Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (16 page)

A lot of stewardesses wanted to be models. The Tanya girl used to be a stewardess on our airline. A stewardess is what they could get and a model is what they couldn’t get. They weren’t the type of person, they weren’t that beautiful, they weren’t that thin. So their second choice would be stewardess.

 

 

I wanted to get out of Broken Bow, Nebraska. (Laughs.)

 

POSTSCRIPT: “
Every time I go home, they all meet me at the airplane. Not one of my sisters has been on an airplane. All their children think that Terry is just fantastic, because their mom and dad—my sisters and their husbands
—
feel so stupid, ‘Look at us. I wish I could have done that.’ I know they feel bad, that they never had the chance. But they’re happy I can come home and tell them about things. I send them things from Europe
.
They get to tell all their friends that their sister’s a stewardess. They get real excited about that. The first thing they come out and say, ‘One of my sisters is a stewardess.’

“My father got a promotion with his company and they wrote in their business news that he had a family of seven, six girls and a boy, and one girl is a stewardess in Chicago. And went on to say what I did, and didn’t say a word about anything else
.”

Prior to her present job as an employment counselor, she had been an airline reservationist for twelve years
.

 

My job as a reservationist was very routine, computerized. I hated it with a passion. Getting sick in the morning, going to work feeling, Oh, my God! I’ve got to go to work.

I was on the astrojet desk. It has an unlisted number for people who travel all the time. This is a special desk for people who spend umpteen millions of dollars traveling with the airlines. They may spend ten thousand dollars a month, a hundred thousand a month, depending on the company. I was dealing with the same people every day. This is so-and-so from such-and-such a company and I want a reservation to New York and return, first class. That was the end of the conversation. They brought in a computer called Sabre. It’s like an electric typewriter. It has a memory drum and you can retrieve that information forever. Sabre was so expensive, everything was geared to it. Sabre’s down, Sabre’s up, Sabre’s this and that. Everything was Sabre.

With Sabre being so valuable, you were allowed no more than three minutes on the telephone. You had twenty seconds, busy-out time it was called, to put the information into Sabre. Then you had to be available for another phone call. It was almost like a production line. We adjusted to the machine. The casualness, the informality that had been there previously was no longer there. The last three or four years on the job were horrible. The computer had arrived.

They monitored you and listened to your conversations. If you were a minute late for work, it went into your file. I had a horrible attendance record—ten letters in my file for lateness, a total of ten minutes. You took thirty minutes for your lunch, not thirty-one. If you got a break, you took ten minutes, not eleven.

When I was with the airlines, I was taking eight tranquilizers a day. I came into this business, which is supposed to be one of the most hectic, and I’m down to three a day. Even my doctor remarked, “Your ulcer is healed, it’s going away.” With the airline I had no free will. I was just part of that stupid computer.

I remember when I went to work for the airlines, they said, “You will eat, sleep, and drink airlines. There’s no time in your life for ballet, theater, music, anything.” My first supervisor told me that. Another agent and I were talking about going to the ballet or something. He overheard us and said we should be talking about work. When you get airline people together, they’ll talk about planes. That is all they talk about. That and Johnny Carson. They are TV-oriented people.

I had much more status when I was working for the airlines than I have now. I was always introduced as Beryl Simpson, who works for the airlines. Now I’m reduced to plain old Beryl Simpson. I found this with boyfriends. I knew one who never dates a girl with a name. He never dates Judy, he never dates Joan. He dates a stewardess or a model. He picks girls for the glamor of their jobs. He never tells you their names. When I was with the airlines, I was introduced by my company’s name. Now I’m just plain old everyday me, thank God.

I have no status in this man’s eyes, even though I probably make twice as much as the ones he’s proud of. If I’d start to talk about some of the stocks I hold, he’d be impressed. This is true of every guy I ever dated when I was working on the airlines. I knew I had a dumb, stupid, ridiculous, boring job, and these people were glamorizing it. “Oh, she works for the airlines.” Big deal. When I used to go back home, the local paper would run my picture and say that I work for the airlines and that I had recently returned from some exotic trip or something. Romance.

A lot of times we get airline stewardesses into our office who are so disillusioned. We’d like to frame their applications when we get a bright-eyed, starry-eyed kid of eighteen who wants a career in the airlines. Big as life disillusionment. We want to say, “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, girlie.” If a girl’s a stewardess, she might as well forget it after twenty-six. They no longer have compulsory retirement, but the girls get into a rut at that age. A lot of them start showing the rough life they’ve lived.

She is a photographer’s model, high fashion. Her face is a familiar one in magazine ads as well as on television commercials. She has been engaged in this work for eight years. She earns the city’s top rate
:
fifty dollars an hour
.

 

I do whatever kind of products anyone wants. This week I had a job for some South American product. They said, “We want you to be sexy, coy, pert, but not too effervescent.” It always means the same smile and open eyes. For forty-five minutes they tell you what they want. They explain and explain and you sort of tune out and do the same thing.

There are a lot of people there: the person who has the product, the man from the ad agency, a couple of people from the photography studio, the stylist, who poses your dress to make sure it hangs right . . . suddenly there are a dozen people standing around. Each is telling you to do something else. You know they are even more insecure than you. You pretend you’re listening and you do what you’d planned to do in the first place. When you’ve worked before a camera long enough, you know what they want even though they don’t.

At first you work very hard to try to discover different looks and hairdos. After a while, you know them all. Someone once asked me, “Why do high-fashion models pose with their mouths open? They look like they’re catching flies.” (Laughs.) This look has been accepted for a long time. They want everything to be sexy, subtle or overt. After a while, it’s automatic.

