Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  She arrived, as requested, at Waterloo Station and boarded a chartered train. “It drew out of the station and stopped at a very small, deserted station, where the Beatles hopped on!” Boyd exclaims. At the end of the day’s filming, in which Boyd played a schoolgirl who encounters the pop group, guitarist George Harrison asked her out. “I said I couldn’t because I had a boyfriend,” she recalls, and instead, asked Harrison if he wanted to join her, Swain, and their gang. “He was horrified at this idea and said no!” she says. A week later Boyd was recalled for another day’s shooting. “How’s your wonderful boyfriend?” Harrison asked her.

  “Of course, by this time I’d realized he wasn’t quite so wonderful,” Boyd says. “I was trying to extricate myself from his influence, and I was actually quite excited by the fact that George had asked me out and was rather keen. I’d realized I might be missing a great opportunity, and I accepted.”

  Soon she and Harrison were a couple. “I wasn’t allowed on any of the tours, because the security was so rigid, and they were very worried that the Beatles would be harmed, and on occasion it was actually pretty dangerous for them,” Boyd says. “So bringing girls along was totally out of the question.” But when the band was in London, she joined their life of screenings, parties, and dinners with the rich and famous.

  Boyd married her Beatle boyfriend in 1965 and went into semiretirement. “George was from the North of England, a very sort of traditional working-class boy, and he felt his wife should be at home,” she says. “So I’d mess around at home, trying to teach myself how to cook.” Though she’d left Cherry Marshall, Boyd still took the odd modeling job, booked through Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s office. “I’d do special things,” she says. “But quite honestly we were staying up very late at night and to try and carry on modeling would have been very difficult, so I had to really make a choice.”

  Boyd eventually left both modeling and Harrison and married guitarist Eric Clapton, who wrote his song “Layla” for her, before they, too, broke up.

  Lesley Hornby, the daughter of a carpenter, was born in 1949 in Neasden, England, a tidy suburb of London. At fifteen she met Nigel John Davies, ten years her senior, at the hairdresser’s salon where she made herself useful on Saturdays in exchange for pocket money to buy clothes. He’d worked variously in betting parlors and nightclubs, as an amateur boxer, a clerk, a porno film salesman, an interior decorator, an antiquaire, and a hairdresser at Vidal Sassoon (where he called himself Mr. Christian). Everything about him was dashing, from the name he’d most recently assumed, Justin de Villeneuve, to the red Triumph Spitfire he drove when he came to pick up his brother, who worked with Lesley and dubbed her Sticks, which eventually metamorphosed to Twig and then Twiggy. Justin thought she was “breathtaking” despite the fact that she “sounded like a demented parrot.” When they started seeing each other, his wife left him—and took back the Triumph, which was hers. Twiggy soon made up for the loss.

  “It just happened,” she later said. Justin had the idea that Twiggy should model. But when she was snubbed on a visit to Queen, the pair went back to an earlier plan to open a boutique and stock it with trousers Twiggy sewed from antique fabrics. Then, despite the fact that she was too short at five feet six inches and too thin at ninety-one pounds, measuring 31-22-32, a friend of Justin’s offered Twiggy a job modeling for a magazine. The editor sent her to Leonard’s posh hair salon on Upper Grosvenor Street for a haircut. Intrigued by the girl’s looks, Leonard said he’d give her some pictures in exchange for modeling a hairstyle he’d just invented. It took eight hours of snipping and coloring to get her elfin cap of hair just right. But when Leonard was through, “she looked like Bambi,” De Villeneuve said later. “I knew then that she really was going to make it.”

  Twiggy and her Svengali, Justin de Villeneuve, photographed by Philip Townshend

  Twiggy and Justin de Villeneuve by Philip Townshend

  Deirdre McSharry, a fashion writer for the Daily Express, saw pictures of her at Mr. Leonard’s salon. “They phoned me that night and asked where they could find her,” the photographer, Barry Lategan, recalls. A few days later McSharry published a full-page story dubbing Twiggy “The Face of ’66 … the Cockney kid with the face to launch a thousand shapes.”

