FROM THE MAGAZINE
June 2015 Issue

How Ford Models Changed the Face of Beauty

The little-known story behind a pair of young newlyweds in post–World War II Manhattan who launched the era of the supermodel.
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Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; By Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

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When Eileen Otte and Jerry Ford eloped to San Francisco in November 1944, in the midst of World War II, it was hardly surprising that Jerry should declare his profession as “Naval Officer” on his marriage certificate. His new spouse, however, set down an occupation that was more unusual in a time of war, “Stylist,” and she listed her employer as a “commercial photographer.” Earlier that spring, around the same time the young couple first met, Eileen had embarked on the career path that would lead to her creation with Jerry of what would become the Ford modeling agency.

It had started not far from her Great Neck, Long Island, home. Lying on a towel on Jones Beach, Eileen was engaged in one of her favorite activities: perfecting her tan. “I had just finished a hot dog when this charming photographer came up to me,” Eileen recalled in one of our numerous conversations before her death. “He said he was called Elliot Clarke and that he was taking pictures for an article on the history of beach fashion. Would I care to put on, he asked me, these old-fashioned suits?”

Eileen jumped up and put one hand to her ear and the other to her hip to present herself as the perfect 1910 Bloomer Girl. Then she put on a black-and-white spotted “dressmaker suit” from 1922 and waded out into the surf to show what a bathing belle looked like in the year of her birth. With her animated features and wide, toothy smile, Eileen made herself the star of the quirky color feature that Elliot Clarke put together on Jones Beach that day, completing her poses with children and other bathers gathered around a picnic basket in a family tableau worthy of Norman Rockwell.

The photographs appeared early in August 1944, in The Saturday Evening Post, accompanying the headline YES, MY DARING DAUGHTER. They hardly prompted a flood of phone calls from modeling agencies. In fact, the session with Clarke would be one of the last in Eileen’s relatively modest career in front of the camera. Yet it did prove a crucial step in her progress on the other side of the lens.

Cover Girl

‘Elliot was looking for a secretary,” Eileen remembered, “someone to get in early every day and open up the office. He asked me if I could type and do shorthand, and I said I could do both. I was lying, of course.”

Yet Elliot Clarke, a courtly character who was seldom seen without a bow tie, recognized the potential in his energetic young assistant. At the time of their meeting, he had just won a major commission to help launch “a new kind of young magazine.” Walter Annenberg, publisher of the moneymaking Daily Racing Form and of The Philadelphia Inquirer, had noted the recent coining of the word “teenager” and had decided to take one of his show-business titles, Stardom, and rebrand it to capture the advertising revenue being aimed at this new demographic: “All the clothes shown,” promised the mission statement, “will be found in Teen Departments of the best stores in the country.” Elliot Clarke got the commission to design the cover, so Eileen Otte found herself on the launch team of America’s first-ever teenage magazine, Seventeen.

The beach recruit’s role was minor—to help create the large numerals, 1 and 7, that would be held up on the cover by the model selected and photographed by Elliot Clarke. Yet it was Eileen’s idea to decorate the numerals with brightly colored alpine flowers—Shirley Temple had been a hit as Heidi, after all. So the new studio assistant could claim some small role in the instant success of Seventeen, which sold out its first printing of 400,000 and was soon handling more advertising than any other women’s service magazine.

The young stylist’s next bright idea was not so well appreciated by her employer, however. When Eileen set off for San Francisco in November 1944, she failed to inform Elliot Clarke of her elopement plans with Jerry—and also forgot that she still had the keys to his studio. So, by the time Eileen noted her profession in San Francisco’s City Hall, on November 20, 1944, she was, technically, an ex-stylist.

Left on her own in San Francisco following the departure of her new husband to the Pacific, Eileen Otte Ford was not afflicted by second thoughts. “I was lonely, of course,” she remembered. “I wept when I said good-bye to Jerry. But I had never felt so right being with anyone. I loved Jerry Ford then with all my heart—and I loved him for the rest of our life together.”

