Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (10 page)

No models attended his funeral.

A
nita Colby’s sister, Francine Counihan Okie, was a lady, dignified and proper. She offered a drink before a lunch of deviled egg and rolled slices of ham. She wore a nautical print dress, gold, red, and blue against white, and a gold necklace, bracelet, and ring. Her gray hair was worn off her face. Her husband, Jack Okie, an OSS operative during World War II and an international businessman afterward, puttered in and out of their house in Rhode Island. A swimming pool shimmered beyond a set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors. Although she was being treated for the cancer that would claim her life in October 1994, that spring she gave no sign that she was suffering. Like most of the models of her time, even approaching her death, she wore her charm and beauty like an impenetrable suit of armor.

In a small room upstairs in her home is a chest of drawers covered with decoupage—cutout and lacquered photographs and magazine pages—that are all that remain now of her thirteen years as a model with John Robert Powers and Harry Conover. There is a photograph from a
Life
magazine article naming Counihan one of America’s ten best-dressed models, a Chesterfield ad drawn by Bradshaw Crandall, another showing Counihan with a cigarette dangling in her lips, a photo from
Town & Country
, a shampoo ad, a Louise Dahl-Wolfe photo, a
Mademoiselle
cover, a photograph from the Stork Club. On the walls are photographs and paintings, several by her sister, whom she called Colby and admired greatly. She nonetheless pointed out that she modeled for far longer and implied that she probably made more money than her more famous sister. “Oh”—she seemed to sigh—“but that was a hundred years ago.

“We lived in Washington, D.C., when we were young. Colby designed, she drew, she’d design our clothes, and my mother was very capable of sewing, and
she’d make the things that Colby would design. Sometimes I wasn’t as crazy about the outfits that she had in mind, but she’d say, ‘You must.’ I’d say, ‘People turn around and look at me all the time.’ And she’d say, ‘The day they stop looking, you start to worry.’ Colby was always in the future, you know. She might be here, but she was always thinking of someplace else. Woodward and Lothrop is a department store in Washington, and she modeled there, and she got a taste of wanting to be a model. Colby wanted to work. I didn’t. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m never going to work, I’m having a wonderful life tea dancing and all that kind of thing.’

“Colby started in ’34 with Walter Thornton. There was an ad in the paper, and my mother went over with her. The minute they saw her they said, ‘This is it.’ She would walk into a room and everybody else could go home. And she was bright, very very bright. Then she went on a job—the first job she had—and Harry Conover was with her on the job. And he said, ‘What are you doing at that agency? That’s an awful agency.’ Then she went with Powers. Thornton was nothing. Powers had everyone. You didn’t go anyplace else but Powers. A week later she was on everything. I mean, they had her on magazines and billboards and everything.

“Colby started me in ’35. Conover said, ‘Have her come with you on one of the jobs and I’ll talk to her.’ I was eighteen, and Colby was nineteen. Conover said, ‘You’re crazy if you don’t start modeling. There’s so much money in it.’ Well, in those days it was five dollars for an hour and a half. So I went to Powers. He was very interested in people, and he was interested in you being successful. He was a great morale builder. I went into everything. Fashion shows; Sears, Roebuck;
Vogue; Harper’s Bazaar;
all the catalogs. I went to Canada, and I went to Arizona—any place that there was money.

“My parents had moved back to New York. Quentin Reynolds was working at the
Evening World
with my father. He became the war correspondent, and he was very famous. And he decided that we should meet certain people in New York. And so the whole world was at our feet. It was ‘Twenty-one,’ Stork Club, El Morocco, tea dancing at the Plaza Hotel. We were always more popular than the girls that drank because they sometimes got sick. Then we had their dates along with ours.

“My mother would never allow us to go anyplace unless we were chaperoned. She would say, ‘You have a date tomorrow night? Well, then you get one for your sister or you can’t go.’ Why we did it, I don’t know, but we’d try to get the worst date for the other one. Isn’t that awful?

