Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Toward the end of that year the Fords suddenly asked the Paines to buy them out and take over the agency, but by December Eileen had changed her mind. “On behalf of my clients, Gerard and Eileen O. Ford, notice of termination and dissolution of partnership is herewith given you, effective December 31, 1952,” said the letter Ford’s attorney sent to Natálie on December 29. Her attorney advised her to sue but warned that any settlement would likely keep her out of the model business.

  With her husband’s grudging blessing, Natálie opened her own agency in 1953 with two top Ford models—Sandy Brown and Dovima—and five telephones. “I couldn’t think of a name for the agency, and I wasn’t going to use my own name,” Natálie says. “I wanted to be very behind the scenes and not publicized and I never was, incidentally. I sent out notices that Dovima would be at Plaza five-five-eight-nine-three or whatever it was, and the same for Sandy Brown, and that’s where the Plaza Five came from. I had given Dovima twenty-five percent to come with me, because I, like Eileen, needed a top model, a big name.”

  Dovima was that. After Dorian Leigh and before Suzy Parker, she was Richard Avedon’s favorite, but she was more. Dovima was the quintessential 1950s high-fashion model and in that, arguably, the apotheosis of all models. “Dovima was simpleminded and uneducated, [but] an absolutely incredible person,” says Dorian Leigh.

  Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba was born in the Bronx in 1927, half Polish, half Irish, the daughter of Patrolman Stanley Juba of the Fourteenth Precinct. She grew up in a two-story brick apartment building in Jackson Heights. The students at the Blessed Sacrament Elementary School called her Skinny Dottie Pigtails. “We called her Doe,” says her mother, Margaret Juba. She had brown hair and large, luminous blue eyes that helped her win beauty contests as a child. Her picture appeared in the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association Bulletin.

  At age ten Doe developed rheumatic fever, and she spent the next seven years at home in bed. Tutored at home, she’d talk on the phone with her visiting teacher’s other bedridden young patients. Doe dreamed of being a ballerina and developed into a talented artist. At twelve she started signing her drawings and paintings with the first two letters of each of her names: Do-vi-ma.

  Doe Juba was finally declared well at age eighteen. She got a job selling candy at Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue, went to art school, and even saw John Robert Powers; but modeling didn’t pan out. “I never thought I was a beautiful woman,” she once said. “As a child I was a gangly, skinny thing and I had this ugly front tooth that I broke when I was playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes.”

  In 1948 she married Jack Golden, an orphan who worked at a bank and lived upstairs from the Jubas with cousins. He moved downstairs into her bedroom. Six months later Doe was laid off by the advertising agency where she’d gotten a job as an artist. She was waiting by an elevator at 480 Lexington Avenue to meet a girlfriend for lunch when someone grabbed her arm and said, “Come with me.” Within minutes she had a new hairdo and was earning $17.50 posing for Glamour magazine.

  “I was an instant success,” she said later. “They sent me to Eileen Ford.” The very next day she had a booking with Irving Penn to model an off-shoulder gown for Vogue. Penn asked her to smile. She gave him an enigmatic look to hide her cracked, discolored front tooth. Penn asked her name. “Dovima,” she replied.

  “She was the super-sophisticated model in a sophisticated time, definitely not the girl next door,” Jerry Ford once said, summing up her visual appeal. But Dovima was the girl next door at heart. “It always seemed like I was watching a movie,” she said of her model years, “and I’m in the movie, only it really isn’t me.”

  In the early scenes of that movie she bought an $18,000 brick house in Jackson Heights and was earning modeling’s top rate, $30 an hour. “After my initial discovery, Vogue began booking me every day and I found myself beginning to think of me as a model,” she said. “I was a prima ballerina one day, then an adagio dancer, a movie queen, a clown, a forlorn waif. I was anything that could be portrayed with a look, a gesture, a stance, a mood and the right costume. The more the photographer demanded, the more I was willing to give…. I found ways to change my hairdo in three minutes … and sometimes when we worked on location, I had to change outfits in taxis, or behind a tree. Once, I changed in a telephone booth.”

