On the outskirts of the Meatpacking District. 7:00 PM. Photo: JH.

A beautiful summer weekend in New York. Sunny, hot and breezy by the river. The Telegraph of London ran an obituary of Dorian Leigh, a name unknown today but very famous in fashion and international circles a half century ago, as one of the most famous photographers’ models in the world. In those days, there were runway models and photographers’ models. The runway girls worked for the fashion designers and their shows which were much smaller, almost always in house (showroom) or for the couturiers and the Paris collections. The photographers’ models did the print work and very rarely, if ever, worked for the designers in their showrooms.

Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker in Piguet evening dress, Paris, August 1949. Photograph by Richard Avedon.

The most famous model agencies were Ford, Harry Conover and John Robert Powers. There were others, also important although not quite as high profile. Of all of them, Ford, which was started by Jerry and Eileen Ford is still going strong today and run by their daughter. The Fords, incidentally, are now up there in age although I saw them at lunch a few weeks ago at Michael’s. One of their early youngest models was Carmen Dell’Orefice who started working at 14 (and supporting her family). Coincidentally, I saw the beautiful Carmen last night at Swifty’s. Now somewhere in her 70s, as you can see from the pictures, Carmen still looks totally soigné and is still working in front of the camera.

Carmen Dell'Orifice in the 1950s.

Carmen today.

The Telegraph obit which is, as they always are, fascinating, claims that Dorian Leigh was perhaps the first “super” model although the term “supermodel” really never was used until the 1970s by which time Leigh’s career was over. Nevertheless, she was famous in her world and her kid sister, whom she introduced at age 15 to Eileen Ford became even more famous than she: Suzy Parker, who also had a film career. Models and their world was also a glamour thing back then after the War when the country was booming and had emerged in vibrant force from the Great Depression. Fashion presaged. Models were not as famous as movie stars but they often lived very glamorous and/or fast lives. Many were “unknown” by name but their faces were very famous. Whoever heard of the beautiful Angela Howard, one of the most famous faces of the early 1960s?

Dovima, born Dorothy VIrginia Margaret Juba, was one of the greats whose image continues to fascinate long after her passing in 1990.

Maxime de la Falaise. daughter of British portraitist, Sir Oswald Birley, sister of the late London restaurateur and clubowner Mark Birley, and mother of YSL muse and designer, Loulou de la Falaise, de la Falaise became a fashion designer in her own right and now lives in the South France.

Drugs were not part of the scene (although alcohol was). Fashion photographers had big domineering personalities and often a stable of girls eager and/or willing to comply to their every wish. $100 an hour was big big money. Of course $100 could get you a very nice studio apartment or maybe even a flat in a brownstone in the best part of town too. Dorian Leigh’s life reads like a novel. She had many liaisons including a “bigamous” marriage to a Spanish marquess race car driver named Alfonso de Portago. The marquess had a marquessa at the time too – also a beautiful American woman named Carroll McDaniel who bore him two children (Leigh had a daughter with him), the son of whom was married briefly to a well known New York woman named Barbara whom you’ve seen many times in these pages. The marquess died tragically at the tender age of 29 (after wasting not a moment and living a full life) in a race car accident leaving many broken hearts behind him, including his inamorata of the moment, Linda Christian, who had been married to Tyrone Power. The marquess’ widow is known today in New York as Carroll Petrie.

Nina Dyer, an Anglo-Indian model who married Sadruddin Khan, (son of the Aga Khan and (late) uncle of the present Aga Khan) as well as Hans Heine Thyseen-Bornemisza, German industrialist who gave her an island in the Caribbean, a fortune in jewels and a chateau in France. The divorces left her very rich although decidedly not happy. She committed suicide in 1962, the lover at the time of a woman who was the desired one of Greta Garbo. Dyer left her fortune to the maintenance and care of animals.

Twiggy, born Lesley Hornby on September 1949. The last of the great 60s Supermodels, Twiggy, managed by Justin Villeneuve, came to America at 16 to work for Irving Penn and caused a sensation because of her look and her age.

Jean Shrimpton. Possibly the most famous fashion model of the early 1960s, "The Shrimp" was the toast of two continents, wildly successful, and retired to marry and run a bed and breakfast with her husband in England. Shrimpton always seemed very unimpressed with her celebrity.

Dorian Leigh was also married to an admiral named Roger Mehle. Before he was married to her, he was married to a Texas belle named Aileen who was as pretty as a movie star and later made a very big name for herself as the prima society columnist in the world, known as Suzy. So you see, it was a lot less than six degrees of separation in the high life. Although the Telegraph’s obituary doesn’t say it specifically, Dorian Leigh lived and played hard (she might not have characterized it that way). There were a lot of men in her life, a lot of work – those long photographic sessions under heavy and hot lights was done in a world where there was little or NO air-conditioning; and quite a few children. In her later years, after many losses including children by suicide, she became a believer and turned to Christ to guide her into the realm of peace. How successful she was in her pursuit is unknown to this writer except it was well known that she was at one with the result. Alzheimer’s took her at 91. Her younger sister, incidentally, died five years ago at 69.

