Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  $60 AN HOUR

  The trouble really started on Labor Day weekend, 1954, when James Courtney Punderford, Jr., started seeing double. In November he went into the hospital, dying of brain cancer. So his wife, Ford model Barbara Mullen, worked every day from 9:00 A.M. until 4:30 P.M. to pay their bills and then spent another six hours at his bedside. Mullen was lonelier than she’d ever been in her twenty-seven years. Ironically, she looked better on film than she ever had before. “I was very much in demand,” she says dryly. “During the day it was marvelous. The one place that I found freedom and relief was in front of the camera.”

  When she learned Jim would never recover, Mullen called the Ford agency and was bundled off to the duplex Park Avenue apartment Eileen and Jerry Ford shared with their two children, Jamie and Billy. Ford called Tom Rees, a doctor (who was married to a Ford model and performed plastic surgery on many more), “and got some sleeping pills and gave me some swift drinks, because that was the solution in those days,” Mullen says. She stayed two nights and then checked into the Allerton House.

  Then, one bad night in March, she called the Fords again, and Jerry answered the phone. Eileen was in Florida with the kids, he told her, but he would come pick her up. After all, personal service was one of the prides of the Ford agency. A few years before, Life magazine had run photographs of Eileen sewing Barbara’s gown before a party and soaking another model’s feet under the headline FAMILY-STYLE MODEL AGENCY. The Fords provided diets, dermatologists, and hairdressers and urged their models to improve themselves by studying culture, speech, dancing, acting, and languages. There was no hanky-panky at Ford, nor would there ever be. They wouldn’t even let their girls hawk deodorant, let alone lingerie. Jerry Ford could be counted on to take good care of a model in trouble. He came and got her that night, and they talked about unhappiness. “And of course we had a drink, and then we had another drink, and he said, ‘Come back to the apartment,’ and we had another drink,” Mullen says. “And that’s how it began.”

  She was a New York City girl, raised by a single mother and relatives in Illinois and Texas. She wanted to go to college, but money was scarce, so she ended up a beautician. “I hated it,” she says. “I couldn’t stand all those dirty heads and fingernails, and as I was very thin, somebody suggested that I should go see John Robert Powers.”

  Powers sent the seventeen-year-old to Bergdorf Goodman. Its in-house couturier needed a showroom model, $35 a week. Bergdorf models were kept hidden in a special room, but one day in 1947 a Vogue editor sneaked up the back elevator. “We’ve been trying to contact you for a very long time, but they would never give us your name,” she told Barbara. It seemed there was a dress that had been made on Mullen, and none of Vogue’s models could get into it.

  She shot the picture, and the magazine wanted her again and again. Vogue’s staffers suggested she call Ford Models. “They were very insistent,” Mullen recalls, so she went to the agency. Eileen Ford was away, but Jerry agreed to take her bookings. “You’re the new model my husband has taken on?” Eileen Ford said as she eyed the girl a month later. “You have a terrible profile, and you must never show it.” Thus Mullen was admitted to the most select company in modeling.

  Eileen Ford had already assumed the mantle of godmother of modeling. A tiny, pretty, but tightly wound woman, she was a know-it-all with an answer for everything, eight answers at once if need be. She was typically photographed, furrow-browed and talking, with two phones draped over her shoulders, another to her ear, and a fourth being handed to her by her dutiful and handsome husband, Jerry. At her meeting with Mullen she decreed that the model would charge $25 an hour to start. “You’ll either make it or you won’t,” Ford told her.

  That annoyed Mullen. “I don’t think Eileen did it deliberately,” she says. “It just didn’t register that people would be hurt. I think that’s what turned a lot of people off about her. She was young, she was pretty, she seemed very happy, but she was always barking at Jerry. He was always smiling and looking handsome, and there they sat, side by side, and took the bookings. They were a fabulous team.”

  It turned out that Eileen was right about Mullen’s price but wrong about her profile. “That’s the only thing I did show!” Mullen laughs. “There you are! I had just done a sitting for Town & Country, and the photographer kept insisting on my profile.”