The dive-in-headfirst Eileen Ford had found the solid and steady partner who completed her. Jerry did not so much cancel out his wife’s impulsiveness as harness it for the benefit of the wild and challenging life path that they would carve out together.

When Eileen finally returned home to New York, in the spring of 1945, four months after her elopement, her priority was to get back to work, and the gentlemanly Elliot Clarke proved willing to forgive and forget. He provided his runaway assistant with a reference that helped Eileen secure a job with the William Becker Studios—the largest commercial-photography studio in America at the time.

Eileen Ford started working in the Manhattan headquarters of this hard-driving operation in the Seventh Avenue Fur District, where her job was to coordinate, number, pack, and ship the clothes that would be photographed at Becker’s main photographic operations, in Tucson, Arizona, and also to book the models to be flown out there. It was her first experience of serious negotiation with John Robert Powers, Harry Conover, and Walter Thornton, the heads of the principal agencies of the day, and she tried to beat down prices that had risen to $25 per hour in America’s wartime consumer boom.

Yet before she could get seriously engaged in the business of booking, Eileen fell afoul of Becker’s penny-pinching ways. She had made some progress with her typing—but not enough to avoid mistakes; she was forever rubbing out her errors. Having bought herself a 25-cent eraser one day, she went to see William Becker’s secretary, Blanche, and asked to be reimbursed.

“Whaddaya mean you spent our money?” came the angry response. “You pay for that eraser yourself!” Just 23, and a long way from her husband’s steadying calm, Eileen responded with equal aggression. She threw the eraser back at Blanche and walked out of Becker Studios for good. “Blanche made Judge Judy sound like a lady,” Eileen later recalled. “Besides, it’s hard for people now to realize how easy it was to get work in those days.”

Scarcely missing a beat, later in 1945 Eileen found herself a job in the advertising department of what was once America’s oldest department store, Arnold Constable & Company, on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the New York Public Library. Reporting to Isaac Liberman, the president of Arnold Constable, Eileen continued the apprenticeship she had begun with Elliot Clarke in the practicalities of the fashion business.

“It was my job to hire all the models for Constable’s advertising campaigns and catalogues. So I was on the telephone a lot. I got to know how all the different agencies worked, and I made friends with a lot of the models. I learned a big lesson when Mr. Isaac Liberman saw what I was paying for some models per hour. He was not happy, and he let me know it. So we had to work that much quicker in the photo studio.”

Negotiating with photographers and modeling agencies, arranging photo shoots, and devising the marketing campaigns for one of the city’s most eminent department stores, Eileen rapidly made a name for herself as she bustled around the high-pressure world of New York City’s fashion business. Lively, self-confident, and efficient, the young Mrs. Ford was clearly a rising talent.

Top Model

Another notable up-and-comer was Natálie Nickerson, who at five feet ten inches in her silk-stockinged feet had a pair of legs whose length and slenderness were scarcely believable. As peace returned to America in 1945, Natálie stepped out at the head of a postwar parade of relaxed and modern fashion models who were different from their predecessors. They made you wonder, as you gazed upon their long and lanky frames, whether they were not magically floating an inch or so above the ground.

Instead of going to college, the Phoenix-born Natálie had gained some experience modeling, so she decided to splash her savings on a flight to New York, where she settled into a humble church hostel in Lower Manhattan. She soon made friends with Eileen Ford, who had booked her to pose for the Arnold Constable catalogue in 1945, and in no time she was doing well enough to move uptown to the fashionable address for debutantes, the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

“I used to sleep on a camp bed sometimes in Natálie’s room,” Eileen later remembered. “I’d stay with her if I could not get back to Great Neck at night or had an early start the next morning in Manhattan. She was a sweet, sweet woman. We spent a lot of time talking.” Natálie would eventually have her own personal stationery, stylishly engraved without any capital letters: “natálie, the barbizon, 140 east 63rd street, new york 21.” The accent above the second a of her given name was her cue to people to place the stress on the second syllable. That, she said, was how her mother had always pronounced it: Na-tah-li.

