Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (17 page)

“But the truth is, everyone in this business including
Vogue
and
Bazaar
and Avedon and Penn,
everyone
is commercial,” Jerry says. Still, they did it Eileen’s way. “And Eileen was right,” her husband says.

Just as the attentions of
Vogue
or
Bazaar
could make a model, they could also make an agency. Polly Knaster, who’d previously worked for Huntington
Hartford, took over the management of
Vogue
’s studio in 1949, booking all the models for seven Condé Nast magazines. When the studio closed in 1952, because the magazines could no longer afford to keep stables of exclusive photographers, Knaster moved to
Vogue
as its models editor.

“I saw anybody, but I warned them to be prepared to be told they had no potential,” she says. “When I had somebody right, I’d work on their books, I’d make appointments. It was fun to groom a model so she’d be used, collaborating with the agent. When tests came through well, I’d show them to Babs Simpson, and she’d try them.” Knaster would push to get new models on one of
Vogue
’s then twice-monthly covers. “And when a new girl got on, she was made.”

“We’d use them a lot,” agrees fashion editor Babs Simpson. “And we’d ask them, please, not to work for the
Bazaar
.” Adds another
Vogue
fashion editor, Catherine di Montezemolo: “I would have lunches and meetings with Eileen to find out about new girls. She would send them to both magazines to feel them out. Then, if we really wanted a girl, we’d have to guarantee a certain number of pages in order to get her.”

Once a model was wanted, she was treated like a rare gem, and many of them came to believe that’s what they were. Retired Ford mannequin Ruth Neumann calls her generation of models the Untouchables. “We looked like we couldn’t say ‘shit,’” she explains. “We were snotty, cold. You couldn’t speak to us.”

Though it wasn’t the only game in town, the Ford agency epitomized that look with its icy blondes, gaunt brunettes, and snooty society types. It all came down to Eileen’s taste in women. “I have to like the girl,” she said. “Unless I’m sold on her, I can’t sell her. I don’t want to sound corny, but she has to be somebody I would like to have over to dinner.” It helped if a model was haughty and a little bland. “A model shouldn’t have a particular nationality, since she’s selling to everybody,” Ford said. And models had to be hardworking. When a Ford model went to the Riviera and came back a little spoiled, Ford dismissed her with a telegram. “I adore you, but I can’t afford you,” it said. “There’s no room for playgirls in this picture,” she explained. “We just can’t afford them. The people footing the bills aren’t fooling. They’re looking for a girl who’s trying to make money with her face.”

Natálie Nickerson stopped modeling the day she married Wingate Paine in 1949 and went into business with him, running his studio and acting as his agent. “By that time Eileen didn’t need much recruiting,” she says. “Every
body wanted to be with them. There was no competition. We saw each other socially.” When a good model appeared in Wingate’s studio, the Paines told her about Ford.

“But then,” says Natálie, “I disagreed on some things. There was too much controlling, control of clients, control of models. People were being told that models were busy when they weren’t, so Eileen could bring newer girls along, and maybe dissipate their strength!” By 1952 Natálie thought Ford was abusing her position.

There was also the matter of money. “We gave her half of everything,” says Eileen. Adds Jerry: “But that wasn’t much.” Between 1946 and 1952 Natálie says she never received more than $20,000 from Ford. She got regular financial statements, and she never questioned the Fords about what she considered overly lavish entertainment expenses. But then came “expenses I considered personal,” she says, declining to elaborate. “Rightly or wrongly I felt cheated and betrayed, and in my mind everything between us had changed.” Stewart Cowley says he told Natálie that the Fords were using her money to light cigarettes in Paris with $100 bills.

Toward the end of that year the Fords suddenly asked the Paines to buy them out and take over the agency, but by December Eileen had changed her mind. “On behalf of my clients, Gerard and Eileen O. Ford, notice of termination and dissolution of partnership is herewith given you, effective December 31, 1952,” said the letter Ford’s attorney sent to Natálie on December 29. Her attorney advised her to sue but warned that any settlement would likely keep her out of the model business.

