Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Bill Blass remembers those days well. “Each house had five or six girls,” he says. “The models would go to the Colony for lunch and dance all night at El Morocco. Betty Bacall was a house model at David Crystal. She replaced Dusty Anderson and Lucille Ball, who were both house models, too. It was her first job before the war. She worked for us by day and as a theater usher by night. The other girls? It gave them pretty clothes until they hooked up with a man.” Blass’s favorites also included mannish Toni Hollingsworth (“the first model who’d parade around without clothes; she never wore a bra and she had great bosoms, big ones”) and Wendy Russell (“the first mannequin who ever dragged a sable coat down a runway”). He booked them all through Stewart Cowley. “He was the best-looking guy,” Blass says. “He must’ve fucked every one of those girls.”

  Cowley scouted new talent at the Miss Rheingold contest, among other places. “There were lines around the block,” he recalls. “They were the supermodels of their day. God, I almost married three Rheingold girls. My brother did marry one.” The Cowley brothers weren’t the only model lovers mixing business and pleasure. The A&P playboy Huntington Hartford had decided to stop hanging out at Powers and Conover and opened an agency of his own in 1947.

  Today it is difficult to imagine Huntington Hartford, eighty-three, running anything at all. He spends his days in bed in a run-down town house on the edge of Manhattan’s midtown business district. Only a bronze bust of a handsome, younger Hartford, placed in a niche in the elegant curving stairway, gives a hint of what he once was.

  There is a shuttered, makeshift bedroom on the parlor floor. A television set buzzes at the foot of a bed. Hartford lies amid piles of books, newspapers, and dirty laundry on stained blue-and-white-striped sheets that are pinned to his mattress. Barely covered by a ratty orange plaid blanket, he wears once-stylish boxy eyeglasses, boxer shorts printed with red dots, and an M. C. Escher T-shirt. It, too, is covered with stains. His long white hair reaches his shoulders. His nails have grown into claws. He has trouble moving, and his eyes constantly wander behind the thick lenses. A wastepaper basket next to the bed is filled with empty candy wrappers. Inexplicably, short lengths of cut-up soda straws are scattered on his bedside table.

  “There really isn’t much to tell,” Hartford begins vaguely. “I got interested because I was interested in Hollywood, and I figured top models could become actresses. It didn’t work out because Eileen Ford had the inside track with the inside people in the fashion business and got all the best models. I hired people to run it. I don’t remember anything about it. It wasn’t important in my life.”

  George Huntington Hartford’s grandfather had left him 10 percent of the A&P supermarkets. Hartford also inherited his father’s share when his mother died in 1946. His fortune totaled about $500 million. After studying at Harvard, Hartford got married and divorced, fathered an illegitimate son, and worked as an A&P clerk and as a tabloid reporter (who went to assignments in a limousine) before he joined the Coast Guard in 1942. His first venture after the war was the Hartford agency.

  Hartford was friendly with Steve Elliot, a fashion photographer married to a top model named Georgia Hamilton. He would go to Elliot’s studio and watch him work. He liked the idea of work that involved pretty girls. “What was he trying to do?” Elliot asked. “He just wanted to be somebody, a John Powers, Harry Conover, as though that were something.” Hartford thought that by guiding young women, he might find direction in his own life. He decided to open offices in New York and Los Angeles, hoping to use his models to lever himself into the movie business. “His family felt he couldn’t take care of himself and got my father to take care of things,” says Clay Deering Dilworth, daughter of William Deering, who was installed as the Hartford agency’s director.

  His money gave Hartford a gimmick that changed modeling forever, a scheme that made his agency—briefly—the city’s strongest. He financed his models’ paychecks through what came to be called the voucher system. It is still in use. At every model booking the client—be it a magazine, photographer, studio, or ad agency—is obligated to sign a voucher attesting to the hours the model worked and the agreed-upon rate. Each Friday Hartford’s agency made good on the vouchers, subtracting only a commission, at that time 10 percent. “Unheard of!” exclaims Stewart Cowley. “We’d wait a year, two years to get paid; then the model would get paid. All of a sudden here’s Hunt. Models went there because they got paid right away.”

