by Nyna Giles
But by June of second grade I had been absent so much that my teachers couldn’t comment on my reading record.
* * *
SO MANY DAYS I stayed home from school, resting in my bedroom. Mine was the smallest of the three bedrooms in the wing I shared with my sisters. It had slanted high ceilings and a large picture window that faced the garage. The furniture was white, with a canopy four-poster bed and a white bedspread with red eyelet trim. Here I played with my dolls and read my books.
My sister Jill was the one who got me interested in reading, giving me my first Nancy Drew, The Secret of the Old Clock. After that, I begged my mother to buy me each additional book in the series so that I could read them all. I loved the Nancy books with their familiar black-and-yellow spines and the brave girl detective whose life was so boldly different from mine. I’d been in school just enough to get the hang of reading, but after Jill gave me the confidence to read on my own, I started going to the library and coming home with stacks of books. I fell in love with reading, filling the long hours of my days with the stories I found in the pages.
I also watched a lot of TV. In my room, I had a small black-and-white television with a rabbit-ear antenna on the top, or I would go downstairs and watch TV in the den. I was addicted to soap operas. My favorites were Dark Shadows and General Hospital. I became attached to the characters and to their dramas. In the soap operas, children found out that their parents weren’t their parents. Husbands who seemed trustworthy turned out to be cheating on their wives. Siblings stopped talking to one another and stabbed each other in the back. In my own family, tensions simmered below the surface, exploding into arguments in ways I couldn’t understand. In the world of soap operas, the drama was constant and easy to predict. Drinks were thrown in faces, doors were slammed, cars sped away into the night, and everyone said exactly what they thought. You could depend on the characters to be as hurt, angry, and vocal as yesterday, and always at the regularly scheduled time.
News broadcasts also helped to break up the day. I watched the news on ABC religiously at 7:00 A.M., 5:00 P.M., and 11:00 P.M. I loved the handsome newscasters for their firmness, their solemn voices, and their confidence. Bill Beutel and Roger Grimsby were my heroes; no matter what happened, they took the world as they found it and explained it in terms even a child could understand. Back then every night on the news, they would read the body count from the war in Vietnam. Across the country, people were marching and protesting, against the war, for civil rights. I remember when Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, watching the news, seeing Robert Kennedy standing up on the back of a flatbed truck, urging for calm and unity in King’s memory. When two months later Kennedy was also shot and killed, it seemed as if the violence would never end. At home in my room, in my bed, via the little box of my television, I had a window on the strangeness of the world.
If my mother allowed it—if I was well enough and the weather was warm—I was allowed to wander through the woods at the back of our house through the tangled honeysuckle and raspberry bushes that grew on the property. On weekends I might go to play with Fay, the daughter of Sherman’s groundskeeper, who lived next door to the castle and who was two years older than I. But during the weekdays I was mostly alone or with my cat, Little. Little was a gray cat with white mitten paws, and everywhere I went, she would follow me. We’d play hide-and-go-seek in the cattails on our beach. I talked to Little; she was my friend; sometimes I thought she knew what I was thinking. Then we’d wander out onto our beach at the back of our house with its mottled sand, pitted with grasses and a small inlet, looking out across the gray waters of the Sound. There I’d sit on a rock and pretend I was someone else: a princess waiting to be rescued by a prince, or a famous model like my mother. Then, when the light started to ebb out of the sky, I’d go back to the house to see what the evening would bring.
Years later, I reconnected with the daughter of one of our neighbors on Long Island. She told me that she would often ride her bike by our house, to see if she could catch a glimpse of me at the window. “We knew there was a strange girl who lived there but she mostly stayed in her room because she was sickly,” our neighbor told me. “It was like a mystery—what was going on in there?”
CHAPTER 5
Carolyn
My mother in her Barbizon days is a person I barely recognize: so excited, happy, and hopeful, standing at the window of her hotel room looking out over a city that she felt was hers for the taking. She was so completely alone in New York, without any family support or a built-in safety net, yet determined not only to survive but to succeed.
