Billion-Dollar Baby

(See Cover)

In a dazzling bright room high above the late summer landscape of Manhattan's Central Park stood an exquisite blonde in a regal white dress (by Hattie Carnegie). She rustled her billowing petticoats and smiled a smile of quiet rapture. Above her decolletage, as bare as a lie and as bold as fashion, sparkled a small cascade of diamonds--or what looked like diamonds. Her slender, black-gloved hand gripped a black cigarette holder from which, now & again, she flicked a trace of ash with gracious disdain. A man's voice cooed to her.

"Just enjoy the whole thing," said the man. "Now let's have some major action here, some minor action there . . . That's quite good . . . Go on now, really moving . . . Go right on . . . Yes, yes . . . let the action transfer to the whole body . . . Relax the shoulders . . . Hollow the chest . . . That's wonderful, wonderful! . . ." The voice became slightly breathless with excitement : "Now just gently . . . close your mouth please . . . Go on now, really moving . . . Yes, yes, YES! . . . That's so beautiful. . ."

This passionate effusion was punctuated by the constant, brittle click of a camera. The ecstatic monologuist was Vogue's talented photographer Irving Penn and the woman in white was his model. Well might Penn be ecstatic. In that strange, floodlit world whose heaven is Paris and whose economic life force is the American woman's checkbook, his model was a reigning queen. She was Lisa Fonssagrives, the highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business, considered by many of her colleagues the greatest fashion model of all time. Says Photographer Horst Paul Horst, who helped her get started: "She has one of the most beautiful bodies I have ever seen."

While Penn chattered on, Lisa continued in her uncomfortable but graceful pose, looking as though some preposterous comedy plot compelled her to be completely at ease while leaning against an exceedingly hot stove. Thus for about four hours, model and photographer labored over a picture, which had but one purpose: to convince as many women magazine readers as possible that they could look just like Lisa Fonssagrives in Hattie Carnegie's new creation.

New Look, Old Hat. The flood of such pictures in magazines and newspapers was strategically timed. It would coincide with the climax of the American woman's familiar rite, already well under way last week --the annual surrender to the fall fashions.

The New Look was already old hat. The great wheel of fashion was turning onward from the bustling '90s to the tubular '20s: the new line was boyish and slim. U.S. dressmakers had lifted skirts closer to the knees. Paris houses showed short, narrow evening gowns with huge, trainlike attachments and bathing suit tops. There was a host of minor gimmicks: the boyish haircut, jagged at the edges; the sleek "attenuated siren look"; huge black fur muffs; long umbrellas; Edwardian gloves; the lacquered evening "back-of-the-head bandeau"; Eton collars; the coal scuttle; the Picasso bicorne.

To exhibit--and sell--these glories, page after glossy page of models paraded past magazine readers. Historically, the model was the descendant of the come-on girl posted in front of a Midway show tent; socially, she ranked high above the chorus girl and not far below the movie star. In the bright parade, with the assurance of a duchess and the accomplished posturing of an actress, floated Lisa Fonssagrives. There was Lisa in a little black moire number (by Jacques Fath); there was Lisa invitingly recumbent in a black lace and taffeta ensemble (by Janet Taylor); there was Lisa wistfully bored in tulle, for McCallum stockings ("You just know she wears them"). Thin, slightly bony, gowned and groomed with superhuman perfection, she was undeniably beautiful, but in her pictures a bit distant and ethereal, and not altogether real.

Lisa Fonssagrives was, in fact, an artfully posed, painstakingly lighted, lavishly printed image which bore about as much resemblance to an ordinary woman as Plato's "forms" to their imperfect earthly copies. Recently, Lisa Fonssagrives asked a photographer friend what he thought of her. "Lisa," he said, "you are just an illusion."

But the model is an illusion that can sell evening gowns, nylons and refrigerators. She can sell motorcars, bank loans and worthy causes. She can sell diesel engines, grapefruit and trips to foreign lands. She can sell everything from diapers to cemetery plots, aspirin to Zonite. She is a billion-dollar baby with a billion-dollar smile and a billion-dollar salesbook in her billion-dollar hand. She is the new goddess of plenty.

The Birth of the Model. In the past century, America underwent a great economic revolution. Americans made more things, and created more power to create still more things, than all past ages put together. The force chiefly charged with selling this breathless, and sometimes choking, proliferation of wealth is advertising.

At the Victorian era's high noon, most businessmen were warmed by the belief that the biggest rewards would automatically go, by economic law, to the producer of the best and cheapest product. It was mainly patent medicinemen who "took advertising" regularly. In 1888, there were only two men in New York who admitted to being professional writers of advertising; one of them resided in a Bowery hotel, at 25-c- a night.

