Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  “My parents had moved back to New York. Quentin Reynolds was working at the Evening World with my father. He became the war correspondent, and he was very famous. And he decided that we should meet certain people in New York. And so the whole world was at our feet. It was ‘Twenty-one,’ Stork Club, El Morocco, tea dancing at the Plaza Hotel. We were always more popular than the girls that drank because they sometimes got sick. Then we had their dates along with ours.

  “My mother would never allow us to go anyplace unless we were chaperoned. She would say, ‘You have a date tomorrow night? Well, then you get one for your sister or you can’t go.’ Why we did it, I don’t know, but we’d try to get the worst date for the other one. Isn’t that awful?

  “One weekend Quentin Reynolds gave us his house in Westchester. He was renting from Heywood Broun at the time. My mother was the chaperon. And there was Harry Conover, Harry Ubhiroff, another model, Colby, myself, and I’m trying to think of who else, but there were about eight of us. And that weekend Harry said to my mother, ‘I really want to start an agency.’ I said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him; he’s been saying that over and over.’ And so we said, that weekend, ‘Either you do it or let’s not talk about it anymore.’ He decided to, and we went with him.

  Anita Colby (left) and her sister, Francine Counihan, photographed by John Rawlings

  Anita Colby and Francine Counihan by John Rawlings, courtesy Francine Counihan

  “In those days they didn’t think about your health. They figured they were paying you, and this was a very expensive job, and that was it. I used to faint maybe three or four times a day, wearing fur coats in studios without air conditioning. In the cold weather they’d say, ‘Meet us at the pier,’ and you’d get in bathing suits and jump in the East River when it was below zero. But as you became more important, you could say, ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to do this, and I’m not going to do underwear. That would not be correct.’ I had children. And so I didn’t want my pictures all over the place in negligees and nightgowns and all that. That was a no-no for me. And today they’re nude in Vogue!

  “We always dressed to the nines when we worked. We were never late; we were always on time. And if they said, ‘Bring the jewelry,’ we brought the jewelry, and if they said, ‘Dress as though you’re going to a black-tie dinner,’ we had to bring that kind of dress.

  “Colby was more glamorous than I was. I thought glamour was fine, but I wanted the money. She was doing a lot of Vogue and a lot of Harper’s. I was more commercial, and she was more high-fashion. I made a lot of money. See, for me, being a model wasn’t as important as the money. I had a seven-room apartment in New York, I had two children in private school. I got married in 1936 for the first time. But after our daughter was born, about eight months later in 1941, we separated. I was separated for about eight years.

  “Colby would see somebody who was very attractive, and he’d be attracted to her, and that would last about two weeks. She wanted somebody that was going to take the lead, you know. But in no time at all they were her little puppy dogs. And I think she always said, ‘Getting married is not difficult; staying married is difficult.’ And I think she always felt, ‘If I marry, it must be for life.’ She was very Catholic. She finally married Palen Flagler when she was fifty-six.

  “I remember when Colby went out to the Coast for the first time. They were doing Mary of Scotland with Katharine Hepburn, and the director used some unattractive language, and Colby walked off the set. And she was not a big star. But we were brought up a certain way. I had very strict rules and regulations. Photographers could not be in the dressing room. When I look back over it, it’s a wonder they ever put up with me.

  “We did Cover Girl in 1943. There was Jinx Falkenburg, Colby, me, fifteen of us all together. Cover Girl was produced by Harry Cohn. Oh, he was a monster. He decided to put us all in one house together where he could see that nobody could get out. So we stayed in Marion Davies’s home in California. He only let us out to go shopping.

  “Colby and I were friends of Cary Grant and [his then wife, the heiress] Barbara Hutton. And they would give a dinner party and invite us. Cohn would say, ‘I don’t want any of the girls to go. And if they do go, I want a guest list.’ Remember, he was not that accepted in society out there. Barbara Hutton didn’t have to give a guest list to Harry Cohn. Finally he decided that Colby could go, but nobody else could. Cohn put policemen at the gate so that we couldn’t go. He said it was because of the reputation of the picture.