The model’s lean “postwar” look attracted the fashion business’s top photographers. In the fall of 1945, Natálie posed for George Hoyningen-Huene wearing a striking backless dress by Claire McCardell, America’s new sportswear queen, for Harper’s Bazaar. A few months later, in January 1946, she was on the cover of Vogue, photographed by John Rawlings. Then, in the fall of 1946, she started work with Richard Avedon, the talented young protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, known for his relentless quest for the novel. Avedon provided “novel” with his iconic first cover for Bazaar: a cool Natálie, athletically modern in shorts and a loose top, her long, bare legs akimbo, with a shirtless young male model lying on the floor behind her, his back to the camera, resembling the young photographer. Brodovitch had worked with Jean Cocteau, Marc Chagall, and Man Ray, and Avedon’s touch of surrealism seemed to owe something to them. Was it possible that fashion photography, a commercial mechanism for selling frocks, might one day be considered an art form?

At the height of her career Natálie was said to be earning $40 an hour—making her, at that date, the highest-paid model in Manhattan, and hence the world, since no other country was paying rates to match those in America. After a false start with a short-lived cooperative, the Society of Models, she had moved to John Robert Powers, the doyen of model agents, still in business after nearly a quarter of a century and still capable of securing big bookings—though not as good at paying out on them. Powers owed Natálie thousands of dollars, but when she went in person to protest, the great man did not seem to know the name of his most successful model. “His secretary whispered it into his ear,” Natálie later recalled to Michael Gross, chronicler of the American model business. “That started things going in my brain.”

Richard Avedon’s first Harper's Bazaar cover, featuring Ford model Natálie Nickerson, January 1947.
By Richard Avedon/© The Richard Avedon Foundation/Published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1947, Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.


Natálie decided she would take over her own billing, adopting a similar payment method to the voucher system that was already being used by models in California and the Midwest. She detailed her hours and her fee at the end of each session. She would then get the client to sign this mini-contract, and she would leave it as her invoice for the job. When the money came in, she would forward the 10 percent agency commission to Powers.

This was a precursor for what would become the protocol by which models were paid for the rest of the century, but as Natálie put it to Eileen in their late-night Barbizon conversations, the system was back to front. According to Eileen, Natálie told her, “Models were treated as if they worked for the agencies, instead of the agencies working for them. There was too much sink-or-swim. Models needed to know exactly where they had to be for a job, and what they were supposed to bring with them, and the big agencies were not efficient in making sure their girls knew even such simple things. There was no career planning, no special training or care, no help with hair or makeup—no real system at all.”

So the two women decided to work out a system together. Eileen would act as secretary and booker to Natálie and to another model, Inga Lindgren, a Swedish beauty with high-arching eyebrows and meticulously manicured nails. Each model would pay Eileen $65 per month for her secretarial assistance and for making phone bookings, while Natálie would act as a discreet publicist and drummer-up of business, quietly recommending the energy and efficiency of Eileen’s services to other models. “I realized,” Natálie explained to Michael Gross, “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.” Natálie beat the bushes well. Eileen started working for her and Lindgren in the fall of 1946, and by March of the following year Natálie’s word of mouth and Eileen’s proven efficiency had attracted the signing of seven additional successful models—high-flying women who were all fed up with how men were handling their business. Each newcomer paid Eileen a further $65 for her services, which took her monthly income to almost $600—some $7,000 per year.

Though Eileen did not put all this money in her own pocket (she split the commission revenues she received 50–50 with Natálie), it soon became clear that the two women were partners in a flourishing commercial enterprise: a modeling agency.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

In the fall of 1946, Eileen set up her card table, address book, and telephone in a house owned by her parents, in Manhattan. “I wasn’t so much of a booker,” she later recalled. “I didn’t need to be. The work just came in. The price was set already, and I just had to work out how many hours and the other details like time and place. So I was like their secretary.”

