Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (19 page)

Oleg Cassini was another fan of models, but hardly a contender for husbandhood. Half Italian and half Russian, he was a hereditary count who later became Jacqueline Kennedy’s official dressmaker while she was in the White House. Earlier he had opened a couture salon in Rome after starting his career sketching for Jean Patou in Paris. Cassini used local society girls as his models. In 1936 he came to America, passing through Seventh Avenue en route to California, where he designed costumes at Paramount, married the actress Gene Tierney, and served in the Army before going to work as a designer in New York. Cassini got his models from Paris or discovered them himself. He was invited to Eileen Ford’s once, but never again. “I was too European, too playboyish,” he says. “She told
her models, ‘He’s dangerous.’” Cassini was unabashed in his pursuit of women. “I told the girls I was like a doctor, examining them from all points of view,” he says. “A lot of beautiful women marry their doctors. And you could give them clothes to wear, so it was good advertising.”

In the middle fifties models joined the jet set. “They became part of the movement,” says Cassini. “All the playboys, Rubirosa, Agnelli, were operating the same way. It was de rigueur. You couldn’t arrive in St. Moritz without a beautiful woman. So there was a chase. You had to book your girl for the season. When I’d go to Austria to ski, I always brought two girls with me. Power in life is not money. He who controls women is the most powerful.”

The problem was the Fords expected their girls to behave. “Ford was a family, a school,” according to Cassini. “Her girls had to go out with college guys like her husband. They had the same ties, suits. But girls from Europe wanted more spicy food. They fought against the rigid puritanism of the agents. Particularly Swedish girls. You’d often see them in black parts of the city the agents said were dangerous. Sometimes it excited a girl to violate a commandment.”

Something about modeling seemed to attract women who attracted trouble. “So many tragic lives” is all Richard Avedon will say about the models of his formative years in fashion. “They’re not very bright, you know,” Bill Blass says of the models he’s known. “They have the worst taste in men. Muriel Maxwell, my God, was on welfare before she died. Tragedy after tragedy. They ended up penniless and destroyed.” On the pages of magazines models presented images of perfection. But the real girl behind the controlled image on the page was often a total mess. Nancy Berg was, and proud of it, too. “I want to live my life grandly,” she pronounced to the New York
Journal-American
in 1955. “Grandly?” She laughs, rereading that clipping today in a network television studio where she works as a makeup artist. “I did it druggedly and drunkenly. I did
anything
I could get.”

Berg was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1931. At age three she posed for her first photograph. “It was the first time I got any attention or affection from my mother, and that made me think, ‘This is what I have to do with the rest of my life,’” she said. Her long-separated parents divorced when she was eleven. “My mother beat the shit out of me every day with belts, shoes, boiling coffee,” she says. “I said, ‘This isn’t going to happen anymore,’ and I left.” At fifteen she tossed a suitcase out her bedroom window and ran away from home.

“People had said I was pretty,” Berg relates. “I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘There’s something there.’ I didn’t have many alternatives. You got married, typed, or you were a hooker. I had one asset, my face. I figured if I got on the cover of
Vogue
, I’d be OK. If I was a sweet, pretty thing, I’d be all right in my mother’s eyes.”

With $50 in her pocket, she headed for Florida, rented a room from a family in Fort Lauderdale, and got work as a trick water skier and as a model at Burdine’s. From there she bounced to Chicago, where she met her first boyfriend, the broadcaster Dave Garroway, who later was the host of NBC’s
Today
show. When he moved to New York early in 1951, she followed and checked into the Plaza Hotel.

Berg had tremendous energy. Unfortunately it came from an elixir Garroway introduced her to—“a red liquid called the Doctor,” Berg recalls. “It was pure speed. One sip, and I could conquer the world. With a little Doctor or a vodka, I had the courage to make it. I was just a scared little five-year-old with a birth certificate that said I was twenty-five.” Berg appeared on her first
Vogue
cover six months after hitting New York. “It was such an easy living,” she says. “But after the first few years, the first few covers, and no response from my mother, I got really bored. It’s not intellectually stimulating or spiritually nourishing work. You’re an object, a thing.”

She was earning $40,000 a year, but she didn’t hold on to it. “Brilliant advisers” in the investment business ended up with a lot of her earnings. She went out every night, tossing back vodka tonics, sometimes smoking cigars and dancing barefoot in nightclubs. “I’d go to the theater with a critic like Richard Watts or Harold Clurman, he’d go write his review, and I’d meet Leonard Lyons at Sardi’s, go to E1 Morocco, meet a date, dance till dawn, go home, take a bath, some more speed, and go to work,” she says. “I didn’t sleep for ten years.” Ironically, in 1955, she starred in a television show,
Count Sheep
, that aired at one each weeknight. Designed to help insomniacs, it followed Berg through a bedtime routine that found her cuddling a little dog, changing into a nightie, and then signing off, yawning and counting.

Her suitors were legion, but never special to her, she says. “Do you think anybody went out with me for my mind? Everybody wanted a trophy, the girl of the moment. I was invited to parties by people I barely knew. I went out with Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, Aly Khan, Yul Brynner, George Peppard, Orson Welles, James Michener, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, both Cassinis. I almost married Efrem Zimbalist. Then there were those social freaks, Claude Cartier, Reinaldo Herrera, Peter Salm. I didn’t get fucked because I kept
moving. I was very angry. I was in analysis all the time. Thank God for acting. It was an acceptable way to vent.”