With her husband’s grudging blessing, Natálie opened her own agency in 1953 with two top Ford models—Sandy Brown and Dovima—and five telephones. “I couldn’t think of a name for the agency, and I wasn’t going to use my own name,” Natálie says. “I wanted to be very behind the scenes and not publicized and I never was, incidentally. I sent out notices that Dovima would be at Plaza five-five-eight-nine-three or whatever it was, and the same for Sandy Brown, and that’s where the Plaza Five came from. I had given Dovima twenty-five percent to come with me, because I, like Eileen, needed a top model, a big name.”

Dovima was that. After Dorian Leigh and before Suzy Parker, she was Richard Avedon’s favorite, but she was more. Dovima was the quintessential 1950s high-fashion model and in that, arguably, the apotheosis of all models. “Dovima was simpleminded and uneducated, [but] an absolutely incredible person,” says Dorian Leigh.

Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba was born in the Bronx in 1927, half Polish, half Irish, the daughter of Patrolman Stanley Juba of the Fourteenth Precinct. She grew up in a two-story brick apartment building in Jackson Heights. The students at the Blessed Sacrament Elementary School called her Skinny Dottie Pigtails. “
We
called her Doe,” says her mother, Margaret Juba. She had brown hair and large, luminous blue eyes that helped her win beauty contests as a child. Her picture appeared in the
Patrolman’s Benevolent Association Bulletin
.

At age ten Doe developed rheumatic fever, and she spent the next seven years at home in bed. Tutored at home, she’d talk on the phone with her visiting teacher’s other bedridden young patients. Doe dreamed of being a ballerina and developed into a talented artist. At twelve she started signing her drawings and paintings with the first two letters of each of her names: Do-vi-ma.

Doe Juba was finally declared well at age eighteen. She got a job selling candy at Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue, went to art school, and even saw John Robert Powers; but modeling didn’t pan out. “I never thought I was a beautiful woman,” she once said. “As a child I was a gangly, skinny thing and I had this ugly front tooth that I broke when I was playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes.”

In 1948 she married Jack Golden, an orphan who worked at a bank and lived upstairs from the Jubas with cousins. He moved downstairs into her bedroom. Six months later Doe was laid off by the advertising agency where she’d gotten a job as an artist. She was waiting by an elevator at 480 Lexington Avenue to meet a girlfriend for lunch when someone grabbed her arm and said, “Come with me.” Within minutes she had a new hairdo and was earning $17.50 posing for
Glamour
magazine.

“I was an instant success,” she said later. “They sent me to Eileen Ford.” The very next day she had a booking with Irving Penn to model an off-shoulder gown for
Vogue
. Penn asked her to smile. She gave him an enigmatic look to hide her cracked, discolored front tooth. Penn asked her name. “Dovima,” she replied.

“She was the super-sophisticated model in a sophisticated time, definitely not the girl next door,” Jerry Ford once said, summing up her visual appeal. But Dovima
was
the girl next door at heart. “It always seemed like I was watching a movie,” she said of her model years, “and I’m in the movie, only it really isn’t me.”

In the early scenes of that movie she bought an $18,000 brick house in Jackson Heights and was earning modeling’s top rate, $30 an hour. “After my
initial discovery,
Vogue
began booking me every day and I found myself beginning to think of
me
as a model,” she said. “I was a prima ballerina one day, then an adagio dancer, a movie queen, a clown, a forlorn waif. I was anything that could be portrayed with a look, a gesture, a stance, a mood and the right costume. The more the photographer demanded, the more I was willing to give…. I found ways to change my hairdo in three minutes … and sometimes when we worked on location, I had to change outfits in taxis, or behind a tree. Once, I changed in a telephone booth.”

“Just look at that waist!” Diana Vreeland cried the first time she saw Dovima. In August 1950 she went to Paris with Vreeland and Avedon for
Harper’s Bazaar
. An innocent abroad, she used the bidet in her hotel room as a flower pot. When she arrived in Egypt for another shoot with Avedon, she was asked how she liked Africa. “Africa?” she asked. “Who said anything about Africa? This is Egypt.” Told Egypt
was
in Africa, she responded, “I should have charged double rate!” Years later Richard Avedon told model Lauren Hutton about that trip. “They were going on a camel trip across the desert,” Hutton says. “Dick had told everyone to bring just one small bag, but Dovima had this huge trunk, so he thought she was bringing a lot of clothes, and he said, ‘What are you doing, bringing all those clothes?’ And she said, ‘Those aren’t clothes, those are my books!’ And he thought, ‘I can’t take books from a girl!’ But it turned out to be all comic books—a gigantic steamer trunk of comic books.”

