The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

did as well: to the Barbizon. She wanted everyone to know it too, and had special stationery ordered to announce her place in the world: NATÁLIE, THE BARBIZON, 140 EAST 63RD STREET, NEW YORK 21. Eileen Ford, who had booked her for a job and then befriended her, would stay the night on a cot in Natálie’s Barbizon room when it was too late to return home to her husband on Long Island. She and Natálie would lie there and chat for hours about the modeling world they both knew so well. And just as Natálie had improved the production of altimeters, so now she would improve the world of modeling (and, just as happened at the aircraft plant, she again would not get the credit that was due, nor really the payout).

Plotting well into the night, Natálie, on the narrow Barbizon bed, and Eileen, on the foldout cot the hotel provided at request, decided to overhaul the New York modeling industry. The first step would be an entirely new payment method for the models. Eileen would work for the models, and not the other way around, as the three top agents, Powers, Conover, and Hartford, all men, assumed it should be. Now the photographers would pay the models at the end of the shoot, and the models would then pay the Ford Modeling Agency its 10 percent. There would be no more worrying for working models like Carolyn about when they’d get paid. Natálie put herself in charge of recruitment, ushering her favorite models over to Eileen. While the ideal Ford model later became a facsimile of Natálie’s blond, healthy, tall, leggy profile, during the late 1940s and then 1950s especially, the Ford agency handled all three categories of models: the junior model, up to five foot five and 106 pounds; the misses model, an inch or two taller and up to 110 pounds; and then the elite high-fashion model, who towered over the rest yet weighed around 112 (and if they didn’t, Eileen would badger them into it).

It was Natálie who approached Carolyn about joining their agency. Natálie and Eileen had set up shop in a brownstone sandwiched between a funeral parlor and a cigar store on Second Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Street. Three flights up the stairs and behind a red door were the official headquarters of Ford Models. When Carolyn walked in, there was no receptionist, only a small, curly-haired woman surrounded by six black telephones. This was Eileen. She sat, a telephone or two hoisted to her ear, and wordlessly pointed to an old red sofa. Carolyn sat down and listened to Eileen argue into the phone. Natálie was the face of the agency, the one who picked the girls with good working reputations and brought them in; then Eileen worked her magic, her Rolodex. Eileen booked shoots, banished photographers who crossed the line, and instructed “her girls” on how to style their hair. Eileen was particularly conversant in the new junior market, and she immediately saw Carolyn’s potential: petite, slender, small-waisted, with large eyes and a great smile. Eileen took matters into her own hands and renamed Carolyn on the spot. Carolyn Schaffner would not do, she said: from here on, she would be Carolyn Scott.

Eileen delivered on what she promised. Carolyn was soon on the cover of McCall’s, photographed by a still relatively unknown photographer by the name of Richard Avedon. He was able to capture Carolyn’s intelligence: holding a parasol, in a lacy dress, a spring bouquet of flowers and a yellow satin ribbon in her hair, Carolyn could have come off as vapid or mundane. But in shot after shot, Carolyn stares out at the viewer in a way that makes one want to see more of her, even as (or because) so much in fact remains hidden behind her expression. (It helped that Avedon, unlike so many other photographers, treated the models humanely, playing music, letting them choose the music, in fact, and ordering in their favorite food during shoots.)

It seemed Carolyn had made it; she had accomplished what she had set out to do when she boarded that train from Ohio to New York. She now made the kind of gesture that marks the triumph of a small-town escapee: she sent her mother the latest refrigerator model to replace the ice block in the larder. It was also a four-letter gesture to her stepfather, of course. She was saying it loud and clear: she, the newly renamed Carolyn Scott, barely twenty, could provide what he would never be able to, or be willing to.

Lorraine Davies, the Tangerine Queen, like Carolyn, had found her niche as a junior model, even as she idolized the tall high-fashion models. She specialized in live television commercials, print work, Sears Roebuck, and even managed to land a lucrative gig handing out prizes on the television game show Try and Do It. Like Celeste Gheen, Barbizon resident and Powers model during the Great Depression, who had even bathed in a tub of Colman’s mustard for the extra pay, Lorraine considered herself an artist of disguise. This was the secret to her success: she would switch her hair from long to short, blond to dark—anything the job demanded. But also like Carolyn, she was always having to worry about getting paid on time and settling her weekly Barbizon bill. Tired of Conover’s tricks, she first moved over to Huntington Hartford, an agency started in 1948 by the heir to the A&P supermarket fortune. He did it so he could “be with the girls.” When he said girls, he meant it too; he had a penchant for the particularly young, and thought “way past her prime” Lana Turner and “too pushy like a high-class hooker” Marilyn Monroe were too old for him. They were certainly too mature for him. A decade earlier, he had had a son with a twenty-three-year-old chorus girl, who then left him for the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. By some accounts,