Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (14 page)

“I grew up with talk about mink coats,” says Richard Avedon. “Should we buy fifteen or four? Short or long?” He was born in 1923 and grew up in New York and Cedarhurst, on Long Island, the son of Jacob Israel Avedon, who owned Avedon’s Blouse Shop in Harlem and then Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, a specialty store at Thirty-ninth Street, with his brother Sam. Gertrude Lawrence appeared in its ad in
Vogue
. Sonia Delaunay designed its scarves. Their houses were always full of copies of
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Vogue
. When Sam Avedon lost all his money in bad investments, Jacob went to work as an insurance salesman and then as a buyer at the Tailored Woman, a top women’s fashion store. He ended up with another Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

Dick had a Kodak Brownie box camera as a boy. But he’d taken his first pictures without a camera. After his father taught him the principles of photography, he tried them out by taping a negative of his younger sister, Louise, to his shoulder and sitting in the sun as her image burned into his skin. Louise was also his first model. He took her to Central Park and posed her, copying photographs by Munkacsi and Frissell. Her later mental illness and death in a hospital at age forty-two are Avedon’s Rosebud, the source of his focus on the thin line between high style and deathly rictus. In Avedon’s photos there’s barely a difference between a laugh and a scream.

“Louise’s beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life,” he said in an interview with
Egoïste
, which published his work in the late 1980s. “She was the prototype of what I considered beautiful in my early years as a fashion photographer. All my first models … Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen … were all memories of my sister…. Beauty can be as isolating as genius, or deformity. I have always been aware of a relationship between madness and beauty.” Fifty years later his photograph of model Stephanie Seymour baring her carefully shaved pubic patch in a sheer dress evoked the same attractive madness.

After dropping out of high school, Avedon joined the Merchant Marine in 1942 and was assigned to the photo department. “I learned the techniques of photography,” he says. “I did hundreds and hundreds of ID photos.” Pictures he took for a service magazine caught Alexey Brodovitch’s attention. Brodovitch brought the young man after a year of study to Carmel Snow, who started him at
Junior Bazaar
, an ambitious new section that briefly turned
into an influential magazine for teenagers. “He used to scout the streets looking for new models,” remembers photographer Lillian Bassman. “At the beginning he used teenage models. Then he got the chance to work on
Harper’s Bazaar
, and of course he had to use older models. They were crazy about him. He was a jazzy little character.”

“There were no young photographers before me,” Avedon says. “I was the first. Now there are only young photographers. I had to be hidden from Louise Dahl-Wolfe. When she saw my first two pictures, she lost her memory and was found stumbling down Fifth Avenue.”

But Avedon was actually stumbling until 1948, when he shot the couture collections in Paris with model Elise Daniels, who didn’t so much pose as act. The palpable anxiety she betrays in Avedon’s portrait of her wearing a tulle turban in a restaurant brought something new—subtext—to fashion photography. By 1949 Avedon was king at
Harper’s Bazaar
. That June Avedon asked Dorian Leigh to go with him to Paris. “I didn’t pay much attention to Dick until he asked me to go to Paris,” she says. Dorian’s daughter Young had been born that spring, and they’d moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But she wanted to get back in harness and had started working with Milton Greene and Carmel Snow’s niece Nancy White, an editor at
Good Housekeeping
. Though her love affair with Irving Penn was over, she was working with him, too. In fact, they’d just completed a series for
Vogue
, of Dorian dressed in the fashions of different periods. When Penn heard that Dorian had been asked to Paris by Avedon, he “was furious, absolutely furious” and was convinced that Dorian had told Avedon about their recent session. Though they did become friends, Penn and Avedon were always also competitors.

“In that period, we could maintain a close working relationship with our models,” Avedon wrote in
Portfolio
, a brief-lived graphic arts quarterly Brodovitch designed in 1950. He and Penn “rarely encroached” on each other’s turf, Avedon added, “so that when Penn was working with Dorian Leigh for
Vogue
, I wouldn’t use her: there are no photographs of Jean Patchett or Lisa Fonssagrives by me and none of Dovima by Penn.” Avedon later compared his relationship with his models to that of a choreographer with his ballerinas. Sometimes the closeness turned comic. “Suzy Parker used to go through the top drawer of my desk, spying for messages, seeing if I was using anyone else,” the photographer revealed. “I knew that she did that, and I would leave chicken wings in the drawer for her. She loved chicken wings.”

