The man-eater who invented SUPERMODELS: Countless men adored her, many women loathed her... but she became the most powerful force in fashion
- The self-belief of a beloved child never left Eileen Ford, writes Robert Lacey
- The American model agency executive says she 'majored in men' at college
- She was a hands-on and lived by the maxim 'the opposite of work is death'
- Eileen's brutal manner made her enemies and almost cost her her marriage
MODEL WOMAN: EILEEN FORD AND THE BUSINESS OF BEAUTY
by Robert Lacey
(Harper £20)
There is a famous Vogue cover from 1990, featuring five of the most exquisite faces of the decade. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford were a new breed of model: ‘supermodels’ who, in Linda’s much-quoted phrase, wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.
At the time the image was shot, only one of them - Christy - was represented by the mighty Ford model agency; the rest were on the books of the raffish John Casablancas at Elite. But in a way, Casablancas had the Fords to thank for his success.
Before Christy and her colleagues were even born, Eileen and Jerry Ford revolutionised the modelling industry and - decades later - made their success possible.
Pictured: face of the Nineties Linda Evangelista. Before she and her colleagues were even born, Eileen and her husband Jerry Ford revolutionised the modelling industry and - decades later - made their success possible
Eileen was feared, respected and sometimes loathed by her colleagues in the business.
With her husband Jerry, she formed a team whose formidable work ethic, keen business sense and sharp eye for beauty won them a place among the most powerful players in the modelling industry for almost half a century.
The models on their books at various times included many of the 20th century’s most beautiful faces: Suzy Parker, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Jerry Hall, Christy Turlington, Karen Elson ... the list goes on and on.
As Robert Lacey explains in his new biography, a love of style and an appetite for hard work were embedded in Eileen’s genes.
Born in 1922, she was the grand-daughter of Finnish, Irish, German and Russian immigrants. Her father was a successful lawyer and debt collector and the family lived in some style in the New York suburb of Great Neck — the inspiration for the setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Eileen’s parents doted on her: ‘So far as they were concerned, I was the most talented child ever born - the answer to all the world’s problems.’
The self-belief of a beloved child never left her in adult life. In the self-help book she published at the height of her success in the mid-Seventies, she wrote: ‘If you are firmly convinced of what you want, your inner self will take the suggestion and act upon it ... If you were conditioned as a little girl to think of yourself as pretty, vital and attractive, your mind will still project this image.’
Eileen graduated from prestigious Barnard College, where she discreetly changed her name from the Jewish-sounding Ottensoser to the more Wasp-sounding Otte.
Eilleen Ford (pictured) was a hands-on and lived by the maxim 'the opposite of work is death'. Eileen's brutal manner made her enemies and almost cost her her marriage
At college, she recalled: ‘I suppose you could say that I majored in men and minored in psychology.’
When the U.S. joined World War II in 1941, Eileen signed up as a volunteer with the Navy League, later claiming to have been engaged to at least 11 naval officers.
In 1943, she met a good-looking ensign, Gerard ‘Jerry’ Ford. He was three years her junior - 19 to her 22 - and two months after meeting him, she married him. ‘Jerry didn’t know he wanted to get married until he was married,’ she later explained.
The new Mrs Ford began work in the advertising department of a large department store, devising marketing campaigns and booking models, including Natalie Nickerson, Manhattan’s highest paid one.
Fed up with her agent’s dubious business habits, Natalie decided to handle her own bookings, and hired Eileen as her secretary. In September 1946, the business that would eventually become the Ford Agency began with an address book and a telephone on a card table in the family home on Lexington Avenue.
Jerry Ford wasn’t altogether convinced that his future lay in the modelling business - ‘He was a pretty masculine kinda guy,’ the photographer Bill Helburn recalled - but with their first child on the way, he had little option but to help his wife run her agency.
They were to become a winning team: Eileen’s abrasiveness softened by Jerry’s charm; his business acumen underpinned by her legendary protectiveness towards her models.
In 1948, Life magazine published a feature, Family-Style Model Agency. A flattering photograph showed Eileen and Jerry juggling a vast battery of telephones. It was an amazing publicity coup — the equivalent, Lacey writes, of appearing on both Oprah and Good Morning America.
The Fords woke up to find themselves and their business famous. It was a success on which they would build brilliantly for decades.
There is a famous Vogue cover from 1990, featuring five of the most exquisite faces of the decade. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford were a new breed of model: ‘supermodels’ who, in Linda’s much-quoted phrase, wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day
Fashion craves novelty, and Eileen’s scouting trips meant that she discovered, on average, a new face every three or four months. These beautiful girls inevitably attracted a following of fascinated men. Here, too, Eileen was hands-on. She began inviting eligible suitors to lunch with select groups of her models.
Not all her girls were grateful for her efforts, though. ‘I didn’t want to be mothered by my own mother, let alone Eileen,’ said the elfin British model Penelope Tree.
Success has its price. Eileen’s brutal manner made her many enemies, and in 1955 it almost cost her her marriage to Jerry, who began an affair with one of their models while Eileen was pregnant with their third child. Years later, Eileen admitted that Jerry had ‘told me I had to mend my ways or we’d be divorced. So I mended my ways.’
At home she may have become more emollient, but in business she remained an implacable foe, as Casablancas found when he set up a branch of his agency in Manhattan in the late Seventies and began poaching the Ford girls and their bookers.
When two of her staff left to work with Casablancas, Ford bought a couple of Bibles, underlined every reference to Judas Iscariot in red ink and had them couriered to her former employees’ homes.
The Ford agency kept its place as the most successful in Manhattan until the Eighties, but the Nineties marked a new era in modelling. Eileen’s maxim had always been: ‘The opposite of work is death.’ But even for her, it was time to retire.
The Ford agency was sold in 2007, just before Jerry’s death, aged 83, the following year. Eileen, too, was ill and died in 2014 from a brain tumour.
In her final months, she went backstage to see her former protegee, Christie Brinkley, starring as Roxie Hart in the Broadway hit Chicago, telling her: ‘I always told you you can do anything you want.’
It was the maxim by which she had always lived, and for herself, as for so many of her girls, it worked.
