Eileen Ford’s Legacy

When Lauren Hutton first arrived in New York in the early 1960s, there was little to suggest she would soon become one of fashion’s highest-paid models and, later, an alluring actress paired with leading men like James Caan and Richard Gere.

As she called on almost every modeling agency in town, the message was the same: She was, they told her, too old (at 22), too short (at 5-foot-7), too gaptoothed (then unfashionable) and — by her own estimation — possessed a “bulbous, bumpy nose.”

But the one person who did agree to represent her was the one who mattered most: Eileen Ford, a co-owner of Ford Models, then the industry’s most powerful agency. “I think she took me because I’d gone to a good girls’ school,” Ms. Hutton recalled last week in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “She liked that sort of thing.” But Mrs. Ford had a few requests to make of the aspiring model.

“She showed me a cover of Vogue,” Ms. Hutton said. “She said, ‘See her?’ She just had her nose fixed by ... ’ She mentioned some doctor’s name I’ve forgotten. ‘You should get a nose like hers. It’s a good nose.’ ”

Ms. Hutton, original nose extant, went on to become one of the agency’s great stars, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Glamour, shooting with the likes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn and landing one of the first exclusive cosmetics contracts, with Revlon. (She had pleaded lack of funds to get out of the proposed rhinoplasty.)

It was not the last time the two did not see eye-to-eye. For instance, upon signing with the agency in 1965, Ms. Hutton insisted upon two weeks of vacation her first year, so that she could travel to Africa. “I came to New York for two things,” she said. “To get to Africa and to take acid. And I had already taken acid.”

In Ms. Hutton, Mrs. Ford may have found a model as forceful as herself. When she died on July 9 at the age of 92 of complications from a meningioma and osteoporosis, the modeling world lost not only one of its strongest-willed and most opinionated power players, but also one of its longest-reigning. She ruled her roost for decades, perfectly but unostentatiously turned out (“always dressed impeccably,” remembered her former charge, Naomi Campbell) with a short coif and a strand of pearls.

With her husband, Jerry — who oversaw the models’ contracts, and to whom she was so closely aligned in life and business that Cheryl Tiegs, a former Ford model, recalled that she would always write Eileen-and-Jerry as one word — she founded Ford in 1946 and over the course of its history handled everyone from society-girl Life magazine cover models in the 1940s through the Vogue-dominating supermodels of the 1990s. Until the so-called model wars of the late 1970s and 1980s, when agencies proliferated and upstarts like Elite Model Management and Click Models emerged as powerful competitors, “The Ford agency was just the iconic name of modeling,” said the actress Kim Basinger, who signed with Ford in 1971.

 The list of models Ford represented is exhaustive, including Christie Brinkley, Veruschka, Jerry Hall, Ali MacGraw, Brooke Shields, Candice Bergen, Suzy Parker, Carmen Dell’Orefice and Jean Shrimpton, to list only some of its best-known names.

Mrs. Ford, the more vocal of the couple, could be an imperious presence. “We used to call her Madame,” said Patty Sicular, now the director of the Trump Legends division at Trump Models, who worked for Ford (with stints at its competitors) between 1980 and 2010 and acts as an unofficial agency archivist and historian. “God help you if you were ever late for a job she booked for you," said Lillian Marcuson, a Ford model and three-time Life magazine cover girl.

 Tough as she was, she could also be maternal. “She was a mother hen, and I admired her so much for that,” added Ms. Marcuson, who was signed in 1948, reassured by a Life magazine profile of the Fords that year that the agency was not “risqué.” “I don’t think you realize it at the time, but you do when you look back.”

 Mrs. Ford was particularly stern of issues of decorum. “She was very traditional in her thinking and her boundaries, her rules and regulations,” Ms. Tiegs said. But her insistence on propriety helped to legitimize a profession previously deemed suspect.

