Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (21 page)

I
t was a sunny afternoon in 1958 in Windsor Great Park near London, where Britain’s royals played polo. A short dark man with swept-back hair approached a pouty, snubnosed sixteen-year-old in a gray silk dress. “You know, you really should model,” he said.

Introducing himself as Colonel Voynovitch, he invited the girl and her date into the exclusive royal enclosure. She didn’t say a word, so impressed was she as she spotted the queen mother and met the queen’s dressmaker, Norman Hartnell. Had Jean Shrimpton not been born with eyebrows arched in permanent wonder, they certainly would have stood up at all that. So it was quite easy for Voynovitch to lure her to his Aston Martin, where he softly stroked her bare, coltish legs and cooed that he wanted to photograph her for a women’s magazine. Not only that, he said, but he’d pay her £5 for an afternoon’s work.

A sheltered convent school graduate, Shrimpton was a bit appalled by the stranger’s behavior; but his connections were obvious, and modeling sounded better than anything Langham Secretarial College at London’s Marble Arch had to offer. So she gave him her number and said he should call and ask her parents’ permission.

A few days later Voynovitch appeared at Rose Hill Farm in Buckinghamshire, where Shrimpton had grown up in rural isolation, a horse-crazed daughter of an ex-Royal Air Force corporal turned pig breeder. After meeting her parents, the colonel drove her to his country home, where he stroked her legs a little more and offered her a bath, strawberries, and champagne. “Why don’t you take your bra off?” he asked her. “You’re not a virgin, are
you?” He made a circle with two of his fingers and pushed another through it, in and out, in and out.

As the shooting progressed, so did his clumsy ardor. “I just want to touch your breasts,” he said. She let him. After all, she’d come this far. But although she considered herself a “retarded sixteen-year-old,” she had the sense never to see him again. But she’d tasted forbidden fruit, and wanted more. Being a secretary suddenly seemed a bleak fate, indeed. Still, it was a year before a way out appeared.

Again a male stranger intervened. At lunch break every day when the weather was good, Jean and a friend would buy sandwiches and go to Hyde Park to eat. One day just before final exams an American movie director named Cy Endfield hailed them as they crossed the street on their way back to school. He said he wanted to cast Jean in a film he was making. Tossing a business card at her, he jumped in his car and screeched away. Sadly Endfield’s producer didn’t agree with his assessment of Shrimpton’s star quality. The director then insisted she should become a model. He even knew the name of a school where she could learn how.

It was called Lucie Clayton.

Sylvia Gollidge, a gangling brown-eyed beauty from Blackpool, came to London in 1926 and got a job as a model for 10 shillings (about $2.50) a day at a dress shop called Bantall’s. On her first day at work the sixteen-year-old stood perfectly still, expecting the shop’s customers to gravitate toward her. She didn’t keep her job long. Vowing to better herself, she traveled to Paris, where she decided that the way to be a model was to look angry, arrogant, and condescending. Armed with this new knowledge, she returned to London, got another job, and was soon so successful that she insured her long blond hair for £1,000.

Years later she told Leslie Kark how she decided to open a modeling school and agency. “One or two of her friends, all of whom were thin giantesses like Gollidge, asked her to show them how to model,” Kark says. “She thought, ‘Well, I can make more money by showing them than by modeling.’” So, in September 1928, Gollidge opened the Lucie Clayton Modeling School, teaching charm, the art of the curtsy, and how to walk a runway. She changed her name because “she just liked the name Lucie,” says Kark, who bought her business in 1950. “And Clayton was solid business, you know, earthy.” Within months Gollidge had an agency, first booking only fashion show mannequins but soon adding photo models.

