Cover Girl

Anita Colby, nee Counihan, was 30 last August. She has never married, and the chances are that she never will. This is obviously not for lack of looks. Years ago her good friend Quentin Reynolds gave her a permanent nickname : The Face. Her good friend Voldemar Vetluguin, a one time editor of Redbook, has called it "the most beautiful face this side of Paradise." (He added: "And the sharpest tongue this side of Hell.") And until she got tired of the work, this seraphic property made her the highest-paid model in America.

Nor is it for lack of more essential feminine qualifications, either, if the judgment of such an authority as her good friend the late Dr. Alan Dafoe is to be trusted. Dr.

Dafoe once sent her six lucky pebbles from the Dionne front yard, and bet on her to restore the fecundity title to the U.S.

Least of all is it for lack of suitors. Laid end to end, the eligible and often famous men who have courted her might reach from the Stork Club to the Mocambo. She has inspired one of them to the century's most poignant heart-cry: "Colby, you are the only woman in the world whom I'd like to pay alimony to." But another of the most avid of them, a European who in his spare time directs pictures at Warner Bros., once sadly explained to her: "Colby, I can't marry you. I want to be married to a woman, not an institution."

Inside Hollywood. Anita Colby's current title is Feminine Director of the Selznick Studios.* But the designation is flagrantly inadequate. The Face, who has a brain to match, has been better described as one part Hedy Lamarr, one part Machiavelli, one part Sammy Click.

For Selznick, she combines and uses the talents of ace trouble shooter, saleswoman, fixer, promoter, talent scout, fashion ex pert, beauty expert and housemother. Ingrid Bergman would prefer not to be photographed unless Colby is on hand. Jennifer Jones thinks twice about blowing her nose without reporting to Colby. Inde pendent of Publicity Chief Don King, she works closely with Selznick, handling all deals public and personal which call for grade-A finesse. Her social and journalistic contacts in both New York and Hollywood are peerless; she calls Winchell Walter and Lyons Lennie. To all the people on earth who most matter to David Selznick, she is an indispensable one-woman pipeline.

Hollywood is her element. The vibrations are right. The rarefied atmosphere exhilarates instead of suffocating her. She is possessed not only of Dionysiac energy but also of an all but demoniac appetite for expending it. All of each day, from 9 to 7, she pours this boiling vitality into office work, as lavishly over minor details as major crises. All of each evening, until a normal 3 a.m., she keeps right on working--at parties. The only thing that can keep her away from a party given by Elsa Maxwell, Lady Mendl or Cobina Wright Sr. or Barbara Hutton Grant or Ouida Rathbone or Baron Rothschild is an earthquake, a flood, or possibly a runny nose. Her conversation is slick, spangled, witty, shot full of Colbyisms. Some of these are close to schoolgirlish, like "doll," meaning darling, for a man she likes; others are more stern, like her stock stopper to a conversation she thinks silly: "Well, how dull can we get?"

It is not extraordinary for Colby to go to three parties in an evening. On the side, she has just finished her autobiography, significantly titled I Paid 'for It Myself* which will appear late this year. She still models occasionally, rarely with her too-similar sister Francine. And last week The Face was playing with the idea of going on the air opposite The Voice, with the prospect of becoming a national as well as a local institution. When a friend asked her recently how she does it all, she replied incredulously, "But doll! I like to make everything a production!"

If he had asked her not how, but why, she might have been harder put to it for an answer. The answer appears to be that she runs so frantically fast because she is running away. It is not so easy, however, to know what she is running away from; though where she started is clear and important.

Father & the Facts of Life. Anita is the daughter of the cartoonist Bud Counihan, a legendary figure among New York artists and newsmen. A handsome, impulsive, lace-curtain Irishman, he had an indefatigable affability, a great love of good fellowship and good liquor. He was loved as only a man can be whose weaknesses are at once amiable and unaggressive. Settled in Brooklyn and prospering on the New York Evening World, Bud Counihan made many of the friends who were later to give his daughter her start in life.

"I was a calm, good child," recalls Anita, who has always adored her father. The statement only mildly suggests her upbringing, and the terrifying crisis for which it prepared her. Expected by both her Catholic parents to behave as nearly as possible like a saint, she tried only too hard to oblige. A nun who taught and befriended her in grammar school remembers her as "a beautiful dreamer."

Then one day when Anita was 13, fate dealt her a blow that sent her reeling. A child on the street, using a street child's dialect and detail, told her the facts of life. Totally unprepared for such reality, she was plunged into a year of adolescent hell. Disillusioned with her parents and friends, she went to church twice a day, often knelt for hours at a stretch. At length she announced that she was going to become a Carmelite, an order of nuns which requires complete seclusion. Soon afterward, at 14, she had a nervous breakdown and was whisked off to Chesapeake Bay for six months of complete rest.

