Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (5 page)

“I
t all started with being out of a job.”

John Robert Powers was a dark, handsome man but a lousy actor, as he was the first to admit. So around 1915 he took a job as a bit player and wardrobe boy with impresario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the Shakespearean actor, in his touring theater troupe. Powers’s acting skills eventually won him a job as assistant business manager. When Tree closed his company, the scarcity of parts for a man with no talent became a problem.

Then, one day, a man approached Powers about posing for a photograph with silent screen star Mary Pickford. Powers showed up at the appointed time and place three days in a row. Pickford never appeared. But Powers, $30 richer, had experienced nothing less than an epiphany. He found another commercial photographer who needed a model. Although he had a long, sharp nose, thick eyebrows, and thin lips, it didn’t seem to matter.

It was the Damon Runyon era, when urban fables embellished their way from the Great White Way into history. So almost every account of the birth of the John Robert Powers agency differs from the last, sharing only hyperbole and an apocryphal quality. But a sketch emerges nonetheless of how Powers invented the modeling business. By the most likely account, in about 1921, Powers showed up for a job with a photographer named Baron Adolphe de Meyer. The baron worked for fashion magazines and clothing manufacturers. He asked Powers to round up seven more men to work in an ensemble. “I got them for him and then he kept asking me to get him some more,” Powers said. The job was easy because “most of my friends, like myself, were actors, and again like myself, they were what is laughingly known as ‘resting.’”

These were the days when two-reel silent films were produced in a small circuit of studios stretching from South Brooklyn to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Out-of-work thespians would loiter in front of the Palace Theater in Fort Lee, hoping for work. Powers knew them all, and soon his pockets were overflowing with their phone numbers. Photographers began calling him instead of advertising for models. “I seemed to be able to get in touch with people more readily than anyone else,” Powers said. “Bit by bit I seemed to be assuming the proportions of an extra’s clearing house. But this was all unconscious. I didn’t have the business sense to see the possibilities.” Finally, though, “a great light smote me in the face. If I was becoming so useful, why couldn’t I become useful to myself?”

Powers credited Alice Hathaway Burton, his wide-eyed Kewpie doll blond wife, with hatching the idea of a model agency. “There must be lots of commercial photographers looking for models,” she told him. “And we know dozens of actors and actresses out of work. Why can’t we find a way of bringing them together?”

So Powers “had their pictures taken, made up a catalogue containing their descriptions and measurements, and sent it to anyone in New York who might be a prospective client—commercial photographers, advertisers, department stores, artists,” he recalled. “There were not more than 40 people listed in that first catalogue,” which was published in 1923, “but the idea was a new one. While I had started with the idea of supplying a demand, I began to realize that I was creating one.”

A lucky break with real estate helped, too. “John lived in an old brownstone over a speakeasy just off Broadway then,” a friend of his remembered. “That was the humble beginning of the modeling industry. It went on like that—over the speakeasy—until Steve Hannagan, the press agent who was building up Miami Beach on a solid foundation of bathing beauty pictures, started nudging John to get away from Broadway and move his operation to Park Avenue.” Hannagan had a traveling architect friend with offices on the second floor at 247 Park Avenue that he let Powers share.

Soon Powers, Alice, their three assistants, and seven French phones crowded the architect out. One wall was lined with charts—writing pads, actually—one per model, detailing jobs the agency had booked for its models, broken down into fifteen-minute intervals, and noting what accessories they needed to bring along. Powers would sit at a small table in the anteroom behind the door labeled “John Robert Powers Publications,” greeting visitors himself, studying everyone who walked in with his ever more practiced eye. He called himself “the highest paid reception clerk in the city.”

Charles Rainey, the aging widower of Powers’s only child, an adopted daughter, lives surrounded by Powers agency mementos in the suburban ranch-style house on a corner lot in the Los Angeles suburb of Toluca Lake, where Powers lived before his death in 1977. “He did begin in 1923,” Rainey says, “but he didn’t get his act together until 1925.” He pulls out books and columns by his father-in-law and even a couple of children’s mystery novels featuring Powers Girl sleuths.

“He was a very good-looking man,” Rainey continues. “As an actor he was a spear carrier. That’s how he described himself.” Rainey points to an oil painting on his wall, titled “Her Knight Off.” It shows Powers, dressed in armor, jumping off a horse to save Alice, a damsel in distress.