Avedon had originally already booked another model, Mary Jane Russell, for the Paris trip. A Sarah Lawrence College graduate, Russell had worked for
a photographer booking models until one day in 1948 an editor asked to book
her
. “I’ll be straight with you,” Eileen Ford said when Russell called to ask if the agency would represent her. “You’re too tiny. Nothing’s going to fit you.” Jerry Ford convinced his wife to take Russell on. Jerry sent her to Diana Vreeland, who sent her to Lillian Bassman, Dahl-Wolfe, Frissell, and Avedon. All four booked her immediately, and she started posing for
Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal
, and
Vogue
. She was among the first to break down the wall between the dueling magazines.

Early in 1949 Mary Jane had been asked to go to Paris with Avedon. “I got my passport, I got my ticket,” she says. But one day a letter from Avedon arrived by messenger. It said that he’d decided Russell’s small size would be too limiting. She quickly discovered he was going to take Dorian to Paris instead. “I think Dick had a crush on Dorian,” says Russell. “I thought my heart would break.”

Says Mary Jane’s husband, retired advertising executive Edward Russell: “She’d spent night after night working. She colored her hair because Dick wanted something different. The whole enterprise was a lust to do better. Then this letter arrives. Dorian, other than a bigger chest, was the same size as Mary Jane.”

Avedon met Dorian when her airplane landed in Paris. “We got in the taxi, and they sliced peaches into glasses and poured champagne on it, and when we got to the Hôtel San Régis,” where all the photographers and models stayed, “we had the suite at the right of the glass door, a sunken bathtub full of flowers. It was just marvelous,” Dorian says. On that trip she was smuggled through the streets swathed with sheets so no one could see what
Bazaar
was photographing.

Avedon took one of his best photographs on that trip, of Dorian, wearing a tiara and laughing hysterically, at Le Pré Catalan restaurant in the Bois du Boulogne. “When I saw that, I thought it was Princess Margaret bombed out of her mind; I didn’t know it was you!” Suzy told Dorian.
Bazaar
wouldn’t publish it, deeming it, quite rightly, unflattering. “It was in the Metropolitan Museum,” Dorian says proudly. “Still is.”

She was the first jet set model, cavorting with what would have been the
Vanity Fair
set had
Vanity Fair
still been in existence. “It was so marvelous,” she says, “everyone was young and we were all starting—Byron Janis, Lenny Bernstein, Adolph Green, Betty Comden—all of them were friends of Dick’s, and I was, to them, a prize, because here was this model who is talking to us and knows what she’s saying. They thought models were empty-headed.”

Dorian started working for everyone. One garment center client told her, “You’re the thing I admire most, a lady who looks like a whore.” When another potential client called her in the country and asked what she’d done lately, Dorian picked up the latest issue of
Vogue
and counted forty-nine pictures of herself. She soon began shooting Revlon’s first national ads with Richard Avedon, including images that are remembered to this day for the lipsticks and nail polishes called Cherries in the Snow, Ultraviolet, and Fire and Ice.

Although she was paid a mere $250 for her famous Fire and Ice ad, Dorian claims she was making $300,000 a year. “Everybody was making forty dollars, I was getting sixty dollars an hour,” she says. “I used to imagine the clients were behind the camera, whispering to the photographer, ‘A dollar a minute, a dollar a minute.’ I also did something that Eileen said would ruin me: lingerie. And then, of course, I got a hundred twenty dollars. I also went to Europe twice a year, and they paid me a lot of money to come and work freelance for them.”

Meanwhile, her sister, Suzy Parker, had married her high school boyfriend secretly, just before she graduated from high school at age seventeen, in 1950. “Mother came upstairs and found them in bed and had hysterics,” says Dorian. “Suzy said they were married, and they were.” Although her parents wanted her to stay in the South and go to college, Suzy and her husband moved to Bucks County near Dorian and Roger Mehle. But Suzy’s marriage was already in trouble. As it deteriorated, she was becoming a top “editorial,” or magazine, model. Diana Vreeland called her “an intelligent American beauty who is interested in independence and making money.” Her income shot up to $100,000 a year.

