Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (8 page)

Brown helped recruit models, who arranged to leave Powers a few at a time, so as not to set off alarms. She also engaged in a bit of petty theft that won the Conover agency ten fresh faces. She’d been working for an illustrator for
Cosmopolitan
magazine, and one of her jobs was to serve as a judge in a
Cosmo
Girl contest. Though the contestant lists were secret, Brown made off with the names and addresses of the best-looking entrants and gave them to Conover. “Of course, I eventually got caught,” Brown told Conover’s daughter, Carole, in
Cover Girls
, her memoir of her father’s life. “As I recall, Jerry and I went off for an extended skiing vacation to avoid my being drawn and quartered.”

Brown and Ford modeled for Conover for the next three years as the agency grew from one room to four. After America entered World War II, Ford enlisted in the Navy. Conover didn’t follow his friend. “Harry was
turned down for flat feet,” his second wife, Candy Jones, said later. “Harry bought out Jerry’s interest…. Not for as much as he asked for but he was satisfied. He was going into politics. I remember Harry coming back from Washington after the war saying ‘Jerry’s going places.’” Indeed, in 1974, Ford became President of the United States.

At first Conover operated much as Powers did. He even published a model book just like Powers’s directory, titled
Who Is She?
Unlike Powers, Conover favored well-scrubbed collegiate types, preppies and campus queens. He derided the high-fashion Powers Girls as “Adenoid Annies, rattling bundles of skin and bones.” He liked his women healthy and round. “Frankly, I made up my mind long ago that life was too short for me to kowtow to these Melba-Toast prima donnas whose waspish figures are matched by equally waspish temperaments,” he wrote.

He called his finds Conover Coeds, then Cover Girls. But Conover’s greatest gimmick was the way he renamed his models. “A good, startling name establishes an identity and personality that increases her calling power,” he said. “Most women are natural actresses, and a change in name is like putting on a masquerade costume; it lets her blossom.”

Marion Sorenson, a former Watermelon Queen, arrived at Conover’s office in 1944. Now she joined a different food group. Conover pulled out the list of names he kept tucked into his desk blotter and dubbed her Chili Williams. She soon lived up to her new moniker. In 1944 Mura Moran, the wife of an illustrator, arrived at her husband’s studio and found him having a hot time with Chili. Both denied any wrongdoing in subsequent press accounts. And there were many. New York’s columnists loved Conover’s kooky Cover Girls.

The very first Cover Girl with a startling name blossomed not from Conover’s agency but from a proletarian beer promotion. It was 1939 in Paramus, New Jersey, and Bob Wechsler, a junior account executive at the Einson Freeman advertising agency, was after the Rheingold beer account. His bait was provided by Paul Hesse, a California-based photographer. Hesse had pictures of an athletic young woman he’d spotted playing tennis. Wechsler gave them to Philip Liebmann, Rheingold’s ad manager and the son of Alfred Liebmann, its president. The pictures inspired Liebmann to hire Wechsler and Einson Freeman to start work on what was to become one of the longest-running advertising campaigns in history, Miss Rheingold.

Jinx Falkenburg was in the right place at the right time. She was nineteen when one of Hesse’s first pictures of her ended up on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
. Hesse kept shooting her and introduced her to Anita
Colby—who’d gone west to try to break into movies—and they became fast friends. Colby urged Jinx to come back to New York, offering to support her until she could live on her own. Jinx refused.

Late in 1938 a shipping line in San Francisco hired Jinx for a shoot in Hawaii. The photographer was Edward Steichen on his last commercial assignment. They shot for six weeks in the sand and surf. On the last night Jinx and another model were sitting in the outdoor dining room of their hotel with Steichen and the ad executives. They had a five o’clock flight the next morning, so the men suggested they go to bed early. Jinx and the other model went to their room on a low floor of the hotel. It had a veranda that looked over the glass and steel roof of the dining room. Miffed at being sent off to bed, the giggling teenagers decided to creep out onto the roof and shock the men still at the table by waving down at them.

Unfortunately the roof wasn’t as sturdy as it looked. Jinx crashed through the glass, hit her head on a steel beam, and landed, unconscious, on the table where she’d been eating minutes before. Luckily she suffered only a few cuts, bruises, and a minor concussion. But a few months later she doubled over in pain at a tennis match, and it was discovered that one of her kidneys had been dislodged. During her monthlong convalescence, Hesse sent her photographs to Bob Wechsler. Instead of being “the end [of my modeling career], it was the beginning,” she says. “It gave me the incentive to get better. It sounded like a wonderful adventure.”