 “Eileen was the person who made modeling really respectable,” said Sarah Slavin, who served as the model editor of Vogue between 1967 and 1979. “It was something that nice girls could do. Before that, it was a step up from being a hatcheck girl at the Copacabana.”

 As the agency grew, aspiring models sought out the Fords, but Mrs. Ford remained a passionate scout. “She loved finding people in hallways or on the street or in restaurants,” said Katie Ford, one of the couple’s daughters, who began working at the agency in 1982 and by the mid-’90s, was its chief executive. “That was her favorite thing.”

Karen Graham was spending her lunch break at Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue when Mrs. Ford found her.

 “I became a little pinched for time,” Ms. Graham said by phone from her home in Tryon, in North Carolina’s horse country. “I started dashing down the back stairs to get out of the store in time to get to the office. A lady on the back stairs behind was keeping up with me. Finally she stopped me and introduced herself. To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Eileen Ford. She said, ‘I have the world’s biggest, best model agency.’ ”

SLIDE SHOW|14 Photos

The Faces of Ford

 Ms. Graham, who had studied to be a schoolteacher, decided to sign up, she said, to afford furniture for her apartment, where she had been sleeping and keeping her clothes on the floor. She modeled for decades, and became the first face of Estée Lauder, from 1970 to 1985.

 In a pizza restaurant in Stockholm, remembered the model Vendela Kirsebom, “All of a sudden this lady walked up to our table and said: ‘Would you like to make a million dollars? You have to come to New York.’ At that time my English wasn’t perfect but my mom understood what she was saying. She had heard about Eileen.”

 Part of the appeal of the Ford agency to young models (and their concerned parents) was the management Mrs. Ford offered not only of their careers, but also of their personal lives. She brought many of her youngest charges to live with the family at their townhouse on East 78th Street and their summer house in Quogue, N.Y.

“I went to other people’s homes and they were incredibly quiet compared with ours,” Ms. Ford said. “We were surrounded by the business.” (She recalled her father stopping at pay phones during her college tours to negotiate clauses of a contract for Ms. Hutton.)

 Christy Turlington, Ms. Campbell and Ms. Kirsebom were only three of the models who lived for a time in the Ford house, where instruction was freely given and rules strictly enforced. “It’s sort of like what you see on TV with some of these shows now,” said Ms. Kirsebom, who moved in in 1989 and became a Sports Illustrated cover girl in 1993, “but she had it at home and nobody was filming.”

Men could be a point of particular contention. Ms. Kirsebom remembered a suitor coming to the house to pick her up for a date and being cross-examined. “Poor guy, he was sweating to death by the time we left the house,” she said. Even Anne Anka, then known Anne de Zogheb before her marriage to the singer Paul Anka, recalled Mrs. Ford’s initial disapproval of her ex-husband. “She thought, ‘Show business, that’s trouble,’ ” Ms. Anka said. “I think she eventually came around. We were married for 38 years.”

Nor did Mrs. Ford’s watchful eye falter once her models left her home and arrived at their shoots. The agency worked to professionalize an often scattershot and predatory industry in two key ways: by insisting on respectful treatment of its models and by instituting a voucher system, which paid girls out of the agency’s own pocket and then collected their fees from its clients, which might not be delivered until months later.

 “They protected what were basically like kittens, beautiful kittens,” Ms. Hutton said. “Most of the girls were young and they’d come in from someplace else and didn’t know anything. A good amount of people they were meeting, photographers and ad agencies, were predatory alley cats. Eileen protected them by guaranteeing that if they a) didn’t pay, or b) came on, they’d never work with a Ford model again.”

 “She kept an eye out for me, and because she did, I think other male agents and photographers were more careful around me, more respectful,” Ms. Turlington wrote in an email. “Every young model should have such protections.”

 Beverly Johnson, who signed with Ford in 1970, added: “I had never been around a woman that wielded that kind of power. She could close down a whole industry by not giving them any models. And she told them that.”

