Eileen Ford, who died Thursday at age 92, was the self-appointed godmother of modeling.
Tiny and pretty, tightly wound, she was a know-it-all with an answer for everything — eight answers at once if need be. She was typically photographed, furrow-browed and talking, with two phones draped over her shoulders, another to her ear and a fourth being handed to her by her dutiful husband, Jerry.
The Fords founded their eponymous modeling agency in 1947 as an answer to the male-dominated industry, offering career guidance and honest bookkeeping — and the promise models wouldn’t be hit on by the owner. She was a North Shore of Long Island native, Barnard College graduate and, briefly, a model. He was the naval officer with whom she eloped.
Together, they appeared to be the moral exemplars of modeling, insisting that underage and foreign models live with them in their own home. They offered diet advice, doctors and dermatologists, as well as hair and makeup lessons (for there were no hair or makeup artists then), and pressed their charges to improve themselves by studying culture, speech, dancing, acting and languages. They banned their models from late-night carousing and hawking deodorant.
Eileen stood up for the models, threatening photographers who were late or went over time. Her gifts were her eye and her calendar.
“I was very good at recommending models,” she once told me. “And I’m a fanatic about getting people to the right place at the right time.”
She represented the faces of five decades: from Dovima, Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker and Jean Patchett (in the ’40s and ’50s), through Jean Shrimpton, Donna Mitchell and Lauren Hutton (in the ’60s and ’70s) to Renee Simonsen, Christy Turlington and Amber Valleta in the years before her mid-’90s retirement.
Image was all. So when Jerry Ford had an affair with one of their models, and Eileen caught on and forced him to choose, the scandal was hushed up and the model in question even remained on the Ford books as Jerry returned to Eileen, staying by her side until his death six years ago.
But real life didn’t bend to Eileen Ford’s desires as thoroughly as her husband did. In the early ’70s, Ford’s unchallenged rule over modeling was threatened by a brash newcomer, John Casablancas, the handsome, charming, well-educated child of wealthy Spaniards. And he had a personal as well as a professional interest in his charges.
As his Elite Model firm grew, the look of fashion changed from the Ford-era’s demure cashmere twin-set sweaters and pearls to girls on all fours or legs spread in miniskirts and open shirts and, sometimes, nothing.
Casablancas considered himself honest. “I said to models, ‘I’m going to sell you like women, I’m going to bring out the sex appeal and sensuality, and we’re going to make more money,’ ” he later boasted. The difference was simple, he continued: “Ford was a prude, and I was not.”
He was also happy to point out what he deemed Ford’s hypocrisy. Sure, Eileen’s bookers kept tabs on the younger girls. But Eileen and Jerry also introduced their older charges to wealthy men.
“There were hangers-on who wanted to date models, but also a lot of models who wanted to date men,” one Ford employee told me. “You screened people. Eileen did it.”
She loved to play matchmaker. “Eileen wanted all her girls to marry rich husbands,” says April Ducksbury, a London agent. “Then she’d have social friends who were loyal and faithful to her, because not only had they been her models but she found them a husband.”
Ultimately, Ford Models was out-sexed. The company would stage a comeback in the early 1990s when Eileen and Jerry took a step back and let their daughter Katie take charge of the business. But it never appeared that her heart was in it the way her mother’s had so long been. Eventually it was bought out by investors. Though still a great name, Ford ceased to be a modeling powerhouse.
When I last spoke to Eileen Ford in 2011, she seemed both baffled and saddened by the turn of events. “I don’t even know who’s running it,” she said. “They fired everyone I knew.”
Adapted from “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,” copyright © 1995, 2003, 2011 by Michael Gross. Reprinted by permission of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.