Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross Page A
Authors: Michael Gross
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but not models.”
Though he continued booking men (including the young Fredric March, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Brian Donlevy), he would ever after be known for his Powers Girls. Over the years the agency’s list included top models like Anita Colby, Helen Bennett, Kay Hernan, and Muriel Maxwell. Better known today are the models turned actresses: Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, Joan Caulfield, Jean Arthur, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Blondell, and Paulette Goddard.
Powers Girls who didn’t go Hollywood often stayed in the public eye as the wives of the millionaires who pursued them as avidly as they had the show girls of earlier generations. From the first, model agents have maintained a sideline in informal matchmaking. Bachelors were said to shop the Powers catalog for dates, just as rock stars later browsed the books from Ford and Elite. Woolworth Donahue, Marshall Hemingway, Winthrop Gardiner, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jack Chrysler, Earl E. T. Smith, Rutherford Stuyvesant Pierrepont, Jr., Count Rodolfo Crespi of Rome, Stanley Rumbough, Jr., and Dan Topping all married Powers Girls. “Sometimes it seems to me that instead of a modeling agency, what I’m running is a matrimonial agency for millionaires,” Powers boasted.
By 1935 Powers and a handful of other New York agents were running stables that contained a total of about two hundred working models, most of them women. Most of them earned about $25 per week. Some commanded $75. And a few, perhaps ten, who had signed exclusive deals with advertisers, took home as much as $100 a week.
Powers made his reputation with high-fashion models, but his business was actually much broader. “One girl would specialize in hats,” says Bob Fertig. “Another did junior modeling and could adapt for cosmetics. Powers did pulp magazine pictures, too. He’d say, ‘If there’s a buck in it, I’ll do it.’ Wherever you had a pretty girl, a dog, and a baby, you had the potential for a publicity picture.” Powers drew the line only at nudes and ads for underwear, depilatories, deodorants, and bathing suits, calling them “objectionables” and demanding extra pay for models who agreed to do them.
It was only a matter of time before competition sprang up. As early as 1929 Walter Thornton announced the opening of a new model agency. Claiming he’d been an orphan, a delivery truck driver, a bricklayer, a shipping clerk, a sculpture student, and an underage enlistee in the Army before beginning to model professionally, Thornton promoted himself as the perfect male type. He’d had fifteen hundred plaster casts of his head made for illustrators to usewhile he posed for photographers. As an agent he styled himself a “Merchant of Venus.”
Fashion modeling had actually existed for more than three hundred years when John Robert Powers “invented” it. Women wore important clothes in paintings by artists like Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Goya, Sargent, and Whistler. The first recorded instances of models’ selling fashion involved wooden dolls dressed in miniature versions of couture—or hand-sewn—clothes that were sent in the seventeenth century to wealthy dress buyers in the capitals of Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century the first fashion magazines had appeared, showing the work of royal seamstresses like Rose Bertin, a favorite at the court of Versailles. Le Costume Français and Journal des Dames et des Modes contained early fashion plates. The first known fashion photographs as such were probably taken in Paris around 1840 in Charles Reutlinger’s Maison Reutlinger studios on Boulevard Montmartre. In England David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson photographed Lady Mary Ruthven in the fashions of 1845.
The first true model came along soon thereafter. Marie Vernet started out as a salesgirl in a Paris clothes shop, Gagelin et Opigez. In 1852 she married a salesman named Charles Worth and became
Though he continued booking men (including the young Fredric March, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Brian Donlevy), he would ever after be known for his Powers Girls. Over the years the agency’s list included top models like Anita Colby, Helen Bennett, Kay Hernan, and Muriel Maxwell. Better known today are the models turned actresses: Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, Joan Caulfield, Jean Arthur, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Blondell, and Paulette Goddard.
Powers Girls who didn’t go Hollywood often stayed in the public eye as the wives of the millionaires who pursued them as avidly as they had the show girls of earlier generations. From the first, model agents have maintained a sideline in informal matchmaking. Bachelors were said to shop the Powers catalog for dates, just as rock stars later browsed the books from Ford and Elite. Woolworth Donahue, Marshall Hemingway, Winthrop Gardiner, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jack Chrysler, Earl E. T. Smith, Rutherford Stuyvesant Pierrepont, Jr., Count Rodolfo Crespi of Rome, Stanley Rumbough, Jr., and Dan Topping all married Powers Girls. “Sometimes it seems to me that instead of a modeling agency, what I’m running is a matrimonial agency for millionaires,” Powers boasted.
By 1935 Powers and a handful of other New York agents were running stables that contained a total of about two hundred working models, most of them women. Most of them earned about $25 per week. Some commanded $75. And a few, perhaps ten, who had signed exclusive deals with advertisers, took home as much as $100 a week.
Powers made his reputation with high-fashion models, but his business was actually much broader. “One girl would specialize in hats,” says Bob Fertig. “Another did junior modeling and could adapt for cosmetics. Powers did pulp magazine pictures, too. He’d say, ‘If there’s a buck in it, I’ll do it.’ Wherever you had a pretty girl, a dog, and a baby, you had the potential for a publicity picture.” Powers drew the line only at nudes and ads for underwear, depilatories, deodorants, and bathing suits, calling them “objectionables” and demanding extra pay for models who agreed to do them.
It was only a matter of time before competition sprang up. As early as 1929 Walter Thornton announced the opening of a new model agency. Claiming he’d been an orphan, a delivery truck driver, a bricklayer, a shipping clerk, a sculpture student, and an underage enlistee in the Army before beginning to model professionally, Thornton promoted himself as the perfect male type. He’d had fifteen hundred plaster casts of his head made for illustrators to usewhile he posed for photographers. As an agent he styled himself a “Merchant of Venus.”
Fashion modeling had actually existed for more than three hundred years when John Robert Powers “invented” it. Women wore important clothes in paintings by artists like Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Goya, Sargent, and Whistler. The first recorded instances of models’ selling fashion involved wooden dolls dressed in miniature versions of couture—or hand-sewn—clothes that were sent in the seventeenth century to wealthy dress buyers in the capitals of Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century the first fashion magazines had appeared, showing the work of royal seamstresses like Rose Bertin, a favorite at the court of Versailles. Le Costume Français and Journal des Dames et des Modes contained early fashion plates. The first known fashion photographs as such were probably taken in Paris around 1840 in Charles Reutlinger’s Maison Reutlinger studios on Boulevard Montmartre. In England David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson photographed Lady Mary Ruthven in the fashions of 1845.
The first true model came along soon thereafter. Marie Vernet started out as a salesgirl in a Paris clothes shop, Gagelin et Opigez. In 1852 she married a salesman named Charles Worth and became
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