Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (7 page)

H
arry Conover registered as a John Robert Powers model in 1935. He was twenty-four years old and, like his agent, came from the American heartland—Chicago. Like Powers, Conover was charming, too, but there the similarity ends.

Conover was a little
too
charming and definitely no gentleman.

He was born in 1911, and his parents separated soon afterward. His father was a traveling salesman, a bigamist, and a rascal. After his mother tracked her wastrel spouse down and divorced him, she sent Harry away to military school in 1923, hoping he’d become a priest. He dutifully headed for Notre Dame University but lasted only a day. He bounced from Chicago, where he worked in an uncle’s biscuit factory, to New York, where he was a radio soap opera actor and a salesman at Abercrombie & Fitch, to Michigan, where he was a disc jockey, before returning to New York and a job as a tie salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue. One day he went along to provide moral support for a friend who wanted to model. The friend’s fate is unknown. But John Robert Powers signed the green-eyed, wavy-haired six-foot Conover.

Conover was so smooth that Powers soon asked him to introduce new models around. “He knew he was showing himself off, too,” says Powers promo man Bob Fertig. “He was a self-promoter. We got along very well.” Conover was the first, but hardly the last,
rabatteur
in the world of models. The French word refers to the man who leads a hunt, beating the bushes to flush out the day’s prey.

One day Conover met a willowy ash blonde in an elevator in the Chrysler Building, where Walter Thornton’s agency had its offices. “You look like a model,” he told her.

“Not a very successful one,” she replied. She was with Thornton.

“Come with me,” Conover said, leading her to the Powers office on Park Avenue. “We’ll make you the most famous model in New York City.”

Her name was Anita Counihan, and despite heavy legs and a thick figure, she did indeed become the first supermodel, appearing on fifteen magazine covers in a single month. The daughter of Daniel Frances “Bud” Counihan, a sportswriter and artist on the
Betty Boop
cartoon strip, Anita was from Washington, D.C. It was there one night at a Georgetown University dance that she had an encounter with a Powers model. “I suddenly found myself deserted,” she recalled. “I followed the mob to the center of interest. It was a girl named Peggy Leyden. I was just as pretty as she was, but she was a model. So I decided to be a model in New York. My parents were outraged.”

Not for long. While her body wasn’t great, her face was so flawless that a friend of her father’s, war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, nicknamed her the Face. Almost immediately it was on newsstands and billboards across the country. A Broadway bachelor proposed to her with the line “You’re the only woman in the world I’d like to pay alimony to.” She smoked and drank. She ground her teeth when she slept.

A year after she started with Powers, Anita recruited her sister, Francine Counihan, to join her at Powers and then, lured by RKO Pictures, left for Hollywood. As Anita Colby she appeared in a series of films. But by 1937 she was back in New York, modeling and hanging out with Francine at the newly voguish Stork Club, dancing at El Morocco, and chatting with Ernest Hemingway, just returned from covering the Spanish Civil War. “I came in with my little hat box,” she recalled, “and Hemingway was talking about Spain. Well, I didn’t say a thing for an hour, which was an all-time record for me.”

Colby joined Conover when he opened but didn’t stay around very long. “I said to myself, Colby, you better give it up while you’re on top,” she recalled. “A model’s days are numbered.” Late in 1938 she astonished her friends by getting a job as an ad salesperson at Hearst’s
Harper’s Bazaar
. Not only did she become a top money earner there, she also kept modeling, but only for those who’d pay her ever-increasing fee. In 1945 it hit $50 a hour. She eventually got $100.

In 1944 Colby returned to Hollywood as the ringleader and press agent for a gang of Conover models—including sister Francine—who’d traveled west in a special train car to pretty up a movie called
Cover Girl
(on which Conover served as technical adviser). The newspapers followed every step as the Cover Girl Caravan crossed the country to Beverly Hills. There “wolves” howled at
their door, and Mickey Rooney turned handsprings on their lawn. Behind the scenes there was an even wilder circus. Producer Harry Cohn treated the models like galley slaves. They were benched—and virtually imprisoned—for months while Cohn searched for a star (finally ending up with Rita Hayworth). Meanwhile, Colby’s astonishing success with the press—she averaged three magazine covers per cover girl—won her a new job as “Feminine Director” of the David O. Selznick studio.

