Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Only Eileen and Ford go on. But their eventual triumph was by no means clear. It was a time of great cultural transition. John F. Kennedy was America’s vital new President; astronauts and cosmonauts were riding rockets into the new frontier, and the Beatles were barnstorming Europe. It was only natural that upheaval would hit modeling, too. For the next few years bookers, models, and modeling executives hopped to and fro like fleas in the fur of the fashion business. No one paid attention to the passing of modeling’s aristocracy. “Our era was finished,” says Ruth Neumann. “The Untouchables were not anymore.”

  The Supermodels of 1992 photographed by Patrick Demarchelier. Clockwise from bottom left: Cindy Crawford, Elaine Irwin, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Yasmeen Ghauri, Karen Mulder, Claudia Schiffer, Niki Taylor, and Tatjana Patitz (under the ladder)

  Ten Supermodels of 1992 by Patrick Demarchelier

  PART TWO

  BAD AND BEAUTIFUL

  Polly Magoo, you have become for the civilized world a symbol of elegance and sophistication.

  But I have the impression that all this is only a game.

  You’re acting.

  Your life as a model is a masquerade.

  You act it out and others help you to act it.

  The Fairy Godmother tapped you with her magic wand, but if midnight sounds, your coach, will it turn to a pumpkin, your footmen to lizards?

  —FROM THE FILM QUI ÊTES-VOUS, POLLY MAGOO,

  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY WILLIAM KLEIN

  CELIA HAMMOND

  Her blond hair still seems Sassooned, her lips bee-stung, her lilting accent naggingly familiar, neither totally passé nor fully present. Celia Hammond, fifty-two, is still the British Dolly Bird incarnate, Darling and Georgy Girl rolled up in one, the embodiment of London circa 1964, the Beatles and the Stones, Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, fab and gear.

  At nineteen, in 1961, Hammond was a contract model with editor Jocelyn Stevens’s pacesetting Queen magazine, working with Norman Parkinson, the last of England’s gentlemen photographers. Then she had a romance with Terence Donovan, one of the Terrible Trio (with David Bailey and Brian Duffy) who changed fashion photography as radically as Penn and Avedon had when they’d seized fashion photography’s crown and scepter in the late 1940s. All three photographers came from the rough and raffish East End of London, a working-class neighborhood not known for its refined tastes. Indeed, refinement was the first thing that went out the window when the East End boys and their girls hit it big.

  Suddenly there was pop, and models were its princesses.

  It was a time when models no longer lay down with lords and rose up ladies of the manor. Suddenly a model was au courant only if she was coupled with a top photographer, although a pop star wasn’t a bad catch either. Patti Boyd snared the ultimate prize when she married Beatle George Harrison. Jean Shrimpton had famously tempestuous relationships with David Bailey and the actor Terence Stamp. After Donovan, Hammond hooked up with Stamp and comic actor Dudley Moore, before ending up with a genuine guitar hero, Jeff Beck, who played with the Yardbirds before founding his own group.

  Hammond and Beck met in summer 1968. A few months later she bought a five-hundred-year-old cottage set in ten acres of woodlands in Kent and announced her retirement from London night life, if not the modeling scene. “It simply bores me to death,” she said then. “I realized last year that I earned an awful lot of money but I didn’t have anything to show for it.” She was looking, she said, for peace of mind.

  Today, thin in a thick Irish sweater, Hammond looks more like a stable girl than a pop princess. She runs the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, a registered charity in Sussex, England, that rescues, neuters, and finds homes for stray pets. At night she drives a tiny car between building sites, saving abandoned cats. Though it might make a glamorous fashion photograph—a model in an evening gown, clutching a crying kitten—there is nothing romantic about Hammond’s life. She has little money and operates constantly on the edge of ruin. Ten years ago, after sixteen years with Beck, she was traded in for a younger model. So she is alone, except for the dozens of cats she keeps. But they may be a better breed than those with which she used to play.