  It took a lot of money to get the voucher system up and running, but that wasn’t Hartford’s problem. His problem was his reputation. He was a rake, or at least a rake manqué. “He was very unsuccessful in his attempts to be the lover of the modeling business,” Jerry Ford says. That didn’t stop him from trying. Hartford denies making passes at his lasses. “I could get dates,” he says. “I had no problems finding girls.” But Polly Ferguson Knaster, a fashion editor Deering hired to run the agency with him, remembers, “When a mother said, ‘I’m sending my daughter,’ I stood at the elevator. I knew where to look if a model was late. Hunt would be talking to her. I was not Hunt’s favorite person.” She finally made a rule barring Hartford from the agency. “It took me nine months to find people willing to deal with the Hartford agency because of his reputation. He was in the news. Photographs were taken.”

  While he owned the agency, Hartford also opened an artist’s retreat, produced several films, financed Broadway plays, bought a theater, and provided fodder for a lot of gossip columns. Later, after selling half his A&P shares, he developed the Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas and opened a supper club/disco, a magazine, a parking garage, an institute to study handwriting, and a private modern art museum. He lost money on just about all of it.

  He did succeed, however, in scaring the daylights out of Eileen and Jerry Ford. Despite his reputation, the voucher system took hold. “He had the power to kill us,” says Jerry Ford. Models “wanted to come with us but couldn’t afford to. We eventually got them, but not until we were in a position to finance vouchers. He had no idea how many of our models were thinking of going to him.” Hartford soon tried to buy the Fords out. But in 1949 two Ford family friends mortgaged their houses and lent them $50,000 to start a voucher system.

  “A generation of mothers and girls owe Eileen Ford a debt,” says Carmen Dell’Orefice. “People took advantage of young women. You’d do the jobs and never get paid. She put a price on young womanhood and got a lot of young women college educations. She opened a doorway and defined a profession. But Jerry is actually the unsung hero. He figured out how to get backers.”

  Meanwhile, Ford’s partner, Natálie Nickerson, had met a photographer named Wingate Paine in March 1947. They’d gotten involved and had begun working together all the time. Paine was wealthy and willful. Blind in one eye from a lacrosse accident at Yale, he’d talked his way into the Marine Corps and ended up a captain. On reemerging, he decided not to resurrect his interrupted business career and took up fashion photography instead. Now Natálie’s efforts promoting the Fords were augmented by his. Their first success was beating back the Hartford challenge.

  Voucher system in place, Jerry says, “We were very hot, and the word was all over town.” His innovation co-opted, Hartford’s agency puttered along for about a dozen years, ending up concentrating on male models. Finally, in 1959, he offered to buy Ford again, for $1 million. When Hartford promised the Fords they could retain total control, Eileen agreed to meet him. “I have to ask you a couple of questions,” Hartford said. “If I want to go out with a girl and she says no, will you drop her?” Ford said no.

  “If I want a girl to be with the agency, will you hire her?” No again.

  “This won’t work out,” he decided.

  Soon thereafter Hartford’s lawyer approached the Fords and asked if they would buy him out. According to Lisa Gubernick, Hartford’s biographer, the abrupt change of heart came only after the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs had begun investigating the agency
. “They felt it was a toy,” confirms Don Stogo, an agent who later worked with refugees from Hartford. “The city couldn’t prove anything, but they gave him a lot of trouble, and he decided to give it up. It had degenerated anyway. A lot of models left because of all the innuendo. He was a playboy, let’s face it, pre-Hugh Hefner. I heard he took a minor over the state line into California.” Models were interviewed by city officials and asked if Hartford had ever propositioned them. “The girls started laughing and responded, ‘Of course,’” Gubernick reported.

  The Fords absorbed the Hartford agency. It had been losing money for years and was carrying $750,000 in debts on its books by that time. In exchange for assuming its debts, the Fords got one of the best stables of male models in the city. One of Hartford’s close associates joked, “Hunt’s lost a million dollars in this business, and he’s never gotten laid.” Hartford himself is hazy on the details.

  “Ask Eileen Ford,” he says. “She’ll remember.”

  By 1948 the Fords were already well established. That year they signed up Dorian Leigh. “Dorian was the star,” says Eileen Ford. “She could swell her chest to fill the clothes,” says Jerry. “She knew how to breathe,” says Eileen. She also knew how to bargain. Two years earlier, just before her parents left for Florida, Dorian had come home one day to find her kid sister, Suzy, crying at the kitchen table. “She thought she was a monster,” Dorian recalls. “Imagine, that was the real teenybopper period; my mother made her wear pigtails with red hair and freckles. And she was taller than her whole class. I said, ‘No, you’re beautiful, and I’ll prove it to you.’”

