Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (6 page)

Fashion modeling had actually existed for more than three hundred years when John Robert Powers “invented” it. Women wore important clothes in paintings by artists like Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Goya, Sargent, and Whistler. The first recorded instances of models’ selling fashion involved wooden dolls dressed in miniature versions of couture—or hand-sewn—clothes that were sent in the seventeenth century to wealthy dress buyers in the capitals of Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century the first fashion magazines had appeared, showing the work of royal seamstresses like Rose Bertin, a favorite at the court of Versailles.
Le Costume Français
and
Journal des Dames et des Modes
contained early fashion plates. The first known fashion photographs as such were probably taken in Paris around 1840 in Charles Reutlinger’s Maison Reutlinger studios on Boulevard Montmartre. In England David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson photographed Lady Mary Ruthven in the fashions of 1845.

The first true model came along soon thereafter. Marie Vernet started out as a salesgirl in a Paris clothes shop, Gagelin et Opigez. In 1852 she married a salesman named Charles Worth and became his house model when he opened Worth, the first “designer” couture salon, in 1858. When she approached the Austrian ambassador’s wife, Pauline de Metternich, and sold her two crinolines, her husband’s fortunes were assured. He went on to dress Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. Inspired by his wife, Worth pioneered the use of live models in selling his haute couture designs.

The first photographic model of any accomplishment was the Countess of Castiglione, a Tuscan noblewoman at the court of Napoleon III. In 1856 a book of 288 photographs of her by Adolphe Braun displayed her renowned style and wardrobe. She even demurely raised her skirts to show off her shoes.

Technology made photographic modeling something more than a dilettante’s avocation. The halftone process that allows photographs to be printed on the same page as type was patented in 1881 and refined throughout the proceeding decade. In 1892
La Mode Practique
was the first to use halftones to show fashion. A few years later John Robert Powers was born in the farm town of Easton, Pennsylvania, the son of an engineer. As he grew up, worked as a newspaperboy, attended local schools, and caught the acting bug, other key figures were coming onstage as well—all over the map. Adolphe de Meyer was born in Paris in 1868 (as Adolphe Meyer Watson). Edward Steichen was born eleven years later in Luxembourg. Louise Dahl-Wolfe was born in San
Francisco in 1895. Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was born in Leningrad in 1900. The four were pioneers of fashion photography.

At first their subjects were actresses and aristocrats whose names were known to at least some of the public and who were sometimes given the clothes they wore as compensation for posing. Steichen, for example, shot a portrait of the wife of a swell named Condé Nast in 1907. Two years later Nast, an ambitious young man from Peoria, bought
Vogue
magazine. Two years after that Steichen took what he later modestly claimed were “the first serious fashion photographs ever taken.”

Paul Poiret, a Parisian haute couturier, had used his wife, Denise, as his muse and model and had hired others to stage fashion shows on a barge on the Seine. In 1911
Arts et Décoration
commissioned thirteen Steichen photographs of Poiret dresses for an article on “The Art of the Dress.” His models were not great beauties. But Poiret became a patron of fashion photographers and models, and the visual quality of his
cabine
—his private group of models—improved with time.

Ten years later, when Man Ray, the American surrealist, arrived in Paris during the summer fashion shows there, he met Poiret and photographed some of his Orientalist designs. In Man Ray’s autobiography,
Self Portrait
, he remembers his first meeting with Poiret’s models: “They were beautiful girls … moving about nonchalantly in their scanty chemises, stockings and high-heeled shoes…. I tried to look as if I did not see anything. The girls were cool, almost forbidding. All except one black-haired, wide-eyed girl…. She, too, was from New York, studying singing and making her way by modeling.” She agreed to pose for him and said she hoped the photos would be published in a fashion magazine. In fact, they became monuments in the history of photography: Man Ray’s first “Rayographs.” He stumbled upon the process when his darkroom door was accidentally opened while he was making contact prints of the American model.

Baron de Meyer, an admirer of Whistler, Sargent, and Europe’s great court painters, had started working for
Vogue
in New York in 1913, earning $100 a week as the world’s first full-time fashion photographer. He’d dropped his original last name when, despite his homosexuality, he married a woman reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Britain’s Edward VII. “There was always a slight air of mystery about him,” said
Vogue
’s then editor, Edna Woolman Chase, who remembered him as “Von” Meyer. His first model was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the bohemian society matron. His photographs were mysterious, a bit stiff, but always extravagant.