Eileen was a secretary with a difference, however. Her work with Elliot Clarke, William Becker Studios, and Arnold Constable meant she knew or could find out exactly what her girls needed to take with them—models in the 1940s were expected to do their own hair and makeup, carrying their hairpieces and curlers around with them in large circular hatboxes. Also, Eileen had a different attitude. “The thing about Eileen,” recalled Joan Pedersen, one of the earliest models to join her, “was that there was never any doubt that she cared. It was as if each booking she made for you was the most important in her life to that date—so you felt that you should treat it that way, too.”

Eileen may have been working out of her family home, but she dressed up smartly every morning as if she were going to work in an office, even though she and Jerry (who had returned from the war in the spring of 1946) had just $25 in the bank.

It had been Eileen’s optimistic intention to carry on working without interruption right up to and through the birth of her new baby. But with the arrival of firstborn daughter Jamie, on March 17, 1947, Jerry Ford stepped in to help his wife with the day-to-day problems of running her modeling agency, and he never stepped out. Jerry matched Eileen for efficiency and commitment, and he managed it all with a softer, less abrasive touch. “He would play good cop to her bad cop,” Michael Gross once said. “They made an incredible team. Eileen found herself a husband smart enough to revolutionize the way the business was done—and Jerry Ford didn’t just stop at one good idea.”

In the long term, Jerry’s revolutionary ideas ranged from mechanized office efficiency to the re-structuring of the perfume- and makeup-advertising contracts that would pave the way for the emergence of multi-millionaire supermodels.

At the end of March 1947, Eileen Ford had just turned 25. Her husband was still 22.

A Star Is Born

Nineteen forty-seven did not, on the face of it, seem the ideal moment for Eileen’s father, Nat Otte, to tell his daughter and son-in-law that he would like them to move their burgeoning modeling business out of the family home.

“We had an old brown 1941 Ford that we could sell,” recalled Eileen, “and we got $900 for that. That was enough to put down a deposit on an office on Second Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets.” Thus the Ford modeling agency’s first commercial address became 949 Second Avenue, a walk-up between a funeral parlor and a cigar store. “It was two floors up,” remembered Eileen, “and we painted the front door of our office red, to the horror of the owner.”

Eileen brought the folding card table from home, Jerry got a bank of telephones, and Eileen’s mother, Loretta, provided an old red sofa for the comfort of visitors and models—one of the first of whom was a young woman named Jean Patchett, who had been working for Conover until she encountered Natálie Nickerson on a shoot for Ladies’ Home Journal. When Patchett heard about Eileen’s expertise, she was suitably impressed and arrived at 949 Second Avenue expecting a plush office supervised by a woman of 60—“very stern.” But Eileen “turned out to be none of that,” Patchett told the author Charles Castle. “I walked into this tiny, grubby office. There were six telephones on a card table, behind which sat Eileen Ford. She turned around, and I found she was only about three years older than I was.”

Eileen Ford was equally surprised. “I was just stunned by the look of Jean,” she recalled more than 60 years later. “I still remember the day she walked into our first office, on Second Avenue, wearing a long black coat with a black velvet yoke that her mother had made for her.”

Coming from a humble background (as, indeed, did almost all of Eileen’s earliest recruits), Jean Patchett—“I’m Jean Patchett: You don’t darn it. You patch it”—initially relied for her wardrobe on a devoted mother with a sewing machine and the Vogue Pattern Book. “Jean was just breathtaking,” recalled Eileen, “tall, with great legs, a long neck, and a really beautiful face with brown eyes. She had a mole on her cheekbone, and she made it her trademark, three decades before Cindy Crawford. Jean knew what she looked like, and she knew how to make herself look even better—though at the beginning she did need to lose some weight.”

The model herself recalled Eileen putting it more directly. “You’re as big as a house!” was Patchett’s version of what Eileen bellowed as the model came through the red door. Having burst into tears, the new arrival thought further and decided that this opinionated and abrasive young woman was at least more attentive to her job prospects than was Harry Conover—“He had five hundred girls. I don’t think he paid attention to any of them.” So the 135-pound “house” set about losing weight, while Eileen set about booking her stunning new client some cover sessions.