Rainey hands over a yellowing booklet, the
Actor’s Directory and Studio Guide of April 1925
, vol. 2, no. 2. John Robert Powers is listed as the publisher with offices at 19 West Forty-sixth Street. In an introduction he wrote, “The kind approval bestowed upon preceding issues renders it unnecessary to offer any apology for the appearance of our present number…. Our directory does, we think, strengthen the collusion so much to be desired among the members of the profession.” What profession, he doesn’t say.

From the look of Gaston DuVal, with his twirled, waxed mustache and chestful of medals, preening inside, Powers would have happily taken bookings for Prussian officers. Among the women there are flappers, dowagers, and scruffs who look as if they stepped straight off the silver screen.

By 1932 Powers’s booklet had grown up into a thick hard-cover book containing about five hundred models, very similar to today’s model head books. Models paid $25 a year to appear in it. Hannah Lee Sherman, a debutante in a long satin gown, is shown in Lauren Hutton in a photograph by Gabor Eder. Her height (5 feet 7 inches), weight (121 pounds), and measurements (32-27-35) are given, along with her shoe, glove, and hat sizes and her home phone number.

Rainey pulls out scrapbooks Powers kept of his clippings. They are filled with stories about his models and about the society lifestyle modeling brought him. “They lived in a fifty-two-room estate in Locust Valley on Long Island,” Rainey says. “They had fifty acres. My wife grew up there. She had seven horses. He became a society person. They’d winter in Florida at the Everglades Hotel on Worth Avenue.” Powers spent money like water. “John
would give away the store,” according to Rainey. “He wasn’t ever poor. He tried to keep up.” The scrapbooks show the Powerses at play at a Palm Beach dinner hosted by the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys. Powers models, “gay as magpies and dressed to the hilt,” traveled with him, enlivening the southern scene and not coincidentally garnering considerable publicity. Once Powers caught on, he played his hand for all it was worth.

Advertising was only a few decades old. Commercial photography was a bit younger than that. At the turn of the century a Chicago photographer named Beatrice Tonneson may have been the first to use live female models in an advertisement. Powers was in on the ground floor with a better mousetrap—a classic American success story. Illustrators like James Montgomery Flagg, J. C. Leyendecker, and Howard Chandler Christy still ruled the commercial roost and would stay key Powers clients into the 1940s. Even they had started using cameras to shoot pictures of models and draw from them, instead of from life. It took only a second to snap a picture. Previously they’d had to pay a model to sit and pose for hours. But this was their last hurrah. Magazines were starting to use photography regularly, and advertisers were following suit. The bookings started pouring in, and Powers took 10 percent of each one.

The 1929 stock market crash and the Depression that followed changed everything. Only for Powers did things change for the better. He began attracting debutantes whose families were suddenly short on cash. “I was in high school in 1929,” says Betty McLauchlen Dorso, eighty-two, who became one of Powers’s top models. “I wanted to be a gym teacher, a coach. But it was during the Depression, and my father, like every male in the country, lost his job.” When McLauchlen was laid off from his designer’s post with Cadillac, he bought his daughter a cloche and fur-collared coat and took her to be photographed by a friend who’d shot advertisements for the luxury cars. The photographer posed her on a revolving platform and sent her picture to Powers, who called the dark-haired, sophisticated beauty in for an interview.

“There was only the one agency,” Dorso recalls. “I went in on a Saturday and I registered and he sent me off into the night. I didn’t know anything about the business. You had to pound the pavement in those days,” and stop at the agency each day to check in. “I finally found a job at Henri Bendel, modeling on the floor. It was then a wealthy women’s boutique. I was paid thirty-two dollars and seventy-five cents a week, and five dollars extra for decorating the windows.” She had worked there several years, supporting her whole family by showing clothes to customers, when a
Vogue
editor spotted her and
asked if she would pose for a young woman photographer named Toni Frissell, who’d started working for the magazine after assisting the British photographer Cecil Beaton. Dorso began working for Frissell regularly. “Then I actually started functioning with Powers,” Dorso says. “I really wanted to be a gym teacher, but I happened to have the looks that got me this lucrative life.”