But the living standard of the ad-smiths improved rapidly. Other manufacturers, led by the makers of such simple consumer items as soap and baking powder, began to learn the lessons of trademarks, contact with the customer, expanding demand. In church one Sunday morning in 1879, Harley T. Procter, of Procter & Gamble, listened to a passage from the 45th psalm (". . . all thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they made thee glad . . .") and coined the label "Ivory Soap." In 1890, Kodak launched one of the first relentlessly successful slogans: "You press the button--we do the rest." As other manufacturers ventured into advertising's strange new land, a blaze of new slogans followed: "The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous," "Pink Pills for Pale People," "Do You Wear Pants?" Slogans temporarily gave way to jingles, alarming forerunners of the singing commercial. Illustrations (the manufacturer's face, Indians, prominent public figures, including President James A. Garfield) were used wildly and sometimes weirdly to catch the customer's eye. Then destiny struck in Chicago; a photographer named Beatrice Tonneson used pictures of live girls in ads for the first time.

By the end of World War I, the rush to put women in ads was on. Coca-Cola used a black-haired beauty and a kitten. Holeproof Hosiery pioneered cheesecake by lifting skirts and showing legs. Chesterfield made shocking history by subtly inciting women to smoke: a flapper cuddled up to her smoke-puffing boy friend and whispered, "Blow some my way."

With the motorcar had come the Fisher Body Girl. In Paris, Harvard-educated, Poet E. E. Cummings sneered:

. . . Spearmint

Girl With The Wrigley Eyes . . .

of you i

sing . . .

from every B.V.D.

let freedom ring . . .

Men of Distinction. Admen, in league with psychology, following charts marshaled by armies of researchers, plotted a never-ceasing campaign to capture the public's attention, and stab to the psychological soft spots of men & women. They appealed to fear ("Even your best friends won't tell you"), to snobbery ("Men of Distinction"), to romance ("She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Pond's"). They spoke in euphemisms, wrapped like cotton around the harsh facts of life, and invented dread new diseases (B.O., Office Hips, Halitosis). They found that endorsements by real people, from tobacco auctioneers to movie stars, were astoundingly successful sales plugs. ("Fifty million women a week see movies," explained one adman. "They see these dames always get their man, so they want to use Lux soap, too.")

They documented more or less factual claims to superior quality ("Tests by independent research laboratories prove . . ."). They sponsored contests, told jokes, wrote essays, and often told a straight story about the things they had to sell. They appealed -- and thus redeemed their sins of excess -- to all men's desire for better things by dazzling them with glowing pictures of the new & better things American industry was making. But always present was advertising's simplest and most potent symbol, the female figure.

Reservoir of Beauty. On its advertising message of optimism and progress, U.S. business this year is spending about $830 million in magazines and newspapers alone. At least one-third of all the advertisements bought by that staggering sum are using models. The proportion is nearer half in beer, cigarettes, cosmetics, the biggest users of models outside the fashion field. The figures add up to the simple conviction that there is nothing like a girl to catch the public's eye. Actually, with the buyers' market making the going tougher than before, the advertising business has begun to realize that a pretty girl can only lead the customer to the store counter; she cannot make him buy. Only the product itself can do that. The new emphasis in advertising, particularly for such goods as synthetics, electronic devices and new drugs, is on telling an informative story of quality.

Some products, of course, would always be best advertised by models. This fact is borne out by such stories as the rise of Manhattan's Rheingold beer. It climbed from eighth to first place in Eastern beer sales largely by the use of pretty Miss Rheingolds, about half of them Irish "colleens" duly elected each year by beer drinkers. (Current Miss Rheingold: pert Pat McElroy.) In its battle with Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola plans to count heavily on the new television Pepsi-Cola Girl, Louise Hyde, a 24-year-old Chattanooga belle of whom one adman said hopefully: "She just makes you feel thirsty."

To supply the huge demand made by the advertisers on America's vast reservoir of beauty, the highly specialized and erratic model business has materialized. An appendage of advertising, model agencies combine the ethics of theatrical agents with the esthetics of bathing beauty judges.

The Dawn of Disillusion. Modeling is concentrated in a few crowded Manhattan blocks between Fifth and Third Avenues, brightened by the parade of breathless, breath-taking young women dressed at fashion's extreme, hatboxes* in their hands, their feet fleet and flat-heeled, their pancaked faces as blank as a baby's conscience. There are about 1,000 professional photographic models active in New York (including 25 men, 25 children and several dogs).

Thousands more knock on agency doors every year, driven by their own ambitions, by unscrupulous "modeling schools" which promise to turn them into cover girls in six easy lessons, or by relentless mothers. But disillusion awaits them.

