Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (15 page)

Early in 1955 Dorian asked Eileen Ford to keep her busy with assignments while she waited for Fon’s return. He bounced in and out of her house in Bucks County but was mostly tied to his family’s purse strings. When Dorian heard that Carroll and Fon had reconciled, she headed back to Paris. “He was living in his flat in Avenue Foch, which was next to his mother’s flat, and he gave me a key to the garden,” Dorian says. “I had to sneak in, and I just suddenly thought, ‘I’m out of my mind. How can I ever make things right?’”

Pregnant again, she tried to kill herself. The doctor who pumped her stomach and sewed up her wrists offered to end this pregnancy, too, but she refused. Fon reappeared and stayed with her until the baby was born. They named him Kim. “Two days after the baby was born I flew to New York to do a series of photographs,” says Dorian.

Suzy met her plane. Suzy’s irresponsibility about money had caught up with her. The Internal Revenue Service was after her for back taxes, and she’d returned home to put her financial house in order. Before she left Paris, Pitou
and Coco Chanel had both cynically urged her to marry a rich man, but she’d refused. Pitou had even tried to “sell” Suzy earlier that summer in the south of France when a playboy made him an indecent proposal. “He was a South American son-of-a with a yacht,” recalls Carmen. “He saw Suzy and Pitou and said, ‘How much for a weekend?’ The Cunt De La Salle named a price. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was very appealing, very sexual, but it was all very self-centered, uncaring, unloving, unconstructive.”

The designer Oleg Cassini knew Pitou De La Salle well. “I kept warning Suzy,” he says. “She told me he was Dostoyevsky in the making. He never worked a day in his life. He wrote the same chapter for years.” Nonetheless, that August Suzy married De La Salle, and they took up residence together in an East Fifty-seventh Street penthouse. At Pitou’s request, she kept their marriage secret. And despite the high profile the Parker sisters had assumed, news of Dorian’s suicide attempt and her out-of-wedlock child didn’t leak out, either.

Dorian’s on-again, off-again affair with Portago continued, although by now he was also seeing Linda Christian, the actress who’d been married to Tyrone Power. Fon told her his divorce from Carroll would soon be final. Dorian’s heart soared. Then he crashed his race car in Mexico in May 1957 and died. Eileen Ford, who’d become a masterful crisis manager for her models, helped the grieving Dorian gather her children and retreat to Paris, where she remained for the next twenty years.

Meanwhile, Suzy went to Hollywood. Her first film appearance was a cameo in
Funny Face
, a 1957 movie starring Audrey Hepburn, as an existentialist turned model, and Fred Astaire, in a role based on Avedon. Avedon, a consultant on the film, suggested Parker play a model in the fashion sequences. Many of the pictures Astaire “takes” in the film were first shot by Avedon of Suzy. By the time the film was released, Suzy was making another movie in California, with Cary Grant, at Audrey Hepburn’s suggestion. Unfortunately Suzy was dreadful in it. “You saw on the screen a terrified girl who didn’t know the setup,” Avedon said. Horst, who hated working with her because she couldn’t hold a pose, said, “In the movie she stood still. It is exactly what I always wanted her to do for me.”

Dorian, meanwhile, was hiding out in Paris, trying to keep Fon’s child a secret and furious at her paramour for “marrying” her in Mexico even though he was still married to Carroll de Portago. Then Suzy revealed Kim’s existence in an interview with the Hollywood gossip Louella Parsons. “Suzy just didn’t approve of me,” Dorian says. “Cary Grant said to her, ‘You must not let your
self be associated with this scandal.’ So she gave an interview saying that we were ‘estranged,’ because she didn’t approve of my having a child out of wedlock. But anyway, that’s how Mother and Daddy found out about Kim. They read it in the newspaper.”