Meanwhile, in 1913 the publisher William Randolph Hearst bought a magazine called
Bazar
—the second
a
was added in 1929—and retooled it as an elite fashion magazine. In 1918 Hearst lured De Meyer from
Vogue
with a higher salary and a promise of work in Paris. The baron’s move began a fashion war between
Bazaar
and
Vogue
that has lasted the rest of the century. The next year Hearst’s newspapers announced—prematurely—the demise of Nast’s British
Vogue
. Chase complains in her autobiography,
Always in Vogue
, that Hearst poached her stars “with money often beyond their worth and beyond what Condé was willing to pay.”

The fashion runway that supermodels now prowl likely came into being at a trade exhibition held in Chicago in 1914—the first recorded instance of a catwalk being built out into the audience to afford a good view of the clothes.
Vogue
organized its first fashion show in New York that year, too, and advertised publicly for models. “They beat our doors down,” Chase said. “The following year, mannequins started to become an important factor in the American fashion scene.” By 1924 French fashion designers had heard the call. Jean Patou decided to recruit in America and held the first model search, finding, among others, Dinarzade, aka Lillian Farley, and Edwina Prue, who was just seventeen. In 1931 Prue married Leo D’Erlanger, an English banker, who later saved Condé Nast from bankruptcy.

Slowly, fashionable magazines began moving away from their first models, actors like Marion Davies, dancers like Isadora Duncan (who posed for Steichen at the Parthenon in a Grecian tunic), and celebrated women like Mrs. Whitney. When
Vogue
next had a fashion show, it imported two professionals, Hebe and Dolores, from the salon of the English designer Lady Duff Gordon, who worked as Lucile. Models in houses like Lucile and Poiret were already marketing themselves with single names, but that may have been because they were considered disreputable, one step above courtesans. Their clandestine affairs with rich aristocrats were the subjects of alternately horrified and fascinated whispers in polite society.

Vera Ashby worked as head model in the Molyneux couture salon. She went by the exotic name Sumurum. “Modeling was considered very fast and loose in France,” she recalled. “We were not received in society. I used to have four or five boys after me at a time. The Comte-de-this and the Vicomte-de-that. Whatever mannequin or young woman was fashionable at the time, they always wanted her.” But designers still treated them in a second-class manner. “Do not speak to the girls,” Poiret would say. “They are not there.”

That soon changed. A whole new fashion business had sprung up between the high-priced couturiers of Paris and mere manufacturers of clothing for Everyman and -woman. It made dresses magazines could “cover.” Powers was already positioned to provide models to wear the dresses. All that was missing was class, and the courtly gentlemen photographers of the era were there to provide it, even as they effected a silent coup d’état against the ruling elite of illustrators.

Edward Steichen joined
Vogue
, replacing De Meyer as chief photographer and De Meyer’s florid style with something crisper. Steichen’s favorite model was Marion Morehouse, who later married the poet e. e. cummings. She “was no more interested in fashion than I was,” Steichen said. “But when she put on the clothes that were to be photographed, she transformed herself into a woman who really would wear … whatever the outfit was.” Condé Nast, still smarting perhaps from the loss of De Meyer, told Steichen, “Every woman De Meyer photographs looks like a model. You make every model look like a woman.”

De Meyer’s career went into decline. Fired by
Bazaar
’s new editor, Carmel Snow, in 1932, De Meyer went to
Vogue
and begged for his job back. “He seemed wasted somehow and his gray hair, which had given him an elegant air, was dyed bright blue,” Chase recalled. Unfortunately for the baron, he “was now known as a
Bazaar
personality. Also his work was sadly passé.” Steichen had just taken the first color fashion photograph and the first photographic
Vogue
cover! Forgotten, Baron Adolphe de Meyer “wandered into the night-dark of opium and cocaine,” according to a Condé Nast history of fashion photography, and ended a broken man. He died in Los Angeles in 1949.

Fashion is a vicious business. Long before De Meyer died, another baron had come on the fashion scene, ready to replace him, and this time his social position was unquestionable. George Hoyningen-Huene moved to Paris in 1923 to work at his sister’s fashion house as a sketch artist. Born in 1900 in St. Petersburg, he was the grandson of an envoy to a past czar of Russia and the son of the chief equerry to the last czar. Hoyningen-Huene’s mother was a product of Grosse Point, Michigan. The family fled prerevolutionary Russia for London in 1916. After World War I Hoyningen-Huene went to Paris. In 1925 he was working as a background designer for the new French edition of
Vogue
when he collaborated with Man Ray on a photo spread. After seeing it, Main Bocher, who was French
Vogue
’s editor before he became the designer
Mainbocher, decided that the baron could take fashion photographs. A modernist like Steichen and a homosexual, like many of his other contemporaries Hoyningen-Huene was far more interested in the photograph than in the girl who posed for it and considered his models “nothing more than clothes-horses.” He was more polite than Cecil Beaton, who joined
Vogue
in 1926. He called models “silly cows.”