She was hardly over the worst of this crisis when, along with the stockmarket, the Evening World collapsed, and Bud's job, and his money. So, for a second time, did his daughter. Some of her friends believe that her whole career has been an effort to vindicate her father. Anita Colby seems occasionally to feel so, and says with passionate intensity: "I have always had dignity. No matter how long I live I will always have it. I will keep scandal away. I will not go out with the town playboy."

When the Counihans moved to Washington, where Bud worked for Hearst and the sisters had to finish their education at a public high school, Anita was profoundly humiliated by her family's reduced circumstances. One of the most important evenings of her life was the one, at a Georgetown prom, when she saw the reigning model of the day make a conquest of the floor. She decided immediately, she remembers, that if that was how it was done, she would do it. That decision led her swiftly onward & upward to New York and a job as a Powers model. Arrived with Powers, she was at the model's zenith and might have stayed there indefinitely. But nature had other plans for her, and other ways of carrying them out.

Celebrities at the Stork. One day her father's old friend, Quentin Reynolds, almost the only friend she had in New York then, took her to a 53rd Street bistro just coming into vogue, the Stork Club. There, while Reynolds waited for a friend, Anita haltingly sipped an orangeade. The people she met were all fond of Bud Counihan; they found it, now, remarkably easy to be fond of his girl Anita. In a matter of weeks her friends had increased from one to 201; in a matter of months, Bud's beautiful daughter was the toast of the town.

From then on, Anita Counihan was to live almost exclusively among celebrities. Almost any night she might be found surrounded by one or all of her Stork Club gang: talking over his experiences in Spain with Ernest Hemingway or their experiences anywhere with Westbrook Pegler, Peter Arno, Damon Runyon, Steve Hannegan, John O'Hara; dancing at El Morocco with Dan Topping and Shipwreck Kelly; dashing out to the country to help Deems Taylor compose a new operetta. Between times there were play or ballet or opera openings with the William Rhinelander Stewarts, the Orson Munns, Prince Serge Obolensky, the Averell Harrimans, Sonny Whitney. Once a weekend at San Simeon lasted six weeks because the old man could not bear to let her go. From the bed she slept in, she could stare at a painting on the ceiling and listen to the lion roar in the private zoo.

Meantime Colby was becoming famous and familiar in her own right. Like many dominant women, she had (and is still embarrassed by) heavy legs and a rather unimpressive figure. So she never modeled such commodities as bathing suits or lingerie or stockings. But she became easily the nation's foremost magazine-cover and hat model, had her face plastered on tens of thousands of cigaret-advertising billboards. At $50 an hour, the highest modeling fee ever paid, she sometimes made more than $1,000 a week. Her sex appeal was attested by such demonstrations as the receipt from various male admirers one Christmas of no less than 44 bottles of her favorite, $40-an-oz. perfume. Hollywood was the almost inevitable next step. She took it--and flopped.

Park Avenue Kitty Foyle. Arriving in the summer of 1935, she promptly had her named changed to Colby and was cast in Mary of Scotland. In the finished film, she scarcely appeared. After that she scarcely appeared in pictures like The Bride Walks Out, Wings of Mercy, Walking on Air, some Ginger Rogers films, a smattering of Bs. Anita had too many inhibitions to be adept at playing anyone except herself. After two and a half years of it she gave up, returned to New York --and became, for a time, a Park Avenue Kitty Foyle.

Aside from modeling, she decided, the one thing in the world she knew better how to do than anyone else alive was to get into an office. In September 1938 she flabbergasted the business manager of Harper's Bazaar and most of her friends by applying for a job as an advertising salesman. The universal laugh that went up was quickly quieted. Ten days after she started she landed her first account; by year's end she was their star salesman.

The reasons were by no means the ones that might be crudely assumed of such a face in so wolfish a world. Colby is probably the most experienced and skillful intercepter of passes in America. She succeeded then, as she has succeeded in Hollywood, because she had friends in top executive positions almost everywhere and steadily made more, because her face and tongue were an almost irresistible combination, because she had energy, and because she had ideas -- "$10,000 ideas" --according to Steve Hannegan.

"Cover Girl Caravan." It was Vetluguin, however, who had the original idea for Cover Girl, which proved to be the turning point of her career. But without Colby there probably would have been no such musical film. Good models were not anxious to exchange the security of New York for the risks of Hollywood. Magazine publishers, remembering an unfortunate B-picture called The Powers Girl, were leary of the whole idea.

