Dallas scene that has since gone the way of $30-a-barrel oil. Glitzy clubs with private memberships cropped up everywhere. Champagne, ecstasy, and cocaine flowed freely. It was a far cry from praise songs and Wednesday night Bible study. In a bit of ominous foreshadowing, Marla got in a nasty row with a roommate over a $250 rent deposit. She wrote the roommate a hot check; a Dallas cop picked her up at work and took her to jail.
During this period, Marla thought about modeling, but Dallas agent Kim Dawson told her that she was too short, that her look was wrong for Dallas, that she would be wasting money on a portfolio. Yet she managed to land a job at JH Collectibles, a fashion firm at the Dallas Apparel Mart. She worked there as a salesclerk, but she also did some showroom modeling—hats mostly—in exchange for a discount on clothes.
In the summer of 1985 her boss offered her a transfer to New York City, and she didn’t think twice about it. She felt she had used up Dallas. It was time to move on. “I didn’t have any family support,” she told me. “They didn’t even come see me. I had no money, no education. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So you float around and try to figure it out. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs—except for ecstasy, I did try that. I think I was pretty tame compared to the people I knew. Especially the guys.”
Not long after the Fort Worth fundraiser, I met Marla at a small cafe near her Greenwich Village apartment. Dressed in a T-shirt and pants with a matching jacket, she was wearing no makeup, and her hair was put up in a spiky pile, so her scars were visible. In addition to the main scar, a second one runs atop her left eyebrow, near the freckles that surround her eyes; it looks as if it could have resulted from a fall. A third scar—fine, distinct, and chilling—angles across her left nostril.
Over lunch, Marla reminisced about her early time in New York. When she arrived in mid-1985, she said she hated the place. Her sense of isolation in such a teeming environment was oppressive, and she was unprepared for the high cost of living. Unable to get by on her $25,000 salary, she was forced to moonlight—working, again, in a bar at night. Her principal job, as a showroom salesclerk at JH Collectibles, proved disappointing; there was no room for advancement. But she didn’t want to go back to Dallas like a whipped puppy. She turned a mental corner, she says, only when an old friend far removed from her thoughts spotted her through the window of a restaurant and rushed inside. “I thought, ‘Wow, wow, I know someone here,’” she recalled.
On three occasions during her first weeks in New York, men stopped her on the street and said they would like to photograph her, handing her business cards. Disgusting old guys, she figured. At the time, she was dating a young photographer. One night he picked up one of the cards, stared at the name in disbelief, and told her she had better get on the phone. Too late that time; the job was over. But Marla was inspired. She put together a portfolio and signed up with the Petite Modeling Agency. She was never going to be a runway star of the major fashion shows; off camera, they’re all legs, like sleek basketball players. And she was three inches shorter than most “petites.” But she appeared in ads for a liquor company, a candy bar, and a line of bras, and she was featured in a J. C. Penney catalog. Later, her legs were in Mademoiselle, her eyes in Glamour.
After a few months, as a result of her modeling, Marla encountered Steve Roth, a 27-year-old makeup artist who had done some TV work. Their first conversation concerned bikini waxing, a practice in which models remove body hair with hot wax. “I met him one night in a photographer’s studio,” Marla told me. “I thought he was just this sleaz-o hanging out there. He said I should never shave my legs—he would be happy to wax them for me. Then he offered to wax my bikini line. He said, ‘How would you feel about having my face between your legs?’ I said, ‘I would find that disgusting, actually.’”
Yet only a few weeks later, Marla agreed to move into an apartment that Roth rented to young women who were trying to establish fashion careers. Marla liked the roommates, and her share of the rent was only $600. Still, she clashed with her new landlord frequently—over sexual innuendos, over who should pay for a broken shower head, over his habit of letting himself into the apartment with a passkey. It quickly became too much for Marla, who found another apartment in the same building and telephoned Roth to say that she was moving out. Immediately, Roth came over and flew into a rage that, according to one of the roommates, left Marla “looking like a scared rabbit.” But Marla held her own. She threatened to sue Roth in small-claims court for her $850 deposit and to report him to the city for illegal subletting. Finally, he relented, agreeing to meet with her in a nearby bar called Shutters.
The night of June 4, 1986, Marla had her hair highlighted. Celebrating the results and the end of the day, the colorist opened a bottle of champagne. Marla described her battle with Roth to her new friends in the salon, and they offered to go with her. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “We’re meeting in a bar. But if I wind up in a ditch somewhere, you know who did it.”
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