“Each of those early models was precious,” recalled Eileen. “We worked very hard for all of them. But Jean Patchett was the first that we made into a star.”

Keeping hold of a star could prove difficult, however, if Ford could not deliver the hard and reliable cash that was being offered by the rival agency recently opened by A&P shopping-empire heir Huntington Hartford. The only way to dissuade Ford’s high-earning models from defecting to Hartford was to set up a guaranteed payment system. Eileen and Jerry needed capital, and for that Eileen would turn to two of her friends from the North Shore of Long Island, the brothers A. J. and Charlie Powers, whose wealth derived from their father’s prosperous photoengraving company; the brothers supplied the funds that Eileen and Jerry needed to match the liquidity of the Hartford agency.

“Basically,” Eileen later recalled, “A. J. and Charlie took out mortgage loans on their homes to raise us the money. We were all friends. We would do anything to help each other. It’s difficult to explain it, but that’s what it was like in those days. We were young. We were naïve. We were all working, and we were having a good time.”

As a partner in the business, Natálie Nickerson was a co-signatory to the note—a loan to the agency from “Augustin J. Powers, Jr. and Charles A. Powers in the sum of Thirty-five Thousand ($35,000.00) Dollars”—and Jerry Ford negotiated the technicalities.

Eileen and Jerry Ford now had the capital to expand their nascent modeling business.

Smooth Operator

In his earliest days on the phone as a model booker, Jerry Ford was delighted to negotiate a plum commission for Jean Patchett—a full two weeks in the Bahamas, travel and all expenses paid, in order to shoot a collection of beach- and leisurewear. Patchett was already commanding $25 an hour, close to the highest rate then being paid in New York, so Jerry assumed that at six hours a day for at least 10 or 12 days he could clear $1,500 or more for his rising star. When Patchett got back to New York, however, the voucher for her two-week trip showed only a few hundred dollars.

“It rained,” explained the photographer, and the model glumly confirmed that the weather had been atrocious. In their two weeks in Nassau, they had been blessed with only a few days of sunshine for shooting. Those few days were all that went on Jean Patchett’s time sheet—no work, no pay. Patchett would have made more money staying in New York doing regular studio work.

It was Jerry’s first encounter with the financial realities of the fashion business. Canceled work meant canceled checks. He and his wife might regard their models as “stars” to be cherished and rewarded for their very particular beauty, but in the eyes of the rag trade, models were just wage earners, another category of hired help.

Eileen had always cultivated the style of the scrappy shop steward in her protective demeanor toward her girls. Now Jerry engaged in the same battle for better pay and conditions—in his own, courtlier fashion. “It was Jerry,” recalled Roland Schucht, Jerry’s Swiss investment-banker friend, “who introduced cancellation fees, fittings fees, and weather-permitting fees to the modeling business, without any shouting. He was very polite about it—and he also put in time and a half for overtime, in the event that sessions ran long. But he was different from a shop steward: if the girls were late and held things up, then he would make them pay. The lost time was docked from their fee.”

Eye for Style

A few years later the young Dick Richards, the photographer and later film director and producer (of such films as Tootsie), was serving his apprenticeship as a photographer’s assistant when his boss suddenly vanished from the studio. “I looked around,” Richards remembered, “and there was Jerry Ford, who had just appeared from nowhere, all six foot two of him. My boss had fled. Jerry asked, ‘Where’s George?’—perfectly politely—and I said, ‘In the back, I think.’ So Jerry left without a fuss, but a few minutes later George came out with a check for me to take straight around to the Ford office. When you looked at Jerry, you just knew you had to pay; he had his own quiet way of saying, ‘Hand it over.’ It was partly because he was such a nice guy—you didn’t want to let him down. And the bottom line was you knew that you couldn’t get the top models from Eileen unless you paid Jerry.”

This was the creative essence of the Ford partnership—Eileen had the eye that recruited the quality, and Jerry made sure that people paid properly for it. As for Eileen’s eye, said Richards, “I remember the girls that Eileen used to send over for test shots. You could tell that many of them had never done modeling before. But they always had something special about them—you just yearned to put them in front of the camera. Eileen had a nose for quality.”