Even if a girl is accepted by one of New York's 23 agencies (the best known: Powers, Conover, Thornton, Hartford, Ford), it is still a long road to a magazine cover or a four-color ad. Most agencies register far more models than they can possibly place, are little more than clearinghouses which keep the models' bookings, relay telephone messages, give them a place to sit around and wait between jobs, and collect 10% of their fees. It is usually the model who has to sell herself, tramping in & out of photographers' studios, showing her scrapbook, trying to look like the advertisers' cryptic specifications ("We need the soap and motherhood type"). By great good fortune she may land a movie contract./- But in most cases, she will achieve a glamourous life only in the ads she poses for.

Nor will her income be glamourous. Virtually all statistics in the modeling business are the figment of someone's creative imagination. Best estimates are that only about 50 or 60 of New York's 1,000 photographic models make between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. Among them are two outstanding up & coming fashion models, a sensational, Lauren Bacallish redhead named Kathryn Cassidy, 23, and a sultry Maryland beauty named Jean Patchet, 22. About 75 models make between $8,000 and $10,000 at rates up to $25 an hour. The rest charge from $5 to $15 an hour and often do not find enough work to make ends meet. Lisa Fonssagrives is alone in charging $40 an hour.

The Day of a Model. What makes a face and a figure worth $40 an hour? The answer to that lies in the way Lisa Fonssagrives works.

Last week, one of Lisa's typical days began at 7 a.m., when she arose at her converted gardener's cottage in Muttontown^ Long Island. She breakfasted in bed, listened to her eight-year-old daughter Mia read her lessons. She drove 35 miles to Manhattan in her red-upholstered Studebaker convertible. On the road, she was something of a hazard. An amateur plane pilot, she considers any speed under 70 m.p.h. dull. She fretted at whistling truck drivers and ogling motorists/'There will be an accident for sure," she said, "and those silly men will get us all tickets."

Her first Manhattan stop was her office, where she picked up" gloves, shoes and a list of bookings which her secretary had prepared for her. Then she went to Seventh Avenue for a fitting of a dress she would model later in the week. From Seventh (where a gown is a garment, a batch of dresses a line and a model a dearie), she taxied two blocks east to Fifth (where a garment is a creation, a line a collection and a dearie a darling). After a session with the hairdresser (Lisa's hair, which used to be black and then red, is now ash blonde), she rushed to a sitting with old friend Horst at the Vogue studios. Two hours later, she raced on (without stopping for lunch) to another sitting with Photographer Henry Gravneek. She retouched her make-up in the taxi. Says she: "It makes for the most interesting variations depending on which way the driver takes the bumps." As she entered the studio, Designer Taylor was on hand to introduce Lisa to the black cocktail dress she was to model. While the designer pulled and pinned the dress into place, she patted Lisa Fonssagrives' modest bosom and said: "Darling, you'll simply have to fill that out. You know what I want--the Maxime look."

"Well," said Lisa with resignation, "it's a leettle difficult when one has never been chez Maxime, but I think the feeling will come." The feeling came with the addition of some falsies.* There were crises over shoes (wrong ankle straps) and gloves (too shiny) and the necklace (too large). But presently the massed lights went on, all shadows withering in the merciless crossplay. (Many models are less than brilliant conversationalists. Says Lisa, an excellent one: "Sometimes I think all these hot lights numb the brain.")

Then Photographer Gravneek quietly started shooting, only now & then asking Lisa to turn a bit this way or that. Thirty minutes and 16 camera clicks later, it was all over.

The Good Clothes Hanger. Working with a less accomplished model, the photographer might spend hours trying to prod and push her into the proper pose. But not with Lisa. With a dancer's discipline and grace, she responds instantly to the photographer's every direction, almost before it is spoken. Her body (bust and hips 34 in.) is so supple that she can pull in her normally 23-inch waist to 18 inches. She has the gift of mimicry every good model needs, and a keen fashion sense. Once, she appeared 103 times in a single issue of a magazine, scarcely looked like the same girl in two pictures. Says she: "The photographer says, 'Look sexy,' and I look sexy. He says, 'Look like a kitten,' and I look like a kitten. It is always the dress, it is never, never the girl." As one satisfied customer put it: "A lot of models will not move a muscle for a cheap dress. Lisa makes a $10 cotton dress look like a Schiaparelli." Mockingly, Lisa Fonssagrives puts it another way: "I'm just a good clothes hanger."

Oriental Slave Dance. The life dedicated to the task of being a paragon of fashion for American women began 38 years ago, far from the U.S. and far from fashion. Lisa was born in the small Swedish town of Uddevalla (present pop. 22,675), the daughter of Dr. Samuel Bern-stone, a dentist. Lisa's father had changed his name from Anderson, which he considered too commonplace: there are 48 pages of Andersons in the Stockholm telephone directory. The Bernstones were always considered a little daring by the town: they liked to go swimming in the nude. Lisa still likes to when she swims at a deserted Long Island beach.