“One weekend Quentin Reynolds gave us his house in Westchester. He was renting from Heywood Broun at the time. My mother was the chaperon. And there was Harry Conover, Harry Ubhiroff, another model, Colby, myself, and I’m trying to think of who else, but there were about eight of us. And that weekend Harry said to my mother, ‘I really want to start an agency.’ I said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him; he’s been saying that over and over.’ And so we said, that weekend, ‘Either you do it or let’s not talk about it anymore.’ He decided to, and we went with him.

Anita Colby
(left)
and her sister, Francine Counihan, photographed by John Rawlings
Anita Colby and Francine Counihan by John Rawlings, courtesy Francine Counihan

“In those days they didn’t think about your health. They figured they were paying you, and this was a very expensive job, and that was it. I used to faint maybe three or four times a day, wearing fur coats in studios without air conditioning. In the cold weather they’d say, ‘Meet us at the pier,’ and you’d get in bathing suits and jump in the East River when it was below zero. But as you became more important, you could say, ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to do this, and I’m not going to do underwear. That would not be correct.’ I had children. And so I didn’t want my pictures all over the place in negligees and nightgowns and all that. That was a no-no for me. And today they’re nude in
Vogue!

“We always dressed to the nines when we worked. We were never late; we were always on time. And if they said, ‘Bring the jewelry,’ we brought the jewelry, and if they said, ‘Dress as though you’re going to a black-tie dinner,’ we had to bring that kind of dress.

“Colby was more glamorous than I was. I thought glamour was fine, but I wanted the money. She was doing a lot of
Vogue
and a lot of
Harper’s
. I was more commercial, and she was more high-fashion. I made a lot of money. See, for me, being a model wasn’t as important as the money. I had a seven-room apartment in New York, I had two children in private school. I got married in 1936 for the first time. But after our daughter was born, about eight months later in 1941, we separated. I was separated for about eight years.

“Colby would see somebody who was very attractive, and he’d be attracted to her, and that would last about two weeks. She wanted somebody that was going to take the lead, you know. But in no time at all they were her little puppy dogs. And I think she always said, ‘Getting married is not difficult; staying married is difficult.’ And I think she always felt, ‘If I marry, it must be for life.’ She was very Catholic. She finally married Palen Flagler when she was fifty-six.

“I remember when Colby went out to the Coast for the first time. They were doing
Mary of Scotland
with Katharine Hepburn, and the director used some unattractive language, and Colby walked off the set. And she was
not
a big star. But we were brought up a certain way. I had very strict rules and regulations. Photographers could not be in the dressing room. When I look back over it, it’s a wonder they ever put up with me.

“We did
Cover Girl
in 1943. There was Jinx Falkenburg, Colby, me, fifteen of us all together.
Cover Girl
was produced by Harry Cohn. Oh, he was a monster. He decided to put us all in one house together where he could see that nobody could get out. So we stayed in Marion Davies’s home in California. He only let us out to go shopping.

“Colby and I were friends of Cary Grant and [his then wife, the heiress] Barbara Hutton. And they would give a dinner party and invite us. Cohn would say, ‘I don’t want any of the girls to go. And if they do go, I want a guest list.’ Remember, he was not that accepted in society out there. Barbara Hutton didn’t have to give a guest list to Harry Cohn. Finally he decided that Colby could go, but nobody else could. Cohn put policemen at the gate so that we couldn’t go. He said it was because of the reputation of the picture.

“I was incensed. I said to the other girls, ‘We can go. We’ll go two at a time as though we’re going shopping, and when we get back’—we had to be back at a certain time—‘we’ll each say we’re Anita Colby,’ because she was allowed to do whatever she wanted to do. So they each said, ‘I’m Anita Colby,’ when they came back. ‘But Anita Colby just went in.’ ‘How dare she use my name!’ And the next one, and the next one. All of a sudden I come along, and the guard says, ‘I have at least six Colbys up there right now.’ So I say, ‘I think that’s disgusting for somebody to use my name. Wait till Mr. Cohn hears about this.’ Colby came in after us, and they wouldn’t let her in. They called Cohn. Cohn got out of bed and came over, and it was Anita Colby.

