After she spent a stint in secretarial school, Patchett’s parents sent her to college, but she wasn’t prepared. Her roommate looked at her one day and said, “You’re so unhappy, why don’t you go to New York and be a model? Just get up and go look in the mirror!”
Her parents weren’t pleased, but Patchett prevailed. She headed off to New York in February 1948, moved into a Methodist home for girls for $13.50 a week, and signed with Harry Conover. She paid for her own test pictures and then “traipsed the streets,” she says. Her first job was with Mademoiselle. She thinks she was paid $12.50 an hour. “Whatever bookings I got at Conover I had to get myself. You just went from studio to studio to drop off your test pictures. He had five hundred girls. I don’t think he paid attention to any of them.”
In March 1948, while working for the Ladies’ Home Journal, she met Natálie, who said, “You ought to get out of Conover and go with Eileen Ford.”
Jean Patchett photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Jean Patchett by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York
Patchett recalls, “I went to Second Avenue, to a red door in a walk-up, and I go into this room, and there’s Eileen Ford sitting at a card table, in an icecream chair, with about six phones on the card table, two phones on her shoulders, and talking away into a third, and I came in the door, and I said, ‘I’m Jean Patchett.’”
Ford turned in her chair. “You’re as big as a horse,” she bellowed.
Patchett, who weighed about 127 pounds, burst into tears.
“I lost weight. Eileen made appointments. I was working—immediately! White gloves, my dear. I dressed every morning to go to work in white gloves. My first cover on Vogue was September. The next one was October, on Glamour. The following November I moved into the Allerton House. When I was living at the Allerton House, Barbara Mullen was living there, too. Some cover had just come out on the stand, and I was just full of myself. Barbara and I were having a whiskey sour, and she said, ‘Look, just get off that high horse! Who in the hell do you think you are anyway?’ I didn’t realize I was being such an obnoxious woman. That just brought me right down, and after that I think I became very modest about the whole thing and realized that really, it was nothing more than a tabloid on the newsstands that’s going to last for about a week and it’s going to go to the trash heap! And I just never let it go to my head again.
“I went to Cuba with Life magazine. My Life cover was January first of 1949. After my trip to Cuba I went to South America with Penn.
“I’d done only one sitting with Penn in New York. I didn’t even know who he was. We get to Lima, and we’re there for five days, and we don’t take a picture. We had thirteen outfits to do for Vogue Patterns, and I was getting kind of nervous because I thought maybe my face was turning green or something. I thought he didn’t like me. We’d get up at five-thirty in the morning for the mist, and he’d look in his little Rolleiflex, and nothing would happen. He just couldn’t take a picture. Finally, we went to this café one day, and I had on this lovely hat and cocktail dress, and there’s a young man sitting there, and I’m sitting with a glass of wine, and I kind of just said, ‘Oh, the hell with it,’ and I kicked off my shoe and sat back. I thought, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ I’m sitting there eating my pearls, and he said, ‘Stop!’ And it was the most horrible sound I ever heard in my life, because what he wanted me to do was not to be pose-y. He wanted me to do things that I would do if I was sitting talking to a young man, and that was the whole secret, and it just went from there. It’s interesting today to look back on it. We really made history. To have five pictures of yourself hanging in the Museum of Modern Art! I didn’t know that I was going to be doing that!
“As we kept working, he’d tell me little stories. In New York he would get me in front of the white paper, and he would said, ‘OK, it’s intermission at the theater, and your young man has gone out to get you an orangeade, and it’s been an awfully long time, and you’re standing there, and you’re waiting for him, and you can’t find him.’ So my neck would get longer and longer, looking for my young man! There was always a story behind every picture.
“I didn’t belong to Penn. I belonged to Vogue. You couldn’t work for Harper’s and Vogue at the same time when I was working. If you went to work for Harper’s, you couldn’t work for Vogue anymore! I did work for Dick [Avedon], but I don’t know, I always felt inadequate. He jumped around too much for me. Penn was a serene person and quiet, always chasing the bluebird. We’d take five hundred pictures on one outfit. It would be a whole day. We had thirteen outfits in Lima, and we took thirty-two hundred pictures! I don’t think he ever took a model anywhere after that.