Lee Miller probably would have bristled at Beaton’s misogyny. A blue-eyed blonde from Poughkeepsie, New York, she ran off to Paris as a teenager to be an artist. Dragged back by to America by her father, she was saved from being hit by a car by Condé Nast and became a
Vogue
cover girl, working for Steichen. (She was horrified when his pictures of her turned up in an ad for sanitary napkins.) Returning to Paris, she modeled for Hoyningen-Huene and moved in with Man Ray, working in his darkroom. It is said that it was she who opened his darkroom door and created the first Rayograph when something ran across her foot in the dark.

Miller learned to take pictures from Man Ray. (She learned more than that, in fact. He once took her to dinner in the hotel room of a fetishist, who had a girl chained up on the floor during their meal.) She returned to New York in 1932 and became a photographer herself, moving eventually from fashion to reportage. Her photographs of the devastation of World War II were highly regarded.

Indeed, models like Miller helped Hoyningen-Huene and his brethren capture the first commercial evidence of women moving out of servitude toward freedom. Just as high fashion had once bound them in whalebone corsets, designers like Madeleine Vionnet were now freeing them in bias-cut dresses. “Was there no way to render images of women the way you saw them, in their normal surroundings, pausing for a moment in their daily activities and not posing for a photograph?” Hoyningen-Huene asked. The answer was right around the corner, just past the Great Depression.

O
n a small table in the entrance to Hannah Lee Stokes’s house in Cooperstown, New York, there is a black-and-white photo of her by De Meijian. She wears a Mariano Fortuny jacket and dress. She still has the jacket, though it’s a bit worn. On display in the house are paintings of George Washington and several other military men, including some who are her ancestors. Medals they won as far back as the Civil War hang artfully framed on her walls. There are none of Hannah Lee’s medals—photographs by Edward Steichen. She was one of his favorites, but she never talks about it.

Hannah Lee has a scrapbook of her achievements as a model tucked into the bottom of a closet. In it is a clipping from an old New York
Telegram
.
THAT LOVELY
,
ANONYMOUS GIRL OF
“
ADS
”
ADMITS SHE
’
S IN THE SOCIAL REGISTER
, the headline says. “Unwittingly, she has pointed a trend that is now veering gay Junior Leaguers from the chiffon of boudoir and lounge to the jersey of subway and office,” the
Telegram
reported. “It is the new expression; the economic, subjecting the cosmic, urge.”

It was the birth of the modern woman. Stokes was an early model.

“My father’s uncle was General William Tecumseh Sherman. My mother’s father was General Joseph T. Bartlett. My father was a lawyer in Boston. He lost his inherited fortune because of unfortunate stock market investments. After he died, when I was five, mother brought my brothers and me to New York. She took one of those lovely and fashionable brownstone houses at 109 East Fifty-fifth Street and became an interior decorator. Her
name was Bertha Bartlett Sherman. I went to Brearley and then to finishing school near Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

“I grew up during Prohibition. We went to beautiful, extravagant coming-out parties. All those robber barons wanted to spend their money. It was the end of an era. You always knew everybody. But things were changing. My friends would have fainted if someone asked them, ‘What are you doing?’ I was one of the first. I didn’t want to be a fat sponge, sitting around. Natica Nast, Condé Nast’s daughter, said I had to see her father and he’d give me something. So I hotfooted it down there, and Mr. Nast gave me an office. He said, ‘You just call all your friends and get them to subscribe to
Vogue
.’ I did it for a week, and I thought I would go out of my mind. I said, ‘Please, your magazine is wonderful, but I can’t do this.’ He said I should go see Mr. Edward Steichen.

“I kept saying to Mr. Steichen, ‘You don’t want pictures of me, oh, please, no,’ and he said, as though talking to a kid, ‘Allow me to be the judge.’ He took a whole roll of pictures of me, and I went home. That’s that. Then he called and said, ‘
Vogue
wants you.’ I worked exclusively for them, for Mr. Steichen or Mr. Gabor Eder. He was Hungarian. They were of the old school, proper and gentlemanly. Mr. Steichen was so nice. One day he said, ‘It isn’t fair you are tied down to
Vogue
.’ He opened his drawer, and there were letters from different companies, Chesterfield cigarettes, Coca-Cola. He said, ‘I must give them to you.’