  Eager to cash in, de Villeneuve decided that Twiggy should join Lucie Clayton, then still the top agency in London. But in her autobiography, Twiggy, she says that her father nixed that idea and demanded that Justin manage her career or that she give it up. It didn’t matter. Her phone number was listed. Her mother took the requests for bookings. There were lots of them.

  Not everyone wanted her. The Terrible Trio, for example. “The new look of the sixties is the woman, and the Twig ain’t a woman,” said Brian Duffy. But her career momentum was building fast. Though she was, in effect, working outside the fashion/model system, it couldn’t help taking notice. Diana Vreeland saw her in Elle and booked her for Vogue. A British clothing company signed her to create a Twiggy fashion collection. Her body was cast for shopwindow mannequins, and the Ford Motor Company even lent her one of its first Mustangs. All over Britain teenage girls started copying her hairdo and makeup style—three sets of false lashes on top, drawn—on lashes, quickly dubbed Twigs, below—and grown-ups went on starvation diets, trying to mimic her emaciated looks. “It was dreadful,” says Gillian Bobroff, a British model of the sixties. “She started a trend, and you had to be just the same. I had my hair cut and started killing myself, taking a million slimming pills. I never ate. I had bulimia. It was a nightmare, trying to keep up.”

  Twiggy’s appeal was as enormous as it was initially inexplicable. “Within a year she was on her way,” says Lategan. “She started being a phenomenon.” She wasn’t a model like any model before her; she was a marketing miracle, the first of a new breed. Flying by the seat of his pants, de Villeneuve had created a monster. She was the first model to achieve genuine international celebrity. “That was the beginning of marketing models that agencies all do now,” says Patti Boyd.

  Twiggy finally did sign with several agencies. Dorian Leigh, who represented her in Paris, arranged for her and Justin to meet Barbara Stone of Stewart Models. Jerry Ford insists Leigh promised Twiggy to him. In fact, she became the object of a heated competition. “Justin was playing us off against each other,” Stone says. “The decision was his.” But Twiggy apparently had some say in the matter. “Eileen desperately wanted Twiggy,” says Dorian, “but I couldn’t make her do it. Twiggy said, ‘She scares me shitless!’”

  Accompanied by de Villeneuve and a street peddler turned bodyguard named Teddy “the Monk” Adams, Twiggy arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on a Monday afternoon in March 1967 and walked straight into a riotous press conference. Asked what effect his protégée would have on America, de Villeneuve, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, green shirt, and flimsy pink neckerchief, declared, “She’ll have the same effect as the Beatles. She’s sort of the miniqueen of the new social aristocracy.” Asked if her figure was the look of the future, Twiggy giggled and asked, “It’s not really what you call a figure, is it?”

  Bert Stern, who had made a deal to film Twiggy’s every move for an ABC-TV documentary, hired a helicopter to fly her to Manhattan, installed her in a brand-new East Side apartment, and tossed a studio party in her honor that was attended by the likes of Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, art collectors Ethel and Robert Scull, and electric-dress designer Tiger Morse. On the streets, wherever Twiggy went, The New Yorker reported in a hundred page story on her trip to America, “a yelping, shrieking, thrashing crowd” was sure to follow. When Newsweek put Twiggy on its cover a few weeks into her trip (“four straight limbs in search of a woman’s body, a mini-bosom trapped in perpetual puberty, the frail torso of the teen-age choirboy … a fallen angel … the first child star in the history of high fashion,” the magazine rhapsodized), she raised her rate to $240 an hour. But when Vogue called to book her for a shoot with Richard Avedon, he g
ot her for $100 a day. “Twiggy, even though she’s so very big, has been something of a joke,” de Villeneuve said in a rare moment of modesty. “Avedon can change that.”

  For his part Avedon was impressed. “Women move in certain ways that convey an air of the time they live in, and Twiggy, when she’s in front of lights, is bringing her generation in front of the camera,” the photographer said. “I think what’s involved is the stripping away of certain affectations about what is beautiful. Twiggy is made for that.” Vogue’s Mrs. Vreeland agreed. “This little girl is not a Cockney phenomenon,” she said. “For us, at Vogue, she represents beauty, not Twiggery. We love her silky throat, her naturalness, her inner serenity.” To Avedon, Vreeland was somewhat less poetic, worrying about her outward faults instead of her inner beauty. “Ask her to pull in behind,” Vreeland commanded in a memo to her photographer, “and you will have a glorious girl and not an ill-fed adolescent.”

