Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (18 page)

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 York 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.”

The key question wasn’t whether Dorian’s business was viable, but if it could be made legal. Finally, Hervé Mille’s boss, Jean Prouvost, a textile millionaire turned publisher, came to the rescue. After Leigh received another summons to court in 1959, Prouvost suggested that Mille hire his lawyer, Robert Badinter, to defend her. Backed by the powerful magazines, they eventually won the case and changed the laws. “We established that model agencies were different,” Leigh says. Later she opened branches of her agency in London and Hamburg, Germany.

Until that time most of Ford’s models had come from within fifty miles of New York City. “We didn’t go looking,” says Jerry. “They came to us. Then came a flood of girls from California.” Leigh went looking for models all over Europe, and the Fords followed suit. “Eileen started traveling in Germany, because Otte is a German name, and she is very proud that she’s half German,” Dorian recalls. “She became friends with photographers in Switzerland and Germany.”

Today Eileen Ford won’t discuss the trips on which she laid the tracks for the Ford agency’s model railroad from Germany and Scandinavia. “I’m not going to write a manual for every person who wants an agency,” she snaps. “We just went around. It wasn’t hard.” Anna-Karen Bjork, Ford’s first Scandinavian discovery, was working in a drugstore when she won a magazine’s modeling contest in 1960. Ford was a judge. From then on, Ford traveled from Stockholm to Göteborg to Malmö to Copenhagen, meeting photographers, agents, and magazine editors, panning for golden-haired lovelies in dreary cities young girls couldn’t wait to leave.

In agreeing to “trade” models with Dorian, Ford had created modeling’s first career development plan. “Eileen would ship girls who weren’t working to Dorian for a year and bring in Europeans to replace them,” says Rose Bruner, a booker. “It took a while to get rolling, but when those girls came back, they were
hot.
”

In 1958
The New York Times
estimated that the eight biggest agencies in New York had combined bookings of $5 million. Top models were earning as much as $3,500 a week. Flush with success, the Fords, whom the
Times
credited with putting modeling on a “business basis,” had moved from Park Avenue into a town house around the corner after their third child, Katie, was born. In their role as the moral exemplars of modeling, they had their underage models and European imports live there with them. Just back from a trip to Europe, Jerry Ford told the
Times
that the “underfed, indoor, super sophisticated fashion model is fading out of the picture” and the American look was everywhere he went. But in fact, it was the American model who was on the wane—at least in the lofty editorial realm where the Fords operated.

“When I first started, the names were Petersen and Hollingsworth,” says Ford’s secretary, Naomi, Rose Bruner’s sister. “Then all of a sudden it was Monique LeFevbre and Anne de Zogheb. We had a girl with an American name. One day I came in, and she was Caroline di Napoli. I asked, ‘Who’s this?’ and they said she’d gone back to her real name because it had become fashionable to be a European model.” Once, when the Fords went to Europe, Eileen asked Rose Bruner to stay at her house and chaperon the immigrant models. “One of them was fifteen years old,” Bruner recalls. “The most precocious human being I ever met. She never came home until three A.M., and I had to be with her every night or I was in
a lot
of trouble.”

Trouble was all around, even in those more innocent days. “There were hangers-on who wanted to date models, but also a lot of models who wanted
to date men,” Bruner says. “You screened people. Eileen did it. There could have been ulterior motives. It could’ve been somebody with a lot of money, but they weren’t ‘bad.’ They had good qualifications.”

Bobby and Charlie Evans, for example. The two sons of a dentist ran Evan-Picone, a Seventh Avenue sportswear company. Bobby had been a child actor. Beginning at age eleven, in 1941, he performed on hundreds of radio and television shows before founding the rag trade firm with his brother and Joseph Picone in 1951. In 1957 Bob Evans returned to acting; in the sixties he became a movie producer and eventually rose to become head of worldwide production at Paramount Pictures. He made
Barefoot in the Park; Rosemary’s Baby; Goodbye, Columbus; Love Story; Chinatown;
and the
Godfather
films. In 1980 Evans was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of possession of cocaine. But in the late 1950s the Evans brothers were best known as men-around-the-garment-business—or, as some would have it, the varmint business.

The Evans brothers both had a taste for pretty girls. Charlie married the sister of a Ford model. When Bobby subsequently broke up with a girl friend, Charlie’s wife called Rose Bruner for a Ford head sheet—a poster showing all of the agency’s models—and they went over it, hunting for a girl for Bob to date. “Things like that happened all the time,” Bruner says. “We had a guy who was a vice-president at an ad agency who spent half the day outside the agency watching models. He’d call and describe the girls to us for go-sees. That’s how desperate he was to go out with a model.” Eileen Ford tried to set Bobby up with the model named Anne de Zogheb, who married Paul Anka in 1963. “Eileen was devastated when Anne chose Anka over Bobby,” booker Jane Halleran says. Ford loved playing matchmaker. “Eileen wanted all her girls to marry rich husbands,” says April Ducksbury, a London agent. “Then she’d have social friends who were loyal and faithful to her, because not only had they been her models but she found them a husband.”