The next time the Parkers made the papers, it was far more serious. On June 6, 1958, Dorian, pregnant again, was in the American Hospital in Paris, trying not to have a miscarriage, when her doctor came in with the Paris
Herald Tribune
. A story on the front page said that her father had been killed when his car was hit by a train in Florida. Suzy, a passenger, had been thrown through the windshield and was in the hospital with two broken arms. That caused another scandal. Suzy had signed into the hospital as Mrs. Pierre De La Salle. “And he denied it!” Dorian recalls. “He thought it was embarrassing to be married.” Within months Pitou returned to Paris as Suzy, even more famous and determined to conquer Hollywood, headed west again.

Their agent, Eileen Ford, wasn’t pleased at that. “They throw you into a pond out there and let you sink or swim,” Ford said. “Our world, fashion, is a very gentle one. We may be a bunch of cats, but we wouldn’t slit your throat.”

“I
want you to meet my wife, the mute,” the actor Bradford Dillman says when he introduces his wife, Suzy, at parties. Once she starts talking, it’s hard to get her to stop, and, as with her sister, Dorian, it’s sometimes hard to know where truth ends and invention begins. “I embellish,” admits Suzy Parker Dillman, sixty-one. “The Kirk-patricks—that’s my mother’s family—will make every story a little bit better, a little bit bigger. I’ve said a
lot
of stupid things.”

Those days are pretty much over now, gone with her modeling career. But Richard Avedon still pops his head in every once in a while, driving up from L.A. in a limo to eat the chocolate chip cookies Suzy bakes in the kitchen of the large white hacienda-style house she, Dillman, and their children share in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. She’s a plumpish housewife with frosted blond hair, a sunburn from a sailing vacation, and a Chrysler Le Baron in the driveway. But it has a “vanity” license plate that reads “
FAKOKTA
”—Yiddish for “dizzy.”

“I was an afterthought. My mother thought I was menopause until she was five months pregnant, and for the next three months she didn’t talk to my father. All my mother had ever wanted was a son. Fortunately for me, she didn’t let Daddy name me Billie Jo. Billie Jo Parker. She named me after three friends: Cecelia, Rena, and Ann. Dorian laid them out that way so my initials would spell CRAP. I had no idea what the word meant! Daddy never called me Cecelia because he hated the name, so he always called me Susie. Later on, when I was working as a photographer for French
Vogue
, they said, ‘S-u-s-i-e, how pretentious!’ So they spelled it S-u-z-y, and then I came back to the United States, and they said, ‘S-u-z-y, how pretentious!’ And I said, ‘Oh, to heck with it.’

Dorian Leigh (
left
) and Suzy Parker photographed by Richard Avedon in Paris, 1950
Dorian Leigh and Suzy Parker by Richard Avedon

“My father was so disappointed in what Dorian had done. She was the oldest and the brightest, and every book he gave her would say, ‘To Dorian, with merit.’ She had wasted her life on what he thought was an inferior way to make a living. And then, of course, hers was the first divorce in the whole of our family, and I’m talking about sixty first cousins—that’s how big our family was.

“Dorian had me come to the studio, and I’d have long braids, and she’d wrap them around my head. She’d do my hair and my makeup. I was so hapless. I was a tomboy from Dorian’s point of view. I don’t think she ever learned how to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. There’s absolutely nothing that she does physically—except for that one important thing! She wanted to help me realize that I was attractive because I didn’t think so. Dorian had friends who were photographers, and she really kind of crammed me down their throats. She created a monster.

“Models were all teeny tiny. I was always tall, so I photographed as if I were older. I was this height already when I was thirteen, so I could start modeling early. The other models all hated me. I drank milk shakes and ate tuna salad sandwiches. Also, my sister was a successful model and had her own agency.

“Dorian lived in a hotel, and her bedroom, the entire wall, floor to ceiling, was photographs of herself! It struck me as the funniest thing I had ever seen in my whole life. Modeling was something I kept a secret. None of my classmates in Florida knew anything about it. I would commute from Florida for the summer and stay with Dorian. She had a house on Lexington Avenue, a brownstone, and if my parents had had any idea of what was going on! I mean, it was just unbelievable. She was going out with Dizzy Gillespie, who was the sweetest man in the whole world. He used to wear a big clock around his neck and he’d let me wear that. Harry Belafonte. I mean, there were legions. She was up to no good! I didn’t approve of her. I think Dorian thinks of me as a prude.