  Back in London, though, the bloom was off the rose. By 1968 the Twiggy fashion collection had fizzled. “You’re a has-been,” the manufacturer told her. De Villeneuve briefly tried his hand at photography and became successful quite fast. But he and Twiggy were never accepted by the fashion establishment they’d disdained. “Twiggy didn’t sort of play or go out with all of us,” says Patti Boyd, who modeled with her and became close to the couple. “They were very much apart from the rest of the people I knew.”

  They were also growing apart from each other. Although they announced their engagement in July 1968, mere hours after de Villeneuve had divorced his first wife, they never married or even lived together. Patti Boyd thought their problem was simple. “He treated her like a child,” she says.

  De Villeneuve ran Twiggy’s businesses (which included a Twiggy stocking line, a hairdressing salon, a film-processing shop, a knitting magazine, an agency for singers, and a King’s Road boutique), made all the decisions, and split all the profits with her. There was little for her to do. “We began to get bored,” he later related. “It became fake because Twiggy didn’t really like what she was doing…. And so Twiggy virtually retired at nineteen. If she’d continued modeling, she’d have completely burned herself out.”

  In 1971 Twiggy emerged from retirement to star in Ken Russell’s film The Boyfriend and in several forgettable movies. She gained twenty pounds, got her own flat, and broke up with her Svengali. Later she married an American actor, Michael Whitney, and had a child. The couple separated in 1983; Whitney, an alcoholic, collapsed and died of a heart attack several months later, while Twiggy was appearing on Broadway in a musical, My One and Only.

  In 1986, back in England, de Villeneuve published a book in which he claimed that he’d first bedded Twiggy when she was fifteen and then cheated on her constantly. “I could never write anything like that,” she complained at the time. But sometimes her anger slipped out in public. In 1980 she’d told Newsweek that she was considering changing her name back to Lesley. “Twiggy’s a ridiculous name, absolutely silly,” she snapped. “To tell you the truth, I can’t stand the sound of it anymore.” But time had a healing effect. By 1993, when another skinny British model, Kate Moss, revived the Twiggy look, the original—now calling herself Twiggy Lawson and dividing her time between England and Los Angeles—was even modeling again. But more happily this time. “I used to be a thing,” she said. “I am a person now.”

  VERUSCHKA

  Standing at the end of a car on the Paris metro is a towering woman. She is tall enough to be a fashion model, but too poor, too rough. Her clothes are ratty; her boots, scuffed and worn. She is covered with paint; it is all over her outfit and her worker’s hands. It is even splattered in her mousy brown hair.

  She was, in fact, the biggest model of her time—in more ways than one. Veruschka, at six feet one inch, was not only the tallest model ever to make it to the top of the fashion scene but also the highest born.

  Hiding behind the pseudonym was the Countess Vera von Lehndorff, daughter of Heinrich, Count von Lehndorff-Steinort, an East Prussian landowner whose family lived in a castle on a twenty-eight-thousand acre lake called Mauersee. It was close to Rastenburg, a subterranean Nazi command post from which Hitler commanded troops as they moved on Moscow.

  Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, requisitioned Lehndorff’s castle and moved in to be near his beloved Führer. The castle also served as headquarters for the German Army’s Oberkommando or high command. Heinrich von Lehndorff, a first lieutenant in the German Army reserve, was part of the military conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. When the Gestapo foiled the plan, Lehndorff was arrested and, along with several other military leaders, was executed on September 4,1944. His family was arrested, and his properties were seized.

  Nineteen years later his second daughter, Vera, an art student, was discovered by a fashion photographer and entered the world of designer dresses and glossy magazines. “She looked like a deer, awkward and yet so graceful,” says Dorian Leigh, her first agent. “Her mother wanted me to take Vera’s younger sister as a model. The sister was smaller, blonder, prettier, but not magnificent like Vera. The next day Charlotte March took pictures of her, and they were incredible!”