“Finally I said to him, ‘This is ridiculous. My mother and father weren’t this strict. And I’m not staying here.’ Then all the girls decided to get out, and Cohn was in a rage. He said, ‘She’s the troublemaker.’ I said, ‘Yes, I certainly am, and I plan to do it for the length of time I’m here, if you don’t release me.’ He was a most repulsive man. So arrogant. He was paying us, I think, a hundred dollars a week. And everybody could have made that in no time at all. For a month it was fine, but seven months?

“I got married again in 1949 after a trip to Europe with Colby. We sailed on the
Queen Elizabeth
with Rita Hayworth, a maharaja, the Churchills. I met my husband on that trip. Dior and all of them wanted me to model for them over there, and he wouldn’t allow it. He said they had very bad reputations.

“I stayed with Harry Conover until I quit. He was smart, he really was. But then he got into some trouble, I don’t know how, and when I left the agency, a lot of money was owed to me, a couple of thousand dollars. Harry said, ‘Bring your books in.’ But my husband was successful, and he just felt, ‘Why go through all that? Forget it.’”

“T
he only magazines I read were
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
, and those only intermittently. My dear, I was an intellect!”

It was 1944, and for Elizabeth Dorian Leigh Parker, becoming a model was an act of prefeminist rebellion. A degree in mechanical engineering from New York University had helped the young woman win a job as a tool designer, fighting World War II at home at Eastern Aircraft, a defense plant in New Jersey. She was the only woman in a room with eighty men; more than a living, breathing Rosie the Riveter, she was their group leader. But the men made twice what she did. Refused a raise, she quit, only to learn that under wartime regulations she wouldn’t be able to work anywhere else—at least not as an engineer.

So Dorian got a job as a promotional copywriter at Republic Pictures in Manhattan, where a co-worker soon had an idea: Dorian was pretty enough; why didn’t she try modeling?

“As far as I was concerned,” she says, “all of the models in the magazines looked Chinese and terribly sophisticated. I didn’t wear makeup. I was sure that was not me.” But she agreed to try, and one lunchtime she joined the crowd in Harry Conover’s waiting room.

“What’s your name?” a man suddenly demanded. “You want to be a model?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m the type.”

“I’ll tell you if you’re the type,” Harry Conover snapped. “How old are you?”

“I’m going to be twenty-four in April,” she answered.

“Don’t tell anybody that!!” said Conover. “You’re nineteen, and that’s over the hill. Can you go to see some people this afternoon?”

She had to go back to Republic, but the next day Parker appeared as instructed at the studio of Louise Dahl-Wolfe. A woman barked, “Go home, come back tomorrow, and don’t change your eyebrows!” Dorian thought the woman was crazy. How could you change your eyebrows? But she returned, and the barking woman, an eccentric editor named Diana Vreeland, put her on the cover of
Harper’s Bazaar’s
June 1944 issue. “So I was a model,” Dorian says, “but I was ashamed about it. At parties a guy would say, ‘And what do you do, little girl?’ I’d say, ‘I’m in advertising.’ I was such a snob.”

Dorian soon found herself at the center of an image revolution. The only job requirement was that she look right for the times. No questions asked. “I feel like a fool,” Vreeland said a year later. “Somebody just told me that you have two children. I thought you were seventeen years old!!”

“There’s so much water under the bridge. You’ll never, never be able to tell all of it,” says Dorian, the most influential, the most larger-than-life photographic model in the seventy-year history of the business. She uses her real last name, Parker, these days and admits to being seventy-four years old. Careworn, with soft brown hair and sad periwinkle blue eyes, Dorian has lost her looks but not her bite.

She started two modeling agencies (including the first ever in France), but she’s ended up “the poorest entrepreneur in the world,” she says, tooling around in a Ford Escort with smashed windows and sixty-six thousand miles on the odometer. Though her sister, model Suzy Parker, once joked that Dorian’s autobiography,
The Girl Who Had Everything
, should have been called “The Girl Who Had Every
one
,” she’s ended up alone. And although she was one of the most loved models of her time, her memories are laced with bitterness and hurt, and her relationships are roiled with mixed feelings. Dorian’s former agent and business associate Eileen Ford calls her “a pathological liar.” Her sister, Suzy, is happiest when she doesn’t call at all.

