Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (30 page)

Despite the industry’s resistance, Wilhelmina took on a number of what were then called “Negro models.” It was another way to differentiate herself from Ford’s White House, but it also seemed to stem from a real belief in equality. Asked in 1969 if they represented a trend, Willie snapped, “No, because Negroes aren’t temporary. We’re all people, we live in the same country. Black
is
beautiful.” Nonetheless, when her first black model, Naomi Sims, started in 1967, “she couldn’t get a booking,” Willie said. “Photographers didn’t want to use her unless it was for the Negro market.”

After graduating from high school in Pittsburgh in 1966, Sims moved to New York to continue her education, paying her way by working as a model for fashion illustrators. A year later she was stopped on the street by a photographer’s agent, who gave her the names of three photographers and urged her to go see them. Within days she was working for Gösta Peterson, an innovative photographer whose wife, Pat, was the fashion editor of
The New York Times Magazine
and its biannual supplement,
Fashions of the Times
. Soon Sims got her big break when one of Peterson’s photos of her appeared on the cover of
Fashions of the Times
.

Sure they would sign her up instantly, Sims called the Fords. She was annoyed when Eileen wouldn’t see her personally and instead, sent her to Sunny Harnett, who’d quit modeling and become a Ford assistant. Sims was thunderstruck when Harnett delivered the verdict: “Ford already has too many models of your type.” The new agent in town, Wilhelmina Cooper, saw Sims personally but, like Ford, was unwilling to represent her. Taking matters into her own hands, Sims decided to send her
Times
cover to every ad agency in New York and asked Willie if she’d allow her agency’s phone number to be printed on an accompanying card. Willie agreed. A few days later a telegram appeared under the door of Sims’s apartment. “
CANNOT REACH YOU BY TELEPHONE. URGENT YOU CALL US
,” it said. Sure she’d done something wrong, Sims did not reply, and two days later another telegram arrived. And then another. This one said, “
WE HAVE MANY BOOKINGS FOR YOU
.”

Naomi Sims photographed by Neal Barr for
Ladies’ Home Journal
Naomi Sims by Neal Barr

The long dark night of the “Negro” model was over. Racism was still very much in fashion, but the first cracks had already appeared in its lily-white facade. “For years, the Negro model was trapped between the unyielding images of a redcap lugging a suitcase and a mammy in a kerchief flipping a flapjack,” the New York
Post
reported in a 1955 story that estimated there were 250 black models then working in New York. Most of them were part-timers, moonlighting from steadier jobs. But some were earning as much as $35 an hour, posing for “Negro market” magazines and advertisers. The Grace Del Marco Model Agency, specialists in the field, had opened. Eleanor Lambert, the fashion publicist, had used black models in her fashion shows for more than a decade.

In 1956 China Machado, a dark-skinned Eurasian beauty, got a job as a temporary replacement house model at Givenchy in Paris. Two years later she branched out into free-lance work, modeling in Italy at the Pitti Palace in Florence, where she appeared in the debut show of a young
alta moda
designer named Valentino. In Paris she was in collections for Dior and Cardin, where she was spotted by Oleg Cassini.

Cassini had used black models in his fashion shows since the middle fifties. “I was the first,” he says, “but I get very little credit. I picked the girls myself and used them at shows for out-of-town buyers and press. It cost me a lot of accounts in the South. It was still the time of fashion apartheid.”

After seeing Machado work in January 1958, he invited her to New York. Hours after her arrival Diana Vreeland booked her to appear in a Fashion Group show. Richard Avedon was in the audience and photographed her almost every day for the next three months. But when he wanted to take her to Paris for
Bazaar
in January 1959 as the first nonwhite model ever to shoot the collections, the magazine’s publisher balked. Avedon insisted, threatening to quit his job, and the publisher capitulated. Machado continued modeling until 1962, when
Bazaar
’s Nancy White gave her a job as senior fashion editor.

