Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Bobby Freedman, a businessman-around-town and friend of both Dorian and the Fords, intervened. Freedman was best friends with Bernie Cornfeld. “Bernie said, ‘Why don’t I back you?’” says Dorian. Cornfeld was part of the new postwar jet set, one of the rich businessmen who hopped from continent to continent, living the good life. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1927, Cornfeld grew up in Brooklyn, where he was briefly a social worker before founding Investors Overseas Services in 1958. A onetime socialist and flamboyant salesman, Cornfeld claimed he created IOS, which grew into a $2.5 billion banking, mutual fund, insurance, and investment trust empire in the go-go sixties, to “convert the proletariat to the leisure classes painlessly.”

  In 1969 Cornfeld took IOS public, but he lost control of the company in 1970, after its share value had dropped from a high of $25 to about $1. He resigned from its board the following year, after turning control of the company over to financier Robert Vesco, who, he claimed, “walked off with the cash box.” In 1973 Cornfeld was arrested for fraud and jailed in Switzerland for almost a year, but he was later acquitted. Vesco, charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with siphoning more than $200 million from IOS, remains a fugitive.

  In the 1960s Cornfeld was still riding high. “I was friendly with Eileen and Jerry Ford,” he says. “They had absolutely stunning women, and every time I was in town, they would organize a party and let the girls know these were people they should be marrying, or if not marrying, then fucking.” One weekend Jerry Ford asked him to look over their company. “It was our dream at that moment to get Dorian and François together,” Ford says. “I’d tried to buy Paris Planning, but I had no money. Bernie said he’d invest, but he wanted us to merge with Dorian.”

  Cornfeld looked at Ford’s books, “and the bottom line was only fifty thousand dollars,” he says. “They lived off the agency. So I put together a plan for them to buy an agency in each key area of Europe. I was going to finance the acquisition and arrange to have it go public.”

  The deal fell apart, Cornfeld says, after Eileen Ford was rude to a girl Bobby Freedman was seeing. “She wanted to be a model,” Cornfeld says, “so Bobby arranged for her to meet Eileen. Eileen kept her waiting a couple hours and then said her mouth wasn’t right, her nose wasn’t right, she’d never be a model. Eileen’s not a bad gal, but the girl left her office devastated and in tears.”

  Cornfeld then met Dovima. After two years at Wilhelmina, she was ready to move on. Just months after joining the Coopers, she’d written a proposal seeking backers for her own business. “The time has arrived for the Dovima Agency to appear,” it said. In fact, it hadn’t, but Dovima kept trying and finally she opened Talent Management International for Cornfeld.

  TMI, as it was known, never really had a chance. It did respectably. But with Cornfeld’s legal problems mounting, he shut it down. Thus Dovima’s career ended. Soon she was a salesgirl at an Ohrbach’s clothing store. After contracting pneumonia, she moved to Florida in 1974 to be near her parents and took a job in a dress shop. “I have put away my false eyelashes,” she said.

  Finally, she found happiness when she met West C. Hollingworth, a bartender in a restaurant on the Intercoastal Waterway where she worked as a hostess. “She finally met somebody who loved her,” says her model colleague Ruth Neumann. “She didn’t care that she was waiting tables.” She married Hollingworth in 1983. The next year she got another hostess job in Fort Lauderdale’s Two Guys Pizzeria. But somehow, Dovima couldn’t avoid a tragic script. Hollingworth died in 1986, and soon afterwards she discovered she had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. For the next four years she remained in Fort Lauderdale, alone, scared, and often “drunk as a skunk,” says model Nancy Berg. Dovima died in 1990. In a show of loyalty that still brings a catch to Eileen Ford’s throat, Dovima named her ex-agent her estate administrator.

  “I went to open her safe-deposit box,” says Ford. “She only had a hundred dollars in it.”

  The next intrigue in the European model war paired Paris Planning’s François Lano and his rival, Dorian Leigh, who conspired to gang up on the Fords. “Jerry had offered to work exclusively with François, and François was stupid enough to believe it!” Leigh says. “They told every agency that. I said to François, ‘Eileen won’t let you get big. She should pay us! We find them, we train them, and we never hear from them again.’ Eileen was double-dealing everybody. She was running every agency in France and Italy!”