“I knew nothing about Dorian. [Penn and I] were very fond of each other. We had a very good time together. I didn’t even realize that he had been seeing Dorian. When we were in Lima, I think he was seeing Lisa; he was getting letters from Lisa. We were in the elevator one day, and I said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a wonderful long letter,’ and he said, ‘Yes, from my tailor!’
“The only time [I met Dorian] was when I first started at Vogue in May [1948]. I was working for [fashion editor] Bettina Ballard, who I adored. She loved me because I called her Miss Ballard, and I’d always say ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am’ to her. We didn’t have cubicles in that dressing room, and Dorian was out on the set, being photographed, and she came back in, and she said, ‘That dress is mine. Take it off!’ Here, I’m really a meek person, and I’d heard of Dorian Leigh and she kind of scared me! Luckily Mrs. Ballard walked in right behind her, and she said, ‘Now, Jean, we’re ready to take you onto the set.’
“I did not mix business with pleasure. I never dated any photographers, ever, like Billy Helburn or whatever. Oh, Billy was a naughty boy! God! But he adored me, and I adored him, and I never had any trouble with him. But he would do such awful things—burps and wheezes in the studio—and I’d say, ‘Bill Helburn, if you don’t stop that, I’m out of here!’ He’d try to sneak in the dressing room when we all had no clothes on. I always had a petticoat on, a slip. He never had a chance!
“I was twenty-one years old. I was dating a lot of guys. Young Gussie Pabst from Milwaukee, the Pabst Brewing Company. Tim Ireland. Jimmy Magin from the fuse box family. I met my husband, Louie, even before I went with Eileen and Jerry. He was working at Macy’s on their training program. Then he went to the New York Trust Company and was an executive vice-president. We saw each other for three years, and we became very good friends. If I wanted to go to ‘Twenty-one’ for dinner, I’d call him up, and I’d pay our way. I was going on trips to Paris with Vogue. I went with Mrs. Ballard and Norman Parkinson and actually began to realize that the person I was missing was Louie Auer!
“After we were married, I gave all my money, all my checks, to Louie, and he gave me back five hundred dollars a month to pay the maid, the rent, my taxis. I would bring home checks for fifteen hundred dollars a week or more. I think the best I ever made was fifty thousand dollars a year. But that’s nothing today.
“I didn’t travel much after that. We were married when I went to do the collections in ’53. I went to Spain with Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and he came over. Our first child arrived in ’59, and Amy arrived in ’62, and I worked, but I found that I couldn’t really be three people. It was impossible, to be the wife, the mother, and the career gal. I don’t know how women do it, I swear!
“The last photograph that I took was in ’68, and it was one of my favorites of all time. But I’m so glad I didn’t live in that era because I don’t think I would have made it. Or in today’s world, either. The new Vogue is out, this little girl is on the cover, the skirt’s up to here. Who, at the age of forty, is going to wear that? I just think that things are not as elegant as they used to be.”
$40 AN HOUR
The woman who made Jean Patchett cry, and then made her one of the world’s top models, was born Eileen Otte in 1922. She grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, went to
Barnard College in New York City, and worked briefly as a model. She joined Harry Conover’s agency “because I was a real live college girl and Mademoiselle was publishing a college issue,” Ford says. “I made five dollars an hour, which my father thought was highly suspicious. I was on the cover of the Columbia Minerva Knitting Book, and you want to know why? I was the only person in the agency with a pair of white ice skates.”
That was as good as it got for Eileen Otte, model. She graduated from Barnard in 1943, met a photographer named Elliot Clark, and told him she could handle his books and correspondence—even though she couldn’t do long division and her father’s office staff had typed her college papers. Nonetheless, she got the job. Among other tasks she booked his models.