  Veruschka photographed by Helmut Newton

  Veruschka by Helmut Newton

  At first Vera was too tall, too strange-looking. “Eileen said, ‘Get that German out of here,’” recalls Ford booker Jane Halleran. But then strange became beautiful, fantasy became the order of the day, and the rule book was thrown out. Veruschka appeared in the opening scene of Blow-Up, writhing sensuously beneath the David Baileyesque photographer portrayed by David Hemmings. By the time she retired in the early seventies, she had appeared on the cover of Vogue eleven times.

  When fantasy fell out of fashion, Veruschka traded in the art of appearance for the related art of disappearance. Though she still sometimes models, her focus has stayed on her artistic visions. Returning to Germany, she began a long collaboration with a German artist, Holger Trülzsch, fusing photography and painting. Using Veruschka’s naked body as a canvas, they spent hours transforming her first into animals and then into reincarnations of movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. As their work progressed, the transformations became more radical. Instead of remaking Veruschka’s appearance, they caused her to disappear into statues, stones, forests, the walls of old buildings and decaying, derelict factories, and, finally, an Italian rag warehouse.

  “The earlier artifice, that of the fashion model, was to simulate an ideal form of oneself—to enhance an already existing, very high order of natural beauty,” the critic Susan Sontag writes of these eerie works. “Here, the artifice is to simulate what is not the beautiful woman…. The person disappears, but beauty does not disappear (any more than does Veruschka’s iconic status). It remains embedded in the image, like a more or less invisible ghost. What these images illustrate is an indomitable career of beauty—though made ugly, still remaining beautiful—as well as an escape from beauty.”

  “I was born in 1939. My father was Count von Lehndorff. My mother is Countess von Kalnein. They are both from East Prussia, where I was born in the Mauersee swamps. That was part of Germany, but it is all Polish now.

  “My father was executed, and we—my sisters and my mother—were sent to a prison called Zeithainhof. We didn’t know where we were at the time because we were taken there one night by the Gestapo. It was not exactly a concentration camp, but it was a kind of a camp where all the children of those men were sent. To Hitler we were the worst of the German race, the ones who betrayed him. We were supposed to be sent to Siberia and be disappeared. Two or three weeks before the war ended, we got out because my mother had a connection. I was four years old.

  “We grew up like Gypsies in West Germany because we’d lost everything. We stayed where we could, with friends who had a house. Then they moved. We were moving every year. I was in thirteen schools altogether.

  “When I was eighteen, I was in art school in Hamburg. Then I
went to paint in Italy in 1962, 1963. I was in Florence, and one day on the street this man I didn’t know asked me if I would be interested to do pictures. The Italian collections were being shown in the Palazzo Pitti and the Palazzo Strozzi, and he brought me there to all the couturiers. I was very shy. Do you remember Nico, the singer from the Velvet Underground? She was also modeling once in a while, and I remember her laughing her head off when she saw me. I don’t know why. I got very ashamed.

  “Anyhow, there I started to do my first pictures for the Italian magazines. I immediately imitated the models I had seen in the Palazzo Strozzi because I didn’t really know how to do it. I did all this kind of posing, you know? I still have pictures of that. It’s very funny.

  “While I was there, I met Denise Sarrault. She was very famous at that time inside the fashion world. She looked like Garbo. Helmut Newton had done quite a lot of beautiful pictures of her. She was working for Dior doing all the shows, and once in a while she did pictures with Jeanloup Sieff. She said to me, ‘I love your face, and I think you could be a very good model. You should come to Paris.’

  “Before that a Polish friend of my mother had come to visit her in Germany. I don’t know how it happened, but he said that he knew the biggest model agency in Paris, Dorian Leigh. I was a little bit interested, but not really that much at that time, because I was studying painting. But he offered to try and arrange a meeting. He said, ‘She comes to Berlin. Why don’t you meet her there?’ So I went to Berlin and met Dorian in a hotel.

  “She said, ‘Yeah, maybe we try with you, but you are quite tall, and I don’t know. We’ll see. You come to Paris.’ So I went to Paris, but I never worked there. I was too tall. Everything was too short on me, of course. They said women’s knees are ugly, so they pulled on my skirts all the time. And I had this very baby face and was at the same time sophisticated because of my length, so it was very difficult. My face belonged in Elle, but my body was Vogue, so nothing worked.