Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (20 page)

Of all the agencies that came into being after World War II, only one still exists, the Fords. Today Huntington Hartford is a ruined recluse, Dorian Leigh is dismissed as a cranky born-again Christian, and Frances Gill is dead. In the early sixties Ford co-founder Natálie Paine grew … vague. “I developed a devastating chronic fatigue which changed my life,” she says. “I was often bedridden. It was just not possible, and it broke my heart.” Today she is involved with medical research into the disorder that disrupted her life. After buying Plaza Five from her, Stewart Cowley briefly challenged Ford, but he ended up a limousine driver.

Only Eileen and Ford go on. But their eventual triumph was by no means clear. It was a time of great cultural transition. John F. Kennedy was America’s vital new President; astronauts and cosmonauts were riding rockets into the new frontier, and the Beatles were barnstorming Europe. It was only natural that upheaval would hit modeling, too. For the next few years bookers, models, and modeling executives hopped to and fro like fleas in the fur of the fashion business. No one paid attention to the passing of modeling’s aristocracy. “
Our
era was finished,” says Ruth Neumann. “The Untouchables were not anymore.”

The Supermodels of 1992 photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.
Clockwise from bottom left:
Cindy Crawford, Elaine Irwin, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Yasmeen Ghauri, Karen Mulder, Claudia Schiffer, Niki Taylor, and Tatjana Patitz (
under the ladder
)
Ten Supermodels of 1992 by Patrick Demarchelier

H
er blond hair still seems Sassooned, her lips bee-stung, her lilting accent naggingly familiar, neither totally passé nor fully present. Celia Hammond, fifty-two, is still the British Dolly Bird incarnate,
Darling
and
Georgy Girl
rolled up in one, the embodiment of London circa 1964, the Beatles and the Stones, Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, fab and gear.

At nineteen, in 1961, Hammond was a contract model with editor Jocelyn Stevens’s pacesetting
Queen
magazine, working with Norman Parkinson, the last of England’s gentlemen photographers. Then she had a romance with Terence Donovan, one of the Terrible Trio (with David Bailey and Brian Duffy) who changed fashion photography as radically as Penn and Avedon had when
they’d
seized fashion photography’s crown and scepter in the late 1940s. All three photographers came from the rough and raffish East End of London, a working-class neighborhood not known for its refined tastes. Indeed, refinement was the first thing that went out the window when the East End boys and their girls hit it big.

Suddenly there was pop, and models were its princesses.

It was a time when models no longer lay down with lords and rose up ladies of the manor. Suddenly a model was au courant only if she was coupled with a top photographer, although a pop star wasn’t a bad catch either. Patti Boyd snared the ultimate prize when she married Beatle George Harrison. Jean Shrimpton had famously tempestuous relationships with David Bailey and the actor Terence Stamp. After Donovan, Hammond hooked up with Stamp and comic actor Dudley Moore, before ending up with a genuine guitar hero, Jeff Beck, who played with the Yardbirds before founding his own group.

Hammond and Beck met in summer 1968. A few months later she bought a five-hundred-year-old cottage set in ten acres of woodlands in Kent and announced her retirement from London night life, if not the modeling scene. “It simply bores me to death,” she said then. “I realized last year that I earned an awful lot of money but I didn’t have anything to show for it.” She was looking, she said, for peace of mind.

Today, thin in a thick Irish sweater, Hammond looks more like a stable girl than a pop princess. She runs the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, a registered charity in Sussex, England, that rescues, neuters, and finds homes for stray pets. At night she drives a tiny car between building sites, saving abandoned cats. Though it might make a glamorous fashion photograph—a model in an evening gown, clutching a crying kitten—there is nothing romantic about Hammond’s life. She has little money and operates constantly on the edge of ruin. Ten years ago, after sixteen years with Beck, she was traded in for a younger model. So she is alone, except for the dozens of cats she keeps. But they may be a better breed than those with which she used to play.

“I was born in Indonesia. My father was a tea taster. We went to Australia when I was one year old, and then my mother and I came back. I was left with aunties and uncles, and I was in boarding school. I had a series of jobs that had nothing to do with fashion whatsoever. I was very overweight. Somebody must have seen something under the fat and said, ‘Why don’t you be a model?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t possibly.’ But I went to a few agents. They said, ‘No, no, no, it’s absolutely out of the question. You couldn’t possibly do it.’ Finally the Lucie Clayton agency took me on. I stayed with Clayton all the way through.

“Jean Shrimpton and I started Clayton’s course the same week. Bailey discovered her, took her right under his wing, and she was right at the top, on the cover of
Vogue
immediately. It took me a long time to get there. I’d go around to all the fashion houses and do their collections. Commercial, the low end of the market. Really hard work, six or eight shows a day. I did that for about a year.

“What used to happen was Norman Parkinson would come a couple of times a year and go around to all the agencies and see if he liked the look of anybody. He called them his cattle markets. The agency said, ‘We haven’t got anything for you this time.” He said, ‘I’ll have a look anyway.’ And we were lined up upstairs, and he came down and said, ‘There’s a star up there.’ And they said, ‘Who?’ And he said, ‘Celia Hammond,’ and they said, ‘It couldn’t possibly be.’ I weighed about ten and a half stone. I don’t know what that is in pounds, but it’s very heavy. And totally not looking the way models were supposed to look in those days.

“Within about a fortnight I was to be at the Paris collections. I didn’t eat anything for that period, three weeks I think it was. They still had to send seamstresses to open the back of the clothes and find a way to hold it together at the back and then sew it back together for the shows the next day.

“That was for
Queen
magazine. They put me under contract, and Parkinson and I worked together. When I first started going abroad with Parkinson, I was so green and useless. I was twenty-one going on sixteen, because that’s how you were in the fifties. You didn’t grow up very fast.