An important psychological divide had been crossed when Powers moved to his Park Avenue address. No longer would models—at least his models—be considered on a par with show girls. Those raffish sorts were booked out of the west side of Manhattan, the theater district, the Tenderloin.
Fashion
models came from higher-priced districts. In part because of the geographical divide, Seventh Avenue showroom models who worked the garment district as well as commercial models and runway mannequins would sit below photographic models in the model pecking order for another fifty years.

With a showman’s flair, Powers even invented a symbol to differentiate his models from all the others. When a Powers girl broke the handle of the satchel in which she lugged around the tools of her trade—her pumps, her waist cinch, her war paints and brushes—Powers replaced the bag with a strong round cardboard hatbox from John Cavanagh, where he bought his headgear. The boxes sold for fifty cents apiece and became the badge of honor of the Powers model.

As the business expanded, Powers moved into larger quarters, installed direct telephone lines to
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar
, and the major catalog studios, and even hired a promotion man. “I was an unemployed actor, kicking around Broadway just like Johnny was,” recalls Bob Fertig, eighty-two. “One of the guys in the crowd said he’d been to a place called Powers, and they wanted to put him to work delivering pictures. I said I could use a few bucks. There were a lot of beautiful broads around him.”

Powers was looking for a label that would differentiate his beauties from the earlier Gibson Girls (the last century’s ideal) and the Ziegfeld Girls of the stage. “We avoided using the word ‘model,’” Fertig recalls. “Women with no means of visible support called themselves models. People thought of them as empty-headed floozies.”

Finally Powers decided to call them “Long-Stemmed American Beauties,” a phrase coined by illustrator Arthur William Brown. “What I seek above all else is a natural wholesomeness,” Powers said. “I do not want types, nor do I want sophistication. I want girls or women who will look like what the advertisers want them to look like, and it is not an easy thing to find. Pretty girls, yes, but not models.”

Though he continued booking men (including the young Fredric March, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Brian Donlevy), he would ever after be known for his Powers Girls. Over the years the agency’s list included top models like Anita Colby, Helen Bennett, Kay Hernan, and Muriel Maxwell. Better known today are the models turned actresses: Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, Joan Caulfield, Jean Arthur, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Blondell, and Paulette Goddard.

Powers Girls who didn’t go Hollywood often stayed in the public eye as the wives of the millionaires who pursued them as avidly as they had the show girls of earlier generations. From the first, model agents have maintained a sideline in informal matchmaking. Bachelors were said to shop the Powers catalog for dates, just as rock stars later browsed the books from Ford and Elite. Woolworth Donahue, Marshall Hemingway, Winthrop Gardiner, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jack Chrysler, Earl E. T. Smith, Rutherford Stuyvesant Pierrepont, Jr., Count Rodolfo Crespi of Rome, Stanley Rumbough, Jr., and Dan Topping all married Powers Girls. “Sometimes it seems to me that instead of a modeling agency, what I’m running is a matrimonial agency for millionaires,” Powers boasted.

By 1935 Powers and a handful of other New York agents were running stables that contained a total of about two hundred working models, most of them women. Most of them earned about $25 per week. Some commanded $75. And a few, perhaps ten, who had signed exclusive deals with advertisers, took home as much as $100 a week.

Powers made his reputation with high-fashion models, but his business was actually much broader. “One girl would specialize in hats,” says Bob Fertig. “Another did junior modeling and could adapt for cosmetics. Powers did pulp magazine pictures, too. He’d say, ‘If there’s a buck in it, I’ll do it.’ Wherever you had a pretty girl, a dog, and a baby, you had the potential for a publicity picture.” Powers drew the line only at nudes and ads for underwear, depilatories, deodorants, and bathing suits, calling them “objectionables” and demanding extra pay for models who agreed to do them.

It was only a matter of time before competition sprang up. As early as 1929 Walter Thornton announced the opening of a new model agency. Claiming he’d been an orphan, a delivery truck driver, a bricklayer, a shipping clerk, a sculpture student, and an underage enlistee in the Army before beginning to model professionally, Thornton promoted himself as the perfect male type. He’d had fifteen hundred plaster casts of his head made for illustrators to use
while
he
posed for photographers. As an agent he styled himself a “Merchant of Venus.”