Her doctor approved, and Jinx and her mother flew to Palm Beach, where the photographs were to be taken. Jinx was to be featured in all of Rheingold’s advertising and display materials. The pay was $1,000 for two weeks’ work—“a huge sum for me in those days,” she says. The team arrived in Palm Beach on a rainy day—January 21, 1939—Jinx’s twenty-first birthday. Hesse gave her the day off, and she went off to visit some old friends. Returning to the hotel, she found her mother and Hesse talking to Philip Liebmann. In introduction, she got to hear Liebmann rant, “She works for me now, just as if she’s a secretary at the brewery! She is not to leave the hotel or her room without my permission; she belongs to the brewery!”

“But Jinx is like a flower,” her mother sputtered. “She needs to be outdoors!”

Hesse piped up to say how dependable Jinx was.

“I could feel this terrible tension created by all these rules and regulations,” Jinx remembers. “I was so upset. I’d never experienced anything like this before.” She was so upset, in fact, that she had to be taken to the hospital. Now she’d never be Miss Rheingold! But two days later Liebmann’s father showed up in her room. All was fine, he said. She was to take whatever time she needed to recuperate and then start to work for Rheingold beer. Philip Liebmann, twenty-eight, had taken himself a little too seriously. Daddy had set him straight.

The pictures Hesse took were immensely popular. “Rheingold was the springboard to success for the rest of my life,” Jinx says. Within a year Al Jolson gave her a part in a Broadway show,
Life
magazine did a cover story naming her 1941’s Girl of the Year, and Columbia Pictures offered her a contract without a screen test. Finally, in 1945, she took Anita Colby’s advice, moved to New York, and joined the Conover agency. But her modeling career was almost over. Falkenburg had met broadcaster and newspaper columnist Tex McCrary in 1941, when he interviewed her about her role as a cowgirl in Jolson’s
Hold On to Your Hats
. The war separated them, but they stayed in touch. In 1945 NBC offered Tex and Jinx a radio show of their own. Falkenburg quit Conover and became cohost of the immensely popular
Tex & Jinx Show
and coauthor with her new husband of a column for the New York
Herald Tribune
.

In the second year of the Miss Rheingold campaign, Einson Freeman printed a book of twenty-six Miss Rheingold aspirants, all personally approved by Philip Liebmann and all, like Jinx, well scrubbed and WASPish. In 1942 Rheingold opened the voting to the beer-drinking public, and for the next decade Miss Rheingold ads saturated America’s Northeast. Cartoons about the contest appeared every year in
The New Yorker
. One showed a bartender fleeing a burning restaurant carrying the Miss Rheingold ballot box.
The New Yorker
wasn’t the only American institution to take notice of Miss Rheingold. Howard Hughes owned the apartment right over Paul Hesse’s studio and frequently offered the winners screen tests and contracts with his Hollywood studio. Some Miss Rheingold contestants went on to fame in Hollywood without Hughes’s help. Tippi Hedren was a runner-up one year, as was Mary Ann Mobley. Grace Kelly was actually rejected by Rheingold in 1948. She was thought to be “too thin.”

By 1951 Rheingold’s share of its market had risen to 49 percent. That year the Miss Rheingold contest “became the second-largest election in the United States,” Wechsler says. “We actually counted twenty-five million ballots.”

The background of Rheingold’s beauties was always 100 percent European—Irish, Scandinavian, German—mirroring the ethnic backgrounds of the residents of the area where the beer was sold. Irish contestants would win the votes of the Irish and so on. But starting in the late fifties and early sixties,
Hispanics, blacks, and Asians settled in the New York area and began putting pressure on Rheingold to select contestants who represented them. Liebmann refused and instead, in 1958, began a separate campaign targeted to African Americans featuring Ella Fitzgerald and Jackie Robinson. The pressure kept up, nonetheless, to include black and Hispanic nominees. In a final act of stubbornness, Liebmann stopped the contest altogether. Nat King Cole replaced Miss Rheingold on the point-of-sale displays, and at that point, one salesman says, Rheingold became “the black man’s beer.” The brewery soon lost its share of the market and was finally sold.