  “Please take some pictures of my baby sister,” Dorian begged all the photographers she knew. They happened to be the best. Suzy tested with Penn, Rawlings, and Karen Radkai. “I hid in the dressing room, because she said she didn’t want me there,” Dorian says. “She was marvelous. She moved, she did everything naturally, just like I did. Karen was carried away.” That summer Suzy Parker joined the Fashion Bureau. “I couldn’t use the last name Parker, but then, when Suzy started, it was OK, because I had made a lot of money and I was established,” Dorian says.

  Irving Penn, for one, was horrified. “Mrs. Parker, do not let this delicious creature ever model,” he told the girls’ mother. “Do you want her to turn out like Dorian?” Mrs. Parker patted Penn’s cheek.

  Suzy didn’t get off to as fast a start as Dorian had. “She’d be in her room sobbing,” Dorian recalls. “She felt photographers were comparing her to me. She was bigger and taller, and they made a big thing out of not photographing her full length. It was very morale-beating. I’d say, ‘Go back to school,’ and she’d say no and cry herself to sleep.”

  Suzy worked with Richard Avedon that summer of 1948. “In came this girl, who looked utterly unlike the usual model type, wearing one of the most rebellious expressions I’ve ever seen on anybody. She positively glowered,” he recalled. “She was taller than any model then working and I only photographed her to oblige Dorian.”

  Though she was tall, Suzy was still a child, as was her best friend, Carmen Dell’Orefice. Born in 1931, Carmen was the daughter of a Hungarian dancer and an Italian violinist. Her parents were continually breaking up and reconciling, so Carmen grew up with relatives and in foster homes. When she was seven, Carmen moved in with her mother, who worked as a building superintendent. In 1942 they moved into a fourth-floor walk-up apartment under the elevated train tracks on Manhattan’s Third Avenue. Carmen caught rheumatic fever and was in bed for a year. Healthy again in 1945, she was approached by the wife of photographer Herman Landshoff as she rode the Fifty-seventh Street bus to a ballet class. “I’d always been the ugly duckling of my crowd,” Carmen says. “I was the tallest, the skinniest, and I had braces on my teeth. The boys couldn’t stand me. I always beat them at running, jumping, throwing a ball.” Maybe that was why her mother agreed to let her pose for test pictures on Jones Beach.

  “I was a big flop,” Carmen says. “The magazine sent my mother a letter saying I was charming and well brought up but, unfortunately, totally un-photogenic.” A godfather with connections “came to the rescue,” she adds. “He introduced me to Vogue.” A few weeks later the fourteen-year-old’s image was spread across seven pages of the magazine, and she signed an exclusive contract with Condé Nast for $7.50 an hour.

  Carmen had no agency at first. Vogue sent runners to her mother’s apartment when they needed her because she had no telephone. “Then Vogue let me have the message that Powers was trying to reach me,” she says. When she visited the agency, Powers had full-length photographs of her on the wall behind his desk. She joined up.

  Carmen was just a skinny kid in love with a neighborhood grocer’s son when Vogue first used her in 1946. She was so undernourished her dresses had to be pinned down the back to make them fit. Tissues filled out her bust when she worked with Horst and Cecil Beaton. These gentlemen—and homosexual—photographers “devirginized me, if you will,” she says. “They were a difficult act to follow. I was very spoiled. They showed me what manhood was about, really. I was madly in love.”

  That summer Irving Penn booked her. When she arrived, he took a look at the frail child and immediately consigned her to a cot outside his office cubicle. He insisted she sleep while he and Dorian Leigh, whom he was also shooting that day, repaired within. “I was so impatient,” Carmen recalls today, sitting in her Park Avenue apartment, surrounded by Norman Parkinson’s photographs of her and personalized Salvador Dali prints that she earned posing for the surrealist artist. At sixty-three she is as sexy as she has ever been. “I didn’t feel I needed a nap before standing in front of a camera,” she says. “His office had a partition that didn’t reach the ceiling. I listened to billing and cooing and moaning and groaning, and then Dorian came out. I didn’t know Penn was in love with her. I wasn’t astute, but I knew something wonderful was going on.”