  “Just look at that waist!” Diana Vreeland cried the first time she saw Dovima. In August 1950 she went to Paris with Vreeland and Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar. An innocent abroad, she used the bidet in her hotel room as a flower pot. When she arrived in Egypt for another shoot with Avedon, she was asked how she liked Africa. “Africa?” she asked. “Who said anything about Africa? This is Egypt.” Told Egypt was in Africa, she responded, “I should have charged double rate!” Years later Richard Avedon told model Lauren Hutton about that trip. “They were going on a camel trip across the desert,” Hutton says. “Dick had told everyone to bring just one small bag, but Dovima had this huge trunk, so he thought she was bringing a lot of clothes, and he said, ‘What are you doing, bringing all those clothes?’ And she said, ‘Those aren’t clothes, those are my books!’ And he thought, ‘I can’t take books from a girl!’ But it turned out to be all comic books—a gigantic steamer trunk of comic books.”

  Dovima never lost that innocence, friends say, even as the money started pouring in ($5,000 her first year; $15,000 her second; $30,000 by 1954) and she grew more accustomed to her new, sophisticated world. By 1953 she had worked with almost every star of photography. But she’d grown unhappy with Eileen Ford. Natálie’s offer of a partnership in a new agency was hard to refuse. Jerry Ford recalls that Paine sweetened the pot by offering Jack Golden a job.

  Eileen’s response was instantaneous, says Natálie. “She refused to give Wingate any models. Nobody could exist without Ford models at that time. I called everybody and said, ‘Look, I’m not asking you to do this for Wingate, but who’s gonna be next? You? Should she be allowed to have the power to shut down a studio?’ I’m sure a lot of people called her and said, ‘You can’t do this, Eileen.’ And there was never another problem.”

  Ultimately Plaza Five benefited the Fords. In 1954 Dovima raised her rate to $50, and other top models followed suit, Ford’s included. “Dovima had trouble being on time,” says Natálie, “but when she arrived late at a studio, she would be so remorseful that she was usually forgiven. I’m not sure this would have been tolerated from any other model.”

  Avedon played a large part in her career. Traveling to Paris, London, Rome, Egypt, and Mexico, “we became like mental Siamese twins, with me knowing what he wanted before he explained it,” Dovima said. “He asked me to do extraordinary things, but I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”

  In 1955 the duo collaborated on what may be the best-known fashion photograph of all time, “Dovima and the Elephants.” She estimated they took a thousand pictures in an hour that day. “By the time I finished, I thought of the elephants as friends working with me in complete synchronization, all of us gently swaying back and forth,” she once recalled. Avedon instructed her to be aloof and so above it all that it would seem as if the pachyderms weren’t there. He later called that photo “her peak of elegance and power.”

  She was Avedon’s fashion doll. She would do whatever he wanted, all the while looking like an unruffled swan. Off the set she tried to live the same story. “I began to [have] the idea that I was a photograph … a plastic image,” she said. “I could only be myself behind a camera.” By 1955 Jack Golden had quit his job at the bank. He joined her that year, at her expense, in Paris. He got drunk, as he often did at home, and threw up in the wastebasket in the front of a reporter as Dovima stood by patiently waiting to clean up the mess. “If I didn’t have my husband, what would it all be worth?” she asked another interviewer. “I think my husband is the only boy I ever met who told me I was beautiful.”

  Dovima raised her rate to $60 an hour and cut her working hours down to four a day. In
1957 she appeared in Funny Face as a model named Marion. Back in New York, she signed up to study at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. There was a whole new world opening up for models on television, and Dovima was determined to be part of it. She appeared on The Phil Silvers Show and Joe Franklin’s Down Memory Lane and made personal appearances for NBC, divorced Golden, and married again, to Alan Murray, an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer. She gave him her money, just as she had given it to Golden. They lived in a nine-room apartment on Seventh Avenue and went out almost every night. A daughter, Allison, was born in 1958. Dovima was getting older, but nonetheless, at the end of that year she raised her rate to $75 an hour.