When Avedon approached the Parker girls that spring to shoot the all-important fall collections with him in July, they jumped at the chance. Dorian went to Italy first with photographer Genevieve Naylor. She met designer Emilio Pucci on that trip. He and a friend took their clothes off, cornered her, and tried to rape her. Escaping to Paris, she hooked up with Suzy, and they fell in with the era’s gang of hot young Frenchmen, including the actor Christian Marquand, director Roger Vadim, magazine director Daniel Filippachi, and journalist Pierre “Pitou” De La Salle of
Paris Match
. Suzy fell for Pitou and almost immediately “retired” and moved to Paris. “She couldn’t afford to just be a model, because they didn’t pay enough money in Paris,” says Dorian. So Suzy got an MG sports car, an apartment on the Left Bank, a camera from her friends Sam Shaw and Robert Capa, and an “apprenticeship” with Henri
Cartier-Bresson. She started taking pictures herself and eventually worked for
Elle
and French
Vogue
and signed up with the Magnum photo agency, although one of its members later admitted, “We never managed to sell a single picture of hers.” Suzy shot a portrait of the handsome expatriate and best-selling writer Irwin Shaw. Dorian had an affair with him before returning to New York.

It was a season of failing marriages. Dorian was about to leave Mehle. Suzy was off to Mexico for a divorce. Richard Avedon had split up with his first wife, too. Unlike Penn and the many photographers who followed them into fashion, Avedon was never known to pursue sexual relationships with models. Early on Avedon told Dorian Leigh that Suzy Parker intimidated him. “He was scared of me, too,” Dorian recalls. “One day he said, ‘It takes a lot of courage to photograph beautiful women.’” That’s why he used a nobody named Dorcas “Doe” Nowell as his model at first. He’d met her in 1945, and they married soon thereafter. “Doe had an androgynous look,” says Lillian Bassman. “Dick, like all of us, has always been fascinated by androgynous sex and theatricality. When they walked down the beach in dungarees, they looked like two little boys.” But in 1948, while Avedon was shooting Elise Daniels in Paris, “Doe was doing summer stock and she met somebody else,” says a friend of the couple’s.

“You can’t fuck and photograph at the same time,” Avedon told writer Anthony Haden-Guest in 1993. “Taking fashion pictures of models is not a matter of arousement. It’s hard work.” Asked for recollections of models he’s worked with, Avedon demurs. “I have no thoughts about models,” he says. “I have no interest in models. I’ve had great friends who were models—Suzy, Dorian, Penelope Tree, Anjelica Huston, China Machado, and now Stephanie Seymour—but these are interesting, feeling women, with good hearts, minds, and, only coincidentally, good bodies. I’d be interested in them no matter what they looked like.”

By 1950 he’d fallen in love with Evelyn Franklin, the nonmodel wife of photographer Milton Greene. They were introduced at one of Avedon’s regular Sunday get-togethers by Lillian Bassman and her husband, the photographer and artist Paul Himmel, who’d shared summer houses with Dick and Doe on Fire Island. “In the period when Evelyn was leaving Milton and going to Dick, she used to come to my apartment on Lexington Avenue,” Dorian Leigh remembers. Avedon married Evelyn in 1951, and although they live apart, they remain married today.

Dorian wasn’t so lucky. Appearing as a model in a Broadway play, she took a leave of absence and returned to Paris in 1953 to see Suzy. “She was living with Pitou,” Dorian says, “and writing very strange letters. I was worried about her, because I never liked Pitou, and I had heard too many stories.” While there, Dorian went to a nightclub, the White Elephant, with Robert Balkany, a wealthy playboy, but slipped off long enough to make a date with the Marquis de Portago, who was known as Fon. Although he was married (to the former Carroll McDaniel, now the very social widow of Milton Petrie), Portago began an affair with Dorian. He was a race car driver, handsome, rich, and very charming. When she appeared on the cover of
Look
magazine that June, he noticed a quote: “I’d rather have a baby than a mink coat.”

“I think I can take care of both,” said Fon, who soon impregnated her.

“I never stopped to think, never,” says Dorian, who aborted the pregnancy, but not the affair with Fon, who’d promised to get a divorce and marry her. Late in 1954 she won a Mexican divorce from Roger Mehle and then married Portago. Unfortunately he was still married. Fon, who promised to divorce Carroll, promptly got Dorian pregnant again and headed back to Paris. Worried about her sister, Suzy set up a lunch for Dorian with designer Coco Chanel, who’d become a close friend. “Chanel said I was throwing my life away on an idiot,” Dorian reports. “She told me to find a rich husband. But the millionaires were all my friends because I wasn’t interested in their money.”