In 1961 the Seventh Avenue designer Pauline Trigère had hired a Grace DeMarco model, Beverly Valdes, twenty-three, as the first full-time black house model in the garment center. In 1964 a second all-black agency, American Models, was launched. In 1968, a third, aptly named Black Beauties, opened its doors. Its director, Betty Foray, was white, but her models didn’t care. “What black people want now is a passageway to economic opportunity and they know very well that the only way is through white conduits,” the agency’s publicist told
The New York Times
.

By decade’s end Naomi Sims had left Wilhelmina for Ford and was earning $1,000 a week. Diana Vreeland had her shot by Irving Penn for
Vogue
. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
even put her on its cover, the first time a black model had so appeared on a national magazine. And now Sims wasn’t alone. When asked whence she hailed, part-black, part-Irish, part-French, and part-Mexican Donyale Luna answered, “I’m from the moon, darling.” But in fact, she was born Peggy Anne Donyale Aragonea Pegeon Freeman in Detroit. The feline looks and wild behavior of this first black high-fashion model made her a sensation in London and Paris. Although she was the first black model on the cover of British
Vogue
(shot by David Bailey) and appeared in
Fellini Satyricon
in 1970, her career was short. “She took a lot of drugs and never paid her bills,” says a designer she modeled for. By the mid-seventies Luna had disappeared from the scene. She died in a clinic in Rome in 1979. She was just thirty-three years old.

Katiti Kironde II also had a moment in the sun when she became the first black model to appear on the cover of a major fashion publication—
Glamour
—in August 1968. The timing was not coincidental. A few months earlier the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had been gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, and race riots broke out all over America. “The death of King shook everybody a bit and woke them up to the fact that something had to be done,” Jerry Ford told
Newsday
. He added that the Fords had increased the number of black models on its rolls by a factor of 25 percent. But when
The New York Times
counted the number of black models on Ford’s head sheet three months later, there were only six.

Nowhere were there more opportunities than on fashion runways, where the black models’ carriage, grace, and bearing proved nothing short of revolutionary. Bethann Hardison, a self-described “spiffy little fashion girl from Brooklyn,” arrived in New York’s garment center in 1968, after a short stint as a guard at a prison. While holding down an assortment of garment center jobs, Hardison signed up with Gillis MacGil’s Mannequin agency. Some designers wouldn’t use her. “Bill Blass, who is the Clark Gable of this business, made me aware of why designers said no,” she says. “He let me know I was barking up a tough tree. He told me his clients wouldn’t understand.” But her greatest moment came on November 28, 1973, when five American designers—Anne Klein, Halston, Stephen Burrows, Blass, and Oscar de la Renta—joined five French couturiers in mounting a show to raise funds for the restoration of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. The French used elaborate backdrops and props. The Americans used a bare stage and thirty black models.

Paris designers, put to shame by the Americans’ simple showmanship and fashion flair, embraced the black models and put them to work. Their rates rose from $50 an hour to $100. Finally, in 1974, Beverly Johnson, a champion swimmer from Buffalo, New York, became the first black model to appear on the cover of American
Vogue
. It was the August issue, traditionally not a big seller, but it
was
a cover. The last lily-white fortress had been breached. By 1975 every major American designer was using black models.

Four years after she opened her doors, Wilhelmina was booking a hundred men and women who together billed $3 million annually. The Coopers traveled constantly all over America, giving interviews everywhere they went. Willie judged Miss U.S.A. and Miss Universe contests and headed to Europe three times a year to see the fashion shows and new girls gathered by agents who worked with her.

Meanwhile, more new agencies were opening and closing like tropical hibiscus. In 1968 Rusty Zeddis, Ford’s top booker, left to open Fashion & Film with another agent and a businessman backer. “Eileen went crazy,” says Gillis MacGil. “How could Rusty do such a thing?” Ford sued Zeddis for stealing business secrets but soon dropped the case. “There are no secrets,” Zeddis explains. “You pick up the phone and book models. What’s the big deal?”