The next summer she met her future husband, Jerry Ford. Although he shared a name with Harry Conover’s onetime partner, future President Gerald Ford, Eileen’s catch was born Gerard, the New Orleans-raised son of a river-boat pilot. A Notre Dame football player, he’d dropped out of college to attend officers’ school at Columbia, where he was training to become one of World War II’s ninety-day wonders. In November 1944 the couple eloped to San Francisco, where Jerry waited to ship out with the Navy.
Returning to New York while her new husband “was floating around on a ship,” as she puts it, the newlywed got a job as a stylist at the studio that shot the Sears, Roebuck catalogs. “I coordinated, numbered, packed, and shipped clothes to Arizona,” she recalls. “Then I spent twenty-five cents on an eraser, and they asked who told me to spend the money. I put a quarter down and went back to Great Neck.” Her next job was as a stylist and copywriter at Arnold Constable, a Fifth Avenue specialty store, where she produced newspaper ads and catalogs and met more models. Then she went to work for the Tobe Report, a fashion industry newsletter. “I was notably unsuccessful there.” She laughs.
Jerry Ford came home from the service in March 1946. The couple planned to move to South Bend, Indiana, that September so he could finish school. Then, in June, Eileen learned she was pregnant. Suddenly everything changed. Eileen Ford denies it, but Dorian Leigh recalls being questioned closely by the young stylist at a studio one day. Ford wanted to know how Dorian planned to compete with Powers and Conover. Dorian said that top models needed secretaries, not agencies.
Ford had also been talking to Natálie. “She booked me for a shoot at Arnold Constable, and we became friends,” the model recalls. Before Jerry came home, Natálie sometimes had an extra bed put in her room at the Barbizon, and Eileen would sleep over. “I told her I wanted to open an agency, that nothing was being done right,” Natálie says. “Models were treated as though they worked for the agencies, not as if the agencies worked for them. There was no career planning, no individual advice on makeup, hair, clothes, or anything else. We talked about things that had happened to me, because I was out there, and how it could be done better. It was first come, first served with no control. Models could be handled with more attention paid to who they worked for. This was a whole new concept that broke the monopoly of Powers and Conover.”
That summer, while Jerry Ford studied accounting at Columbia, Eileen’s conversations with Natálie led to an offer. “As I couldn’t get a job doing anything else,” Ford says, “I took a job as a private secretary for Natálie and Inga Lindgren, a Swedish model.” They each paid her $65 a month to take their bookings. Though she wasn’t yet licensed and legal, Eileen Ford became a model agent that fall.
“Our plan was to gradually evolve,” says Natálie, who agreed to become Ford’s rabatteuse. “I was influenced very much by the fact that Bijou and Dorian didn’t really get the established girls. We needed to prove that we had a lot to offer that models didn’t know they were missing. I realized that for any new operation to be successful, they had to have at least one top girl, and I was the model of the moment. It was decided I would be a silent partner because I could be more effective as a happy model with Eileen, which I was. We were not exactly open and straightforward about it, but on the other hand, we were benefiting the industry tremendously.”
Soon Ford was taking bookings for eight models. Eileen’s father gave her and Jerry an apartment in his credit and collection company’s building on Lexington Avenue and a tiny space on the ground floor to set up shop. There was a garden out back, and Eileen put phones there and started taking bookings. “Conover and Powers went crazy trying to get the police after her” for running a clandestine agency, Dorian Leigh recalls. Eventually Ford got a license.
Jamie, the first of the Ford’s four children, was born in March 1947. When Eileen went into the hospital, Jerry Ford took over the business. And when he got a close look at it, he saw there might be a future in it. “I find all this very glamorous,” he says. “I’m not from New York. I thought models were the most incredible things in the world.”
“And they are,” Eileen adds quickly. Still, she was reluctant. “Nothing could have interested me less,” she says, scowling.
Jerry prevailed. “Eileen was very good at it,” he says. “Avedon booked Eunice Sherman one day and took her to Long Island and ran over an hour. He stopped at a filling station to call Eileen, and she tore him apart. ‘No more models if you can’t get them back on time!’” Another time Eileen sent a model to meet Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who wasn’t there. “When I make an appointment, I expect you to be there!” Ford thundered at the eminent photographer. Says Ford’s husband: “The amazing thing is, they put up with it.”