  “I was incensed. I said to the other girls, ‘We can go. We’ll go two at a time as though we’re going shopping, and when we get back’—we had to be back at a certain time—‘we’ll each say we’re Anita Colby,’ because she was allowed to do whatever she wanted to do. So they each said, ‘I’m Anita Colby,’ when they came back. ‘But Anita Colby just went in.’ ‘How dare she use my name!’ And the next one, and the next one. All of a sudden I come along, and the guard says, ‘I have at least six Colbys up there right now.’ So I say, ‘I think that’s disgusting for somebody to use my name. Wait till Mr. Cohn hears about this.’ Colby came in after us, and they wouldn’t let her in. They called Cohn. Cohn got out of bed and came over, and it was Anita Colby.

  “Finally I said to him, ‘This is ridiculous. My mother and father weren’t this strict. And I’m not staying here.’ Then all the girls decided to get out, and Cohn was in a rage. He said, ‘She’s the troublemaker.’ I said, ‘Yes, I certainly am, and I plan to do it for the length of time I’m here, if you don’t release me.’ He was a most repulsive man. So arrogant. He was paying us, I think, a hundred dollars a week. And everybody could have made that in no time at all. For a month it was fine, but seven months?

  “I got married again in 1949 after a trip to Europe with Colby. We sailed on the Queen Elizabeth with Rita Hayworth, a maharaja, the Churchills. I met my husband on that trip. Dior and all of them wanted me to model for them over there, and he wouldn’t allow it. He said they had very bad reputations.

  “I stayed with Harry Conover until I quit. He was smart, he really was. But then he got into some trouble, I don’t know how, and when I left the agency, a lot of money was owed to me, a couple of thousand dollars. Harry said, ‘Bring your books in.’ But my husband was successful, and he just felt, ‘Why go through all that? Forget it.’”

  $25 AN HOUR

  “The only magazines I read were Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, and those only intermittently. My dear, I was an intellect!”

  It was 1944, and for Elizabeth Dorian Leigh Parker, becoming a model was an act of prefeminist rebellion. A degree in mechanical engineering from New York University had helped the young woman win a job as a tool designer, fighting World War II at home at Eastern Aircraft, a defense plant in New Jersey. She was the only woman in a room with eighty men; more than a living, breathing Rosie the Riveter, she was their group leader. But the men made twice what she did. Refused a raise, she quit, only to learn that under wartime regulations she wouldn’t be able to work anywhere else—at least not as an engineer.

  So Dorian got a job as a promotional copywriter at Republic Pictures in Manhattan, where a co-worker soon had an idea: Dorian was pretty enough; why didn’t she try modeling?

  “As far as I was concerned,” she says, “all of the models in the magazines looked Chinese and terribly sophisticated. I didn’t wear makeup. I was sure that was not me.” But she agreed to try, and one lunchtime she joined the crowd in Harry Conover’s waiting room.

  “What’s your name?” a man suddenly demanded. “You want to be a model?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m the type.”

  “I’ll tell you if you’re the type,” Harry Conover snapped. “How old are you?”

  “I’m going to be twenty-four in April,” she answered.

  “Don’t tell anybody that!!” said Conover. “You’re nineteen, and that’s over the hill. Can you go to see some people
this afternoon?”

  She had to go back to Republic, but the next day Parker appeared as instructed at the studio of Louise Dahl-Wolfe. A woman barked, “Go home, come back tomorrow, and don’t change your eyebrows!” Dorian thought the woman was crazy. How could you change your eyebrows? But she returned, and the barking woman, an eccentric editor named Diana Vreeland, put her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar’s June 1944 issue. “So I was a model,” Dorian says, “but I was ashamed about it. At parties a guy would say, ‘And what do you do, little girl?’ I’d say, ‘I’m in advertising.’ I was such a snob.”

  Dorian soon found herself at the center of an image revolution. The only job requirement was that she look right for the times. No questions asked. “I feel like a fool,” Vreeland said a year later. “Somebody just told me that you have two children. I thought you were seventeen years old!!”

  “There’s so much water under the bridge. You’ll never, never be able to tell all of it,” says Dorian, the most influential, the most larger-than-life photographic model in the seventy-year history of the business. She uses her real last name, Parker, these days and admits to being seventy-four years old. Careworn, with soft brown hair and sad periwinkle blue eyes, Dorian has lost her looks but not her bite.