  Once the Paris agents started talking, they agreed to take action. “We formed an association of model agents in Paris,” Leigh says. “I felt we should all work together and get proper payment from New York for the girls we were finding and developing.”

  On Lincoln’s Birthday 1966 Leigh and Lano flew to New York to present an ultimatum. The luncheon meeting went badly. Lano and Leigh took the position that they shouldn’t pay commissions because they trained Ford’s young models. “But they wanted us to pay,” says Jerry Ford, “and we wouldn’t.”

  “It was awful,” says Leigh. “Looking me in the face, Jerry said to François, ‘Why work with Dorian? We’ll pay you to work with us. We’ll destroy her.’ François said, ‘Dorian, we made a deal, but since they don’t want you, I’ll make my own deal with the Fords.’ By offering François exclusivity and money, she broke off our very tenuous relationship.”

  Says Lano: “It was impossible to stop working with Eileen.” Nonetheless, Dorian was about to.

  Every couture season in Paris the Fords paid for Dorian to throw a party. But when Eileen called from Rome in 1967 to make the arrangements, she couldn’t get Leigh on the phone. Eileen told Jerry something was wrong. He told her she was being ridiculous. If she didn’t get through from Rome, certainly she’d talk to Dorian in Paris. But a few days later, when Eileen arrived at the Hôtel St. Régis, she still hadn’t made contact. So when Hiro, a Bazaar photographer, suggested they go to the party together, Eileen reluctantly agreed. The fete was in a photographer’s studio. “Dorian was at the door,” Ford says. “She’d had a sip or two. She said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Do you want me to leave?’”

  “You can leave by the door or I can throw you down the stairs” was Leigh’s acid reply. A few days later the entire exchange was printed in a New York gossip column. The Fords still blame Leigh for the item. The twenty-year love affair between the mothers of modeling was at an end.

  The Fords soon began working with a new agency, Models International, formed by the husbands of two European models, Simone d’Aillencourt and Christa Fiedler. Dorian had booked them both and believes their spouses “saw how much money they made and thought, Why should Dorian get ten percent of it?” she says.

  Now, cut off from the Fords and from two of her top earners, Dorian was flying from New York to Paris when Jacques Chambrun introduced himself. He was a literary agent, representing Somerset Maugham and Grace Metalious, the writer of Peyton Place, among others. He also owned 16 magazine in New York. “He had been a priest,” Leigh deadpans, “and he was very interested in models, and he said, ‘I understand that you’re having financial difficulties.’ I gave parties twice a year, and I traveled to find models, and I said to Jacques, ‘I really can’t afford to travel anymore to find models.’ He said, ‘I’d be glad to go with you and pay for it.’ So we went to Copenhagen and then to Sweden, and he paid for it all. In the course of that, I met a Swedish girl, a nurse, and asked her to come to Paris to model. Jacques fell madly in love with her, and she moved into his house on Avenue Foch, and she went to New York, worked with Eileen. In the meantime, Jacques would pay for the receptions that I gave. I gave parties at his house on Avenue Foch for Elizabeth Taylor and the Maharani of Baroda. I cooked cassoulet for a hundred forty people.”

  But Dorian’s parties at Chambrun’s hôtel particulier were known for more than her cooking. Nude girls cavorted in the basement pool, visible through an underwater window in his bar. “I thought, He gets his kicks because he’s so unattractive that he just li
kes to watch beautiful young girls and men having a wonderful time,” Leigh says. “And he liked to feel that I was his friend.” She asked him to lend her $16,000 to pay her outstanding debt to the Fords. Chambrun had his lawyer draw up papers. But then the lawyer called Leigh, “in shock,” she says, and told her Chambrun was buying her agency for $16,000. Dorian called off the deal. Then Chambrun called her. “You’ll still invite me to your parties?” he asked.

  Simone d’Aillencourt (foreground) and Nina Devos photographed by William Klein in Rome in 1960

  Simone d’Aillencourt and Nina Devos by William Klein, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

  By 1970 Leigh’s business was nearing insolvency when, with impeccable timing, Bernie Cornfeld turned up again. “I remember sitting at the lunch table with Dorian and Bernie,” says Jérôme Bonnouvrier, who went to work for his aunt Catherine Harlé in 1967. “He looked at her like a prostitute. He pulled out a pack of five-hundred-French-franc notes and told her he wouldn’t do business with her, but he’d help her. Dorian threw the money back at him.”