Now the natural look is in. Jumping up and down or staring out there . . . What’s natural about looking into space? They want you natural but posed. (Laughs.) How can you feel natural with three pounds of make-up, in some ridiculous costume, standing there and looking pretty? What they think of as being natural is very phony.

You never know from day to day. I did a job for a snow blower in Michigan. It’s a little machine that ladies are able to push to get snow out of the way. It was ten below. We flew over at five thirty in the morning. I had my long underwear on, but I forgot to wear my heavy shoes and I froze my feet. You’re either doing fur coats in 110 degrees in the summer or bathing suits in the winter. I do whatever they ask me. I take the money and run.

Someone will call you at seven in the morning and say be ready at eight thirty. Can you be there in forty minutes? You’re a basket case trying to get your wardrobe together and be there on time. You’re having a cup of coffee, suddenly the phone rings and you have to run. It’s terrible. Somehow you manage to make it on time. I’m very seldom late. I’m amazed at myself.

I’d like to say I’m sick and can’t make it, but I seldom turn something down unless I think it’s really awful. Usually I’m just rushing and do the job. I feel guilty if I say no. When you’re working for one agency, they expect you to be on call. Otherwise the client may think you’re too pampered.

You go out of your house with your closetful on your arm. Different colors and shoes to match and purses and wigs. Every time I get a taxi, they think I’m going to the airport. They’re upset when I’m going ten blocks away. I’ve never found one to help me in or out of a cab. And I’m a good tipper. So I’ve developed these very strong muscles with one shoulder lower than the other from carrying all the wardrobe about. (Laughs.)

In the middle of the winter it’s really horrendous, because you’re fighting all the people to get a taxi. I have three or four pieces of luggage. It’s pretty heavy. Then I struggle out of the cab and upstairs to the studio. You’re supposed to look fresh and your hair is supposed to be sparkling. By the time you get there, you’re perspiring like crazy, and it’s difficult to feel fresh under all those hot lights when you’ve had such a struggle to get there.

 

 

Oh, crap.

 

“
I hadn’t set out to be a model. I worked as a receptionist in a beauty shop during high school. This was in South Dakota. A woman who had worked for Eileen Ford and had been in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?’ I didn’t know what a model was. I thought they were dummies in catalogues. I thought the people in the photographs were just cutouts. I didn’t think they were really people. I paid no attention to advertising,.

 

At Eileen Ford, they told me I was too long-waisted and that maybe I should think about something else, and it was too bad since I had come all the way from South Dakota. I was so green.

I looked in the telephone book. Huntington Hartford had just bought this agency. So I went there. I was so bashful I couldn’t even give my name to the receptionist. About a half an hour later, this guy who had just taken over the agency—he’d been a male mode—came in. He was the first man I’d seen in New York, close up. I was just staring at him. He said, “You! Come into my office!” I thought I had really been discovered. He probably called me because I was staring at him and he liked himself a lot. (Laughs.)

A week or two later there was a cocktail party. I’d never had a drink in my life. They said you should be there at five o’clock. At five I was the only person there. They asked me what I wanted to drink. I didn’t know. I said, “Bourbon and water is really nice.” It was awful. The party was for Sammy Kaye. I’d never heard of Sammy Kaye.

The guy just wanted us to be there. He was having fifteen of his favorite models over. You just go. No pay. If there’s an opening at a photography studio or whatever you go, because advertising people are there and you should be seen and you should make sure they remember your face. All the ridiculous things . . . That’s what happens to a lot of girls who go into modeling. They’re very vulnerable. They don’t know what they’re doing. Usually they come from very poor families. This seems glamorous. Most of the girls I met were from Ohio or Indiana or some place like that.

I had fifty cents left in my pocket when I got my first job. I worked two hours and made sixty dollars. It was absolutely incredible to me. I pinned a corsage on a guy. It was some hotel ad in a trade magazine. It was a very silly shot that was terribly simple. I was getting all this money for smiling and pinning a flower on a guy. It didn’t turn out to be that simple.

Most people have strange feelings about standing before a camera. You have to learn to move and make different designs with your body. Some girls know how to puff their nose in and out to make it change or their lips or cheekbones. They practice in front of a mirror.

Usually you’re competing with anywhere from thirty to sixty girls. They’re cattle calls. Sometimes they take you in ten at a time. You wait from forty-five minutes to an hour before you’re called. They narrow it down and ask for three or four to come back. It’s like going out on a job interview every day. Everybody is very insecure. You walk into a room and see thirty beautiful girls and say, “What am I doing here?” Immediately you feel you should leave. But you think you might get three out of fifteen jobs, so . . .

There’s no training needed, no kind of background. People spend thousands of dollars going to charm schools to learn make-up. It’s ridiculous. They just take money from young girls. You learn while you’re working. I didn’t think it was funny the first few years because I was so nervous. After you relax, you see how absurd it all is.

I’ve always had a problem gaining weight. I told a photographer I had gained two pounds. I was happy about it. The agency said, “She’s too fat, tell her to lose weight.” They wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t told them.

I think the shyest people get into show business or modeling. They were wallflowers in their classes. You never really feel at ease and you force yourself to do things not natural to you. It’s always something that you really aren’t, that someone else wants you to be.

You feel like you’re someone’s clothes hanger. One day someone will say you’re great. In the next studio, they’ll say you’re terrible. It changes from minute to minute: acceptance, rejection. Suddenly it doesn’t mean anything. Why should you base your whole day on how you look in the morning?