Why Eileen Ford was a model agent like no other

Perhaps because she had three daughters of her own, Eileen Ford guarded her models' reputations with scrupulous ferocity. If a model was especially young, she was sent to live in one of Ford's apartments with a group of others, where she would be closely chaperoned. She might even live in the bosom of Ford's own family.

Unlike many of her male counterparts, Ford recognised that models, for all their womanly beauty, "are all just little kids. most models are emotionally abandoned. They need me. I'm their mother."

She didn't simply coddle them, but patched up their curtailed educations, taking them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as teaching them to walk properly.

REAS: Ford Models founder Eileen Ford dies aged 92

For Ford's protégées, such as Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell (who Ford wouldn't allow to smoke), Ford's slightly old fashioned hands-on approach, while sometimes chafing, created a tremendous sense of loyalty - and it was necessary, because wherever there is one or more models, it is a law of nature that a school of male predators, often much older, are never far behind.

To be represented by the Ford agency was to be among the elite - and the highly paid. She was a notoriously tough dealmaker, negotiating the first million dollar contract for Lauren Hutton (with Revlon) way back in 1974. And she continued smashing through salary barriers. "My income surpassed my dad's in my first year of modelling - and my dad made a good living," Turlington once said of her earnings.

With increasingly large sums of money at stake, it was inevitable that some acrimonious warfare should eventually break bout between the leading agencies. When the size zero debate caught fire 10 years ago, Ford, somewhat dismissively asked, "Why don't Mummy and Daddy feed them properly? Why should a whole business assume responsibility for a job that absolutely in my mind belongs to the parent?".

The bottom line, however, was that Ford had an extraordinary eye when it came to picking models, and knew how to maximise their potentials. She lived and breathed her job and although undoubtedly a demanding taskmaster, created a cordon-sanitaire of respectability around her models, in a world full of sleaze and temptation.

Ford in 1977. Photo: AP

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