I loved Jerry Ford then with all my heart—and I loved him for the rest of our life together. The dive-in-headfirst Eileen Ford had found the solid and steady partner who completed her. When Eileen finally returned home to New York, in the spring of , four months after her elopement, her priority was to get back to work, and the gentlemanly Elliot Clarke proved willing to forgive and forget.
He provided his runaway assistant with a reference that helped Eileen secure a job with the William Becker Studios—the largest commercial-photography studio in America at the time. She had made some progress with her typing—but not enough to avoid mistakes; she was forever rubbing out her errors. She threw the eraser back at Blanche and walked out of Becker Studios for good.
Reporting to Isaac Liberman, the president of Arnold Constable, Eileen continued the apprenticeship she had begun with Elliot Clarke in the practicalities of the fashion business.
So I was on the telephone a lot. I got to know how all the different agencies worked, and I made friends with a lot of the models. I learned a big lesson when Mr. Isaac Liberman saw what I was paying for some models per hour. He was not happy, and he let me know it. So we had to work that much quicker in the photo studio. Lively, self-confident, and efficient, the young Mrs. Ford was clearly a rising talent.
They made you wonder, as you gazed upon their long and lanky frames, whether they were not magically floating an inch or so above the ground. She soon made friends with Eileen Ford, who had booked her to pose for the Arnold Constable catalogue in , and in no time she was doing well enough to move uptown to the fashionable address for debutantes, the Barbizon Hotel for Women.
She was a sweet, sweet woman. We spent a lot of time talking. That, she said, was how her mother had always pronounced it: Na- tah -li.
A few months later, in January , she was on the cover of Vogue, photographed by John Rawlings. Was it possible that fashion photography, a commercial mechanism for selling frocks, might one day be considered an art form?
After a false start with a short-lived cooperative, the Society of Models, she had moved to John Robert Powers, the doyen of model agents, still in business after nearly a quarter of a century and still capable of securing big bookings—though not as good at paying out on them.
She detailed her hours and her fee at the end of each session. She would then get the client to sign this mini-contract, and she would leave it as her invoice for the job. When the money came in, she would forward the 10 percent agency commission to Powers.
There was too much sink-or-swim. Models needed to know exactly where they had to be for a job, and what they were supposed to bring with them, and the big agencies were not efficient in making sure their girls knew even such simple things. There was no career planning, no special training or care, no help with hair or makeup—no real system at all.
So the two women decided to work out a system together. In the fall of , Eileen set up her card table, address book, and telephone in a house owned by her parents, in Manhattan. The work just came in. The price was set already, and I just had to work out how many hours and the other details like time and place.
So I was like their secretary. Eileen was a secretary with a difference, however. Her work with Elliot Clarke, William Becker Studios, and Arnold Constable meant she knew or could find out exactly what her girls needed to take with them—models in the s were expected to do their own hair and makeup, carrying their hairpieces and curlers around with them in large circular hatboxes. Also, Eileen had a different attitude. It was as if each booking she made for you was the most important in her life to that date—so you felt that you should treat it that way, too.
But with the arrival of firstborn daughter Jamie, on March 17, , Jerry Ford stepped in to help his wife with the day-to-day problems of running her modeling agency, and he never stepped out. Jerry matched Eileen for efficiency and commitment, and he managed it all with a softer, less abrasive touch. At the end of March , Eileen Ford had just turned Her husband was still That was enough to put down a deposit on an office on Second Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. There were six telephones on a card table, behind which sat Eileen Ford.
She turned around, and I found she was only about three years older than I was. Eileen Ford was equally surprised. She had a mole on her cheekbone, and she made it her trademark, three decades before Cindy Crawford. Jean knew what she looked like, and she knew how to make herself look even better—though at the beginning she did need to lose some weight. The model herself recalled Eileen putting it more directly. But Jean Patchett was the first that we made into a star.
Eileen and Jerry needed capital, and for that Eileen would turn to two of her friends from the North Shore of Long Island, the brothers A.
We were all friends. We would do anything to help each other. We were young. We were all working, and we were having a good time. Powers, Jr. Eileen and Jerry Ford now had the capital to expand their nascent modeling business. Former ceo Nancy Chen left the agency early last year for reasons unknown after about three years with the agency.
She was set to be replaced by Nathan Coyle, who had a tumultuous stint as ceo of Pride Media, operator of publications Out and The Advocate, which have struggled under new ownership. But Coyle ultimately did not take on the ceo role, and only stayed on as a consultant for several months. A company representative could not be reached for further questioning and Riberio was not immediately available for comment.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Since the late s, Ford has been controlled by Alt Point Capital, a private equity firm that first invested in the agency in It seems Magnum is now defunct. When Alt Point took over in , it essentially bought out Katie Ford, who had run the company her parents founded since Fashion P.
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