From The Telegraph of London Dark-haired, blue-eyed, 5ft 5in tall, with an hourglass figure and exquisite features, Dorian Leigh appeared on no fewer than six covers of Vogue in 1946, and, over the next six years, graced the covers of 50 more glossy magazines. She played muse to a clutch of photographers – Avedon, Beaton, Blumenfeld, Horst and Penn among them – and in the 1950s became the signature model for Revlon's Fire and Ice lipstick and nail polish campaign in a series of images, photographed by Richard Avedon with the advertising slogan: "For you who love to flirt with fire; who dare to skate on thin ice". Avedon later stated that she was the most versatile model, and the loveliest, that he had ever worked with. Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker in a dress by Jacques Heim. She worked from the late 1940s through the 1960s. It is believed that she was the inspiration for the Audrey Hepburn character in the Fred Astaire film "Funny Face" as well as the character of "Holly Golightly" in Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's." In his Photobiography (1951), Cecil Beaton observed that Dorian Leigh was able to convey "the sweetness of an 18th-century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, or the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani"; but he also noted that she was as demanding as those who photographed her. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2006, her fellow supermodel Carmen Dell'Orefice described her as "sexy without saying a word ... She had so much oestrogen, like some men are full of testosterone." The aura of mysterious and intoxicating sensuality which Dorian Leigh conveyed in her photoshoots was enhanced by her reputation as a grande horizontale. She was married four times – possibly five, if one counts a rumoured bigamous marriage in the 1950s to Alfonso de Portago, a Spanish marquis, racing car driver and playboy, who already had a wife – and had at least five children. She also had numerous dalliances with famous writers, musicians and photographers, including Irving Penn, whose first steps in the art of lighting she claimed to have directed. She described him as "a neurotic lay. Afterwards he'd drink bottled water. Sex dehydrated him." Truman Capote called her "Happy-Go-Lucky", and she was said (though many others claim the distinction) to have provided him with the character of Holly Golightly. Dorian Leigh's career lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s, and her fame was eclipsed only by that of her younger sister, Suzy Parker, whose career she launched when she agreed to join the Ford model agency in the 1940s, but only on condition that they signed up her "little sister Suzy, sight unseen". Suzy Parker, who died in 2003, went on to become the signature face of Coco Chanel and the highest-paid model in the world. The eldest of four children of a chemist and inventor, Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker was born on April 23 1917 in San Antonio, Texas. The family moved to the Queens district of New York, where her father invented an improved etching acid that made him rich.

Suzy Parker.

Dorian Parker was educated at Randolph Macon College at Ashland, Virginia, and New York University, where she studied calculus and landed a job working for the US Navy as a mechanical draughtswoman. She then went on to Eastern Aircraft Corporation, helping to design aircraft wings, but found that the job strained her eyes and instead took a job with Republic Pictures as an apprentice copywriter. She began her career as a model at the relatively advanced age of 27 when she turned up at the Harry Conover Agency. Conover advised her to go immediately to Harper's Bazaar and tell the editor, Diana Vreeland, that she was 19. Vreeland was captivated and instructed her never to touch her zig-zag eyebrows. The following morning Dorian was photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe wearing a black tulle hat trimmed with a pink rose. She appeared on the cover of the June 1944 edition of Harper's Bazaar. Her father, who did not approve of modelling, insisted that she drop the name Parker – though later, because of her success, he was persuaded to change his mind in the case of his younger daughter Suzy.

Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker.

After retiring from modelling in the 1960s Dorian Leigh opened a modelling agency in Paris, but due to the illegal activities of her last husband, Iddo Ben-Gurion, a "sometime playwright" (not related to Israel's former prime minister), the agency had to be closed down. Instead she decided to pursue her love of cooking and was reported to have worked as a chef and caterer in Paris, New York and Italy. In 1980 she published her autobiography, The Girl Who Had Everything. She also wrote two cookery books: Pancakes and Doughnuts. From her liaison with Alfonso de Portago, Dorian Leigh had a son who committed suicide in 1977 by jumping out of a window. Her other husbands were (in order) Marshall Hawkins, with whom she had a son and a daughter (who died in the early 1990s); Roger (later Admiral Roger) Mehle, with whom she had a daughter; Serge Bordat; and Iddo Ben Gurion. She also had a daughter by another relationship. All her marriages were dissolved.

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