By some happy instinct—taste, nose, eye, or however you might describe it—Eileen could pick out the best, and with her husband’s help, “the best” would become her trademark. From the very beginning until her heyday, in the 1970s and 1980s, the title “Ford model” carried a cachet all its own. Ford models were seen as the aristocrats of their profession: thighs that stretched for miles; an expectation of blondeness, though not invariably so; and a general impression of extra sparkle, height, and slenderness—stature, in every sense of the word, including mental discipline and punctuality. They also became known in the business for turning up with every accessory needed in their model bags, from spare eyelashes to extra hairpieces—the result of Eileen’s ferocious attention to detail.

Eileen (front row, in green) with a fleet of Ford models, 1955.

Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; By Mark Shaw/MPTVImages.com.

There were three categories of models in the 1950s: “Juniors” stood at around five feet five in their stockinged feet and wore dress sizes five to nine—weighing 100 to 106 pounds, they were supposed to look like teenagers, and often were. “Misses” were a little taller and heavier, up to 110 pounds—they were sometimes described as “young mother” or “in-between.” At the top of the range came the “high fashion” models, who started at five feet eight, ideally weighing little more than 112 pounds, with vital statistics of a 32- to 33-inch bust, a 20- to 21-inch waist, and 33-inch hips.

“There are two good reasons for these requirements,” Eileen once explained. “First, photographic models must fit manufacturers’ samples… Second, the camera really does add at least 10 pounds to each subject.”

There was no doubt which of the three traditional categories Eileen preferred—“the super-sleek models,” as she lovingly described them, “who appear dripping mink and diamonds in the glossy fashion magazines … the epitome of sophistication.” Unlike her competitors, who recruited all three categories of models and would book their girls for paying jobs ranging from Frigidaire ads to vaudeville tours, Eileen preferred to concentrate on the highest of high-fashion commissions. Even for her models in the junior and miss categories, she spurned what she called “product” advertising. It was her proud boast that she had turned down the young Grace Kelly, quite a successful model in New York before she went to Hollywood, because Grace had done bug-spray and cigarette commercials—one of Kelly’s commercials featured her wearing a pinafore while wielding an aerosol can.

The Inside Track

Forty years later Huntington Hartford identified Ford’s strategy of choosing the high-fashion route as the key ingredient in Eileen’s success. “Eileen Ford had the inside track with the inside people in the fashion business,” Hartford complained to Michael Gross in the 1990s. “[She] got all the best models.” Eileen herself liked to explain her “inside track” in terms of the fashion expertise she had developed in her months with Elliot Clarke, William Becker Studios, and Arnold Constable. “Let’s say the Wool Bureau called,” she would explain, “and needed someone who could wear [the designer] Norell well. I knew who could.”

Yet Eileen was hardly unique in this, and the inside advantage that really gave her the edge for more than five years was the succession of behind-the-scenes approaches made on her behalf by her partner and undercover publicist, Natálie Nickerson—which, while “not exactly honest and straightforward,” as Natálie herself later admitted, was very effective. With one of America’s most sought-after mannequins singing Eileen’s praises in the changing rooms of Avedon, Penn, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe on an almost daily basis, it was scarcely surprising that the Ford agency should find its stable filling up with some of New York’s most elegant high-fashion models.

Jerry Ford capitalized on his wife’s high-fashion priorities, following her lead in downplaying product advertising and drawing up a list of commissions that Ford would not accept for its models in any category. For example, Ford girls would not pose for true-crime-magazine illustrations; they would not consent to brassiere or bathtub poses; the Fords would not supply bosomy heroines for steamy book jackets; and deodorant ads were discouraged as “not worthy” of their girls’ “special talents.”

Family Affair

This titillating list of taboos was published in Life magazine on October 4, 1948, in a five-page feature, “Family-Style Model Agency,” which opened with a photo of the handsome young couple juggling phones in their Second Avenue office. “While her husband answers one telephone and hands her another, Eileen Ford, on a third, lines up a new job for one of her 34 fashion models.”