  She started two modeling agencies (including the first ever in France), but she’s ended up “the poorest entrepreneur in the world,” she says, tooling around in a Ford Escort with smashed windows and sixty-six thousand miles on the odometer. Though her sister, model Suzy Parker, once joked that Dorian’s autobiography, The Girl Who Had Everything, should have been called “The Girl Who Had Everyone,” she’s ended up alone. And although she was one of the most loved models of her time, her memories are laced with bitterness and hurt, and her relationships are roiled with mixed feelings. Dorian’s former agent and business associate Eileen Ford calls her “a pathological liar.” Her sister, Suzy, is happiest when she doesn’t call at all.

  “Dorian was ahead of her time,” says model Carmen Dell’Orefice. “She did things her own way. But in a social context she was outrageous beyond being. Everyone knows she screwed the Eastern and Western worlds. We all felt people took advantage of Dorian. It was shocking and possibly embarrassing to Suzy, who lived a different way.”

  Dorian Leigh was born on a farm in San Antonio, in either 1917 (according to Suzy) or 1920 (according to Dorian). Raised by strict parents who approved of neither smoke nor drink, she finished high school at fifteen and went to Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. She was engaged to three men there when she married a fourth. “To me it didn’t mean anything,” she says.

  Thrown out of Randolph-Macon for cohabiting with her husband, she stayed with him long enough to have two children, then left him and moved to Metuchen, New Jersey, to live with her parents while she earned her degree at NYU. She worked at Bell Labs, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Eastern Aircraft. But she was still something of an innocent when she arrived on the fashion scene.

  “I was commuting to New Jersey,” she recalls. “No matter how many dates I had a night, and I usually had a dinner date and a late date, I would then go to Penn Station and get home. The next morning I would drive to the station in Trenton and leave my car there and take the seven fifty-one A.M. back to New York.” She truncated her name to Dorian Leigh for her parents’ sake. “My mother and father thought modeling was so low-class that I shouldn’t use the last name Parker.”

  One of her first jobs was with Horst P. Horst, who’d left Paris one step ahead of the Nazis, resettled in New York, and joined the American Army. He was still in uniform the first time he shot Dorian. “I was madly in love with him, I really was,” she says. “And that was when I found out what a homosexual was, because the advertising woman who had booked me for this job said, ‘My dear, it’s a lost cause.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s not married!’ And she said, ‘Yes, he is, to a photographer named George Hoyningen-Huene.’”

  Dorian believes she was the first working model to shoot with an eager young Richard Avedon, then a bespectacled newcomer at Bazaar. “He got the clothes at Henri Bendel because he said he’d booked Dorian Leigh, and all the time he was taking pictures of me in his little Merchant Marine uniform, he was saying, ‘You’re a famous model.’”

  In fact, she wasn’t yet, but she was about to be.

  It was one of those rare moments in history when everything was made over. World War II brought both bad and good. In America the fashion industry was hit with staff reductions, fabric restrictions, price controls, and the loss of communication with Paris, still thought to be the source of all style. But this set the stage for the emergence of the American sportswear industry after the war. Centered in New York City’s Seventh Avenue garment district, a native fashion business rose to the occasion and rewrote the rules of getting dressed for a generation of optimistic victors.

  The new mood and new fashions were reflected in profound changes at the major fashion magazines. For models and photographers, those changes opened up new worlds of possibilities. Carmel Snow had left Vogue, where she worked under Edna Chase, and joined a moribund Bazaar in 1932. Her first act was to make the émigré Alexey Brodovitch her art director. Severe money troubles had already caused Condé Nast to lose control of his magazines to bankers in 1929. Now Snow’s defection set the abstemious publisher reeling—literally. It is said he got drunk for only the second time in his life. “The crown princess had abandoned him. Everything was based on her,” says Alexander Liberman, who became Vogue’s art director and later the editorial director of all the Condé Nast magazines.