Colby did not stop at merely persuading both models and publishers. She also sold the magazines a tie-up with the movie, and averaged three magazine covers per Cover Girl model before the picture opened, with accompanying articles. She even talked the editors of Farm Journal (biggest rural-magazine circulation) into joining the venture, though they had had no females except cows or pullets on their cover since the magazine was founded. "We'll have to change all that," Colby informed them. They changed it.

The adventures of the "Cover Girl Caravan" in its special car en route to the Coast, and the girls' adventures in their Beverly Hills house under "Mother" Colby's chaperonage (with eight "wolves" howling at the door one night and Mickey Rooney turning handsprings on the lawn another),made endless gossip-column copy. Colby followed up with personal calls on editors in 40 major cities. When Cover Girl finally appeared, it may not have been the best picture ever made, but it was certainly one of the best publicized. And Colby's reputation was made.

She returned to Hollywood and to immediate offers from Warner, Lester Cowan, M.G.M. and David 0. Selznick. But Selznick alone met her terms--willing as she was to swap careers at a discount. He agreed to pay her $250 a week for the first six months, $350 (her present salary) for the second, plus an expense account which includes her clothes, a titanic item,* and everything else that has anything remotely to do with business.

The care & feeding of females -- in this case Selznick actresses -- is one of Colby's most important functions. Joan Fontaine, for instance, has long felt that Selznick has exploited her. Colby, if she does not cajole Miss Fontaine into coming to terms about a new contract, will at least set up the very best possible arrangement for her boss. Selznick meanwhile will know exactly what is going on in Miss Fontaine's mind (unless Miss Fontaine is mighty careful) by virtue of sitting in vicariously on the kind of female conversations which generally take place in the powder room.

Jennifer Jones, for another example, is a shy, eager, gifted girl who last year underwent the alarming experience of being rocketed to stardom almost overnight by her performance in The Song of Bernadette. Jennifer was confused and frightened by the fuss made over her. From now on, she realized, people would stare at her, expect something of her. She lacked confidence; she did not dress well; she did not know how to give a party. She did not know how to be photographed, how to make herself up, what dresses to buy, how to talk casually with people, how to hold herself, how to stop feeling like Phylis Walker, the country bumpkin from Oklahoma. "It is my job," explains Colby, "to make these gals catch on fast, and to save them the grief and uncertainty." With poised, older stars like Bergman and Fontaine the problem is the same in essence but different in approach. With Jennifer Jones the problem is more immediate and pressing. Selznick has tied up an awful lot of money in her. Colby is his one-woman finishing school; she tutors Selznick stars and stock players as if she were a combination of Hattie Carnegie, Elizabeth Arden, Emily Post, John Powers and the Warden at Vassar.

Colby does the preliminary planning on clothes for every picture, making sketches which give the designer the gist of what Selznick is looking for. ( She had five years of art study; Bud Counihan is still convinced her real talent lies in art.) She has well in mind, before she starts, what each star can wear: "Bergman is something so beautiful you must play it down. You cannot overpower Ingrid with clothes." "Make Fontaine smart, feminine and refined." "Keep Shirley looking sweet sixteen with soft hair, pigtails and girlish pinafores."

"I'm Perfectly Happy." All this, of course, is only half of Colby's life; the other half, the night half of each day, might encrust the next two columns with precious and semiprecious names. It is a life which leaves her extraordinarily little time for sleep--five hours a night; less on Sunday because of Mass--and far less time for quietness or thought. Plain people often wonder how such supercharged individuals keep their health. The answer is, they usually do not. Anita Colby was hospitalized three years ago for complete physical exhaustion; last year two doctors kept check on her: now, like Lord Byron and a host of other driven people before her, she' has developed a habit of grinding her teeth in her sleep. To a friend concerned over her obsessive exertions she exclaimed: "But doll! Once I let up I fall apart! So I never let up!"

But when people ask her, as many do, why with her beauty and renown she does not go back to acting, she declares: "I'm perfectly happy now. I know everybody and I'm recognized in the business world. I don't have to pose for cheesecake and I don't"--unless David O. Selznick, or Hollywood itself, be taken for one--"have to sit on elephants."

*The following Colby charges--top Selznick actresses--are shown clockwise from bottom on the cover: Shirley Temple, Jennifer Jones, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Dorothy McGuire.

*So many friends have offered to write the preface that Colby has considered publishing a book consisting of prefaces alone--with perhaps a short chapter by herself.

*Items: a hat collection which fluctuates be tween 140 and 400 with a complete annual turnover; five furs; 20 cloth coats, 150 pairs of shoes, 40 evening dresses, 75 blouses, 25 daytime dresses, 18 cocktail dresses, ten miscellaneous dresses, uncounted suits. "I do not like dresses," she says. "I live in suits."

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