  Leigh soon lost her apartment and was forced to sell all her belongings. “She’d entertained all of Paris, and suddenly no one was around,” says Bonnouvrier. Finally Dorian Leigh closed, “merging” with Catherine Harlé to save face and celebrating with a party at Jacques Chambrun’s house, featuring naked girls in the swimming pool.

  “That’s when my darling friends got together and said, ‘You’ve been cooking for your friends for years, you might as well do it for a living,’” Leigh recalls. With investments of $1,000 each from several photographers, she opened a restaurant in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, the next summer, and spent the next four years there. She was well rid of the modeling business. “I could no longer ask a beautiful girl to be a model,” she says. “I couldn’t say it would be a wonderful life.”

  LAUREN HUTTON

  “I’m like, almost a grown-up,” Lauren Hutton says from the vantage of age fifty-one. She’s en route to New Guinea to make a network television show on its natives, among the last primitives in the world. Although she’s spent a quarter century in the Western world’s most sophisticated set, Hutton’s interests have always been native, as evidenced by the tableful of ethnic jewelry, the tusks, skulls, and skeletons that surround her in her loft apartment in Manhattan’s trendy NoHo district.

  Raised in the Florida swamps, the gap-toothed Hutton is as strong as she is striking. Her resilience has served her well. After a ten-year career as one of America’s top models, she made history in late 1973, when she signed the first exclusive modeling contract in the cosmetics business, agreeing to pose only for Revlon’s Ultima brand in exchange for $400,000 to be paid over two years. The number sounds small today, but back then, it was groundbreaking. Richard Avedon, who often photographed her, explained Hutton’s appeal in 1974, when she appeared, on the cover of Newsweek. She’s “the link between the dream and the drugstore,” he said.

  Once she signed her contract, Hutton headed to Hollywood, where she appeared in films like Paper Lion; The Gambler; Welcome to L.A.; Gator; Zorro, the Gay Blade; and American Gigolo. Her association with Revlon ended in 1984. Then Hutton was rediscovered in the late eighties. An appearance in an ad for Barneys New York revived her career and led to a new three-year seven-figure deal with Revlon. In her wake two entire generations of models aged thirty to fifty returned to the scene. “Suddenly,” she says with a happy laugh, “I’m an everyday working model again.” And earning a lot more money than she did the first time around.

  Lauren Hutton photographed by Luca Babini in 1994

  Lauren Hutton by Luca Babini

  “The most important thing about me is that I got an enormous range of experience early on. I knew every economic class by the time I was ten. Mother worked from the time I was born—November 17, 1943. My father left before Mother knew she was pregnant. I was the pregnantee. In my earliest life I lived in Charleston, with my godparents, who were millionaires back when that meant something. Then I was in Miami with an aunt and uncle who were solid middle-middle-class, comfortable and full of love and joy, and that saved me.

  “My aunt Gaga was my caretaker. But I remember that Mother was a major fashion freak. She had crocodile shoes, and she got her hair combed out every day. She was basically raised to marry a rich man. When I was six, mother married Jack Hall, who was an Ozark Mountains Texas-type guy. Hall had some money, and Mother had an inheritance, and the next thing I knew, I was taken off by my mother and this complete total stranger to a mountain in the middle of nowhere in Missouri, where they invested in a development business; but it went bust, and we ended up in a swamp that became part of Tampa. My stepfather got a job as a milkman and worked his way up, but we were seriously poor for a very long time. We ran cottage industries to keep food on the table. We had a nursery in the backyard, and I raised fishing worms. I had a serious live wriggler business.

  “When I was a teenager, I thought I was ugly, tall, and gawky. A lot changed the summer after high school. Boys discovered me. I had sort of turned beautiful or something. But I recently met my class president, and he said, ‘Mary, you weren’t ugly, you were beautiful, but you had ideas. You terrified us.’ I went to the University of South Florida for a year. Then I fell in love with an older man; he was thirty-eight. I think it was because I hadn’t known my father. He came to New York, and I followed him. I thought New York was the center of the world. People came down from there and drove very fast through the swamp and sprayed you with mud. Those were New Yorkers.