In the evenings, both Carolyn and Grace did their homework. Carolyn wrote the next day’s modeling appointments in her notebook, scrutinizing her map of Manhattan, so she would know exactly where to go and what time to leave to get there. Then she practiced smoothing her hair and applying her makeup with care. Her looks were her currency: her even features, the satin of her hair, the slender figure and tiny waist—these had been her ticket out of Steubenville, and now they were going to be her means of staying in New York. Her appearance might have been her birthright, but Carolyn knew it was up to her to convert it into a career.
Grace was also fighting for a self-made place in the world. Unlike Carolyn, Grace came from money—her father was a millionaire—but that wouldn’t help her if she failed in New York; she’d still have no place to go but back home. Each night, after her classes at the Academy were over, Grace practiced her vocal exercises standing in front of a mirror in her room, a clothespin on her nose. Her instructors at the Academy had told her that her voice was too high and nasal and “improperly placed.” She kept a wire recorder in her room and listened to herself so that she might improve her diction, working to perfect a tone that was lower, with an accent that fell somewhere mid-Atlantic. They were such hard workers, the two of them, building their lives up from scratch in those next-door rooms on the ninth floor.
* * *
THE NEXT TIME Carolyn appeared in a magazine, it was in an advertisement for silverware. This time, she wore a canary-yellow dress, with puffed sleeves and a black ribbon at her waist.
Carolyn learned to model on the job, listening to the photographer’s direction and observing the other, more experienced girls. For some shoots, clothing was provided, but for others you had to bring your own outfits; you were told in advance whether to come dressed for the street or in afternoon dresses or evening gowns. The other models carried around black bandboxes with a leather strap attached where you could store an extra change of clothes and accessories, so Carolyn started carrying a bandbox, too. Instinctively, she understood how to dress a look up or down, adding a jacket, a hat, or an apron, or changing shoes. The photographers appreciated her ability to style herself, delivering exactly whatever the job required.
Carolyn kept booking jobs, and the more jobs she booked, the more photographs she had to circulate to prospective clients, which meant more assignments. Each new appointment was scrawled on the callboard marked CAROLYN SCHAFFNER in the Conover offices. After only three months in New York, Carolyn had appeared in Glamour, Junior Bazaar, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, and Charm. By now, she was making more than enough money to cover her expenses, but even so, she worried about paying her weekly bill at the Barbizon. The reality was that Conover was slow to pay. He had hundreds of models on his books and seemed to barely know their names, let alone how much he owed them. Two months after Carolyn started work for him, she was still waiting for Conover to cut her a check.
Carolyn wasn’t the only model unhappy with Conover’s failure to pay. Many of the girls were talking about a new agency started the year before by the model Natálie Nickerson and her friend Eileen Ford. Natálie was one of the most successful and highly paid models in New York. Blond and towering at five feet ten, she’d initially been with John Robert Powers—another well-established New York modeling agency—but had left in protest after Powers repeatedly failed to pay her on time. Natálie had heard abou
t models in California who were taking matters into their own hands, asking clients to pay them directly. So she set up her own shop with Eileen, a former model booker. Together, the two women had instituted a new payment method. At the end of each job, the model gave an invoice to the photographer, and then the photographer paid the girl directly. After that, the model paid the agency its 10 percent fee. Instead of waiting months to be paid, the model got her money right away.
Natálie had heard about Carolyn’s success as a junior model and suggested to Eileen that they approach her about joining their fledgling agency. And so, one morning in the new year, Carolyn found herself walking across to Eileen’s offices on Second Avenue in the Fifties. Arriving at the dilapidated old brownstone sandwiched between a funeral parlor and a cigar store, Carolyn had to check to make sure she had the correct address. After she confirmed she was in the right place, she rang the bell and went inside, climbing the darkened stairs, then knocking on a red-painted door on the third floor. A voice called out to her to come in, and Carolyn peered around the door, looking for a receptionist’s desk or banks of secretaries. Instead, a tiny woman with a shock of curly brown hair sat in a small room at a folding card table, in front of six black telephones, one of the receivers tucked under her chin.