  “I was born in Indonesia. My father was a tea taster. We went to Australia when I was one year old, and then my mother and I came back. I was left with aunties and uncles, and I was in boarding school. I had a series of jobs that had nothing to do with fashion whatsoever. I was very overweight. Somebody must have seen something under the fat and said, ‘Why don’t you be a model?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t possibly.’ But I went to a few agents. They said, ‘No, no, no, it’s absolutely out of the question. You couldn’t possibly do it.’ Finally the Lucie Clayton agency took me on. I stayed with Clayton all the way through.

  “Jean Shrimpton and I started Clayton’s course the same week. Bailey discovered her, took her right under his wing, and she was right at the top, on the cover of Vogue immediately. It took me a long time to get there. I’d go around to all the fashion houses and do their collections. Commercial, the low end of the market. Really hard work, six or eight shows a day. I did that for about a year.

  “What used to happen was Norman Parkinson would come a couple of times a year and go around to all the agencies and see if he liked the look of anybody. He called them his cattle markets. The agency said, ‘We haven’t got anything for you this time.” He said, ‘I’ll have a look anyway.’ And we were lined up upstairs, and he came down and said, ‘There’s a star up there.’ And they said, ‘Who?’ And he said, ‘Celia Hammond,’ and they said, ‘It couldn’t possibly be.’ I weighed about ten and a half stone. I don’t know what that is in pounds, but it’s very heavy. And totally not looking the way models were supposed to look in those days.

  “Within about a fortnight I was to be at the Paris collections. I didn’t eat anything for that period, three weeks I think it was. They still had to send seamstresses to open the back of the clothes and find a way to hold it together at the back and then sew it back together for the shows the next day.

  “That was for Queen magazine. They put me under contract, and Parkinson and I worked together. When I first started going abroad with Parkinson, I was so green and useless. I was twenty-one going on sixteen, because that’s how you were in the fifties. You didn’t grow up very fast.

  “Models have got it pretty easy these days. I’ve done one or two shoots lately recalling the sixties. They say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about your makeup or anything, just turn up. If your hair’s bad, it doesn’t matter; we’ve got people.’ In the actual sixties, when you turned up for a job, you had to have a bag about three feet deep. My left arm was longer than my right arm for about a year after I stopped. You had to carry about six or eight pairs of shoes, your rollers, different pairs of scarves, gloves, jewelry, accessories. You used to have to do a different hairstyle for every photograph. All your own makeup. You had to do everything yourself.

  “We were a pretty good bargain, really. What I’d like to know is, at what point did the girls become worth ten thousand dollars a day? I was modeling only because there wasn’t anything else I could have done. I’ve got no qualifications of any sort. I wanted to end up with a bit of security for myself, I wanted to earn enough to buy a house, because obviously a model can’t do it indefinitely.

  “I worked with Parkinson for a couple of years. And then, once my contract expired in the early sixties, I started getting other offers. I started working with Terry Donovan, I started working for Bailey and doing Vogue, and that was the beginning of the end of Parkinson. I still did the odd thing with him, but it was never the same. He couldn’t handle it when I got involved with Terry. He liked working with a raw canvas. He sort of takes that person over and makes her into something. And your getting involved with somebody else is not part of his picture. You would pick up other mannerisms, and then he would stop using you.

  “Bailey and Terry were very sexually oriented. That’s how they worked. The
y would just tell you to, you know, fuck the camera or something. That’s what their message was, sex and raunchiness. You’ve only got to look at their pictures to see what was going on.

  “Donovan was enormously sexy and attractive. He was married when I met him. But he was so good-looking. He was thin and with this curly, black Irish hair and piercing eyes. It was a real cliquey set, Donovan, Duffy, and Bailey, a lot of the young people, editors, models, advertising people, music people, all just a big, great club. We kept ourselves very much to ourselves. We used to go to the same parties, the same restaurants. We’d meet up almost every night. It was far more than just a working relationship. It was a life, yeah.

