whose families were suddenly short on cash. “I was in high school in 1929,” says Betty McLauchlen Dorso, eighty-two, who became one of Powers’s top models. “I wanted to be a gym teacher, a coach. But it was during the Depression, and my father, like every male in the country, lost his job.” When McLauchlen was laid off from his designer’s post with Cadillac, he bought his daughter a cloche and fur-collared coat and took her to be photographed by a friend who’d shot advertisements for the luxury cars. The photographer posed her on a revolving platform and sent her picture to Powers, who called the dark-haired, sophisticated beauty in for an interview.
“There was only the one agency,” Dorso recalls. “I went in on a Saturday and I registered and he sent me off into the night. I didn’t know anything about the business. You had to pound the pavement in those days,” and stop at the agency each day to check in. “I finally found a job at Henri Bendel, modeling on the floor. It was then a wealthy women’s boutique. I was paid thirty-two dollars and seventy-five cents a week, and five dollars extra for decorating the windows.” She had worked there several years, supporting her whole family by showing clothes to customers, when a Vogue editor spotted her andasked if she would pose for a young woman photographer named Toni Frissell, who’d started working for the magazine after assisting the British photographer Cecil Beaton. Dorso began working for Frissell regularly. “Then I actually started functioning with Powers,” Dorso says. “I really wanted to be a gym teacher, but I happened to have the looks that got me this lucrative life.”
An important psychological divide had been crossed when Powers moved to his Park Avenue address. No longer would models—at least his models—be considered on a par with show girls. Those raffish sorts were booked out of the west side of Manhattan, the theater district, the Tenderloin. Fashion models came from higher-priced districts. In part because of the geographical divide, Seventh Avenue showroom models who worked the garment district as well as commercial models and runway mannequins would sit below photographic models in the model pecking order for another fifty years.
With a showman’s flair, Powers even invented a symbol to differentiate his models from all the others. When a Powers girl broke the handle of the satchel in which she lugged around the tools of her trade—her pumps, her waist cinch, her war paints and brushes—Powers replaced the bag with a strong round cardboard hatbox from John Cavanagh, where he bought his headgear. The boxes sold for fifty cents apiece and became the badge of honor of the Powers model.
As the business expanded, Powers moved into larger quarters, installed direct telephone lines to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar , and the major catalog studios, and even hired a promotion man. “I was an unemployed actor, kicking around Broadway just like Johnny was,” recalls Bob Fertig, eighty-two. “One of the guys in the crowd said he’d been to a place called Powers, and they wanted to put him to work delivering pictures. I said I could use a few bucks. There were a lot of beautiful broads around him.”
Powers was looking for a label that would differentiate his beauties from the earlier Gibson Girls (the last century’s ideal) and the Ziegfeld Girls of the stage. “We avoided using the word ‘model,’” Fertig recalls. “Women with no means of visible support called themselves models. People thought of them as empty-headed floozies.”
Finally Powers decided to call them “Long-Stemmed American Beauties,” a phrase coined by illustrator Arthur William Brown. “What I seek above all else is a natural wholesomeness,” Powers said. “I do not want types, nor do I want sophistication. I want girls or women who will look like what the advertisers want them to look like, and it is not an easy thing to find. Pretty girls, yes,
“There was only the one agency,” Dorso recalls. “I went in on a Saturday and I registered and he sent me off into the night. I didn’t know anything about the business. You had to pound the pavement in those days,” and stop at the agency each day to check in. “I finally found a job at Henri Bendel, modeling on the floor. It was then a wealthy women’s boutique. I was paid thirty-two dollars and seventy-five cents a week, and five dollars extra for decorating the windows.” She had worked there several years, supporting her whole family by showing clothes to customers, when a Vogue editor spotted her andasked if she would pose for a young woman photographer named Toni Frissell, who’d started working for the magazine after assisting the British photographer Cecil Beaton. Dorso began working for Frissell regularly. “Then I actually started functioning with Powers,” Dorso says. “I really wanted to be a gym teacher, but I happened to have the looks that got me this lucrative life.”
An important psychological divide had been crossed when Powers moved to his Park Avenue address. No longer would models—at least his models—be considered on a par with show girls. Those raffish sorts were booked out of the west side of Manhattan, the theater district, the Tenderloin. Fashion models came from higher-priced districts. In part because of the geographical divide, Seventh Avenue showroom models who worked the garment district as well as commercial models and runway mannequins would sit below photographic models in the model pecking order for another fifty years.
With a showman’s flair, Powers even invented a symbol to differentiate his models from all the others. When a Powers girl broke the handle of the satchel in which she lugged around the tools of her trade—her pumps, her waist cinch, her war paints and brushes—Powers replaced the bag with a strong round cardboard hatbox from John Cavanagh, where he bought his headgear. The boxes sold for fifty cents apiece and became the badge of honor of the Powers model.
As the business expanded, Powers moved into larger quarters, installed direct telephone lines to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar , and the major catalog studios, and even hired a promotion man. “I was an unemployed actor, kicking around Broadway just like Johnny was,” recalls Bob Fertig, eighty-two. “One of the guys in the crowd said he’d been to a place called Powers, and they wanted to put him to work delivering pictures. I said I could use a few bucks. There were a lot of beautiful broads around him.”
Powers was looking for a label that would differentiate his beauties from the earlier Gibson Girls (the last century’s ideal) and the Ziegfeld Girls of the stage. “We avoided using the word ‘model,’” Fertig recalls. “Women with no means of visible support called themselves models. People thought of them as empty-headed floozies.”
Finally Powers decided to call them “Long-Stemmed American Beauties,” a phrase coined by illustrator Arthur William Brown. “What I seek above all else is a natural wholesomeness,” Powers said. “I do not want types, nor do I want sophistication. I want girls or women who will look like what the advertisers want them to look like, and it is not an easy thing to find. Pretty girls, yes,
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