  Dorian adopted Carmen, who, to this day, calls her Big Momma. “Dorian was the rage!” Carmen exclaims. “She was very solicitous. She asked Penn, ‘What is this child doing here?’ I had such a crush on him. Dorian perceived this and was darling with me about it.” Carmen and her mother, both accomplished seamstresses, were soon making clothes for Dorian, and when she opened the Fashion Bureau, Carmen left Powers and signed up. “It was winter,” she recalls, “and I go there, wearing what I owned, a chic trench coat my mother bought me for Easter, not a winter coat. No boots. Needless to say, I walked out with Dorian’s coat.”

  Carmen Dell’Orefice photographed by Melvin Sokolsky

  (standing behind the camera)

  Carmen Dell’Orefice by Melvin Sokolsky, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

  Carmen roller-skated everywhere she went. A bus was five cents, and she didn’t have it. Dorian gave her taxi fare. “I took it home for my mother to buy food with,” Carmen says. “Or else Suzy and I would go to the movies instead of my bookings. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.” Perhaps. The pair were, in fact, model troublemakers for years. In 1954, for example, they attended the opening of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, on assignment for Vogue with photographer Roger Prigent. “There was a big fountain in the lobby,” Prigent remembers, “and they put bubble soap in it.” Then, at dinner in a seafood restaurant, Suzy and Carmen begged Prigent to buy them a shark from a display tank. “Like a fool, I did,” he says. The next morning the manager called in a panic. The shark was in the Fontainebleau’s swimming pool.

  In 1947, with Dorian’s help, Carmen won a raise from Vogue to $10 an hour and the right to shoot ads for $25 an hour. She appeared on her first Vogue cover that October, at age fifteen. That year, too, a doctor working for Condé Nast prescribed shots to force her into puberty. Soon afterward Mr. John, a milliner, gave a party to introduce her to eligible bachelors. Her mother insisted on a personal interview before she let Carmen out of her sight with a man. Pat di Cicco, who later married Gloria Vanderbilt, took her to El Morocco on her first real date. Igor Cassini, who wrot
e a gossip column under the nom de plume Cholly Knickerbocker, introduced her to a friend of his, a grandfatherly fellow who offered her a Park Avenue apartment. Her mother told Joseph P. Kennedy sorry, no. Carmen was seventeen going on thirty-five.

  When Dorian got married and closed the Fashion Bureau that year, most of her models, including Carmen Dell’Orefice and Barbara Brown, joined Huntington Hartford’s agency, the only one then on the voucher system. “Hartford used the agency to look at all the girls,” Carmen says. “By then I was pretty insightful about what goes on, and it was hard earned. I’d heard about Hunt’s reputation. Bill Deering assured me it was a totally professional operation.”

  Suzy went to Walter Thornton, who set her price at $15 an hour. Dorian urged her sister to switch to Hartford. He pegged Suzy’s price at $25 an hour. Dorian still wasn’t satisfied. She wanted $40 an hour for Suzy. “That’s when Dorian entered our lives,” says Eileen Ford. Dorian called Ford and said, “Take Suzy, sight unseen,” Eileen recalls. “Can you imagine how we felt?” They arranged to meet at a restaurant, Mario’s Villa d’Este, and once Ford saw Suzy Parker, she recovered from her shock and agreed to take Suzy on one condition: that Dorian join the Fords, too. “I always said, that was the best bargain Eileen ever got in her life,” Dorian says. “She didn’t realize what she was getting. She just thought she was getting my kid sister. Suzy put them on the map.”

  “I grew up with talk about mink coats,” says Richard Avedon. “Should we buy fifteen or four? Short or long?” He was born in 1923 and grew up in New York and Cedarhurst, on Long Island, the son of Jacob Israel Avedon, who owned Avedon’s Blouse Shop in Harlem and then Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, a specialty store at Thirty-ninth Street, with his brother Sam. Gertrude Lawrence appeared in its ad in Vogue. Sonia Delaunay designed its scarves. Their houses were always full of copies of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. When Sam Avedon lost all his money in bad investments, Jacob went to work as an insurance salesman and then as a buyer at the Tailored Woman, a top women’s fashion store. He ended up with another Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.