Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (11 page)

Dorian Leigh was thinking along the same lines after a couple of years of modeling. She was a huge success, earning as much as anyone. “I just never looked back,” she says. “I went from twenty-five dollars an hour to thirty dollars an hour.” Gene Loyd, an illustrator and art director, used to love watching her work. “When Dorian posed, it was like a jolt of electricity,” he says. “She put out both feet in infallible positions, then she set her knees, then her hips, then her waist, then her arms and hands, and at the last minute an expression would come across her face. If a photographer didn’t wait for that, she’d look at him with such anger!” Emerick Bronson, who started shooting for
Vogue
in the late 1940s, had a similar reaction. “When I pointed a camera at Dorian, I felt like seven five-thousand-watt lamps had been lit and were looking at me,” he says.

Despite her star power, Dorian decided against going to Hollywood, even though Diana Vreeland, who’d discovered Lauren Bacall and sent her to director Howard Hawks in 1943, gave her the same push. Leonard Lyons chimed in in his show business column, even calling Dorian’s mother for comment. “Leave my daughter alone,” her mother barked. “We’re a good middle-class family and we’re quite happy the way we are.”

Dorian got a different message: “Go. I’m taking the children.”

Twice Dorian was summoned by Howard Hughes, the billionaire who had produced
Hell’s Angels
(1930) and
The Front Page
(1931) and gone on to control RKO Studios. Their meetings did not go well. “I thought he was the rudest man in the whole world!” Dorian says. She wasn’t the type to take direction, as Harry Conover was about to find out. By 1946 her clients were complaining that they couldn’t get the bookers at Conover on the phone. “My clients weren’t interested in his other models. I was working for
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Vogue
, and his models were doing cheesecake. Candy later said he was really running a call girl service, getting dates for airmen!” He even tried to get Dorian to go out with Pappy Boynton, the World War II flying ace. She told him that unless he put in separate phone lines for his top models, she would leave.

“You can’t exist without me,” he told her.

“Honey, I could stand in Grand Central Station and my clients would find me,” she snapped back.

She was right. Dorian had hit the top quickly. “
Vogue
, you know, that’s the mark of success, when you’re editorialized at fifteen dollars an hour,” she says sarcastically of the relatively meager wages paid to models then, as now, by top fashion magazines. “We’d pay nasty little rates because we made stars of them,” admits Babs Simpson, a fashion editor during World War II.

Dorian and a friend at Conover, a tall, glacial blonde named Bijou Barrington, took a suite at the Elysée Hotel. They slept there at night when they had early bookings or late dates, and by day Barrington’s sister-in-law took their appointments. They were soon joined by other Conover models and a second phone girl. The business wasn’t very well organized at first, but, says Dorian, it
was
a legal modeling agency. She called it the Fashion Bureau. Within a matter of months four more agencies joined her in taking on Powers and Conover. “I started a revolution,” Dorian says. She certainly lived in a revolutionary manner, setting a swashbuckling style in model agentry that still lives today—although mostly in male agents.

Just after the Fashion Bureau opened, Dorian’s parents and her children moved to Florida, and she took her own apartment on Lexington Avenue, between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth streets. She shared the address with Henry Drawant, a friend of a
Vogue
editor, Leo Lerman, whom she knew from high school. They introduced her to their friend Truman Capote. She says Capote used her as the basis for Holly Golightly, the unforgettable character in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. “I took all my phone calls in a candy store across the street,
not a saloon,” she says, “and it was a private house, and it had never been made into apartments, so when I wasn’t there, Truman and Henry and Leo would come up to my apartment because I had a Siamese cat named Posy.”

She surely lived a Golightly life. “I came home one morning about dawn, and Leo Lerman was coming out of my landlord’s apartment on the ground floor. They’d had a big dinner the night before with Truman. I got out of the taxi, and Leo was going to take it, and he said, ‘Oh, profligate one!’ I rushed upstairs, got the dictionary, and looked up ‘profligate.’ Then I knew that what was so funny was
him
coming out at the same hour I was arriving.”