The next spread displayed 21 of the Fords’ 34 models, a charming collection of young women looking rather like a college sorority, all smiling and sitting informally on the floor in the office with Eileen and Jerry—“Unlike most agency models,” explained the caption, “the girls actually like to drop in after work just to visit.” The balance of the photos showed Eileen in a sequence of humble and helpful poses, such as bending over to salve the blistered feet of model Sandra Nelson or having her own shoulder massaged to alleviate the strain of holding the telephone receiver to her ear.

“Eileen was like a mother hen,” recalls Lorraine Davies Knopf, who went to work for Ford some years later as a junior model. “She used to give us advice on our makeup or personal life. She used to give us all Christmas presents—with presents for our children if we had any. That was unheard of.”

The model Carmen Dell’Orefice remembers Eileen and Jerry’s riotous Christmas parties, complete with balloons and streamers, at which Eileen would call out a name and fling her present across the room, with everyone cheering or jeering wildly depending on whether the recipient caught the present or dropped it. “Eileen and Jerry just loved entertaining,” she recalls. “They worked hard and played hard, and they were very generous to all of us. Eileen organized a huge wedding shower for every one of my three marriages—until I worked out that I didn’t have to marry the guy every time.”

Big Break

The Life article put the Fords’ “family-style” modeling agency firmly on the map. The feature was an immense publicity coup—and the images of the attractive young couple who were generating revenues of $250,000 a year for their attractive young models prompted still more mainstream articles. Before the arrival of Eileen and Jerry, there had been a certain hesitation in the media—a cough of apology, almost—when it came to coverage of the glossy, graying gentlemen who headed up the rival agencies. There was a lingering suspicion of seediness. Yet no one could be suspicious of the Fords with their baby on the floor beside them.

“The bookings came rolling in after that write-up,” remembered Joan Pedersen. “There was an enormous upsurge in the business.” Soon after the Life article appeared, Sherman Billingsley started inviting Jerry and Eileen to bring their girls, on his tab, to join the rich and famous at his fashionable Stork Club, on East 53rd Street—“New York’s New Yorkiest place,” as the nationally syndicated gossip columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell liked to describe it. Winchell had his own, permanently reserved table, No. 50, in the Stork’s inner sanctum, the exclusive Cub Room (also known as the “Snub Room”), and as he name-checked the congregation, the expression “Ford model” entered America’s lexicon. The young Fords were suddenly the toast of Manhattan. They had arrived—and with their new fame there arrived newer and even more stunning models.

Funny Face

Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba grew up an ugly duckling, the daughter of a patrolman in Midtown. She was the butt of jokes at school (as many models relate that they were) on account of her skinniness—the result, in her case, of rheumatic fever in the days before antibiotics. Like Joan Pedersen, Dorothy had had to abandon her dreams of being a ballerina because she grew too tall in her teens. Yet Eileen Ford knew exactly what to do with the 22-year-old beanpole when she presented herself at 949 Second Avenue in 1949. Eileen sent Dorothy directly to the studio of Irving Penn, who asked for her name. “Dovima,” came the answer, a stringing together of the opening letters of her three Christian names: Do-Vi-Ma.

“Just look at that waist!” exclaimed *Harper’s Bazaar’*s Diana Vreeland in delight when she saw her, and she whisked the young model off to Paris to work with Richard Avedon.

Along with Natálie Nickerson, Barbara Mullen, and Jean Patchett, Dovima was one of the elite group of young women for whom Jerry Ford was able to negotiate earnings that made them, at various moments in the late 1940s and early 1950s, some of the highest-paid models in the world—and in 1949, they were joined by two more. Dorian Leigh had already made her name working both for Conover and on her own account when, dissatisfied with Conover’s perpetual failure to pay, she had briefly set up her own modeling agency, the Fashion Bureau. Rather short (five feet five) and definitely on the old side for modeling—her 30th birthday fell in April 1947—Dorian Leigh (who had dropped her given name of Parker because her parents disapproved of modeling) was nonetheless a much sought-after cover girl, thin-faced and elegant, with Harper’s Bazaar, Paris Match, Life, Elle, and half a dozen Vogue covers to her credit.