Everyone agreed that Eileen was awfully good at agentry. “I used to think, even if this woman loses her address book, she’ll still be in business,” says Natálie. To this day Ford can reel off models’ phone numbers from the 1940s. “I was very good at recommending models,” Eileen admits. “Let’s say the Wool Bureau called and needed someone who could wear Norell well. I knew who could. And I’m fanatic about getting people to the right place at the right time.” If she was sometimes blunt and hard, as with Patchett, it was necessary if she was going to succeed against two powerful men like Powers and Conover. She was a woman in business. There were precious few precedents in the world at large. And none, except in London, where Lucie Clayton had reigned for years, in the modeling business. Jerry played the feminine role, good cop to her bad one. “When Jerry came in, he added a soft kind of quality to the operation,” Natálie says.
Through a photographer the Fords met Sherman Billingsley, who owned the Stork Club, the famous supper club. The meeting proved a bonanza. “Billingsley loved to have models in his club,” Jerry says. He’d signed a deal with CBS to broadcast a Stork Club talk show six nights a week with Chrysler as sponsor, and he offered the Fords carte blanche. “Bring as many people as you want—no check,” Billingsley said, “but you have to sit in the background of my show.” They went about twice a week and became part of the set written up regularly by columnists like Dorothy Kilgallen, Tex McCrary, and Walter Winchell. One night Winchell took them to a boxing match in a limousine. “Can you imagine, kids in their twenties in limos?” Eileen asks unbelievingly.
The Fords were in the right place at the right time. There was money again and energy and optimism. The Fashion Group, the nonprofit society of women in fashion—designers, writers, editors, and manufacturers—had begun mounting large shows. Then, just after the war, an energetic young publicity woman named Eleanor Lambert began aggressively promoting Seventh Avenue’s less expensive ready-to-wear clothing. American sportswear designers like Claire McCardell, Anne Klein (at Junior Sophisticates), and Bill Blass (at Ann Miller) thrived in this new environment, despite fresh competition from a revived French fashion industry. With wartime restrictions on fabric lifted, Christian Dior launched his voluminous New Look in Paris in 1947, sending a reviving charge through the international world of style. The Fords were in a bull market for female flesh.
On October 9, 1947, Natálie and the Fords formalized their relationship with a letter confirming that they had “been operating as partners … in carrying on the busines
s of a Modelling Agency” for over a year. They agreed that Ford’s salary would be paid by the business and that they would share all profits and losses equally. “That wasn’t much,” says Jerry Ford. “It’s a miracle we survived.” A month later the Fords sold their 1941 automobile for $900 and used the proceeds to move into their own space, a third-floor walk-up between a funeral parlor and a cigar store. Patchett arrived shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, others were having the same bright idea. Stewart Cowley, a theatrical agent before the war, got out of the Army Air Force around the same time Jerry Ford left the Navy. After a brief stint as a production assistant on a Broadway play, he and a friend, an actor and model named Russell Hoyt, decided to open an agency together in February 1947. “We were new; we had a different angle,” says Cowley. “Conover was never available. He was too busy screwing his models.” Though she denies ever meeting him, Cowley claims he sat down with Natálie and offered her and several other top models 2 percent of the agency each in exchange for being its “nucleus.”
“We were driving in a taxi, and I could see adding machines going in her head,” he says. “We had a big meeting, and everyone showed up but Natálie. She wanted fifty percent, and she knew who to do it with—a little nooch named Eileen Ford. We went ahead without her and started as Russell-Stewart, and a few weeks later Eileen started, and they came running from Powers and Conover.” Cowley tried specializing in photographic models, but “Eileen got the better of me,” he says. Instead he booked runway and showroom models who quit the Seventh Avenue companies where they worked for meager salaries of about $75 a week. Cowley sold them back to their ex-employers for considerably more—$15 an hour.
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 11