“Models have got it pretty easy these days. I’ve done one or two shoots lately recalling the sixties. They say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about your makeup or anything, just turn up. If your hair’s bad, it doesn’t matter; we’ve got people.’ In the actual sixties, when you turned up for a job, you had to have a bag about three feet deep. My left arm was longer than my right arm for about a year after I stopped. You had to carry about six or eight pairs of shoes, your rollers, different pairs of scarves, gloves, jewelry, accessories. You used to have to do a different hairstyle for every photograph. All your own makeup. You had to do everything yourself.

“We were a pretty good bargain, really. What I’d like to know is, at what point did the girls become worth ten thousand dollars a day? I was modeling only because there wasn’t anything else I could have done. I’ve got no qualifications of any sort. I wanted to end up with a bit of security for myself, I wanted to earn enough to buy a house, because obviously a model can’t do it indefinitely.

“I worked with Parkinson for a couple of years. And then, once my contract expired in the early sixties, I started getting other offers. I started working with Terry Donovan, I started working for Bailey and doing
Vogue
, and that was the beginning of the end of Parkinson. I still did the odd thing with him, but it was never the same. He couldn’t handle it when I got involved with Terry. He liked working with a raw canvas. He sort of takes that person over and makes her into something. And your getting involved with somebody else is not part of his picture. You would pick up other mannerisms, and then he would stop using you.

“Bailey and Terry were very sexually oriented. That’s how they worked. They would just tell you to, you know, fuck the camera or something. That’s what their message was, sex and raunchiness. You’ve only got to look at their pictures to see what was going on.

“Donovan was enormously sexy and attractive. He was married when I met him. But he was so good-looking. He was thin and with this curly, black Irish hair and piercing eyes. It was a real cliquey set, Donovan, Duffy, and Bailey, a lot of the young people, editors, models, advertising people, music people, all just a big, great club. We kept ourselves very much to ourselves. We used to go to the same parties, the same restaurants. We’d meet up almost every night. It was far more than just a working relationship. It was a life, yeah.

“There was a rebellion against the sort of morality and the sickness of it all. It was very austere in the fifties. When I started working with Parkinson, I was living at home. I used to go out, come back at night, and I could see my mother’s cigarette, that red cigarette end, burning in the hall, no matter what time I came in. My mother was so terribly strict she did drive me away. Oh, she cried. It was dreadful.

“It was exciting to be able to do what we wanted to do. The new music and the clothes and the sexual revolution. Of course, money was no object in those days, so we used to fly across the world for one picture. Drugs weren’t really that much a part of it, in our lot anyway. But it was very wild. I mean, everybody was very promiscuous. You would have a boyfriend for a few months or weeks, whatever. Then you know he’d be gone, and it was somebody else.

“The work was very hard, but modeling in those days, once you were at the top, you were almost unassailable. If you were in the top half dozen girls, then you would be there for six, seven, eight years. Everybody wanted you—someone that people recognized—and they would always rather have you than take a chance on a new girl who might actually look better or even be better.

“There was not a lot of money then. I think the photographers were paid a lot better than we were. And quite rightly so. I had a jeep, a flat in West Hampstead, and I had a small house; but I never had a lot of money. It was laughable. In those days we used to earn the same sort of money as a professional person, as a doctor or a dentist or something. Not these fabulous amounts like ten thousand dollars a day. Nobody’s worth that.

“The animal rescue work started in London while I was still working. There was a boarded-up house that had a mother cat in it that I’d gone past on the bus. I’d seen this cat up in the windows. And I thought, ‘Well, that can’t be right.’ I came back later with a friend, and we broke into the house and found this cat up in a room with the door shut and three dead kittens. She’d been boarded up in there. And so I took her, and then it just … it was
like a revelation, that this sort of dreadful thing must be happening all over London, this wouldn’t be an isolated incident.

“I started a rescue service for animals in emergency situations like building sites and at the docks and train stations. At first I was just doing it myself, funding everything myself. It just got to the point where I couldn’t finance it any longer. I didn’t have any money left. So now it’s a public charity. And the reason that the charity has taken off now is largely because of what I did then. A lot of people from the sixties are now in positions of great power and influence.

“I carried on modeling for two or three years while I was doing the rescue work. But I just couldn’t combine the two. Having to get up early in the morning looking like a million dollars after not having been to bed till three or four
A.M.
, you know, scrabbling around a building site rescuing animals. There was just one job too many. And then finally I just said. ‘That’s it. Pull down the curtain. I want to get on with what I really want to do.’ I don’t regret modeling for one minute. It was totally superficial, but it was a whole lot of fun.

“By that time I had bought a house in the country, a small house, so I moved down there with all the animals, and Jeff came to live with me. And he stayed there for about seven or eight years, and then he bought a house in Sussex and we moved all the animals over there. And I carried on doing the rescue work for, you know, twenty years or whatever, but eventually Jeff just couldn’t stand it anymore.

“The animals broke us up actually. We both had our crosses to bear. He had my animals, I had his blondes. He had several. He met a blonde that got to him, and she was twenty years younger than me. All middle-aged men do it. I’m glad it happened while I still could handle it.

“People think, ‘Oh, the poor bitch, she hasn’t got a man; she’s got no children; she’s put everything into a child substitute.’ That isn’t true, but I suppose some people might think it could be. I could have gone on modeling perhaps for another four or five years. But it just wasn’t terribly important to me. To actually love what I did, I’d have to have been a really rather extraordinary person. An enormous egotist. I mean, to love standing on a piece of paper in a funny way? You’d have to be so self-obsessed.”