Her strangest suitor was undoubtedly Roy Cohn, the bulldog attorney and closeted homosexual who made his name as counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations during the Red Hunt of the early fifties. She would have Cohn meet her at the Russian Tea Room, and she would show up in a red dress. Once, in a jazz club, Cohn asked for a telephone and called someone to order that the singer they were listening to be investigated. Berg picked up her dessert—cherries jubilee, of course—and dumped it on Cohn’s head.

Berg finally married at twenty-six and was divorced three years later, just after she had a baby. She married again, to a diet doctor “who had these wonderful pills,” she says. “I was never so thin.” But two weeks after their wedding Berg says he beat her
and
her young daughter, and she left him. All along she kept working. While the models Berg knew and lunched with saved their money and had families, she kept playing and paying. “I blew my money on externals,” she says. “A high profile is very costly to maintain. I thought you had to do all that. That’s how you survived.”

Finally she even lost the face that had served her so well. She’d married again in the mid-sixties, to a man with four children of his own. One day one of his sons got high and violent on LSD. “He meant to hit his father, but he slugged me,” Berg says. She lost four molars, chipped fourteen more teeth, and had extensive plastic surgery. “All I was was a face,” she says. “All of a sudden I had no assets. I really started to drink then.” Her analyst treated her with more drugs, “a rainbow of downers, Thorazine, Stelazine, and lithium at the same time,” Berg says. Finally she hit bottom and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Another divorce followed. “My husband didn’t like me sober,” she says.

Berg was hardly alone in her substance abuse. Drinking and pill taking were epidemic in the modeling world. This was the fast lane after all. “A lot of Ford girls went to a Park Avenue doctor who gave us appetite suppressants—nice name, huh?” Berg says. Drinking was the drug of choice, though. “They were terrible, terrible drunks,” Berg says, pointing as an example to Brooklynite Annemarie Margot Elfreda “Sunny” Harnett, an ash-blond Ford star of the era. One newspaper said she epitomized “the clean-living code adopted by the successful model of 1955.” But after she separated from her record executive husband, she grew depressed. Around that time she ran into Gene Loyd, the illustrator and editor, on the street. She put her head on his shoulder and burst into tears. “Wasn’t it fun once?” she asked.

Harnett dropped from sight after that. “So bright and so beautiful,” adds Betsy Pickering. “She got fat, had a mastectomy, and her mind went.” Jerry Ford believes her husband had her hospitalized. “Did she lose her mind?” he says. “I don’t know.” What is known is that in May 1987, although she was only sixty-three, Harnett was confined to a long-term geriatric care facility when a fire broke out in the room she shared with two other women, twenty years her senior. One of them was killed instantly. Harnett suffered second-and third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body. Moved to the burn unit at New York Hospital, she died a few days later, anonymous and unmourned. “It’s a very scary world when all you are is a face,” says Nancy Berg.

Berg calls modeling “a world built on sand.” The sands also shifted beneath Carmen Dell’Orefice.
Vogue
lost interest in her once she reached puberty and her figure developed. Unhappy at this turn of events, she quit the Hartford agency in 1950 and went shopping for a new agent. Eileen Ford turned her down. For the next decade Carmen did catalog work and posed seminude for Vanity Fair, the lingerie company, for fees that reached $300 an hour.

She moved in with Bill Miles, a man she describes as “a hanger-on” to a social group she met at playboy Peter Salm’s Long Island beach house. It was called the Port of Missing Men. Carmen’s first weekend there, the men in the house left her alone. But in secret they’d made a bet on who would bed her first. Miles, whose mother owned a Madison Avenue restaurant, won. “He was one of the golden boys of the time,” Carmen says. “He was stunning. He’d been kept by a woman who died. Her husband hired him to run a farm in Oyster Bay so she could have her lover.” He picked up Carmen’s checks at the agency every week. When she heard that, a horrified Sunny Harnett demanded Carmen get her own bank account. Instead Carmen made a deal with Miles to give her $50 a week to put in a savings account. “I was afraid he’d leave if I disturbed the status quo,” she says. “It’s all to do with an early lack of self-esteem.”

In 1953 Carmen finally joined Ford and had a comeback as an editorial model. As her marriage crumbled following the birth of a daughter, she began traveling to the collections in Paris, where she worked with Richard Avedon and Lillian Bassman for
Bazaar
. In 1958 she met a photographer named Richard Heimann on a shoot. Six months later she married the photographer, who was younger than she. She retired. He left her. At age thirty-two, in 1963, she went back to work. She married again, to a wealthy young architect, Richard Kaplan. By 1966 she’d quit modeling again and called herself the “matron” of their triplex Park Avenue penthouse in New York and a beach house on Long Island’s east end. After “nine wonderful years” together she broke up with Kaplan in the mid-1970s. Carmen was forty-three and desperate. She had a breakdown. But she’d have the last laugh. She went back to work in 1978, did nudes in 1982 at age fifty-one, and is still working today.

Sunny Harnett photographed by Richard Avedon in the casino at Le Touquet, France, 1954
Sunny Harnett by Richard Avedon

Carmen Dell’Orefice photographed by Norman Parkinson
Carmen Dell’Orefice by Norman Parkinson, courtesy Hamilton Photographers Limitec

“I had a lot of fun,” Carmen says. “I did the best I could. My career is atypical.” But her bad luck with men was not. “A lot of [models] were lonely,” says Rose Bruner. “They started at sixteen, seventeen. They never really learned those skills. They weren’t good at getting out and mingling. It was frightening for them. That’s why we did it for them.”