  “There was a rebellion against the sort of morality and the sickness of it all. It was very austere in the fifties. When I started working with Parkinson, I was living at home. I used to go out, come back at night, and I could see my mother’s cigarette, that red cigarette end, burning in the hall, no matter what time I came in. My mother was so terribly strict she did drive me away. Oh, she cried. It was dreadful.

  “It was exciting to be able to do what we wanted to do. The new music and the clothes and the sexual revolution. Of course, money was no object in those days, so we used to fly across the world for one picture. Drugs weren’t really that much a part of it, in our lot anyway. But it was very wild. I mean, everybody was very promiscuous. You would have a boyfriend for a few months or weeks, whatever. Then you know he’d be gone, and it was somebody else.

  “The work was very hard, but modeling in those days, once you were at the top, you were almost unassailable. If you were in the top half dozen girls, then you would be there for six, seven, eight years. Everybody wanted you—someone that people recognized—and they would always rather have you than take a chance on a new girl who might actually look better or even be better.

  “There was not a lot of money then. I think the photographers were paid a lot better than we were. And quite rightly so. I had a jeep, a flat in West Hampstead, and I had a small house; but I never had a lot of money. It was laughable. In those days we used to earn the same sort of money as a professional person, as a doctor or a dentist or something. Not these fabulous amounts like ten thousand dollars a day. Nobody’s worth that.

  “The animal rescue work started in London while I was still working. There was a boarded-up house that had a mother cat in it that I’d gone past on the bus. I’d seen this cat up in the windows. And I thought, ‘Well, that can’t be right.’ I came back later with a friend, and we broke into the house and found this cat up in a room with the door shut and three dead kittens. She’d been boarded up in there. And so I took her, and then it just … it was like a revelation, that this sort of dreadful thing must be happening all over London, this wouldn’t be an isolated incident.

  “I started a rescue service for animals in emergency situations like building sites and at the docks and train stations. At first I was just doing it myself, funding everything myself. It just got to the point where I couldn’t finance it any longer. I didn’t have any money left. So now it’s a public charity. And the reason that the charity has taken off now is largely because of what I did then. A lot of people from the sixties are now in positions of great power and influence.

  “I carried on modeling for two or three years while I was doing the rescue work. But I just couldn’t combine the two. Having to get up early in the morning looking like a million dollars after not having been to bed till three or four A.M., you know, scrabbling around a building site rescuing animals. There was just one job too many. And then finally I just said. ‘That’s it. Pull down the curtain. I want to get on with what I really want to do.’ I don’t regret modeling for one minute. It was totally superficial, but it was a whole lot of fun.

  “By that time I had bought a house in the country, a small house, so I moved down there with all the animals, and Jeff came to live with me. And he stayed there for about seven or eight years, and then he bought a house in Sussex and we moved all the animals over there. And I carried on doing the rescue work for, you know, twenty years or whatever, but eventually Jeff just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “The animals broke us up actually. We both had our crosses to bear. He had my animals, I had his blondes. He had several. He met a blonde that got to him, and she was twenty years younger than me. All middle-aged men do it. I’m glad it happened while I still could handle it.

  “People think, ‘Oh, the poor bitch, she hasn’t got a man; she’s got no children; she’s put everything into a child substitute.’ That isn’t true, but I suppose some people might think it could be. I could have gone on modeling perhaps for another four or five years. But it just wasn’t terribly important to me. To actually love what I did, I’d have to have been a really rather extraordinary person. An enormous egotist. I mean, to love standing on a piece of paper in a funny way? You’d have to be so self-obsessed.”

  £24 AN HOUR

  It was a sunny afternoon in 1958 in Windsor Great Park near London, where Britain’s royals played polo. A short dark man with swept-back hair approached a pouty, snubnosed sixteen-year-old in a gray silk dress. “You know, you really should model,” he said.