“Dorian knows what you want before you take the picture,” Irving Penn, one of her favorite photographers and also one of her numerous lovers, once remarked. He was “a neurotic lay,” she later complained in one of the random barbs of indiscretion for which she was notorious. “Afterwards he’d drink bottled water. Sex dehydrated him.”

After Dorian Leigh closed the Fashion Bureau, not only was she in need of a new agency, but she was eager to advance the career of her much younger sister, Suzy, 15 years her junior. So she phoned Eileen Ford with a proposition, offering to join the Fords immediately and on standard terms, provided that they also sign up her kid sister, Suzy—sight unseen.

“Dorian was wild,” remembered Eileen, “and she was really too small for a model. I wouldn’t have picked her myself—for the very same reason that I wouldn’t have picked Kate Moss. Rejecting the shorter girls was often a bad mistake I made.”

By the time Dorian Leigh approached the Fords, her track record had made her a prospect they could not pass up—but what about her unknown sister?

The couple arranged a meeting with the two sisters at an Italian restaurant, Mario’s Villa d’Este, on East 56th Street, and waited anxiously amid a sea of white tablecloths, eventually to behold the petite Dorian walk in followed by a towering, carrot-haired teenager—the 15-year-old Suzy Parker was already five feet ten.

Model Suzy Parker during the “Think Pink” number in the 1957 film Funny Face.

“Oh, my God!,” Eileen remembered hearing her husband exclaim in dismay. Yet on this occasion Jerry got it wrong, and Eileen’s preference for height was vindicated. In just a few years, Suzy Parker would become even more famous and successful than her sister Dorian. The star model of the 1950s, Parker was also one of the inspirations that Richard Avedon used to cite, along with his first wife, Doe, and also Dorian and Dovima, for an idea of his that became Funny Face (1957), the stylish contribution made by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen to Hollywood’s largely undistinguished roster of movies about models.

The happy ending of Funny Face is as predictable as those of The Powers Girl (1943) and Cover Girl (1944), two earlier model movies that featured the young ladies of the John Robert Powers and Harry Conover agencies, respectively. Yet those earlier projects were essentially “girlie” movies for the proverbial tired businessman—“virtually every nook and cranny,” sniffed Bosley Crowther in his New York Times critique of Cover Girl, “is draped with beautiful girls.” They were happy-go-lucky troop shows on celluloid, with beauty contests and lines of high-kicking girls reflecting the vaudeville backgrounds of both Powers and Conover.

Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, aimed higher and came from a different age and sensibility. While gently satirizing the pretensions of the fashion industry in the person of a Diana Vreeland figure (“Think pink!”), edgily played by the talented singer, vocal arranger, and author Kay Thompson, the movie took models seriously. The underlying message of Funny Face was the same as the gospel according to Eileen Ford: the face, funny or otherwise, was key to the highly serious creative process of fashion photography, along with discipline and a certain mental attitude. Getting the right model was everything—and it was only appropriate that Eileen’s prize models Dovima and Suzy Parker were allotted roles in the film.

Forming Their Future

It is not possible to make a precise inventory of the models who worked for Eileen Ford, but surviving records suggest that more than 1,000 models, male and female, were listed on her books from 1946, when the Ford agency was founded, until its sale, in 2007. Jean Patchett, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker, Tippi Hedren, Wilhelmina Cooper, Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Lauren Hutton, Cheryl Tiegs, Beverly Johnson, Jerry Hall, Brooke Shields, Rene Russo, Christie Brinkley, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Renée Simonsen, Rachel Hunter, Alek Wek, Bridget Hall, Karen Elson, Erin O’Connor, Elle Macpherson, and many more—all bore the title “Ford model.”


Adapted from Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty, by Robert Lacey, to be published next month by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers; © 2015 by the author.