Dovima never lost that innocence, friends say, even as the money started pouring in ($5,000 her first year; $15,000 her second; $30,000 by 1954) and she grew more accustomed to her new, sophisticated world. By 1953 she had worked with almost every star of photography. But she’d grown unhappy with Eileen Ford. Natálie’s offer of a partnership in a new agency was hard to refuse. Jerry Ford recalls that Paine sweetened the pot by offering Jack Golden a job.

Eileen’s response was instantaneous, says Natálie. “She refused to give Wingate any models. Nobody could exist without Ford models at that time. I called everybody and said, ‘Look, I’m not asking you to do this for Wingate, but who’s gonna be next? You? Should she be allowed to have the power to shut down a studio?’ I’m sure a lot of people called her and said, ‘You can’t do this, Eileen.’ And there was never another problem.”

Ultimately Plaza Five benefited the Fords. In 1954 Dovima raised her rate to $50, and other top models followed suit, Ford’s included. “Dovima had trouble being on time,” says Natálie, “but when she arrived late at a studio, she would be so remorseful that she was usually forgiven. I’m not sure this would have been tolerated from any other model.”

Avedon played a large part in her career. Traveling to Paris, London, Rome, Egypt, and Mexico, “we became like mental Siamese twins, with me knowing what he wanted before he explained it,” Dovima said. “He asked me to do extraordinary things, but I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”

In 1955 the duo collaborated on what may be the best-known fashion photograph of all time, “Dovima and the Elephants.” She estimated they took a thousand pictures in an hour that day. “By the time I finished, I thought of the elephants as friends working with me in complete synchronization, all of us gently swaying back and forth,” she once recalled. Avedon instructed her to be aloof and so above it all that it would seem as if the pachyderms weren’t there. He later called that photo “her peak of elegance and power.”

She was Avedon’s fashion doll. She would do whatever he wanted, all the while looking like an unruffled swan. Off the set she tried to live the same story. “I began to [have] the idea that I was a photograph … a plastic image,” she said. “I could only be myself behind a camera.” By 1955 Jack Golden had quit his job at the bank. He joined her that year, at her expense, in Paris. He got drunk, as he often did at home, and threw up in the wastebasket in the front of a reporter as Dovima stood by patiently waiting to clean up the mess. “If I didn’t have my husband, what would it all be worth?” she asked another interviewer. “I think my husband is the only boy I ever met who told me I was beautiful.”

Dovima raised her rate to $60 an hour and cut her working hours down to four a day. In 1957 she appeared in
Funny Face
as a model named Marion. Back in New York, she signed up to study at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. There was a whole new world opening up for models on television, and Dovima was determined to be part of it. She appeared on
The Phil Silvers Show
and Joe Franklin’s
Down Memory Lane
and made personal appearances for NBC, divorced Golden, and married again, to Alan Murray, an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer. She gave him her money, just as she had given it to Golden. They lived in a nine-room apartment on Seventh Avenue and went out almost every night. A daughter, Allison, was born in 1958. Dovima was getting older, but nonetheless, at the end of that year she raised her rate to $75 an hour.

“She had married her second husband, who I felt was not a very nice person,” says Natálie Paine. “He told her that she had to raise her rate, much against our wishes. She was booked every minute, and she raised her rate, and she stopped working. Then she wanted to get involved in the agency. Her husband said she should. She was absolutely his puppet, or so it seemed to me. So she started announcing to the world that she owned a part of Plaza Five—which indeed she did—without ever discussing it with me. My lawyer had a meeting with her, where she demanded that she have the same salary that I do, and
I mean
, it was not rational. I ended up buying her out, which was very unfortunate, because she could have grown into that business. She was wonderful with girls; she could have worked with makeup and hairstyles. There was a lot she could have done.”