  Introducing himself as Colonel Voynovitch, he invited the girl and her date into the exclusive royal enclosure. She didn’t say a word, so impressed was she as she spotted the queen mother and met the queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell. Had Jean Shrimpton not been born with eyebrows arched in permanent wonder, they certainly would have stood up at all that. So it was quite easy for Voynovitch to lure her to his Aston Martin, where he softly stroked her bare, coltish legs and cooed that he wanted to photograph her for a women’s magazine. Not only that, he said, but he’d pay her £5 for an afternoon’s work.

  A sheltered convent school graduate, Shrimpton was a bit appalled by the stranger’s behavior; but his connections were obvious, and modeling sounded better than anything Langham Secretarial College at London’s Marble Arch had to offer. So she gave him her number and said he should call and ask her parents’ permission.

  A few days later Voynovitch appeared at Rose Hill Farm in Buckinghamshire, where Shrimpton had grown up in rural isolation, a horse-crazed daughter of an ex-Royal Air Force corporal turned pig breeder. After meeting her parents, the colonel drove her to his country home, where he stroked her legs a little more and offered her a bath, strawberries, and champagne. “Why don’t you take your bra off?” he asked her. “You’re not a virgin, are you?” He made a circle with two of his fingers and pushed another through it, in and out, in and out.

  As the shooting progressed, so did his clumsy ardor. “I just want to touch your breasts,” he said. She let him. After all, she’d come this far. But although she considered herself a “retarded sixteen-year-old,” she had the sense never to see him again. But she’d tasted forbidden fruit, and wanted more. Being a secretary suddenly seemed a bleak fate, indeed. Still, it was a year before a way out appeared.

  Again a male stranger intervened. At lunch break every day when the weather was good, Jean and a friend would buy sandwiches and go to Hyde Park to eat. One day just before final exams an American movie director named Cy Endfield hailed them as they crossed the street on their way back to school. He said he wanted to cast Jean in a film he was making. Tossing a business card at her, he jumped in his car and screeched away. Sadly Endfield’s producer didn’t agree with his assessment of Shrimpton’s star quality. The director then insisted she should become a model. He even knew the name of a school where she could learn how.

  It was called Lucie Clayton.

  Sylvia Gollidge, a gangling brown-eyed beauty from Blackpool, came to London in 1926 and got a job as a model for 10 shillings (about $2.50) a day at a dress shop called Bantall’s. On her first day at work the sixteen-year-old stood perfectly still, expecting the shop’s customers to gravitate toward her. She didn’t keep her job long. Vowing to better herself, she traveled to Paris, where she decided that the way to be a model was to look
angry, arrogant, and condescending. Armed with this new knowledge, she returned to London, got another job, and was soon so successful that she insured her long blond hair for £1,000.

  Years later she told Leslie Kark how she decided to open a modeling school and agency. “One or two of her friends, all of whom were thin giantesses like Gollidge, asked her to show them how to model,” Kark says. “She thought, ‘Well, I can make more money by showing them than by modeling.’” So, in September 1928, Gollidge opened the Lucie Clayton Modeling School, teaching charm, the art of the curtsy, and how to walk a runway. She changed her name because “she just liked the name Lucie,” says Kark, who bought her business in 1950. “And Clayton was solid business, you know, earthy.” Within months Gollidge had an agency, first booking only fashion show mannequins but soon adding photo models.

  Jean Shrimpton photographed by David Bailey in a New York City phone booth, January 1961

  Jean Shrimpton by David Bailey, courtesy Robert Montgomery

  Lucie Clayton was to modeling in London what Powers was in New York: the person who pulled the profession out of the gutter. “She made it about as respectable as opera singing,” says Kark. “But I don’t think careful fathers wanted their daughters to be opera singers or models.” Clayton understood that good publicity could change that. During the Depression Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn came to London with a troupe of Goldwyn Girls on a publicity trip. Intrigued by the coverage the troupe engendered, Clayton “went to the depressed valleys of Wales,” according to Kark, “found girls six feet tall, took them to London and trained them, and took them to Hollywood,” along with trunks full of British fashions. She got British clothing manufacturers to finance the trip.