The stunning model who vanished without a trace in Manhattan last month may have been turning tricks as a hooker in the city’s posh hotel bars, a new report says.
Gorgeous Lourdes Gruart – who was last seen alive Oct. 13 – was desperate for money after most of her modeling jobs had dried up, New York magazine reports this week. So the 46-year-old redhead took to combing the city’s posher watering holes frequented by millionaires.
She became “aggressive in courting attention at hotel bars like the St. Regis, to the point where she nearly humiliated herself,” one source tells the mag. And when cops searched her Upper East Side apartment after she vanished, they found all of her attention-getting lingerie and makeup missing.
It “supports the notion that she may have led a double life, with an apartment somewhere else,” the magazine says.
Her brother, Mario, adds to the theory, telling the mag his sister may be secretly living as a kept woman.
“Manhattan is an opportunist world, people coming from all over the place, looking for entertainment, for a companion, for all things that are pleasing,” he says.
“Maybe she met one of them. In my mind, I’m thinking she’s gone off with one of her rich boyfriends.”
Lourdes graced the catwalks of Milan, Paris and Tokyo in the early ’80s for such fashion houses as Armani, Valentino and Missoni.
She was reported missing 10 days after she was last seen at her Manhattan headhunting job.
Cops at first suspected her brother of being involved, but have since cleared him.
The Cuban-born beauty, who quit full-time modeling three years ago, has dated a string of filthy-rich men. They included the son of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and Robert Marx, son of Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers and stepson of Frank Sinatra.
Cops have searched the former fashion model’s neighborhood, as well as the East River, with no result. And while some detectives believe Lourdes is probably dead, there is no physical evidence to prove it.