As an “image consultant” for stars like Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, and Jennifer Jones, Colby made the cover of
Time
magazine. Later she worked for Paramount Pictures; opened a public relations firm; bought and sold the Women’s News Service; wrote “Anita Says,” a syndicated newspaper column, and several books; and appeared on the
Today
show in its early years (with the young Barbara Walters as her scriptwriter). Over the years Colby turned down marriage proposals from Clark Gable and James Stewart (“I’d rather be lonely than sorry,” she’d say), but finally married businessman Palen Flagler at age fifty-six. She lived out her days on Long Island’s North Shore and died in 1992.

When Conover brought Colby to the Powers agency, it was prospering. Although the country was still mired in the Depression, the advertising business was going strong. So, too, fashion: A British edition of
Vogue
was first published in 1916, and a French edition was added four years later.

In 1930 George Hoyningen-Huene picked up a handsome young man in a Paris café. He began seeing him regularly and using him as a model. Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (later known as Horst P. Horst) was the second son of a bourgeois hardware store owner and his eccentric wife. He grew up in a small German town, studied architecture at Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, and toyed with the nascent naturist movement with a nudist girlfriend. Though a local artist once painted him as St. Sebastian, nude and tied to a post, Horst found his countrymen provincial. “That’s why I went to Paris,” he says. “I wanted to find out what there is, you know? I wanted to get somewhere.”

Horst took an unpaid internship with the architect Le Corbusier in Paris, but the work bored him. He preferred wandering the city. After their chance encounter in the café, Horst accepted a weekend in a château with the dapper, difficult Hoyningen-Huene, who soon set the younger man up in a servant’s room above his own apartment.

When they met, Horst had never heard of Hoyningen-Huene’s employer,
Vogue
. But the handsome and muscular Horst was soon assisting Hoyningen
Huene and even posing for him bare-chested in a photo that wasn’t seen for many years. “You didn’t
dare
publish it,” Horst says. Indeed, there was much that fashion photographers couldn’t publish then.
Vogue’s
owner, Condé Nast, even dictated the kind of camera his photographers used. Yet when Hoyningen-Huene introduced his protégé to Dr. Mehemed Agha,
Vogue’s
art director, in 1931, the fact that Horst had never taken a picture didn’t keep him from a job as a French
Vogue
photographer.

In 1935 the temperamental Hoyningen-Huene turned a restaurant table over on Dr. Agha after the art director told him he was badly behaved. Hoyningen-Huene decamped for
Harper’s Bazaar
. Horst was his logical successor as
Vogue
’s chief lensman. Summoned to New York, almost immediately fired (“You are not Steichen!” Condé Nast thundered), then rehired in Paris, Horst spent the years before the Second World War photographing the famous, the wellborn, and the beautiful.

There weren’t many models yet in Paris. “In those days we had no hairdressers, makeup people or modeling agencies,” Horst says. “Girls just turned up or somebody knew somebody. I have no idea what they were paid, but it was very little.” Horst worked with the best, including Marion Morehouse, Lee Miller, Betty McLauchlen, and Muriel Maxwell. Princess Natasha Paley, an aristocratic Russian who married the couturier Lucien Lelong, was one of his favorites. So was another Russian, Ludmilla, who lived on a barge on the Seine River. Horst met her when she delivered some sweaters to his studio, and he talked her into modeling. “At first,” Horst recalls, “Mr. Nast said she wouldn’t be right; she wasn’t elegant. She was a Russian girl, and her nose was too short and thick. Later he nearly wanted to marry her.” The couturier Elsa Schiaparelli fell for Lud, too, and demanded to use her exclusively. Years later Horst tried to find her again and learned she’d run off with a lion tamer.

Horst first photographed Lisa Fonssagrives in 1934. He came to consider her the most professional model he’d ever met. Born Lisa Bernstone in Uddevalla, Sweden, in 1911, she was sent to a cooking school by parents who thought she should be well trained to become a housewife. She had other ideas. She went to Paris, danced in minor ballet companies, and in 1935 married another dancer, Fernand Fonssagrives. “I couldn’t take my eyes away from her,” remembers Fonssagrives, eighty-four, now a sculptor in Little Rock, Arkansas.