“Dorian was ahead of her time,” says model Carmen Dell’Orefice. “She did things her own way. But in a social context she was outrageous beyond being. Everyone knows she screwed the Eastern and Western worlds. We all felt people took advantage of Dorian. It was shocking and possibly embarrassing to Suzy, who lived a different way.”

Dorian Leigh was born on a farm in San Antonio, in either 1917 (according to Suzy) or 1920 (according to Dorian). Raised by strict parents who approved of neither smoke nor drink, she finished high school at fif
teen and went to Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. She was engaged to three men there when she married a fourth. “To me it didn’t mean anything,” she says.

Thrown out of Randolph-Macon for cohabiting with her husband, she stayed with him long enough to have two children, then left him and moved to Metuchen, New Jersey, to live with her parents while she earned her degree at NYU. She worked at Bell Labs, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Eastern Aircraft. But she was still something of an innocent when she arrived on the fashion scene.

“I was commuting to New Jersey,” she recalls. “No matter how many dates I had a night, and I usually had a dinner date and a late date, I would then go to Penn Station and get home. The next morning I would drive to the station in Trenton and leave my car there and take the seven fifty-one
A.M
. back to New York.” She truncated her name to Dorian Leigh for her parents’ sake. “My mother and father thought modeling was so low-class that I shouldn’t use the last name Parker.”

One of her first jobs was with Horst P. Horst, who’d left Paris one step ahead of the Nazis, resettled in New York, and joined the American Army. He was still in uniform the first time he shot Dorian. “I was madly in love with him, I really was,” she says. “And that was when I found out what a homosexual was, because the advertising woman who had booked me for this job said, ‘My dear, it’s a lost cause.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s not married!’ And she said, ‘Yes, he is, to a photographer named George Hoyningen-Huene.’”

Dorian believes she was the first working model to shoot with an eager young Richard Avedon, then a bespectacled newcomer at
Bazaar
. “He got the clothes at Henri Bendel because he said he’d booked Dorian Leigh, and all the time he was taking pictures of me in his little Merchant Marine uniform, he was saying, ‘You’re a famous model.’”

In fact, she wasn’t yet, but she was about to be.

It was one of those rare moments in history when everything was made over. World War II brought both bad and good. In America the fashion industry was hit with staff reductions, fabric restrictions, price controls, and the loss of communication with Paris, still thought to be the source of all style. But this set the stage for the emergence of the American sportswear industry after the war. Centered in New York City’s Seventh Avenue garment district, a native fashion business rose to the occasion and rewrote the rules of getting dressed for a generation of optimistic victors.

The new mood and new fashions were reflected in profound changes at the major fashion magazines. For models and photographers, those changes opened up new worlds of possibilities. Carmel Snow had left
Vogue
, where she worked under Edna Chase, and joined a moribund
Bazaar
in 1932. Her first act was to make the émigré Alexey Brodovitch her art director. Severe money troubles had already caused Condé Nast to lose control of his magazines to bankers in 1929. Now Snow’s defection set the abstemious publisher reeling—literally. It is said he got drunk for only the second time in his life. “The crown princess had abandoned him. Everything was based on her,” says Alexander Liberman, who became
Vogue
’s art director and later the editorial director of all the Condé Nast magazines.

Brodovitch and Snow created “a remarkable magazine” for Hearst, according to Liberman. “It had more style and class than
Vogue
, which was extremely conservative. In many ways, I had to follow.” Brodovitch published Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, André Kertesz, Bill Brandt, and Brassaï and ran articles and stories by the greatest writers of the time.
Vogue
fought back, banning the work of the defectors, poaching illustrator Christian “Bébé” Berard and, later, fashion editors like Nicolas de Gunzburg and Babs Simpson. But until S. I. Newhouse bought Condé Nast in 1959, “it was not a healthy situation,” Liberman says. “Control was in distant hands, and there was very little money.” Liberman was also saddled with Edna Woolman Chase, the aging pioneer who held on to
Vogue
’s editorship until 1952.