“Profligate” was understatement. “Many shall be nameless,” she warns, but she admits to many more. “There were very few that she missed,” says her friend Gene Loyd. There was a fling with calypso king Harry Belafonte. Another with her exercise instructor, Nicholas Kounovsky, who trained New York’s elite for years. She met the drummer Buddy Rich at a party thrown by photographer Milton Greene. “We had this two-day marriage,” Dorian says. “We go through a ceremony, and then he tells me, ‘My wife in California is going to use this against me to get a bigger settlement!’”

Then came Irving Penn. Born in New Jersey in 1917, Penn began studying design with Alexey Brodovitch at age eighteen and became his unpaid assistant at
Bazaar
in 1937. Three years later he was made art director at Saks Fifth Avenue, but in 1941 he left for Mexico to try his hand at being an artist. Two years later, back in New York, he went to work as an idea man for Alexander Liberman at
Vogue
. When photographers balked at executing Penn’s ideas for covers, he began photographing them himself. He met Dorian some months later.

“He took hat pictures in a car in front of the synagogue on Park Avenue,” she recalls. “Here I am, thinking he’s a young know-nothing. I’m telling him the best angles because he had just started with
Vogue
. He thought that was adorable of me, telling him how he should be doing it.” They soon went to bed together, though she judged him “a neurotic lay. Afterward he’d drink bottled water. Sex dehydrated him.”

One of Penn’s best-known photographs is a 1946 group portrait of
Vogue
’s photographers, including Serge Balkan, Beaton, Blumenfeld, Horst, Constantin Joffe, George Platt Lynes, Rawlings, and Penn himself. Tucked in among them is Dorian Leigh. Penn inscribed a copy of the photograph to “Dorian, the beautiful muse of all these strange men.” On the same wall in her home are two more Penn pictures from 1946. On one Penn wrote, “To beautiful Dorian, with admiration, gratitude and a heart.”

“Well, of course, Irving at that point was in love with me,” she says with a coquettish grin. She also says Penn “was just terribly … self-involved. Terribly, terribly important to himself. He acted as though we should be posing for him for the pure joy of being tortured. He was a still life photographer. And that’s how he wanted people to be.”

In his famous portraits he wanted personality. Fashion pictures were different. “I don’t think the girl’s personality should ever intrude,” Penn said. Who she was as a real person “was not of any significance.” Not only did Penn objectify his models, but he was also obsessively meticulous about posing them. When he wanted a picture of a model blowing the perfect smoke ring, Mary Jane Russell smoked several packs of cigarettes nonstop. Penn could also be painfully insecure. Says Dorian: “He used to go into a little cubicle in the back of the studio and call Alex Liberman and say, ‘Alex, I can’t do it, I’m sorry.’”

Penn could turn cruel, too. “He would look through the camera, and he’d say, ‘Do something else,’” Dorian remembers. “He reduced Jennifer Jones to ashes, hysterically sobbing and crying. He never took one picture; he just kept saying, ‘Do something else. Perhaps you don’t want to work today, Miss Jones? Perhaps you don’t feel like having your photograph taken?’ He did it, he told me, because she lied to him when he said, ‘I understand that you were a model, Miss Jones?’ She said, ‘Never.’ She was lying. She
was
a Seventh Avenue model, and it made him mad.”

Dorian made him happy. He included her in a 1947 group portrait of the twelve most photographed models of the time. “It was an extraordinary sitting,” recalls
Vogue
editor Cathy di Montezemolo. “There was almost no noise in the studio. The atmosphere was almost reverent.”

“They represent an omnibus of beauty, current replacement of Gibson and Ziegfeld girl legends,” the caption in
Vogue
read. “These twelve share a look of nonadolescence, a look gained not so much from being beautiful as becoming so. And they’ve gone on to be a magazine editor, an actress, newspaper columnist, a singer and a designer, and some are even mothers! All to prove that beauty may very well be as beauty does.” Seven of the dozen, including Betty McLauchlen Dorso (who also produced the photograph in her role as Condé Nast’s studio manager), weren’t working models any longer. But one who worked long afterward was Lisa Fonssagrives. “That was the first time that Penn met her,” Dorian says tartly. “And I was his lady friend.” Eileen Ford claims to have been there, too. “It was
coup de foudre
,” she says. “That was that.”