The same year Rheingold chose Jinx Falkenburg, Harry Conover got hitched. Ruined in the Depression, Gloria Dalton’s father, a banker, started urging his seventeen-year-old daughter to model and got her in to see Conover, who took her on. Within a year Conover married her, moved her into his penthouse apartment on Gramercy Park, and made her stop working. In rapid succession she gave birth to two daughters.

On the professional front, Conover was relentlessly pursuing Powers. He employed five bookers in 1940 in an office decked out with discarded benches from Central Park and with murals depicting park scenes, including a balloon seller whose wares were emblazoned with top model names. Conover’s private office was a portrait in masculinity: oak walls, mahogany desk, and leather furniture. Bob Fertig joined that year as Conover’s head of promotion. “I’m the only living person who worked for both Powers and Conover,” he boasts. “Harry had a completely new approach. At that time fashion people discovered different activity groups, career girls, college girls. A new panorama of talent was needed. John Robert Powers never had the windblown outdoor girl.”

Powers never reacted publicly to the new threat from Conover. “He was very phlegmatic,” says Fertig. “It was ‘Hey, Harry, good luck.’ We’d go out and drink after work. If you’re making money, you don’t care. Later on a sour note invaded the relationship when Powers models started going to Conover.” In private “John simply wouldn’t talk about Harry Conover,” says his son-in-law, Charles Rainey.

Modeling’s pioneer was starting to lose his grip. He’d spread himself too thin. His wife, Alice, had begun teaching charm courses at the first in what eventually grew into a nationwide chain of John Robert Powers Schools. She charged $200 for a ten-week course covering such matters as grooming, diction, and coiffure. Powers was the first person to realize that charm schools
associated with modeling agencies could make money from the hopes of the many young women who would never be models but wanted to be.

“John knew you couldn’t teach it,” says Rainey. “You were a model or you weren’t.” But the power of the Powers Girl was not to be denied. “Girls from all over the country want fashion advice and all that bullshit,” says Bob Fertig. “The idea was, you couldn’t register everyone [who arrived on an agency’s doorstep] because the working models felt threatened.” So you signed them up for a course. “To make money,” Fertig says flatly.

In 1941 Powers published his first book,
The Powers Girls
, which was part autobiography, part model manual, and in large part advertisement. Many more books followed. In 1943 Powers added a seven-week $25 correspondence course, including “practical hints about what men really do and don’t like.” He had a radio show and wrote a regular syndicated newspaper column, “Secrets of Charm.” And he would stop and do a promotion at the drop of a newspaper column item. Servicemen were always going out with Powers Girls. Warner Brothers announced plans to do a movie on them. Released in 1943, it was a flop.

Powers soared away on the ether of publicity. His girls were always going to dances with servicemen on furlough, and photographers were always along. “Could the Hotel Pierre’s sleeping beauty (who took an overdose of sleeping pills and is still unconscious) be Mary Rogers, Powers Model?” Walter Winchell asked in his gossip column in 1940.
POWERS HAND MODEL ARRIVES
, said a Cincinnati
Post
headline in 1941. The Ashland, Kentucky,
Independent
watched as twenty-one models visiting a Marine camp found “convenient seats on the shoulders of members of the Quantico Rifle Team while they try out the ‘devil dog’ weapons.”

With so much going on, it wasn’t easy to tell from the outside that the competition was gaining on Powers. But the business had changed dramatically, and “he did not want to be that competitive,” says Barbara Tyler, an executive vice-president of Robie Enterprises, which today owns the Powers name. “Everybody was out to make a buck. He wanted to make people feel good about themselves.” But by 1946, one Powers model relates, it became an effort to get her earnings out of the agency. “He was a bad businessman,” admits Tyler, who taught at a Powers school in the fifties. “He wasn’t advised well. And he was too nice.”

Powers kept on selling his name until the very end. He launched a line of Powers cosmetics (including John Robert Powers Privilege, a $5 poultice “bursting with super oils, moisturizers, soothing agents and beauty vitamins”),
opened an accessory products company, and briefly sold clothes labeled “John Robert Powers Model.” But his days in the actual model business were just about over. After franchising his schools and selling the rest of the company off in bits and pieces, Powers simply dropped out of the agency business, shutting his doors and moving to Beverly Hills in 1952. In a promotional film from the 1950s a nameless narrator tells how Powers “transcended flesh peddling to become an educator” and stressed that most of his students “want no part of modeling.” At first Powers refused to sell the right to open model agencies bearing his name, but multimillionaire Richard Robie finally bought that, too, in 1974. Today the Powers name is on schools and agencies in many different countries.