  Jim Punderford was from a good but not wealthy family. They married in 1949. While he struggled to establish himself after the war, she shot to the top as a photographic model. Mullen was also something of a party girl. “Barbara and I used to go on location trips together,” remembers Ruth Neumann, who started at Ford in 1950. “She was a very fast liver. We’d get home from work at five and go out again at nine. We were young and beautiful, and nothing ever showed.”

  In 1951 Mullen went on a trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica, with a young photographer, Frank Scavullo. A fashion-obsessed city kid, Scavullo started sweeping studios when he was sixteen and became Horst P. Horst’s assistant. Soon he got a job with Seventeen magazine, and that led to little advertising jobs. Scavullo fell in love with his models indiscriminately. “You never knew who was coming out of Francesco Scavullo’s room, a male model or a female model,” he says. “I didn’t refuse. I was a horny little Italian. Didn’t matter to me!”

  In Jamaica Barbara Mullen dressed in men’s clothes every night, smoked cigars, and danced with a lady fashion editor to scandalize the vacationers at their hotel. She also mesmerized Scavullo, who photographed it all. “I was very much in love with her,” he says. “We were gonna get married. She said she fell in love with me, and then in the middle of the trip, we were sailing and she said, ‘Just kidding. I wanted to see how far a faggot would go.’ I smashed her. I beat her up. She said she was committing suicide. I gave her pills.” Mullen remembers it a little differently. “I told him to cut that out, that blue eye shadow, and he did! He combed his bangs back, and he looked normal!”

  On the surface Mullen was a perfect Ford model, the soul of propriety. But “we were the kind of ladies who, when we were turned loose, didn’t always behave like perfect ladies—and said we didn’t remember anything the next day,” she says. One night in New York, when Mullen joined the Ford models’ table at the Stork Club, Jerry Ford asked her to dance and whispered, “I love you.” She thought he was being silly. “I was Jerry’s pet, the only model he’d taken on without consulting his wife,” she says. But she thought he was good-looking, danced very well, and “he always laughed at my jokes,” she adds.

  By then laughs were few and far between. “I had quite deliberately become a recluse,” Mullen says. “Jim had been virtually dead from the day he walked into the hospital; he just had a very strong heart. I really was in an extremely weak condition when Jerry came to pick me up that night. And after about the third scotch on an empty stomach, that was it.” They made love, but when Ford called the next day, Mullen begged, “Don’t call me.” The secret affair continued nonetheless, even after Eileen Ford returned to New York. Mullen and the other models had discussed the Ford marriage before, and they all thought Eileen was as tough on her husband as she was on the models. “Very frequently to my young eyes she publicly humiliated him by bossing him around in the agency in front of all these beautiful women,” Mullen says.

  Jim Punderford died in July. Complicating matters considerably was the fact that Eileen Ford was pregnant. Mullen’s nerves were shot. The reckless affair had begun to scare her. She demanded her lover tell his wife what was going on. “And I think he did, so give credit where credit is due.” Never was Eileen Ford’s steel better displayed. “I hope you will stay with the agency,” she told Mullen.

  For two weeks the model didn’t hear another word. “I was quite frankly in a terrible shape,” she says, “but I got the eyeliner on, and I went to work.” Jerry Ford started taking flying lessons. “I can spend most of my time in the air where nobody can get me,” he told Mullen. Then one day, in fall 1955, there was a knock on th
e door of Mullen’s apartment. “It was Eileen’s father and her brother, who came into my apartment and pushed the curtains aside as if they thought they’d find somebody there,” she recalls. “They were looking for Jerry. They asked me what my intentions were. I said I’d go along with whatever decision Jerry made. I mean, it was really ghastly.”

  Finally Ford reached his decision. What happened between him and Eileen isn’t known, but they seemed to refer to the incident years afterward in an interview. “Once Jerry was really mad at me,” she said. “He told me I had to mend my ways or we’d be divorced.”

  “I told her she was too bossy,” Jerry added.

  “So …” said Eileen, offering him a placating smile, “so I mended my ways. That’s why I’m so docile now.” But was she really? “If Jerry Ford left me,” she’d said earlier in the same interview, “I’d kill him.”

