Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-15T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

BREAKFAST AT SEVENTY-EIGHTH STREET

The dogs and cats in her house were all shelter animals. And, in a sense, all of us models were strays.

—Anette Stai, former Ford model, 2010

RENE RUSSO RECALLS BEING MET BY A BUTLER IN THE SUMMER OF 1972 on the doorstep of the Ford family’s town house on East Seventy-Eighth Street. “He was not a butler,” said Eileen. “He was Shelton, the driver. But maybe he looked that way to Rene.”

Brought up in Burbank, California, by her divorced mother, a factory worker and barmaid, Russo had dropped out of high school in tenth grade and tried her hand at a variety of part-time jobs till she was spotted by a talent agent who took her to Nina Blanchard. Now she was in New York for the first time, age seventeen, passed on by Blanchard to the Ford agency, and met at the airport by a stretch limousine.

The “butler” was just the start of it. There was a cook, plus a housekeeper who showed her to the room that she was to share for the summer with two Swedish models, who were sitting gossiping to each other—stark naked.

“That’s what Swedish girls do, I later discovered, when they relax,” according to Russo. “After I got to know them, I learned how you can sit around the place naked, if you want to, as if you’ve actually got clothes on.”

The girls were summoned to dinner at 7:30 prompt in the dining room, with individual silver salt and pepper shakers in front of each place, and an array of silver implements deployed on either side of the plate, as if laid out for a visiting surgeon. “Right on the outside there was this teeny-weeny, thin little fork I had never seen before,” remembered Russo. “Turned out it was for extracting the meat from the claws of the lobster.”

Other girls remember the mystery of the cream linen “handkerchief” in front of them that they were supposed to open and place on their lap, and the novelty of being expected to sit at a table and actually discuss the way of the world over supper instead of watching TV. “Eileen was always telling us,” Russo remembers, “‘Girls, you’ve got to educate yourselves. Now look at this artichoke . . .’”

Jerry Hall later said that her six months living with the Fords were “the most boring year of my life.” When she met Eileen and Jerry in Paris in 1974, aged only eighteen, she was already hugely grown up and successful: working with Avedon, Penn, and Scavullo; her face on the cover of Vogue and every major French magazine; with lovers on tap and her own apartment in the Septième.

“Paris was wild,” she remembers, “and very artistic.”

Yet, eager to make it in New York, the young Texan accepted the Fords’ invitation to stay at Seventy-Eighth Street while she got started—“and I came to feel, in a way, that perhaps I needed to be bored for a bit. Modeling in New York was such a demanding business compared to Paris.

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