“John Robert Powers was just a room with telephones. His head man had seen my pictures. Mother was getting a bit … hmm … she wasn’t too crazy about it. She didn’t want me to sign up with him. But he was a nice man. I rather liked him. We never made friends. I didn’t mean not to, but we went with different crowds.

“In those days girls who came out didn’t go out and get jobs. Some people had been modeling already, but they were—how to put it politely?—stage people. It was all so new. But it caught on. Mr. Powers wanted me to help him get a start. He never charged me anything. He said, ‘You give glamour.’ He intimated that he wanted to get a little more social. He said, ‘You’ll draw them in.’ He only had about three or four models like me. He didn’t want frivolous little silly people with frizzy hair posing for ads. I took people to him. Then they all wanted to get into it.

“I was one of the finalists when Jean Patou came to America, looking for models. There were five hundred girls at first, then they got it down to fifty, and then the final five, and I was one. My mother was furious. She said I couldn’t go. But my uncle arranged for me to stay with an American family. We went over by boat. The arrangements were top of the line. They took good care of us, and Patou’s clothes were so chic. There was a rumor that his mistress was the money behind the business. None of us ever saw her, but that was the rumor. He was always perfectly well behaved, however, and a good thing, too. I was asked to stay a year, but I came home after nine months. When we got back, we were even more popular than before.

Hannah Lee Sherman wearing Mariano Fortuny, photographed by De Meijian
Hannah Lee Sherman by De Meijian, courtesy Hannah Lee Stokes

“Our fees kept going up. At the very beginning I got double what anybody else got. It was a big fat joke, twenty, forty, one hundred dollars. And think what a five-dollar bill meant in those days! This was, after all, just after the crash. I got a thousand dollars once for something where they used my name. It was probably a big billboard. The clients would bring little gifts. Suppose they made a perfume, they’d bring you a box. Or jewelry. Good jewelry, not cheap junk.

“It was all very businesslike. We all had hatboxes. They helped a lot. You just threw everything in. Boy, to this day I can change clothes fast. Powers had a secretary who attended to things. They would call and say, ‘Be at such and such a place, and you won’t need special shoes. Do you have a dog?’ You got paid extra if you brought your dog and your Chrysler car.

“I crashed into the general advertising field, and soon billboards appeared. One even called me ‘America’s Sweetheart.’ I started working for everyone. Pepsodent. Vapex cold remedy. My friends told me, ‘It’s in all the subways.’ I’d say, ‘How awful!’ They’d say, ‘Noooo.’ I’d meet cutout figures of myself in the drugstore. It was the queerest. I’d make extra money on the side doing fashion shows for Lord & Taylor, Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman. That was kind of fun. And gorgeous clothes. I could get them for a song. But you didn’t talk about how you got dresses. You wouldn’t tell some
lemon
who’d talk about it.

“My friends were just fascinated. They would want to come with me. I wanted to do it right and not bring a bunch of pals who’d talk their lungs out. Men were fascinated, but I shoved it away immediately and got on to another subject. What did they know about it? None of the other models were my friends. They were fairly nice. I was never high hat. I just didn’t have anything in common with them. The male models were nice. They were all very poor and courteous. Mother was very upset about them at the beginning. I said, ‘Oh, pipe down.’

“How did people react? Sometimes I’d walk into a restaurant and people would say, ‘That’s the such and such girl.’ I would turn scarlet! At house parties people would stick my ads in frames. I went to terribly chic dinners, and
some man would always say, ‘I’ve seen you before,’ and you’d want to bop him over the head. But I met royalty and diplomats. I became a favorite of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. They had a mansion at Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and boy, did they have distinguished people there. I was always the youngest. I was just twenty. Too bad I wasn’t a little older. I felt like a sap.

“I stopped modeling the day before I married in 1934. He was a state senator, and he owned a Wall Street brokerage house. I had to call John Robert Powers up and tell him. He said, ‘What!’ Everyone was trying to get in, and here was somebody calling up and saying, ‘I’m getting out.’ I could have pursued fashion, I suppose. It would have been so interesting. Instead you fall in love, get married, and move to a dinky place like Cooperstown.

“If we could all stay twenty for years and years, wouldn’t it be fun?”