(4 of 8)
Reservoir of Beauty. On its advertising message of optimism and progress, U.S. business this year is spending about $830 million in magazines and newspapers alone. At least one-third of all the advertisements bought by that staggering sum are using models. The proportion is nearer half in beer, cigarettes, cosmetics, the biggest users of models outside the fashion field. The figures add up to the simple conviction that there is nothing like a girl to catch the public's eye. Actually, with the buyers' market making the going tougher than before, the advertising business has begun to realize that a pretty girl can only lead the customer to the store counter; she cannot make him buy. Only the product itself can do that. The new emphasis in advertising, particularly for such goods as synthetics, electronic devices and new drugs, is on telling an informative story of quality.
Some products, of course, would always be best advertised by models. This fact is borne out by such stories as the rise of Manhattan's Rheingold beer. It climbed from eighth to first place in Eastern beer sales largely by the use of pretty Miss Rheingolds, about half of them Irish "colleens" duly elected each year by beer drinkers. (Current Miss Rheingold: pert Pat McElroy.) In its battle with Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola plans to count heavily on the new television Pepsi-Cola Girl, Louise Hyde, a 24-year-old Chattanooga belle of whom one adman said hopefully: "She just makes you feel thirsty."
To supply the huge demand made by the advertisers on America's vast reservoir of beauty, the highly specialized and erratic model business has materialized. An appendage of advertising, model agencies combine the ethics of theatrical agents with the esthetics of bathing beauty judges.
The Dawn of Disillusion. Modeling is concentrated in a few crowded Manhattan blocks between Fifth and Third Avenues, brightened by the parade of breathless, breath-taking young women dressed at fashion's extreme, hatboxes* in their hands, their feet fleet and flat-heeled, their pancaked faces as blank as a baby's conscience. There are about 1,000 professional photographic models active in New York (including 25 men, 25 children and several dogs).
Thousands more knock on agency doors every year, driven by their own ambitions, by unscrupulous "modeling schools" which promise to turn them into cover girls in six easy lessons, or by relentless mothers. But disillusion awaits them.
Even if a girl is accepted by one of New York's 23 agencies (the best known: Powers, Conover, Thornton, Hartford, Ford), it is still a long road to a magazine cover or a four-color ad. Most agencies register far more models than they can possibly place, are little more than clearinghouses which keep the models' bookings, relay telephone messages, give them a place to sit around and wait between jobs, and collect 10% of their fees. It is usually the model who has to sell herself, tramping in & out of photographers' studios, showing her scrapbook, trying to look like the advertisers' cryptic specifications ("We need the soap and motherhood type"). By great good fortune she may land a movie contract.† But in most cases, she will achieve a glamourous life only in the ads she poses for.