  Ford told Mullen they were through, and then they all tried to act as if nothing had happened. “I would call up and get my bookings, but I was so unhappy,” Mullen says. “I was told not to talk to either of them. I was mourning the loss of my husband, and I was mourning the loss of a good friend and lover, all at the same time.”

  Finally she wanted out. “I had the feeling that people were avoiding me socially in New York. I didn’t really know what was happening. I was on the skids. I just thought it would be smart of me to leave. It was not a very comfortable situation for me, and it must have been terribly painful for Eileen. Never again have I gone anywhere near a married man! So I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere for a year. It was January 1956, and a friend of mine at United States Lines got me a cabin on a nice ship to Europe.” Jerry gave her a Cartier passport case as a going-away present.

  For nine months she worked all over Europe. When she came home, she was still a Ford model, but “My reception was rather cool, I thought, and then I heard a few things, and I changed agencies.” Years later Mullen heard “some not very nice things” about the denouement of her career: “There was a rumor in the air that Eileen was not doing me much good.”

  The word was certainly out. Yet curiously it stayed within the small circle of friends that then constituted the modeling business. In that web of magazines and ad agency types, photographers and models, Eileen Ford’s dominion over modeling was already absolute. On the spot where John Robert Powers planted a long-stemmed rose, Eileen Ford had erected a fortress of propriety and moral rectitude that was to stand for fifty years. Today neither of the Fords will talk about Barbara Mullen. But when the subject comes up, Eileen Ford’s eyes still grow red, and her hands start to tremble.

  The agency Barbara Mullen joined in October 1956 was called Plaza Five. Its founding, in June 1953, had been another sort of betrayal to Eileen Ford, one that, unlike her husband’s, she had to face time and again. “It was the biggest news in the business: Models dared to leave Eileen and open an agency!” says Dorian Leigh. “And it was an immediate, immediate success!”

  The Fords’ only real competition at the time was Fan Krainin. An imported-rug dealer turned sales promotion agent and the sister of a photographer, Ewing (né Irving) Krainin, who ran a big studio on Fifth Avenue, she started the Frances Gill Agency with a $5,000 investment at his suggestion in 1951. “We made the name up out of nowhere,” says Ewing Krainin, who ended up marrying a Gill model.

  Gill booked an important handful of top magazine models, most memorably Evelyn Tripp and Betsy Pickering. Pickering was at Sarah Lawrence College late in 1953, when Edith Raymond, the editor of Mademoiselle, sent her to photographer Mark Shaw, who in turn sent her to see Frances Gill. Her father wasn’t pleased. “It was not considered the most reputable profession” the year after the Jelke case broke, she recalls.

  Pickering worked regularly for nine years, beginning at $25 an hour and ending at $65, grossing, she estimates, $1.5 million. She remembers that Fan (who now assumed the name Frances Gill), a sister named Edith, and brother Ewing all were involved in the agency. Gill was tiny, feminine, and always decked out in exotic jewelry. “There was money there,” Pickering says. “She was very well brought up. She’d never says; she’d suggest. No one ever knew where she lived. She was so elegant and so dear. She was a mother to everyone.”

  Frances Gill also booked runway models. Gillis MacGil was one. Born into a Jewish immigrant family in New York, MacGil worked in the stock room at Bergdorf Goodman as a girl and was fascinated by the store’s models. She moved to Nettie Rosenstein’s dress company, where she was one of ten house models earning $75 a week, showing clothes in Rosenstein’s showroom and at trunk shows all over America. Before long MacGil was photographed for Vogue by Alan and Diane Arbus. In 1950 she heard that an agent named Frances Gill wanted to meet her. Gill, who’d instituted a voucher system backed by her family’s money, recruited MacGil with the promise that she’d send the model to Harper’s Bazaar. “I tagged along behind her,” says MacGil’s friend Barbara Brown. They both soon decided they’d made the right decision. “I felt comfortable,” says Brown. “Frances didn’t try to rule your life the way Eileen did.”

  MacGil and Brown both loved fashion shows and often did them together. There was a constant round of collection openings on Seventh Avenue. “You never had a chance to put your clothes on,” MacGil says. “You raced up and down the back stairs at Five Fifty, Five Thirty, and Four Ninety-eight Seventh Avenue in your raincoat.” But despite the increase in bookings, Frances Gill kept her business small. “She never wanted an empire,” says Betsy Pickering.

