Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (16 page)

“That was a bad time. Pitou was cutting up. That’s when I found out about him and the drugs. He wanted me to find out; that’s why he started being less cautious, leaving things around. He was worried that he’d lost his meal ticket. I had terrible dreams, the car accident all over again every night. I was in a very bad frame of mind, and I took an overdose of pills. I was saved by my lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, who hushed it up and kept it out of the papers. The next thing I knew, Dick showed up and said, ‘Get your clothes, Evey and I are going to Round Hill, Jamaica, and you’re coming with us.’

“I said, ‘Can Pitou come?’ This is how stupid I was. Anyway, Dick handed me this phone number of a psychiatrist, and he said, ‘I’ll be very ashamed of you if you don’t call this man.’ So one day I was walking around New York City, and I went by the public library, and I dialed the number, and the doctor said, ‘Well, finally!’ Wonderful Viennese accent. And he proceeded to cut me off from Pitou. He went at it like crazy. He convinced me that I was being selfish in keeping Pitou from having a career, so I sent Pitou back to Paris, with an allowance. At Christmastime I said, ‘I want to go to Paris and be with Pitou.’ The doctor said, ‘All right, but just promise me one thing: Don’t get pregnant!’ Course, guess what I do? I used to wonder if he wasn’t using me as a test case, to see how dumb you could be!

“Pitou left me! He didn’t want to be a father. I had already hired a nanny, and the housekeeper was in this apartment that I had rented in Paris, and they knew that Pitou had moved out. He was gone, history. He moved in with a
Romanian tank heiress who had more money than I did. Pitou was having affairs all over the place. I was just so dumb. It was so obvious he was having an affair with this woman, and I thought he was in Algeria for
Paris Match
. All my friends were seeing him in restaurants, and they didn’t want to say anything to me because the French are very superstitious. I was nine months pregnant, and I wasn’t even allowed to see any bad movies. It didn’t hit the fan until I was in the hospital giving birth to Georgia.

“Dick took a picture of me with the astronauts in about 1962—John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Gus Grissom, the one who died. I pretended I was the editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
, and it was a Hearst publication, so I used my Hertz rent-a-car card as proof that I was with Hertz magazines, and I was actually allowed in! This was before anyone had photographed them, before anyone had seen the missile, and they didn’t want to put on their suits, and I talked them into it. Dick knew what he was doing. He had a plan in his head, and I was going along with it only because of the fun of working with him. He has a tic in his cheek that starts going when he’s really serious about something, and he’s so nearsighted, when he looks at contact prints, he squints. I loved all his different mannerisms, clicking his fingers, pacing around his studio.

“He couldn’t stand advertising people looking over his shoulder. We did photographs for
Harper’s
, for Mrs. Snow’s niece Nancy White, who was a devout Catholic. I remember she had a screaming fit over bikini bathing suit pictures, not only because my navel was showing—at that time you couldn’t show the navel—but also because I was wearing a religious medal, St. George and the Dragon. I have known a lot of fashion editors who are dragons! Anyway, she didn’t want to publish any of them, and Dick said, ‘OK, then I quit.’ They finally had to back down and publish it. She didn’t like any of our pictures. She thought they were a disaster, and so did most people at the time. It’s always been that way with Dick. What he does today, they’ll be copying ten years from now.

“I would do the Revlon ads with Dick. I never had a contract. What Mr. Revson offered me was such peanuts I told him to go take a flying jump. But I always ended up doing retakes for all these other models. Revson got so mad that he said, ‘You will not use Suzy Parker.’ So they gave me these weird names like Bubbles Macao, and we’d be doing it in the middle of the night, the ninth retake after eight other models.

“The greatest thing that happened to me is that Bradford Dillman and I made a film together in 1960 and became best buddies. We were the dearest, best friends in the whole world. The most I can hope for my children is that
they marry someone with whom they’ve had a working relationship and become best friends before they become lovers. I married a good man. I’ve never loved a man as much as Bradford. He’s been a marvelous parent. We’ve raised six kids together.

“I was still doing Revlon ads, I was still doing Hertz, Pabst beer, but it was lousy stuff. I didn’t retire until ’63, and that’s because I was pregnant. But my work was dwindling off. I would still do things with Dick, but that was it. I totally stopped in 1965. That’s a long career.

“It was a job, that’s all. You know, my friend Coco Chanel said it. Fashion is a joke. It isn’t an art, because if it were an art, it would be permanent, and it isn’t. It’s something that changes constantly. I was just lucky. Sheer luck. I was lucky to have been born with cheekbones.”

T
he 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 the 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.”