Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (26 page)

After siring three children by his first wife, Cooper was divorced and married a neighbor. That marriage ended some time after he stabbed his second wife’s first husband. Charged with attempted murder, he was briefly institutionalized. “Bruce left all that behind when he came east,” Melissa says. Resettled in New York, he married his third wife, Bobbie, who was a house model at Hattie Carnegie and had come to Eileen Ford seeking more work. “He wouldn’t give her any money,” Eileen remembers. “Bruce Cooper was a brutal man.” Adds Jerry: “He had creep written all over him.” Soon, Bobbie was out and Willie was in.

The Coopers and their two poodles moved into a big apartment on Central Park. A zebraskin rug adorned Bruce’s den. He’d left
The Tonight Show
and planned to become a manager of opera singers. She continued modeling for two years after their marriage. Now her dress size—12—was accommodated, not criticized. When a sample didn’t fit her, stylists ripped open the back and underarm seams and pinned in matching linings to hide their work. Even the English admitted her importance. “Wilhelmina,” the
Daily Express
declared in 1967, “puts the Shrimp and Twiggy in the shade.”

But after seven years her bookings suddenly started dropping off. “She thought she was over the hill,” remembers Fran Rothschild, a neighbor and a garment center bookkeeper. Then Irving Penn told Wilhelmina that Eileen Ford had said Willie was unavailable on a day when she was actually free. “Eileen took work away from her to give it to her new girls,” Rothschild says Willie concluded.

Eileen had a
lot
of new girls. On their twentieth anniversary Jerry Ford told
The New York Times
that the agency was billing $100,000 a week. That money helped the Fords buy a new computer system, the first in the model business. They needed it. In 1967 they claimed their 175 female and 75 male models controlled 70 percent of the bookings in New York and 30 percent in the world. Ford’s stars included
Harper’s Bazaar
cover girl Dorothea McGowan, Agneta Darin, Babette of Switzerland, Dolores Hawkins, Dolores Ericson, who’d just appeared on the cover of jazz trumpeter Herb Alpert’s
Whipped Cream and Other Delights
, and
Vogue
’s newest favorite, Lauren Hutton.

Another Ford star was Sunny Griffin, who’d replaced Wilhelmina as the agency’s top model and was earning six figures a year. She’d come to New York from Baltimore in spring 1962 and joined Ford. Two years later, having hardly ever worked, Griffin was told the agency was cleaning out deadwood. “And you’re it,” Ford said. Griffin begged to be sent to Dorian Leigh in Paris instead. Nine months later Ford cabled her to come home immediately. A catalog studio wanted to put her under contract. Griffin also got a contract with Kayser-Roth, an underwear manufacturer. At first Ford told the company it was still the agency’s policy to turn down underwear work, a holdover from the era of “objectionables.” “They asked Eileen what it would take,” Griffin remembers. “She said five hundred dollars an hour and five thousand dollars a year. They said yes. From then on, Ford models did lingerie.”

By 1967 Griffin was part of the Ford family. “We’d go out to Quogue every weekend” to the Ford’s huge beach house, she says. “If you were married, you were invited with your husband. Eileen cooked Friday night dinner, big pots of mussels. At Eileen’s you always got enough to eat.” Griffin remembers a family scene. The Fords’ eldest daughter, Jamie, had gotten married and moved away, but the other three children were always there. “Katie and Lacey had to curtsy when they came in the room until they were sixteen,” Griffin remembers. “Billy Ford lived on the fourth floor with all the Swedish models, having a good time, fucking them. Eileen was blind to it, but she finally figured it out,” and young Billy had to give up his roommates.

Griffin thought Ford both eccentric and psychic. Griffin remembers, “She never looked at you, but the next day she’d tell you how many buttons you had buttoned. One day, when I first started, she grabbed me and started plucking my eyebrows. She scared me to death, but she was right. She was a great model agent. And she was a mother tiger to her models. One time a photographer exposed himself to Dorothea McGowan. He never worked again. Ford was that powerful.”

Thirty-two Ford models photographed by Ormond Gigli.
Top:
Wilhelmina;
left to right, second row from top
: Barbara Janssen, Tilly Tizani, Iris Bianchi, Sondra Paul, Melissa Congdon
(in front of light): third row
: Sondra Peterson, Hellevi Keko, Holly Forsman, Maria Gudy, Donna Mitchell, Diane Conlon, Agneta Frieberg, Dolores Hawkins, Agneta Darin;
fourth row
: Victoria Hilbert, Editha Dussler, Ann Turkel, Veronica Hamel, Renata Beck;
fifth row
: Babette, Margo McKendry, Astrid Schiller, Heather Hewitt, Helaine Carlin, Pia Christensen;
on floor
: Anne Larson, Heidi Wiedeck, Astrid Herrene, Sunny Griffin (
in stripes
), Samantha Jones (
in spots
), Ericha Stech (
sitting on stool
)
Thirty-two Ford models by Ormond Gigli, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

So it was no wonder Wilhelmina felt Ford had the power to take her work away and give it to models like Griffin. Says Jerry Ford: “It’s a very familiar song. When a photographer uses a model a lot and then doesn’t and then bumps into her, he doesn’t say, ‘You’re too old.’ He says, ‘God, I’ve been trying to get you.’”