  Brodovitch and Snow created “a remarkable magazine” for Hearst, according to Liberman. “It had more style and class than Vogue, which was extremely conservative. In many ways, I had to follow.” Brodovitch published Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, André Kertesz, Bill Brandt, and Brassaï and ran articles and stories by the greatest writers of the time. Vogue fought back, banning the work of the defectors, poaching illustrator Christian “Bébé” Berard and, later, fashion editors like Nicolas de Gunzburg and Babs Simpson. But until S. I. Newhouse bought Condé Nast in 1959, “it was not a healthy situation,” Liberman says. “Control was in distant hands, and there was very little money.” Liberman was also saddled with Edna Woolman Chase, the aging pioneer who held on to Vogue’s editorship until 1952.

  Meanwhile, Snow and Brodovitch used Hearst’s financial vigor to their advantage, snapping up new talents. For the next quarter century Bazaar was considered the leading fashion magazine. It never beat Vogue’s advertising revenues and only rarely sold more copies, but its stunning, disturbing Brodovitch layouts set a high new standard and redefined the genre.

  A Hungarian sports photographer named Martin Munkacsi moved to New York and began to take snapshotlike blurry-action pictures for Bazaar. Soon Toni Frissell started doing similar work for Vogue. A debutante and sportswoman, she rose to prominence when Cecil Beaton, whom she’d assisted, was dismissed from Vogue after penning anti-Semitic remarks in a drawing. She, too, switched to Bazaar during the war, only to quit fashion photography in 1958, after Brodovitch’s successor dared to look through her viewfinder. Skirmishes between magazines and photographers over creative control have always been in fashion.

  In 1935 a Leica camera with a 1/1000-of-a-second shutter speed was introduced and allowed outdoor location fashion photographs for the first time. Kodachrome film arrived that same year. In 1937 Diana Vreeland’s arrival as a fashion editor at Bazaar brought another kind of color. A grand grotesque with Roman coin features, Kabuki makeup, and enormous style, Vreeland enlivened fashion for fifty years. She later wrote a famous column, “Why Don’t You …,” in which she dispensed advice like “Have a furry elklined trunk for the back of your car?”

  In fact, that elk-lined world was gone. As American arms and soldiers headed to Europe in the early 1940s, fashionable Gypsies, White Russians, and French aristocrats were flitting in the other direction. They’d played by rules of their own until Hitle
r forced them to play by his. In 1939 many of them opted for safe haven in America. Horst P. Horst left Paris. Vogue closed its doors there the following year, when the Nazis took control of the city. Erwin Blumenfeld, a Vogue photographer, was put in a concentration camp but escaped and arrived in New York in 1941.

  Liberman, who’d been art director of an influential magazine in Paris called Vu, joined Vogue in 1941, as did Norman Parkinson, a spindly, mustachioed British dandy. Both Irving Penn, who’d assisted Brodovitch, and Richard Avedon, who later studied under him, took their first photographs in 1944. George Hoyningen-Huene had grown old. He quit Bazaar the next year.

  During World War II some illustrators—perhaps sensing that their day had passed—joined with catalog photographers to form their own model agency, the Society of Models. “They didn’t want to pay advertising rates,” says Dorian Leigh. “They all grumbled about that.” Natálie Nickerson—an incredibly long-necked young woman—joined the Society of Models in 1945. Within months she was working regularly for Frissell, Hoyningen-Huene, and Dahl-Wolfe, and Vogue’s Irving Penn and John Rawlings. She also worked for fashion stores like Henri Bendel, Saks, Russeks, and Arnold Constable. She called herself Natálie. Just Natálie.

  The Society of Models was a mess, as the preamble to its 1946 model catalog attests:

  After rather a tempestuous beginning, the Society of Models, Inc. is at last coming into its own. We have suffered through the growing pains of a new organization and now feel that we can proudly hold up our heads and present to you our models…. It is the purpose of this bureau to eliminate the friction that has existed in the past between models and the users of models…. We shall in fairness to our clients start our new talent at our basic rate…. [W]e do not increase our models [sic] rates without prior notification of the clients who have been using the services of these models…. We have recently added two more cubicle offices for casting and bookkeeping … to eliminate the noise and confusion which pervades at our booking desk with its ever busy buzzing of telephones….