Eileen Ford

By Eric Wilson July 10, 2014 82 Eileen Ford, the grande dame of the modeling industry who influenced standards of beauty for more than four decades while heading one of the most recognizable brands in the trade of gorgeous faces, died on Wednesday in Morristown, N.J. She was 92. Her death, at a Morristown Memorial Hospital, was announced on Thursday by her daughter Katie Ford. Mrs. Ford lived in Califon, N.J., in Hunterdon County. Ford Models, created by Mrs. Ford and her husband, Jerry, in the late 1940s, became the top agency in the world. It elevated the modeling profession into a serious business with $1 million contracts, represented thousands of beautiful young women, and created a market for “supermodels,” a select handful who could command enormous salaries for their looks. While Mr. Ford managed the business, Mrs. Ford became the face of the agency and its chief talent scout, sometimes virtually plucking young women out of a crowd and turning them into models. Some became celebrities in their own right, among them Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Veruschka, Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Elle Macpherson. Many found stardom in Hollywood: Suzy Parker, Jane Fonda, Ali MacGraw, Brooke Shields, Candice Bergen, Rene Russo, Kim Basinger, Lauren Hutton and Jean Shrimpton, who in her modeling days embodied the miniskirted Swinging London of the 1960s. And long before she became a lifestyle mogul, Martha Stewart was in the Ford stable to help pay her way through college. Mrs. Ford built a reputation for transforming girls into stars with lessons in grooming, etiquette and style while running her agency like a convent. Some in the industry called her the mother of New York modeling, in almost the literal sense. A formidable manager, she was widely known for protecting models from underhanded deals and sexual misconduct and generally cleaning up the sleazy image of the business, insisting that both clients and models observe a code of ethics and decorum. Indeed, Mrs. Ford allowed some of her charges to live in her Upper East Side townhouse when they were starting out so she could keep a watchful eye on their careers. On weekends, she would take them to her summer home in Quogue, on Long Island, and have them help in the garden. “They have to account for their time to me,” she said in a Forbes article on the industry in 1984. “They eat dinner with me, at table, every night. I don’t ever want to tell a mother I don’t know where her daughter is at 2 a.m.” In his 1995 book, “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,” Michael Gross described the Fords as the moral exemplars of modeling. Their agency, he wrote, was “a fortress of propriety and moral rectitude that was to stand for 50 years.” At the same time, Mrs. Ford was criticized for an imperious approach. She was well known for brusquely dismissing applicants of a sensitive age with stinging rejections. “Eileen Ford took one look at me and told me to get a nose job,” Lynn Kohlman, a favorite model of the designer Perry Ellis who died in 2008, wrote in Vogue. Birgitta af Klercker, a favorite of the fashion editor Diana Vreeland and the photographer Richard Avedon, said Mrs. Ford told her that she was fat and had crooked teeth. Mrs. Ford was unapologetic. “I interview about three thousand models yearly, and I must see almost 20 tons of excess avoirdupois annually,” she wrote in “Eileen Ford’s Book of Model Beauty” (1968), one of her five books on modeling. “The average would-be model weighs about 16 pounds more than she should.” Mrs. Ford made perhaps her most infamous statement while appearing on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971 — and in doing so seemed to crystallize the perception of a fashion industry that was indifferent to complaints that it was promoting an unhealthy body ideal. Challenged by another guest on the show — the writer Gwen Davis, who compared a model agency to pimping — Mrs. Ford coolly replied, “I never worry about fat people worrying about thin people, because slender people bury the dead.”