  “She had married her second husband, who I felt was not a very nice person,” says Natálie Paine. “He told her that she had to raise her rate, much against our wishes. She was booked every minute, and she raised her rate, and she stopped working. Then she wanted to get involved in the agency. Her husband said she should. She was absolutely his puppet, or so it seemed to me. So she started announcing to the world that she owned a part of Plaza Five—which indeed she did—without ever discussing it with me. My lawyer had a meeting with her, where she demanded that she have the same salary that I do, and I mean, it was not rational. I ended up buying her out, which was very unfortunate, because she could have grown into that business. She was wonderful with girls; she could have worked with makeup and hairstyles. There was a lot she could have done.”

  Dovima and the elephants photographed by Richard Avedon at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, 1955

  Dovima by Richard Avedon

  Dovima always called her life a Cinderella story, so it is hardly surprising that she planned a happy ending. “I didn’t want to wait until the camera turned cruel,” she said. Although she didn’t stop posing entirely until 1962, she later told an interviewer that the moment of decision came atop a wrought-iron ladder at Avedon’s studio in 1959. She was dressed in hot pink, holding a huge letter A that was to be incorporated into the Bazaar logo on the cover she and Dick were shooting. Teetering high off the ground, she recalled a friend’s telling her to quit while she was at the top of her profession. “This is my last shoot,” she told a startled Avedon. He cracked open a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

  Dovima immediately set out to prove that she was more than a comic book—reading model. She appeared with Johnny Carson, on Broadway in Seidman and Son with Sam Levene, and as a newspaper columnist, replacing the vacationing Dorothy Kilgallen. Her private life wasn’t so successful. Her second marriage ended. Her luck in love stayed bad. “Sadly she could only be with men who beat her,” says Carmen Dell’Orefice. “I’d find her on my doorstep black and blue, and I’d take her in and she’d live with me…. Religion served her very well. She had great faith. But she had no education, and she never picked it up. And so she had no self-esteem.”

  Soon Dovima was broke. A downward spiral began. In 1960 she filed a $500,000 slander lawsuit against Eileen Ford. She alleged that Ford had accused her of writing a letter to the government, “to try and stop foreign girls from coming here, so they wouldn’t compete with her.” The suit sank without a trace. Finally, lured by television, she moved to Los Angeles. Murray called the FBI and accused his ex of kidnapping her own daughter. He then got a divorce in Mexico. Dovima never saw Allison again.

  “The Hollywood bug had bitten her,” says her brother Stanley. In the next few years she appeared on Dr. Kildare, The Man from U. N. C. L. E., My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, The Danny Kaye Show, Kraft Suspense Theater, and The Art Linkletter Show. But she was also bouncing from man to man. “Anyone stuck it in her,” says Carmen. “I’d say, ‘Please, Dosie, I’ll find you a guy.’”

  There were no model agents on the European continent after World War II. In France, fashion’s heart, employment agencies had been declared illegal, as it was considered improper for anyone to take a portion of someone else’s earnings. Such arrangements smacked of prostitution. Models in the Paris couture houses took their own bookings, just as Lisa Fonssagrives had done twenty years before.

  When Dorian Leigh emigrated to Paris in the mid-1950s with her son, Kim, she booked her own work, too, and was typically paid on the spot by either photographers or clients. Studying French employment laws, she decided it would be legal to open an agency if she took fees only from clients and not from models. With the encouragement of Hervé Mille (the director of Paris Match—France’s equivalent to Life magazine—and the monthly women’s magazine Marie Claire) and his brother, Gérard, a society decorator, she financed a start-up with her own modeling earnings.

  The Milles were socialites and collectors of wealthy and famous friends. After the war the two bachelor brothers had moved into a house together on the rue de Varenne on the Left Bank and created a salon that attracted Coco Chanel, Juliette Greco, Jean Cocteau, the Rothschilds, Marlon Brando, and Suzy Parker, whom Mille introduced to Chanel. Hervé Mille also arranged for several French magazines—his own, as well as Elle and Marie France—to hire Dorian as their collaborateur, or formal associate. “All the magazines kept saying they couldn’t get top models, they only got dropouts from New York who wouldn’t accept being paid so little money,” Dorian recalls. “I promised them American models, and they promised to use me exclusively, and so the French government gave me a working permit.” Leigh opened her little office just down the street from the Élysées Palace in fall 1957.

