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

definitely no gentleman.
    He was born in 1911, and his parents separated soon afterward. His father was a traveling salesman, a bigamist, and a rascal. After his mother tracked her wastrel spouse down and divorced him, she sent Harry away to military school in 1923, hoping he’d become a priest. He dutifully headed for Notre Dame University but lasted only a day. He bounced from Chicago, where he worked in an uncle’s biscuit factory, to New York, where he was a radio soap opera actor and a salesman at Abercrombie & Fitch, to Michigan, where he was a disc jockey, before returning to New York and a job as a tie salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue. One day he went along to provide moral support for a friend who wanted to model. The friend’s fate is unknown. But John Robert Powers signed the green-eyed, wavy-haired six-foot Conover.
    Conover was so smooth that Powers soon asked him to introduce new models around. “He knew he was showing himself off, too,” says Powers promo man Bob Fertig. “He was a self-promoter. We got along very well.” Conover was the first, but hardly the last, rabatteur in the world of models. The French word refers to the man who leads a hunt, beating the bushes to flush out the day’s prey.
    One day Conover met a willowy ash blonde in an elevator in the Chrysler Building, where Walter Thornton’s agency had its offices. “You look like a model,” he told her.
    “Not a very successful one,” she replied. She was with Thornton.
    “Come with me,” Conover said, leading her to the Powers office on Park Avenue. “We’ll make you the most famous model in New York City.”
    Her name was Anita Counihan, and despite heavy legs and a thick figure, she did indeed become the first supermodel, appearing on fifteen magazine covers in a single month. The daughter of Daniel Frances “Bud” Counihan, a sportswriter and artist on the Betty Boop cartoon strip, Anita was from Washington, D.C. It was there one night at a Georgetown University dance that she had an encounter with a Powers model. “I suddenly found myself deserted,” she recalled. “I followed the mob to the center of interest. It was a girl named Peggy Leyden. I was just as pretty as she was, but she was a model. So I decided to be a model in New York. My parents were outraged.”
    Not for long. While her body wasn’t great, her face was so flawless that a friend of her father’s, war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, nicknamed her the Face. Almost immediately it was on newsstands and billboards across the country. A Broadway bachelor proposed to her with the line “You’re the only woman in the world I’d like to pay alimony to.” She smoked and drank. She ground her teeth when she slept.
    A year after she started with Powers, Anita recruited her sister, Francine Counihan, to join her at Powers and then, lured by RKO Pictures, left for Hollywood. As Anita Colby she appeared in a series of films. But by 1937 she was back in New York, modeling and hanging out with Francine at the newly voguish Stork Club, dancing at El Morocco, and chatting with Ernest Hemingway, just returned from covering the Spanish Civil War. “I came in with my little hat box,” she recalled, “and Hemingway was talking about Spain. Well, I didn’t say a thing for an hour, which was an all-time record for me.”
    Colby joined Conover when he opened but didn’t stay around very long. “I said to myself, Colby, you better give it up while you’re on top,” she recalled. “A model’s days are numbered.” Late in 1938 she astonished her friends by getting a job as an ad salesperson at Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar . Not only did she become a top money earner there, she also kept modeling, but only for those who’d pay her ever-increasing fee. In 1945 it hit $50 a hour. She eventually got $100.
    In 1944 Colby returned to Hollywood as the ringleader and press agent for a gang of Conover models—including sister Francine—who’d traveled west in a special