This was Eileen.
Carolyn sat on the office’s old red sofa while Eileen explained, rapid-fire, how the agency worked. While Natálie was the “face” of the agency, bringing new girls into the fold, Eileen handled the business side, fielding the phone calls, negotiating with the clients, and taking the photographers to task when they failed to pay or made unwanted approaches to her girls. Like Natálie, Eileen was in her early twenties, not much older than many of the young women she represented. She understood the models on her books, knew what they needed from her. At most agencies, models were responsible for every aspect of the job—all the footwork, selling yourself, figuring out where you had to be and when, bringing the right clothing and makeup to the shoot. There was no training, no instruction, and very little support. The girls worked hard for the agency, but the agency gave very little in return. Natálie and Eileen felt that these male agents had gotten things upside down: the agent should work for the model, not the other way around. Eileen saw her role as overseeing every aspect of a model’s career, from how a girl styled her hair to how she moved in front of the camera to the rates she could command.
Eileen understood the junior market well. She had helped style the cover for the very first issue of Seventeen in 1944. After that, she went to work as a model booker for Bill Becker’s photographic studio, the biggest commercial photography studio in the United States. Next she’d worked for the Arnold Constable department store, hiring models for their advertisements and catalogs, negotiating fiercely with the major agencies like Conover and Powers. She knew the business from every angle.
She was also protective.
“No girl on my books will ever be allowed to model lingerie, or appear in cheesecake or bathtub shots,” Eileen declared.
Carolyn felt sure that with Eileen, she would be in excellent hands. Eileen was aware that the teenage market was growing and that she needed more junior models on the books. Carolyn was fresh-faced and petite and had the exact attributes that Eileen was looking for in any girl: wide eyes that photographed well in any kind of light; a straight nose, narrow at the bridge; a physique that was naturally slender; a small waist. Before Eileen would book Carolyn for a job, however, they needed to make one tweak. The problem was her last name. Schaffner was “too ethnic,” too Steubenville, Eileen explained. Carolyn needed something more sophisticated. “Scott” was perfect—short and to the point. And so Carolyn Schaffner became Carolyn Scott.
One of the first jobs Eileen secured for Carolyn Scott was a cover shoot for McCall’s, a glossy monthly women’s magazine with a readership of nearly 4 million. The photographer was Richard Avedon, a young New Yorker with dark thick-rimmed glasses, whom Eileen referred to fondly as “Dickie.” Dickie was twenty-five at the time, and an up-and-comer. The previous year, he’d photographed Natálie Nickerson for his first Harper’s Bazaar cover. Since then, he had gained a reputation around the agency for treating the models better than any other photographer in town. While most of the photographers treated the girls like cattle, to be prodded around, Avedon made the girls feel appreciated. He played music during the shoots, letting the models pick out albums from his collection; he ordered the girls their favorite food to eat. He saw models as his collaborators as much as his subjects, and they loved him for it.
In the cover photograph Avedon took for McCall’s, Carolyn’s outfit and pose are demure, but the look in her eyes is more complex—provocative and questioning. Avedon saw in Carolyn something that no one had noticed before in the girl from Steubenville: her intelligence.
With Eileen’s representation, Carolyn began securing more and more jobs, her fees went up, and she was finally getting paid on time. She had done it. She had secured a place for herself in the city. With the money from her modeling jobs, she knew she could stay on at the Barbizon for the indefinite future.
There was so little she missed about Steubenville, but that didn’t mean she didn’t often think of her mother, Dorothy, still at home in the clapboard house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Dorothy’s days were filled with the labors of taking care of a husband and two children, now without her older daughter to help her. Carolyn decided to take some of her newfound money and send her mother something to help make her life just a little easier. Back home, Dorothy still cooled the milk and butter with an ice block in the larder—and the milk often soured and went to waste. So Carolyn arranged for the latest model of refrigerator to be sent home to Ohio.