  Until then the stars of Paris fashion had been the exotic creatures of the couture cabines. Among the most famous were Bettina Graziani and Sophie Malga. Sophie worked at Jacques Fath and Christian Dior and was to marry film producer Anatole Litvak. Bettina, born Simone Micheline Bodin, a freckle-faced rail worker’s daughter from Brittany, was renamed and recreated by Fath, who told her, “We already have a Simone; you look to me like a Bettina.”

  Although they sometimes posed for pictures, Sophie, Bettina, and the rest of the couture cabine models (many of whom used exotic single names like Praline, Victoire, and Alla) lived in a world totally apart from that of American photo models like Dorian. “We hired them full-time for a small wage,” remembers Percy Savage, who worked for Lanvin couture as a textile designer in the fifties. “They had great bodies and knew how to walk. They weren’t necessarily photogenic, although if they were, we let them do photos. They didn’t belong to agencies. They were above all that.”

  Savage was great friends with Christian Dior, who opened his couture house in 1947. “Dior found his girls in bordellos,” according to Savage. “He went practically every night. He was gay; but he loved that life, and the girls became models and clients. They knew men with money. They’d go to Cannes, Monte Carlo, and Deauville for dirty weekends. They had to have their suit from Chanel, their cocktail ensemble from Dior, their evening dress from Fath. Then they’d marry an English duke and need still more clothes.”

  By attempting to open an agency and change the way models worked in Paris, Dorian Leigh established herself as a maverick, and she quickly met a maverick’s fate. “The police kept dropping in all the time because they said I had a bureau de placement clandestine,” she says. Early in 1958 she was summoned to a tribunal, found guilty, and fined a hundred francs. “I went by myself. I didn’t even have a lawyer!” Dorian laughs. “I didn’t know it was important.” The court told her to find another formula if she wanted to stay in business. “I wanted to start a real agency, and then I went to the Fords, who were very interested,” Dorian says. She and the Fords agreed that she would represent their models in Europe and scout for them there.

  The Fords visited Europe for the first time in 1957, traveling to Rome, Paris, and London, checking out the modeling scene in each city. “We’d dealt with European models before,” Jerry says. “In the late fifties any girl from Europe would make it. People wanted to see what they looked like, and in fairness, they came because Life or Vogue was there and the editors saw people and would tell us, or Dorian would tell us.” Bettina and Sophie had come to New Yor
k with Jacques Fath on his personal appearance tour a few years before. When Eileen got Sophie a job modeling in a Seventh Avenue show, the designer called her, screaming. “She’d come to a fitting without underwear,” Ford remembers, and the designer “just about died.”

  The Fords’ arrival in Europe changed modeling forever. Not long before, Life’s Sally Kirkland, who often shot fashion spreads in Europe, had introduced the couple to Anne Gunning, a London model. In England models were accepted into society in the 1950s. Their aristocratic mien fitted Britain’s class system, and models often married politicians and wellborn men. Bronwen Pugh married Lord Astor. The German industrialist Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemizsa married Nina Dyer in 1954 and Scottish model Fiona Campbell-Walter in 1955. Dyer went on to wed Prince Sadrudin Aga Khan in 1957 (but their marriage was dissolved in 1962, and three years later she was found dead of a sedative overdose). Anne Cumming-Bell became the duchess of Rutland, Jean Dawnay the Princess Galitzine, and Gunning was to marry the statesman Anthony Nutting and later be made Lady Nutting. With her connections, it was easy for Gunning to get the Fords a room at the ultraexclusive Connaught Hotel.

  Then, Jerry Ford recalls, “some British newspaper did an article saying that a millionaire American agent was coming to seek English models.” Before they’d even arrived, the Connaught’s switchboard was swamped with calls, and its lobby was filled with model aspirants. Gunning headed the Fords off at the pass and put them up at her apartment in Belgravia, but an impression had been made.

  Moving on to Paris, the Fords stayed in a terraced suite at the Hôtel Crillon (for $40 a night) and discovered another treasure trove of models at Dorian Leigh’s agency. “Dorian was Paris,” says Jerry. “There was nobody else, and she was, of course, courted by every roué in Paris, and she loved it and kept them for herself and didn’t let them meet any girls. But we met some very nice models, and we became the only importer in the United States. It was easy. Models were dying to come to America because they were paid ten cents an hour there and a dollar an hour here.”