“Dorian and I were both extremely successful and very well known, but we’d still have to wash our face on the airplane or the train for when we’d get off in Jacksonville, because my mother said only whores wore makeup. But she was really very, very proud of Dorian being famous, because Dorian looked a lot like my mother.

“We met the Fords at a restaurant, some dump on Lexington Avenue. Dorian walked in first, heading for the Fords’ table, and I was behind her, and
according to Eileen, she and Jerry said, ‘Oh, my God!’ I was very tall, I had carrot red hair, but they saw the possibilities of my being a model. No question. And that’s how I started—big time. The people who would use me—and I worked an awful lot—were usually the people who made the sleaziest, worst-looking clothes you’ve ever seen in your life, and I’d do ten ads in an hour. I hated that part. The joy was working for
Harper’s Bazaar
or
Vogue
because of the quality of the clothes and the photographers, but they paid nothing. They paid twelve dollars and fifty cents, I think.

“I married in 1950. We were both underage, so we drove to Georgia, and I’ll never forget, I was wearing a bikini bathing suit with a raincoat over it. He was part Cherokee, and he sat behind me in school, and he copied all my work, and he drove Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and he was very good-looking, and it was just a sheer disaster. Basically I was making a lot of money and supporting us. And then that marriage fell apart. We simply married too young.

“Going to Paris the first time was just unbelievable. I’ll never forget that Dick met us at Orly Airport, and he had especially ordered one of those taxi-cabs that has the top that rolls back, so I got to stand up and see Paris! A lot of things I did or said to Dick, like the time in the train station, he incorporated into
Funny Face
.

“Every night Dorian would go out with a different guy, and every night she’d lock me in and I’d have my supper in my room at the Hôtel St. Régis. The first time I went to Paris by myself, she told these three different guys, the worst three leches in France, to look after her little sister. I’ve got to tell you, I fought my way out of more cars! Once I had to walk all the way back at night to my hotel!

“I met Pitou at a party Jacques Fath gave outside Paris for all the New York buyers on that first trip. Dorian got up to go the ladies’ room, and even though she is extremely nearsighted, she could always, even in the darkest room, walk out with the handsomest man. She comes back with this smirk on her face and these two guys, that famous actor Christian Marquand and Pitou. She had picked them up somehow, and they were dressed in a very odd way. I later found out why. Only one of them had an evening suit, so one wore the pants and the other wore the jacket. The sad part is that many years later, after nine years of a disastrous relationship, I found out that it was Christian who wanted to take me to dinner. Isn’t that weird? I went out with the wrong guy. I thought Pitou looked like Ashley in
Gone With the Wind
. I came back to America, went to Mexico, and got a divorce.

“Modeling was always only a way to make money, never any more than that. The only joy I ever got out of modeling was working with Dick Avedon. He was into movement and action, and I never stop talking and moving. I was always in the middle of something, usually talking. What drove Horst crazy was what made Dick happy; he wanted me talking or laughing. I was meant for strobe. But one thing that stuck in my mind constantly was my father’s attitude. ‘I want you to do something with your mind.’ He had been so disappointed that Dorian had not used her great intellect, so I started doing photography. Bob Kaplan at Magnum sent me as a joke to be Cartier-Bresson’s assistant. Cartier-Bresson needed me like a hole in the head! A tall redheaded model dragging along behind him!

“The Fords would send me money. They treated models like the idiots we are, and they would withhold enough money for the moronic models to pay their taxes. I left before the taxes were paid and started borrowing on that money, because I wasn’t making any money as a photographer. I finally did some photographs for
Elle
and for
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and then I got a contract with French
Vogue
, but it was very little money. Every time I’d get broke, I’d model for French magazines. I was making enough to make ends meet and support Pitou.

