The Supermodel Snowpocalypse Was Insane
How a fashion shoot turned into a drug-fueled survival saga in the Andes
Back in the early 2000s when I was the in-house photographer for Polo Ralph Lauren, I occasionally worked with a woman named Pat Christman, the Vice President of Photo Services in the advertising department. Despite both of us working with photography, we worked on very different things. I mostly shot stuff the general public never saw – documenting early design concepts, shooting fashion look books, taking architectural photos of the flagship stores, etc – and Pat worked behind the scenes on the photo shoots for national ads, which were mostly shot at the time by Bruce Weber.
One year, Pat invited my team over to her house for an informal gathering, just a chance for everyone to socialize outside the office. I don’t remember exactly where Pat lived but I want to say it was Pelham, an affluent suburb north of Manhattan. A lot of the details have become fuzzy with time, but one thing I do remember was that Pat had mementos around her home from her days as a model.
I had no idea that Pat had ever been a model. I think she was probably in her mid-50s when I knew her, and I just thought of her as a nice lady who worked in advertising. I had never considered what she might have been like as a young woman, but it turned out that for a while, she was kind of a big deal. Like, really big. Giant.
Pat had been the model for a B.F. Goodrich tire campaign in 1967 where she played a giantess flirting with the driver of a car riding on Goodrich Radial 990 tires. She was seen nationally in print and in TV commercials.
And she was popular enough to be parodied in MAD Magazine.
I found a clip from a British documentary which explains that the 1960s giantess fad, including this ad campaign and movies like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, were a cultural reflection of women’s expanded roles in society after World War II. But the fad didn’t end with the 1960s. In fact, someone has put together a whole YouTube playlist with decades of ads features giantesses. And according to Vice, “giantess” was the most-searched fetish of 2023. Huh.
I left Ralph Lauren in 2007 and haven’t seen Pat since. But in 2019, I was on the documentary committee for a movie award and I received a screener for a biography of Ralph Lauren called Very Ralph. It was a fun stroll down memory lane. It made me think back to my old colleagues and I wondered what everyone was up to these days. So I did what people do. I Googled.
Some people had moved on from Polo. Others had been promoted. But when I searched for Pat Christman, something totally unexpected came up. It was the most insane thing I could have imagined finding: a 2016 article from Elle magazine by Mickey Rapkin, with the headline This Drug-Fueled, Multimillion-Dollar Supermodel Snowpocalypse Has Been Fashion's Best-Kept Secret Since ’77.
The article tells the bizarre story of a 1977 Neiman Marcus fur catalog shoot that spiraled into a drug-fueled survival saga in the Andes, featuring Pat Christman, her younger sister Julie, Jerry Hall, photographer Les Goldberg, and various other people like stylists and executives.
The team traveled to Chile with $2 million worth of designer furs, but as soon as they got to their hotel, a huge snowstorm hit. At first, they tried to work around it. They went location scouting and almost drove off a cliff in the blinding snow before they found an abandoned train tunnel they were able to shoot in for a bit, shielded from the blizzard.
Back at the hotel, they all weathered the storm with some help from cocaine (insert snow joke here) and put on a fashion show for the other snowed-in guests. As the snow piled higher, the shoot got delayed for days, and with nothing else to do, the hotel turned into a party “like Studio 54” with supermodels, drugs, high fashion, and sex.
After a week, the snow was piled higher than the hotel’s first floor and the only way out was through a second-story window. The team managed to get out that way and succeeded in taking some more photos, but they still needed to figure out a way home. Roads were eventually beginning to be cleared, and Neiman Marcus executive David Wolfe befriended a doctor at a military base who helped them secure a helicopter lift. They planned for a bus to pick them up from the hotel and take them to the base, and they would be airlifted from there to an airport. But it was going to have to be done in secret.
"It was almost like evacuating Vietnam or something," adds Wolfe. “People were saying, ‘Please, can I go? Can I go?’”
Once they reached safety, there was still one problem to solve before their flight home.
Of course not. And when their flight reached 30,000 feet, “little by little, everyone started going to the bathroom and passing the cocaine off to someone else,” Pat explains. “Whoever had it at the end of the flight was supposed to throw it in the toilet. We couldn't bring it through customs.”
Eventually, everyone made it back home safely. Pat went on to marry the photographer on the shoot, Les Goldberg. Their son Chris is a film producer trying to get this story turned into a movie or series. The rights to the article were optioned by Paramount with Paul Feig attached, but according to an update Chris posted three years ago, the project has since moved over to Robert Zemeckis’s company ImageMovers as a potential series.
I’d love to see it adapted for big or little screens, but I can’t help wonder what the tone of such a film or series would be. It could be handled in a number of ways. How do you make beautiful rich people into relatable characters? Is it a comedy? Or maybe a dramedy where the characters are just awful, tonally similar to Succession. Or maybe the main character is someone’s assistant and this is just the worst work trip ever. Or the story unfolds in flashbacks like Bad Sisters. Or perhaps the article gets embellished and there’s a murder at the hotel. Ooh, maybe it could be adapted as a future season of White Lotus. I’d totally watch that.
And if it ends up somewhere with commercials, I hope they’re all for B.F. Goodrich.
If this crazy story interested you, read the original article, which has lots more detail and pictures. The guy who wrote the article also wrote the book Pitch Perfect which became the movie Pitch Perfect which until now you didn’t even know was based on a book.
And that’s it for another newsletter! This is the first one I’m sending from Ghost so I sure hope everyone got it. If you didn’t get it and you aren’t reading this, let me know.
See you next time!
David