Jean Shrimpton photographed by David Bailey in a New York City phone booth, January 1961
Jean Shrimpton by David Bailey, courtesy Robert Montgomery

Lucie Clayton was to modeling in London what Powers was in New York: the person who pulled the profession out of the gutter. “She made it about as respectable as opera singing,” says Kark. “But I don’t think careful fathers wanted their daughters to be opera singers
or
models.” Clayton understood that good publicity could change that. During the Depression Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn came to London with a troupe of Goldwyn Girls on a publicity trip. Intrigued by the coverage the troupe engendered, Clayton “went to the depressed valleys of Wales,” according to Kark, “found girls six feet tall, took them to London and trained them, and took them to Hollywood,” along with trunks full of British fashions. She got British clothing manufacturers to finance the trip.

Leslie Kark had been a writer and barrister before joining the RAF during the war. In 1949 he covered a fashion show for a magazine he was editing and had an idea he thought might be profitable. As London’s few model agencies were “fairly, let’s say, inefficient,” he recalls, he published a catalog called
Model
. He only made £500 on the project.

Fortunately for him Lucie Clayton decided to retire to Australia and offered to sell her school and agency to Kark. He bought the operation for £2,200 (less than $1,000), “and I thought I’d been robbed,” he says. Before sailing off into the sunset, Clayton confided that she made most of her money selling coffee to her students.

But there was no lack of world-class photography in London. Cecil Beaton had operated there for years. John Rawlings opened a studio for
Vogue
in 1936. Norman Parkinson joined the magazine in 1941. He was born Ronald William Parkinson Smith in 1913 and learned his trade at Speaight & Son, a past-its-prime society portrait studio on Bond Street, where he apprenticed for two years after school. Parkinson opened his own studio on Dover Street near Piccadilly Circus in 1934 with a partner, Norman Kibblewhite. They called their firm Norman Parkinson and he took that name when they parted company soon thereafter. Friends called him Parks.

Parkinson began his career photographing debutantes, who didn’t always pay their bills. He was running low on funds by 1937, when the editor of the British edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
, first published in 1929, saw his work and hired him. For
Bazaar
, Parkinson shot portraits of the famous: the Sitwells, the American couturier Charles James, and Rose Kennedy, then the wife of America’s ambassador to Britain. But fashion photography was the magazine’s focus. He tried his hand at it and liked it a lot.

That didn’t mean he was content to take pictures like everyone else. Photographers then showed women “standing in scintillating salons with their knees bolted,” Parkinson said. “I never knew any girls with bolted knees. I only knew girls that jumped and ran. So I just started to photograph these girls. Everyone said, ‘How bold!’” In 1939 he shot model Pamela Minchin leaping off a breakwater on the Isle of Wight in one of the first modern fashion photographs.

In 1943 he married one of his favorite models, Wenda Rogerson, who’d been discovered by Beaton. She, Barbara Goalen, Anne Gunning, Carmen Dell’Orefice, and Enid Boulting appeared in most of the photographs he took for
Vogue
in the 1950s, both in quintessential English locales like Hyde Park Corner and on unprecedented location shoots in exotic spots around the world. Once, photographing Wenda in the rubble of the demolished New York Ritz Hotel, both the photographer and his Mainbocher-clad model were briefly arrested.

At six feet five inches, topped by a Kashmiri bridal cap on a balding head, Parkinson dressed for excess in caftans and gold jewelry or a decades-old vanilla bespoke suit made for him by the British tailor Tommy Nutter. His eccentricities extended to his hobbies, listed in
Who’s Who
as “pig farming, sun worshipping, bird watching, breeding Creole racehorses.” He dabbled in them all on the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he and Wenda moved in 1963. Later Parkinson set up a sausage factory there and began marketing its products as “the famous Porkinson banger.”

By the time of his death in 1990 Parkinson was best known as the portraitist of choice of the British royal family. But long before he attained that privileged position, a new photographic royalty had emerged in London. Its source was the studio of John French. Born six years before Parks, French originally wanted to be a painter. But commerce called. He picked up a camera and opened a studio in 1948. At first he worked for England’s
Harper’s Bazaar
, but he soon became a pioneer in daily newspaper fashion photography, beginning on the
Daily Express
. French dressed his models in pearls, stud earrings, and white gloves, called them all darling, and treated them like Dresden china dolls, never touching them but giving them directions in a high-pitched, languid voice. Until his death in 1966 French was renowned for never loading his own camera, clicking its shutter, or setting the lights he was famous for. Among the assistants who did all that for him were Richard Dormer, who soon became the chief photographer of British
Bazaar
, David Bailey, and Terence Donovan.