  A few blocks away Jerry and Eileen Ford argued about that issue. “I wanted to grow,” says Jerry. “We were the first boutique agency, but I thought it was crazy to stay small. The fact is, boutiques either grow or die. I wanted to get as many good models as I could.” Eileen wanted only high-fashion models. The girls who worked with Avedon and Penn and Bazaar and Vogue didn’t walk runways or pose for Pepsodent. Eileen even turned down Grace Kelly, whom she thought too “commercial.”

  “But the truth is, everyone in this business including Vogue and Bazaar and Avedon and Penn, everyone is commercial,” Jerry says. Still, they did it Eileen’s way. “And Eileen was right,” her husband says.

  Just as the attentions of Vogue or Bazaar could make a model, they could also make an agency. Polly Knaster, who’d previously worked for Huntington Hartford, took over the management of Vogue’s studio in 1949, booking all the models for seven Condé Nast magazines. When the studio closed in 1952, because the magazines could no longer afford to keep stables of exclusive photographers, Knaster moved to Vogue as its models editor.

  “I saw anybody, but I warned them to be prepared to be told they had no potential,” she says. “When I had somebody right, I’d work on their books, I’d make appointments. It was fun to groom a model so she’d be used, collaborating with the agent. When tests came through well, I’d show them to Babs Simpson, and she’d try them.” Knaster would push to get new models on one of Vogue’s then twice-monthly covers. “And when a new girl got on, she was made.”

  “We’d use them a lot,” agrees fashion editor Babs Simpson. “And we’d ask them, please, not to work for the Bazaar.” Adds another Vogue fashion editor, Catherine di Montezemolo: “I would have lunches and meetings with Eileen to find out about new girls. She would send them to both magazines to feel them out. Then, if we really wanted a girl, we’d have to guarantee a certain number of pages in order to get her.”

  Once a model was wanted, she was treated like a rare gem, and many of them came to believe that’s what they were. Retired Ford mannequin Ruth Neumann calls her generation of models the Untouchables. “We looked like we couldn’t say ‘shit,’” she explains. “We were snotty, cold. You couldn’t speak to us.”

  Though it wasn’t the only game in town, the Ford agency epitomized that look with its icy blondes, gaunt brunettes, and snooty society types. It all came down to Eileen’s taste in women. “I have to like the girl,” she said. “Unless I’m sold on her, I can’t sell her. I don
’t want to sound corny, but she has to be somebody I would like to have over to dinner.” It helped if a model was haughty and a little bland. “A model shouldn’t have a particular nationality, since she’s selling to everybody,” Ford said. And models had to be hardworking. When a Ford model went to the Riviera and came back a little spoiled, Ford dismissed her with a telegram. “I adore you, but I can’t afford you,” it said. “There’s no room for playgirls in this picture,” she explained. “We just can’t afford them. The people footing the bills aren’t fooling. They’re looking for a girl who’s trying to make money with her face.”

  Natálie Nickerson stopped modeling the day she married Wingate Paine in 1949 and went into business with him, running his studio and acting as his agent. “By that time Eileen didn’t need much recruiting,” she says. “Everybody wanted to be with them. There was no competition. We saw each other socially.” When a good model appeared in Wingate’s studio, the Paines told her about Ford.

  “But then,” says Natálie, “I disagreed on some things. There was too much controlling, control of clients, control of models. People were being told that models were busy when they weren’t, so Eileen could bring newer girls along, and maybe dissipate their strength!” By 1952 Natálie thought Ford was abusing her position.

  There was also the matter of money. “We gave her half of everything,” says Eileen. Adds Jerry: “But that wasn’t much.” Between 1946 and 1952 Natálie says she never received more than $20,000 from Ford. She got regular financial statements, and she never questioned the Fords about what she considered overly lavish entertainment expenses. But then came “expenses I considered personal,” she says, declining to elaborate. “Rightly or wrongly I felt cheated and betrayed, and in my mind everything between us had changed.” Stewart Cowley says he told Natálie that the Fords were using her money to light cigarettes in Paris with $100 bills.