Two years later
Time
magazine chose Fonssagrives as the subject of a cover story on the burgeoning model business. Dorian says she suggested Fonssa
grives to
Time
because she was still embarrassed to be known as a model. But Gillis MacGil, a model who worked with her that week, remembers things a little differently. “Dorian almost killed Lisa,” she says. “The tension was
so
acute. Dorian was like a 1930s movie star. Remember how they were portrayed? Dorian behaved that way.”

“Do illusions sell refrigerators?”
Time
asked in the headline of its story, which described Fonssagrives as the “highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business.” The piece followed Lisa through a typical day in her life, as she sped at 70 mph from her cottage in Muttontown on Long Island in her red-upholstered Studebaker convertible. She picked up her bookings and went to a fitting, her hairdresser, and two sittings. “She responds instantly to the photographer’s every direction, almost before it is spoken,”
Time
burbled. “Her body (bust and hips 34 in.) is so supple that she can pull in her normally 23-inch waist to 18 inches. She has the gift of mimicry every good model needs, and a keen fashion sense.”

Lisa’s fairy-tale life was marred only by her marriage. Her husband, dancer turned photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, had opened a studio on Madison Avenue and briefly, at least, had some success, moving back and forth among
Vogue, Town & Country
, and
Harper’s Bazaar
. But commercial photography soon lost its appeal for him. “You were no longer the initiator,” he says. “Layouts began to be sent,” and photographers had to execute them exactly.

When the couple’s daughter, Mia, contracted rheumatic fever on a trip to Europe in 1950, the family extended a vacation into a convalescent stay of three months. Fonssagrives closed his studio. “I was finished, and Lisa thought her career was over,” he says. “She panicked and wanted a divorce. She felt I’d never get back on my feet.” She’d worked with Penn extensively, and Fonssagrives believes he’d asked to marry her. “I understood her anxiety,” Fonssagrives says. “When she became a top model, she got caught in the world of the in crowd. I didn’t. I wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to give it up.” Immediately after marrying Penn, she was back in
Vogue
and had another ten years. “Both Penn and Avedon were very prestigious and money-oriented. I had no interest in moneymaking,” says Fernand Fonssagrives.

He retired to Spain and became a highly regarded sculptor. Lisa married Penn, six years her junior, on her return to America. “She respected him, and he loved her,” says her first husband. “Her moment of fear was quickly gone. We remained friends. We had our wonderful daughter, and we were intelligent enough not to make her life tragic.” Lisa started taking photographs her
self but gave it up when she became pregnant with her son, Tom, in 1952, and turned her darkroom into a nursery.

She kept modeling through the 1950s and had one of the longest careers in the history of the profession. “She had incredible genes, and you can go on looking good if you do the right things,” says her daughter, Mia Solow. “She was also Irving’s muse. She saw things that he was then inspired by.” At the end of the 1950s she started designing clothes and, like her first husband, sculpting. “By the 1960s she was finished modeling,” says Solow. “Sculpture was her passion.” She was still with Penn in their sylvan house in the middle of Long Island when she died in 1992. “If I lived it over again, I would not change a thing,” she told an interviewer late in her life.

Lisa and Irving Penn’s marriage was one of the great love stories in fashion photography. But before Fonssagrives, Penn had had one other important attachment to a mannequin. Her name was Jean Patchett, and her agent describes her as the Babe Ruth of the new agency in town, Ford Models. “She was a big, big deal,” says Jerry Ford. “The first girl we started. The first big star.” Jerry took her test photographs himself. “I didn’t do that for very long,” he says. “There were just the two of us then,” says his wife, Eileen.

Patchett and Mr. Penn—as he was henceforth known—were together late in 1948 on his one and only location trip to Peru, where he took one of his most famous photographs, of Patchett sitting in a café, shoes kicked off, chewing moodily on a string of pearls. Dorian Leigh believes that Penn and Patchett were lovers. So does photographer Francesco Scavullo, who shot Patchett’s first professional tests. “The pictures they did were so wonderful they could have suggested that to people,” Jerry Ford allows. Patchett won’t address the question directly. Dorian, she says, “is either jealous or unhappy with her life to have to say things like that.” And Penn always claimed to dislike models. “To photograph them is enough,” he said. But clearly there were some models he disliked less than others, and the prim and proper Patchett was one.