Although her parents sent her to cooking school ("with the idea that I should be a good housewife"), Lisa had her heart and her nimble feet set on dancing. The town still remembers how, in a school play, she stole the show dancing the role of an Oriental slave.

She went to Paris where she got engagements with minor ballet companies (her 5 ft. 7 made her too tall for the Paris Corps de Ballet). In 1935, she married her fellow dancer, handsome Fernand Fonssagrives. Both soon gave up dancing, he to be a photographer, she to be a model. She tripped into the profession by chance: a young photographer asked her to pose for him. The results were sensational. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar fought to get her services as a mannequin; she has worked for both. Horst, one of the first photographers for whom she posed, recalls that she trembled with fear during her early sittings, but soon lost her stage fright, and became a top Paris, model. (She once posed in an evening gown while hanging on to the Eiffel Tower with one hand and one foot.)

Greetings from the Stork. When war broke out, Lisa and Fernand came to the U.S. Soon after her first pictures appeared in U.S. magazines, smitten strangers sent her presents, including a bottle of champagne from Stork Club Impresario Sherman Billingsley, whom she has never met. She recalls, "I thought: what a strange country this is. Maybe I'd better go home now." Today, Lisa works an average of 20 hours a week, half on advertising and half on magazine fashion illustrations, which pay less than advertising pictures ($12.50-$15) but carry prestige. Lisa averages about $500 a week, could easily make more if she worked a 40-hour week. Once, working hard, she made $1,800 in one week.

Her home town has not always approved of Lisa's career. Says she: "Uddevalla is, perhaps, a little Bostonian." Her family, however, regards her with a worldly tolerance. Only her brother, a retired army captain, has reservations. "We don't quite know what it is Lisa is doing," he explains, "but I am sure it must be getting on her nerves."

Lisa has managed to maintain something of Uddevalla's freshness chiefly by keeping her life separate from the nervous and narcissistic world in which she moves. She prefers simple sport clothes, rarely wears evening gowns off the job, never goes to nightclubs. She keeps herself in fine modeling fettle--underweight (122 lbs.) and hard as a pole vaulter--by swimming, tennis, horseback riding, and gardening on her new four-acre farm. Daughter Mia frequently functions as her mother's severest critic. Whenever she does not like one of Lisa's ads, she pencils in bold crayon corrections or, by cutting down one of her mother's nightgowns, herself demonstrates a better pose.

Lisa is an expert with a camera, is thinking of combining modeling with a part-time job as a fashion photographer. She has been a top model for 14 years while younger and prettier ones have come & gone, but no one was yet ready to name her successor when and if she stops modeling.

What Every Woman Knows. In one sense, of course, Lisa Fonssagrives would never stop. If her face should disappear from the magazines tomorrow, other faces would crowd to take its place and the American public would scarcely know the difference. For the model is more than an individual; she has become a type and an inevitable part of the American scene. She is everywhere; she smiles down from mountains and from steely skyscraper fac,ades, from billboards and from the most exclusive bars. She is no longer an enticing stranger; the American is fond of her, sometimes irritated by her, but he takes her for granted and looks for her, even when he has no intention of buying what she is selling.

As, in her ads, she moves along in constant and successful pursuit of happiness, from high school prom to church wedding to a mortgage-free white frame house, she becomes a nearly epic figure: America's Everywoman. Her great and simple message is: life can be happy and Everywoman can be beautiful.

In an important sense she exercises an unsettling influence by making men & women dissatisfied with reality. She proclaims that homeliness is a sin and unnecessary. Her every image assures men that women look like goddesses, while their experience tells them that women only look like women. She assures the women, in their turn, that they can clean a two-story house, take the children to school, make a dress at home, cook a four-course meal, wash the dishes, and then slip into an opera gown, make brilliant conversation and look as ravishing as an ad.

But it was precisely the desire for a bigger & richer life, for more and better things (constantly stimulated by advertising), that created the demand for--and sold--the goods which made American men & women better housed, better clothed, better groomed and better-looking than any on earth. American business civilization--leaving aside the poets and the painters--has not put its cult of beauty and its belief in progress into formal philosophies. Yet in a sense, it is writing a statement to posterity into the glossy pages and towering lights of its advertising.

It was somewhat sobering to imagine that just about all of this message that might remain for the contemplation of future ages might be the image of a pretty girl blowing smoke rings through a seductive smile. But it would certainly give posterity a sight to see.

* This traditional model's badge was accidentally originated some 15 years ago by Model Agent John Robert Powers when he gave one of his models a hatbox he happened to have in his office (having just bought a new hat) so that she could carry sundry necessaries with her on her rounds. Usual contents of a model's hat box: make-up kit, extra dresses, shoes, stockings or slips.

/- Some models who have: Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Lucille Ball, Joan Bennett, Joan Blondell, Lauren Bacall.

* Worn by almost all models when the occasion requires.

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