  “I got a job as a bunny in the Playboy Club. It was just opening. They already had three Marys, so I became Laurence first, but it was too long to put on the bunny tag, so I remembered the great Bacall and that’s when I became Lauren. I was too young to be a night bunny, so I was a day bunny. I spent the whole day in the dark. After about four months I knew that I had to get out of there. I ended up in New Orleans.

  “I wanted to go back to school. Sophie Newcomb was there, and they accepted me. I looked around for a job. Al Hirt, the trumpet player, had just released ‘Java,’ and he’d bought a club there. The day it opened I got a job there. I was going to school by day, and by night I would put on a gold wig and be a Grecian goddess at Al Hirt’s. I learned more on Bourbon Street than I did at Sophie Newcomb. Practical information. I found out all kinds of things. The police took graft. The mayor and the Mafia would sit at the same table. I served them! It was also a thrilling time. I got about four hours of sleep a night for about a year and a half. After that it got to me. I had a sort of physical collapse. So I ran away.

  “I went back down to Florida, rented a house on the beach with the little money I’d saved, and slept and slept and fed seagulls for two or three months. Then I saw an article about Africa. All the game was disappearing. I decided to catch a tramp steamer there. I borrowed two hundred dollars from my mother, and I took a cheap flight to New York. I landed at Kennedy at like six A.M. I got in a taxi, and I couldn’t remember a single place except Tiffany’s. I had never seen that movie, but that to me was the heart of New York. So he let me off at that corner at seven-thirty in the morning on a Sunday, and there was no one around. I started crying. I didn’t know what to do, and then I finally remembered a girl at the Playboy Club, and I called information, and sure enough, she was there, and she had this great boyfriend named Arnie and he was just a lifesaver.

  “Somehow I found out that the tramp steamer I thought I was taking to Africa wasn’t leaving for quite a while. And to tell you the truth, unconsciously, I knew New York was my beanstalk and I was Jack with my three beans, my two hundred dollars. I understood what money was. I’d seen my mother’s life changed radically because of losing it. I understood very well it brought you freedom. But I had no role models. I couldn’t imagine the life I wanted.

  “I had to get a job, but I didn’t want to cocktail waitress again because it was really debilitating. Arnie showed me how to look in the paper for a job. He pointed to an ad
and said, ‘You can do this. You look like a model.’ Now I’d been told that all my life, but Arnie knew what he was talking about, so I went to Christian Dior. They were about to turn me down when I said the magic words ‘I’ll work for anything.’ So they gave me fifty dollars a week, which was way below the minimum wage. But I got the job. I found an apartment downtown with two other girls. I lived on twenty-five-cent chicken pot pies. My money went for bus fare and dry-cleaning my one dress once a week on the weekend.

  “One day I was walking by Washington Square Apartments. I remembered that a girl who had been in the Playboy Club used to live there. I rang the doorbell, and she was there. Now, for the five or six months that I had been in New York, I had been hearing constantly, as soon as people found out I was single, ‘Oh, you should meet——-!’ So one of the first things this ex-bunny said to me was ‘You should meet Bob Williamson!’ I didn’t think twice about that because I’d heard it so much. Then she took me to the hipster joint downtown. It was called Duke’s Cube.

  “I had not had a single date in New York. I wouldn’t go on dates because I knew I was easy. I’d lived with the first man I slept with, so I was afraid to even go on a date. I was looking for heart and brains and a lot of information. So I’d been interviewing boyfriends over tea at Chock Full o’Nuts. We always went Dutch. I must have interviewed about forty guys! I didn’t like anybody. So we wandered into this little restaurant, and Bob Williamson was there. He knew a lot about a tremendous number of things I was interested in. Everything that I liked the sound of, he seemed to have read every book written on the subject—from Ezra Pound to Harry James to William Burroughs to LSD to anything about Africa. He even knew about bugs and snakes, and I had a bug collection and used to raise snakes. So we started to date. One day we were sitting at the outside table at Duke’s Cube and he said, ‘You’re not really going to Africa.’ I thought, No, I don’t want to leave this guy. I’m not going to Africa.