Meanwhile, Snow and Brodovitch used Hearst’s financial vigor to their advantage, snapping up new talents. For the next quarter century
Bazaar
was considered the leading fashion magazine. It never beat
Vogue
’s advertising revenues and only rarely sold more copies, but its stunning, disturbing Brodovitch layouts set a high new standard and redefined the genre.

A Hungarian sports photographer named Martin Munkacsi moved to New York and began to take snapshotlike blurry-action pictures for
Bazaar
. Soon Toni Frissell started doing similar work for
Vogue
. A debutante and sportswoman, she rose to prominence when Cecil Beaton, whom she’d assisted, was dismissed from
Vogue
after penning anti-Semitic remarks in a drawing. She, too, switched to
Bazaar
during the war, only to quit fashion photography in 1958, after Brodovitch’s successor dared to look through her viewfinder. Skirmishes between magazines and photographers over creative control have always been in fashion.

In 1935 a Leica camera with a 1/1000-of-a-second shutter speed was introduced and allowed outdoor location fashion photographs for the first
time. Kodachrome film arrived that same year. In 1937 Diana Vreeland’s arrival as a fashion editor at
Bazaar
brought another kind of color. A grand grotesque with Roman coin features, Kabuki makeup, and enormous style, Vreeland enlivened fashion for fifty years. She later wrote a famous column, “Why Don’t You …,” in which she dispensed advice like “Have a furry elklined trunk for the back of your car?”

In fact, that elk-lined world was gone. As American arms and soldiers headed to Europe in the early 1940s, fashionable Gypsies, White Russians, and French aristocrats were flitting in the other direction. They’d played by rules of their own until Hitler forced them to play by his. In 1939 many of them opted for safe haven in America. Horst P. Horst left Paris.
Vogue
closed its doors there the following year, when the Nazis took control of the city. Erwin Blumenfeld, a
Vogue
photographer, was put in a concentration camp but escaped and arrived in New York in 1941.

Liberman, who’d been art director of an influential magazine in Paris called
Vu
, joined
Vogue
in 1941, as did Norman Parkinson, a spindly, mustachioed British dandy. Both Irving Penn, who’d assisted Brodovitch, and Richard Avedon, who later studied under him, took their first photographs in 1944. George Hoyningen-Huene had grown old. He quit
Bazaar
the next year.

During World War II some illustrators—perhaps sensing that their day had passed—joined with catalog photographers to form their own model agency, the Society of Models. “They didn’t want to pay advertising rates,” says Dorian Leigh. “They all grumbled about that.” Natálie Nickerson—an incredibly long-necked young woman—joined the Society of Models in 1945. Within months she was working regularly for Frissell, Hoyningen-Huene, and Dahl-Wolfe, and
Vogue
’s Irving Penn and John Rawlings. She also worked for fashion stores like Henri Bendel, Saks, Russeks, and Arnold Constable. She called herself Natálie. Just Natálie.

The Society of Models was a mess, as the preamble to its 1946 model catalog attests:

Natálie photographed by her husband, Wingate Paine
Natálie by Wingate Paine, courtesy Natálie Paine

If Natálie’s experience was in any way indicative, the anonymous author had reason to be defensive. “They were sweet, dear, ineffective people,” she says. Some of Natálie’s clients suggested she switch to Powers. Though Grace Kelly briefly modeled for the agency before becoming an actress and a princess, not long afterward the Society of Models failed. “Why would a model join an agency that’s going to sell her for less?” asks Eileen Ford, who was a stylist at Arnold Constable.

Powers charged more, but “they were worse,” Natálie recalls. “They collected our money for us, and I had thousands owed to me. I couldn’t pay my rent.” When she confronted Powers, he didn’t know her name. “His secretary whispered it into his ear. That started things going in my brain.” She decided to take over her own billing and printed invoices, which she asked her clients to sign. “When I got the checks, I would make out a check for ten percent to Powers for their commission.” But Natálie’s pique only increased with her income. “They didn’t understand the business they were in,” she says. “There was a great big vacuum that needed to be filled.”