“Was he a ne’er-do-well? Absolutely. And very pretentious, too—with a title. We registered as Count and Countess De La Salle at the ski lodge. He had been so unfaithful to me, and I didn’t know it! I spent all my money on Pitou. Talk about a gorilla on your back. His mother supported him, and then I supported him, and he was very expensive! He was the most pretentious son of a bitch you’ve ever met. He had his shirts made by an English shirtmaker, and since we were living in Paris, they had to be sent back to London to be washed because of the quality of the water.

“You know what my daughter Georgia said when she finally met her father? She was sixteen years old. She said, ‘Mom, I can understand when you married Pitou you were very young, but nine years!’ I was going to hang in there and make it happen. I was very much in love, or thought I was; it was an obsession. I was going to make this person into a wonderful human being. And I think that’s how most of these models get into trouble, where they marry someone who has to be totally dependent on them. That silly power trip, wanting to be totally in charge, marrying beneath themselves intellectually.

“When I’d left [for Paris], I owed possibly sixty thousand dollars in back taxes. It was more than that when I got back to the United States. A nightmare! I came back to pay it off. Jerry Ford, that sweet angel, paid it up front
and never charged me interest because had it been allowed to keep running, it would have quadrupled. So I worked like a maniac, any job that would pay my hourly fee, and I would only receive about twenty percent.

“I was the best. I was very strong. I could work six days a week, from six in the morning to nine at night, do a lot of quick changes, hit the marks, have an idea when the photographer was looking through the camera, a pretty good idea of how I was framed. If I’m charging somebody X dollars for an hour’s work, I’m going to be on time, my hair’s going to be done, my makeup’s going to be done.

“Dorian became jealous. She has this younger sister who’s very famous, who’s on the cover of all these magazines, and men are paying attention to her. I’m grateful to Dorian for what she did, but I can also understand why she turned against me when she did, and that was because of that age difference. Here she was still modeling, and she was in her forties. Now, that’s very unusual. And here I am in my heyday, and then what really put the lid on the whole thing was that I got into movies.

“I felt it was important that Kim be recognized, that Kim be known as Fon Portago’s son, so when Louella Parsons called, I said, ‘Yes, my sister, Dorian, had a baby with Fon Portago.’ I thought that was very important from Kim’s point of view because who else was going to believe it? I’m the one who took ol’ Fon to lunch in New York City, and I said, ‘You have to recognize him as your son! What if something happened?’

“One of the breaks between Dorian and me was, here she had this illegitimate child, that was bad enough, but damn it, when she’s in Switzerland having the illegitimate child, she’s writing my parents and telling them she’s in a tuberculosis sanitarium. So when I go home to spend Christmas with my parents, I’ve got to listen to these sob stories about poor Dorian dying of tuberculosis. Plus she dumped her children on my mother! I wanted to kill her.

“We’re as different as night and day. Dorian has a very intellectual approach to things. I’m more practical. She sows her oats and never looks back, and when she does look back, she writes her script the way she wants to write it. She’s like a child, like the hub of a wheel, and she sees the world revolving around her.

“One time Dick played a terrible trick on us. We were photographing suits. Dick had decided to put us against white paper, and he had a whole stack of lemon meringue pies on one side of the set, and he had us throw pies at each other, and at the very beginning we said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that,’ but then we really got into it. He understood the competitive thing between
us, the opposite thing between us, he understood Dorian’s possible anger at me, he understood my jealousy of Dorian being the sophisticated woman, and he put it all together with the lemon meringue pies.

“In 1958 I got a letter from my mother. My father had angina, and I came home to be with my daddy, and that’s when the train hit him. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were actually on our way to see my mother, who’d just had a mastectomy. This was like a really bad soap opera. We hit that train head-on. My father died. Our car was thrown up in the air, turned around in the air, and came down on the other side of the train facing in the opposite direction.

“Dorian came back from France for that. She was pregnant. When I was in the train accident, the one thought that went through my head was, if I survive, I want to have children. There was a lot of damage done. I lost my daddy, and he adored me. I was in the hospital for three months. I had broken arms, broken shoulders. I had glass in my eyes and my ears, glass everywhere, but I didn’t have a scratch, except for one little scab on my forehead.