One day, in an elevator as Lisa was coming home from a dance lesson, a man asked her to model some hats. “I was terribly shy but flattered,” she later said. Fernand took the resulting pictures to
Vogue
, and another photo session
was arranged, this time with Horst. “I had never seen a fashion magazine,” she said. “I made all my own clothes. I arrived so frightened with my hair long and wild and completely unmanageable…. I had no idea what to do with myself.” At her first shootings with him, Horst recalled, she trembled from set fright. But finally she put her dancer’s skills to work on the photo sets. “The movements I chose in modeling were arrested dance movements. My training gave me terrific control. It was ‘still-dancing,’ really,” she said.

Horst says she started visiting the Louvre, studying statues and portraits to learn how to sit, stand, fold her hands, and smile. “I would imagine what kind of woman would wear the gown,” she said, “and assume different characters. I would look at the cut of the dress and try different poses to see how it fell best, how the light would enhance it…. I was terribly serious about being responsible and even studied photography to learn what the problems might be. I would stand before the camera on a set and concentrate my energy until I could sense it radiate into the lens and feel when the photographer had the picture.”

Fonssagrives liked Horst and Hoyningen-Huene particularly. Despite his imperiousness, she thought Hoyningen-Huene considerate because he used a stand-in while setting up his lights and then had the model led onto his set as if she were part of “some mystic ritual.” Hoyningen-Huene ruled his studio with an iron hand. “No one was allowed on the set in those days,” Fonssagrives recalled. “Not even an editor.” (By the time that changed, Hoyningen-Huene, “bored with it all,” had moved to Los Angeles. He died there in 1968.)

Between jobs Lisa and Fernand traveled. He had a Brownie box camera and took pictures of her dancing, skiing, canoeing, and sunbathing in the nude. When he hurt his back in an accident, he started selling his pictures to magazines. “A lot of money started coming in,” he says. Everyone wanted Lisa. In 1937 Erwin Blumenfeld shot her hanging from the girders of the Eiffel Tower. Jean Moral photographed her parachuting from an airplane. Horst shot nudes of her and, in 1938, helped her husband get work with fashion magazines.

The couple moved to America when war broke out. Fernand started shooting for
Town & Country
. Lisa signed with Powers, but she was so popular she found she could work without an agency and handled her bookings from her husband’s studio. “A lot of top models didn’t have agents,” says Dorian Leigh, who started modeling around the same time. “It was a small world, and photographers knew where you lived and called you.”

Lisa Fonssagrives afloat, photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Lisa Fonssagrives by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

A model of Fonssagrives’s stature might be able to live without an agent, but most models could not. In 1937 a reporter who came calling described the Powers agency in New York as “a madhouse.” There were five secretaries answering seventeen telephones. Powers claimed he’d interviewed half a million model hopefuls in his fourteen years in business. His success had changed the social status of models. Elsa Maxwell, the society hostess, said that while she might give a party without debutantes, she wouldn’t dream of having one without inviting a few Powers Girls. He’d also raised their pay. While starting models were still taking home $5 for every ninety minutes’ work, top Powers Girls were earning as much as $300 a week.

Unfortunately for Powers, success had made him a busy man—too busy to deal personally with all his many models. Conover, for one, began to feel that Powers was inaccessible. Here he was doing his agent’s job, and what was he getting for it? “I saw there was more money at the top,” he said. Conover began thinking of opening his own agency. Anita Colby agreed to switch if he opened. So did Phyllis Brown, who’d started modeling while on a summer vacation from college. Brown’s boyfriend, a tanned blond Yale law student named Gerald Ford, was a Powers model, too. He ended up sharing an apartment with Conover and agreed to invest. Conover and Ford scraped together $1,000 to pay a month’s rent and a security deposit on an office near Grand Central Station. There wasn’t enough money to pay for telephones, so Conover “installed” toy phones in the office, pretending to talk into them to demonstrate how busy his agency was.