When Frances Gill died in summer, 1970, her agency ended up in the hands of Attley Craig, her cousin and bookkeeper. A year later Craig, too, passed away. Two of the agency’s bookers approached model Ellen Harth at the funeral and asked her to take over the operation, she says. Harth was close to Judith Hinman, a Mannequin model married to Jeremy Foster-Fell, an importer of English sports cars, French boats, and watches. Today Harth, Hinman (who is now Judith Williams), and Foster-Fell all seem to despise one another. And each one takes credit for coming up with the idea that the two models should take over the agency from Attley Craig. What is beyond dispute is that they bought the remains of the Frances Gill agency for a dollar and renamed it Foster-Ellen.

Within a year Harth and Hinman, once the closest of friends, grew to distrust each other. Hinman says Harth, who got upset when Hinman got pregnant, began plotting to spirit their models away. Harth says the Foster-Fells secretly gained control of 51 percent of the company’s stock while she was in Germany nursing her ailing mother. “I talked to the models and two bookers,” Harth says, “and I left and started the Ellen Harth Agency in the same building.” Hinman says she learned what had happened when she came back
to work after giving birth. The Foster-Fells struck back, reporting Harth to New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs, claiming she was “morally unfit” to run an agency, Harth says. “They ruled in my favor,” Harth adds angrily. “I think it’s all over, and then they slap me with a lawsuit.”

But the legal action went nowhere. “It just fizzled, and I gave it up,” Hinman admits.

Harth has been in business ever since, first on her own and then as a division of Elite Models. “I’m here, and they aren’t,” she says with some satisfaction. Judith Foster-Fell started over. “I opened Foster-Fell Models in another building,” she says. “Jeremy was snooping around, admiring what I was achieving. He wanted the agency. Ever since then he’s been a model hound. We built a house in Southampton, Long Island, and invited a model to come out there with us. We had dinner one night. I put the baby to sleep and went to bed. In the middle of the night I heard the baby crying, and who comes running out of the forest, covered with dirt? Jeremy and my model!”

Jeremy Foster-Fell has managed to eke out a living on the fringes of modeling ever since. Some would call what he does pimping. But Foster-Fell calls it “the voluntary system.” He learned how it worked from Judith, who’d taken full advantage of the sexual freedom of the times. After divorcing her abusive hometown sweetheart in 1963, Hinman had played the field for eight years, sleeping with both men and women. She is one of the rare few in fashion who will admit to bisexuality in a world where it is far more often practiced than admitted to. “I am not homosexual, but I can certainly be drawn to a woman, and I did enjoy making love to two or three women,” she says. “It’s quite typical in the model business. We get so hyped up and feel so good about ourselves, and we see our own images across the dressing room, all these beautiful bodies. One can’t resist that.”

Hinman also had affairs with club owner Olivier Coquelin and a Moroccan army general. Then, when she and Jeremy were running Foster-Fell together, another Moroccan official she’d met through her general often called her. “He’d say, ‘I need models for the king and the prince,’” she says. “I didn’t want to know what for, but I offered them names, and they paid them and flew them over there, and as far as I know, the girls had a great time.”

“Men constantly seek attractive women for physical purposes,” Foster-Fell says. “Among moneyed men and the most attractive women, that has to be multiplied by a factor of ten. Every guy I know, the minute he hears I own an agency, he brightens up. They get phone numbers; they give presents; they give money. I’ve never shipped a girl off. But I knew guys who’d invite girls
and pay up to twenty thousand dollars for a weekend. I’ve invited girls to such things. I once flew five girls to the tropics. They were paid full rate and told that guys would take a shot at them and they wouldn’t get a second booking. Two of them were pissed because nobody tried, one was pissed because somebody did, and the fifth, I heard later, stayed the course and still sees the fellow. This is the real world. Any agent who says it doesn’t happen is lying. You only cross the line when you take a booking for money with the knowledge that sexual favors are required.” It’s not pimping, Foster-Fell concludes, because pimps take an 80 percent cut and model agents only take 10 percent.