* * *
AS THE WEEKS went on, Grace started to see something in Carolyn’s growing financial independence that she coveted. Yes, Grace was fortunate to have a father who paid her way and took care of all her needs, sending checks to the Barbizon and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts to cover her room and tuition each month. But there was a downside to Grace’s family support. Jack Kelly was determined to control and dominate his daughter’s every decision. It was Jack who had insisted that Grace stay at the Barbizon; Jack who had pointed out that she never succeeded at anything and would likely return home again after three weeks in New York. Jack was paying her way, but this meant that he maintained the power, and this put Grace’s ambitions at risk. She knew that if for any reason her father decided to withdraw funding for her studies, she’d be forced to return to Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Carolyn paid her own way and answered to no one.
It was Carolyn who suggested Grace try modeling. She had seen Grace at the hotel, coming back from the shared bathrooms along the hallway, her face wiped clean each evening. She saw the perfect symmetry of her features, the beauty behind the glasses and the headscarves that Grace wore during the day to her classes at the Academy. She felt Grace had potential as a model, so she sent her to see Eileen. Like Carolyn before her, Grace climbed the two flights of stairs to Eileen’s offices and sat on the red sofa, waiting to be appraised. But Eileen wasn’t impressed. Eileen felt Grace wasn’t slender enough, was too commercial for her stable. “Too much meat on the bones,” Eileen later explained. In years to come, Eileen would admit that saying no to the young Grace Kelly was the biggest mistake of her career.
Fortunately, Grace had other connections. Her mother had once modeled for the John Robert Powers Agency, and after being turned down by Eileen, Grace went directly to Powers, who took her on right away. Her first modeling job was a television commercial for Bridgeport Brass pesticide, requiring her to run around the room spraying at imaginary insects. More jobs quickly followed.
* * *
WITH THEIR HARD-EARNED money in their pockets, the girls could afford to have interests. Thanks to her affiliation with the Academy, Grace was able to purchase inexpensive tickets to the shows on Broadway, so they could go to plays and musicals whenever they liked. They started buyin
g tickets for the ballet, too. It was 1948, and the New York City Ballet was in its first season at City Center, only a few blocks from the hotel. They went there whenever they could, falling in love with George Balanchine’s beautiful, long-legged dancers—Maria Tallchief, Marie-Jeanne, Tanaquil Le Clercq. When they left the theater after nightfall, walking out onto Fifty-fifth Street, they were still under the spell of the costumes and movements, the actual world seeming unreal compared to the visions they’d just left behind them.
If they wanted to extend the fantasy, Carolyn and Grace would walk over to the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street, with its mural of the ballerinas of the Ballet Russe in Les Sylphides and Swan Lake on every side. At the neighboring tables, they could hear the chatter of Russian émigrés, exiled by revolution and war. And if they stayed late enough after one of the performances, they might glimpse Mr. Balanchine himself, walking in through the glass doors of the restaurant with a ballerina on either arm, at which point the entire room would erupt in applause.
For two girls in love with the ballet, New York in 1948 was a wonderful place. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was still based in Manhattan, as it had been since the war. The Ballet Theatre was at Rockefeller Center. The film The Red Shoes had just opened its run at the Bijou Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. Grace and Carolyn went as soon as they could, their eyes swimming with the new Technicolor, with its vivid greens, reds, and blues. Growing up in Steubenville, Carolyn had always wanted to take dance classes, but her stepfather wouldn’t allow it. He put his foot down, said they didn’t have the money to waste. Now that she was in New York, Carolyn had her own money and could spend it as she wished. She signed up for classes in the Balanchine method at a nearby dance school and started going to weekly classes. She loved her lessons, the teacher’s insistence on precision and control. She learned that a simple stretch of the foot and leg—a tendu—wasn’t just an isolated movement; it was part of an artistic journey that expressed something about how you felt. You practiced the same stretch over and over, pointing your toe directly ahead of you, then to the side and behind, dozens of times, until the movements became second nature.
