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.
HANNAH LEE SHERMAN
On 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.’
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bsp; “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?”
$15 AN HOUR
Harry 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 HoyningenHuene 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 Hoyninge
n-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.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 6