 Though there were some young models whose naïveté required Ford agency’s close handling (“I’m a friendly girl. I come from a friendly part of the world,” Ms. Basinger said, laughing, to explain how she happened to find herself hiding in a phone booth after accidentally attracting the solicitations of a pimp), to others, Mrs. Ford’s strictures came to seem the vestiges of an earlier era.

 “She wanted everybody to learn about manners,” Ms. Ford said. “I think the models until the late ’70s really appreciated it. In the ’80s and ’90s, not everybody was brought up with such strict parents.”

   Even those models who lived in the Ford house often contrived ways around Mrs. Ford’s strict supervision, sneaking around once the Fords went to bed. In one of her last conversations with Mrs. Ford, Ms. Campbell met her for tea in Denmark. “I told her we used to steal her Aquavit from the cellar,” she said with a laugh. “And she said, ‘I know.’ She knew everything.”

 The agency was not without its blind spots. Though it represented many models of color, including Naomi Sims, Charlene Dash and Peggy Dillard, its defining look was the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed one that Mrs. Ford herself was said to favor. She called it “all-American,” as Ms. Tiegs was tagged on the cover of Time magazine in 1978, though just as often it was imported from Scandinavia, where Mrs. Ford traveled often and for which she had special fondness.

 “Eileen Ford’s agency was known for blondes and blue eyes,” Ms. Johnson said. “She said, ‘You’ll never be the cover of Vogue.’ ” Ms. Johnson decamped to Wilhelmina, the agency founded by the onetime Ford model Wilhelmina Cooper, and in 1974 became Vogue’s first African-American cover model. She returned to the Ford agency six months later, cover in hand, without hard feelings on either side. Mrs. Ford “took that cover and multiplied my career like nobody’s business,” she said.

 (According to Ms. Slavin, the model editor at the time, the cover likely had more to do with Vogue’s editors than the influence of either Ms. Cooper or Mrs. Ford.)

 As the years went by, the agency became known as a bastion of commercial models rather than the edgier girls who came to be preferred for high fashion. In the words of Sam Shahid, a creative director who became famous for his work on Calvin Klein’s early ’80s campaigns: “Ford was always safe. You had Christie Brinkley, that kind of world.” Though he never met Mrs. Ford, working instead with her daughter or with Joe Hunter, a Ford executive at the time, he added that Mrs. Ford’s imprimatur, “was almost like Good Housekeeping, when they gave their stamp of approval to a product. She was the same thing.”

 Ford did in fact represent edgier girls as well, like the ’90s star Kristen McMenamy. Its offerings expanded significantly over the years, and Ms. Ford extended operations internationally by opening offices in Paris and Brazil.

 Mrs. Ford herself, despite remaining a chairwoman of the company, stepped back from the business when her daughter took over and the family sold the agency to Stone Tower Equity Partners, later renamed Altpoint Capital Partners, in 2007. Since leaving the agency, Ms. Ford has established Freedom For All, a foundation dedicated to combating human trafficking, an industry she sees as “parallel” to modeling. Mr. Ford died in 2008.

 Even in retirement, Mrs. Ford retained a keen interest in models, if not necessarily in the tumult of the modeling industry.

 “Even a few weeks ago, we were at one of the greenmarkets near where she lived,” Ms. Ford said. “This young guy gave her some flowers and she said to me: ‘That guy is really good-looking. Do you think he could be a model?’ I don’t think that’s a switch you can ever turn off.”

 And for the models whose careers she managed, she was beloved, a woman who never let a Christmas or birthday pass without a card, and one whose enduring influence looms large.

 “Eileen Ford made such a huge difference in my life,” Ms. Graham said. “She made me an independent woman.”

 Ms. Basinger has since signed with IMG Models, but said of her time at Ford: “Do I carry that as a part of me, where I came from and what gave me a really strong push off into all of these arenas? Unequivocally. Absolutely. No doubt in the world. She gave me the opportunity to shine in a way I never could.”