The son of an East End truck driver, Donovan began shooting photographs at age eleven, studied lithography, and then went to work on Fleet Street, the center of London’s thriving newspaper business, making the wooden blocks that were then used to print photographs on newsprint. But what he really wanted was to be a fashion photographer. “I don’t know why or anything,” Donovan says. “It wasn’t for the women oddly enough. I just liked doing it. We were fashion photographers.”

After a stint as a military photographer in the army Donovan joined John French as an assistant in the late fifties. “He was the most important fashion photographer in this country at the time, an extraordinary man. Couldn’t actually open the lid of his camera. He was a marvelous sort of queen. He got married to a girl because somebody made her pregnant, and he thought morally he ought to help her. At that stage in England all fashion photographers were gay.” Heterosexuals were “unheard of apart from Norman Parkinson,” according to Donovan. Gay gentlemen dominated the field because “nobody else knew how many bangles to put on. I was an East End bloke. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll never be able to do that; I just don’t know how many jewels to put on.’ And then suddenly you realized that you didn’t have to know. All you had to do was make a strong picture of a girl. I was earning eight dollars a week, and so I borrowed ten thousand dollars off of a bloke who thought I had something going, and we were off and running! I paid him back in a year.”

The sadness and poverty that had enveloped England ever since the war began were finally lifting. “It was a spectacularly exciting time because everything was possible,” Donovan says. “A cheese sandwich never tastes so good as when you’ve just come off of a terrible situation like a war. Everything had an absolute crystal sharpness and clarity. The world was open. You did what you liked; you went anywhere. We were really the first people to think in a much looser way.”

David Bailey joined John French as his second assistant soon after Donovan departed. Born in 1938, the son of a tailor, Bailey grew up hoping to be an ornithologist. “But for a cockney in the East of London to look at birds through binoculars was very suspect,” Bailey said. “In my father’s eyes, I had to be queer as a coot.” He nonetheless took pictures of birds and processed them in his mother’s cellar, an old air-raid shelter. At sixteen his ambition changed. He put down his camera and picked up a trumpet. His new ideal was Chet Baker. “You had two ways of getting out in the Fifties,” he once said. “You were either a boxer or a jazz musician.” He started collecting modern jazz
records and was intrigued by the cover photographs shot by William Claxton (who later photographed and married Peggy Moffitt, Rudi Gernreich’s topless swimsuit model). To pay for his records, Bailey sold shoes and carpets, worked as a messenger, and cleaned windows before he was drafted into the Royal Air Force in 1956.

Bailey served in Malaya and Singapore, where “cameras were cheap,” he said. “I bought a £60 camera for £20 and that was it.” After shooting a roll of film, he would pawn the camera to pay for processing, reclaim it on the next pay day, and start all over again. On his return to England he took a job sweeping floors at an ad agency and wrote to eight fashion photographers asking for work. “I didn’t even know what a strobe was,” he’s said. But John French hired him anyway, probably because he liked the way Bailey looked. “Six months later, everyone thought we were having an affair,” Bailey recalled, “but in fact, although we were fond of each other, we never got it together.”

Dressed in Cuban-heeled boots and a leather jacket, the tough but pretty Bailey reminded the effete French of the scruffy young photographer hero in Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel
Absolute Beginners
, which chronicled the alluring new street culture of working-class England. In fact, young rebels were rising everywhere, from the Left Bank in Paris, where the existentialists reigned, to Greenwich Village in New York, where beat was growing out of bop. Author MacInne’s and the Teddy boys, mods, and rockers he depicted were the earliest British contribution to a cultural movement that was sweeping the Western world. Fashion, ever alert to the newest and the now-est, quickly picked up the beat. The marketing of international youth culture soon became a British specialty.