Regardless, Wilhelmina and Bruce decided to form an agency of their own. Cooper was “the engine,” says their daughter, Melissa. “He had great ideas. She made them happen.” But Willie deferred to Bruce. “He’s the big boss,” she said. They asked Rothschild to handle the numbers. “I knew nothing, except she was my friend,” Rothschild says. “She gave me her diary, so I could learn how she worked. No one kept records like she did.” With seed money of $200,000, they incorporated Wilhelmina Models on April 18,1967.

When Wilhelmina opened on Madison Avenue that July, its namesake was the only model. “Everyone called and said, ‘Thank God, now I can get her,’” Rothschild says. Willie’s earnings—$17,000 in the first month alone, at the new star rate of $120 an hour—kept the agency afloat as she scouted for more talent. Other Ford models soon came. Dovima came, too. By 1967 she’d decided that “the producer and the casting couch life wasn’t for me,” she said. She returned to New York and joined Wilhelmina, where she was put to work interviewing aspiring models and helping Willie with the seminars she held on makeup and fashion flair.

But had Dovima really given up the casting couch routine? “Bruce was stuffing her,” Carmen Dell’Orefice says flatly. “Everyone knew he was a monster, but we protected Willie. We loved her.”

By 1969 European models booked half of Ford’s business. There were more magazines in Europe, yet there was less money involved, so editors and photographers were more willing to take chances on new faces. And in a fashion world hooked on novelty, European models were something new. “They’re green grass,” said Jerry Ford, “and they know what they’re doing when they arrive here.”

New York was their mecca for a simple reason. “That’s where the money is,” Wilhelmina explained. So one of her first moves after opening her doors was to plan a trip to Europe to see the agents there. By the mid-sixties there were a lot to choose from. In Paris two competitors to Dorian Leigh had sprung up almost immediately.

Diane Gérald, Dorian Leigh’s former assistant, had gone to work at a rental service called Paris Planning. Before long she and its owner, François Lano, turned it into a model agency, opening their doors on the rue Tronchet in October 1959. Leigh replaced Gérald with another young Frenchwoman named Catherine Harlé. But then she, too, left, announcing
she
was starting an agency, too.

Agent and
rabatteur
Jacques de Nointel (
left
) and François Lano of the Paris Planning agency
Jacques de Nointel and François Lano, © Michael Gross 1995, all rights reserved

Leigh had taken fees only from her clients—the magazines, advertisers, and fashion houses. “She asked fifty francs a month for the right to call anytime,” Lano says. He decided to charge his models a commission as well. “I said, ‘I’m not interested in this just to have groovy people around me. If I do this, I do it for money,’” he recalls.

Harlé opened shop in the Paris suburb of Levallois. Her first star was Nicole de la Margé. Discovered by an editor of
Jardin des Modes
magazine while working for a Paris dress wholesaler, the girlish Margé, mousy without makeup, was the quintessential French model of her era. “The age of the aloof model was over,” she once said. “I was the anti-Suzy Parker—the girl next door could look like me.” Moving to
Elle
, she became the girlfriend of art director and photographer Peter Knapp and the magazine’s visual image, appearing on about 150 covers before quitting the business in the late sixties. After marrying a journalist for
Paris Match
, she died in a car crash in the early seventies.

Dorian hadn’t been resting as all this agency opening was going on. In 1960 she’d met Paul Harker, a wealthy businessman who co-owned Mirabelle, one of London’s leading restaurants, and Annabel, a private club. He offered to finance an agency in London. But Leigh loved life a little too much, and that eventually proved her undoing. “Dorian was a very big drinker,” says Stéphane Lanson, then a male model with Harlé. When she wasn’t drinking, she was usually with a man. Photographer Brian Duffy, for instance. He was one of six men Leigh slept with late in 1960, when she decided to have another child, following the collapse of a brief marriage to her gynecologist. That same year Leigh was evicted from her apartment in Paris when her landlord discovered she was running her business there. The Fords came to her rescue with a $16,000 loan for key money on a new place.

In 1963 Dorian hooked up with Iddo Ben-Gurion, a distant relative of Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion. “He arrived in my agency, looking glorious, of course, and said he’d written a book and named one of the main characters after me,” Leigh remembers. “He announced he was going to make me famous and we were going to get married. Eventually I got worn down by his salesmanship.” Leigh introduced Iddo to the Fords when they came to Paris in spring 1964, and they adored him. The couple’s wedding caused Dorian’s sister, Suzy Parker, to quip that she’d done it only to be Dorian Ben-Gurion. They honeymooned in Switzerland, where Dorian kept numbered accounts to avoid taxes, en route to Israel.

Catherine Harlé in her Paris agency in 1965
Catherine Harlé by Georges Bordeon, courtesy Jérôme Bonnouvrier

Over the course of the next two years Dorian Leigh’s agency died. “Her business was failing,” says Eileen Ford. She’d already lost the London and Hamburg offices. The Fords hoped Iddo would add stability. But models weren’t being paid. “Dorian wasn’t on top of her business,” says Jerry Ford. “The competition was outstripping her.”

Then Iddo Ben-Gurion disappeared. Dorian says, “I discovered that I owed a lot of money to models because Iddo was jogging to the agency every morning and picking up the mail. He’d opened a numbered account in Germany and was depositing all the checks. I went to the bank in Germany and proved to the bank that none of my signatures or the models’ signatures were true. He had even taken out a Diners Club card and signed my name.”