Free Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross

of us, and Patou’s clothes were so chic. There was a rumor that his mistress was the money behind the business. None of us ever saw her, but that was the rumor. He was always perfectly well behaved, however, and a good thing, too. I was asked to stay a year, but I came home after nine months. When we got back, we were even more popular than before.

    Hannah Lee Sherman wearing Mariano Fortuny, photographed by De Meijian
Hannah Lee Sherman by De Meijian, courtesy Hannah Lee Stokes
    “Our fees kept going up. At the very beginning I got double what anybody else got. It was a big fat joke, twenty, forty, one hundred dollars. And think what a five-dollar bill meant in those days! This was, after all, just after the crash. I got a thousand dollars once for something where they used my name. It was probably a big billboard. The clients would bring little gifts. Suppose they made a perfume, they’d bring you a box. Or jewelry. Good jewelry, not cheap junk.
    “It was all very businesslike. We all had hatboxes. They helped a lot. You just threw everything in. Boy, to this day I can change clothes fast. Powers had a secretary who attended to things. They would call and say, ‘Be at such and such a place, and you won’t need special shoes. Do you have a dog?’ You got paid extra if you brought your dog and your Chrysler car.
    “I crashed into the general advertising field, and soon billboards appeared. One even called me ‘America’s Sweetheart.’ I started working for everyone. Pepsodent. Vapex cold remedy. My friends told me, ‘It’s in all the subways.’ I’d say, ‘How awful!’ They’d say, ‘Noooo.’ I’d meet cutout figures of myself in the drugstore. It was the queerest. I’d make extra money on the side doing fashion shows for Lord & Taylor, Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman. That was kind of fun. And gorgeous clothes. I could get them for a song. But you didn’t talk about how you got dresses. You wouldn’t tell some lemon who’d talk about it.
    “My friends were just fascinated. They would want to come with me. I wanted to do it right and not bring a bunch of pals who’d talk their lungs out. Men were fascinated, but I shoved it away immediately and got on to another subject. What did they know about it? None of the other models were my friends. They were fairly nice. I was never high hat. I just didn’t have anything in common with them. The male models were nice. They were all very poor and courteous. Mother was very upset about them at the beginning. I said, ‘Oh, pipe down.’
    “How did people react? Sometimes I’d walk into a restaurant and people would say, ‘That’s the such and such girl.’ I would turn scarlet! At house parties people would stick my ads in frames. I went to terribly chic dinners, andsome man would always say, ‘I’ve seen you before,’ and you’d want to bop him over the head. But I met royalty and diplomats. I became a favorite of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. They had a mansion at Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and boy, did they have distinguished people there. I was always the youngest. I was just twenty. Too bad I wasn’t a little older. I felt like a sap.
    “I stopped modeling the day before I married in 1934. He was a state senator, and he owned a Wall Street brokerage house. I had to call John Robert Powers up and tell him. He said, ‘What!’ Everyone was trying to get in, and here was somebody calling up and saying, ‘I’m getting out.’ I could have pursued fashion, I suppose. It would have been so interesting. Instead you fall in love, get married, and move to a dinky place like Cooperstown.
    “If we could all stay twenty for years and years, wouldn’t it be fun?”

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    H arry Conover registered as a John Robert Powers model in 1935. He was twenty-four years old and, like his agent, came from the American heartland—Chicago. Like Powers, Conover was charming, too, but there the similarity ends.
    Conover was a little too charming and