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The Good Clothes Hanger. Working with a less accomplished model, the photographer might spend hours trying to prod and push her into the proper pose. But not with Lisa. With a dancer's discipline and grace, she responds instantly to the photographer's every direction, almost before it is spoken. Her body (bust and hips 34 in.) is so supple that she can pull in her normally 23-inch waist to 18 inches. She has the gift of mimicry every good model needs, and a keen fashion sense. Once, she appeared 103 times in a single issue of a magazine, scarcely looked like the same girl in two pictures. Says she: "The photographer says, 'Look sexy,' and I look sexy. He says, 'Look like a kitten,' and I look like a kitten. It is always the dress, it is never, never the girl." As one satisfied customer put it: "A lot of models will not move a muscle for a cheap dress. Lisa makes a $10 cotton dress look like a Schiaparelli." Mockingly, Lisa Fonssagrives puts it another way: "I'm just a good clothes hanger."
Oriental Slave Dance. The life dedicated to the task of being a paragon of fashion for American women began 38 years ago, far from the U.S. and far from fashion. Lisa was born in the small Swedish town of Uddevalla (present pop. 22,675), the daughter of Dr. Samuel Bern-stone, a dentist. Lisa's father had changed his name from Anderson, which he considered too commonplace: there are 48 pages of Andersons in the Stockholm telephone directory. The Bernstones were always considered a little daring by the town: they liked to go swimming in the nude. Lisa still likes to when she swims at a deserted Long Island beach.
Although her parents sent her to cooking school ("with the idea that I should be a good housewife"), Lisa had her heart and her nimble feet set on dancing. The town still remembers how, in a school play, she stole the show dancing the role of an Oriental slave.
She went to Paris where she got engagements with minor ballet companies (her 5 ft. 7 made her too tall for the Paris Corps de Ballet). In 1935, she married her fellow dancer, handsome Fernand Fonssagrives. Both soon gave up dancing, he to be a photographer, she to be a model. She tripped into the profession by chance: a young photographer asked her to pose for him. The results were sensational. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar fought to get her services as a mannequin; she has worked for both. Horst, one of the first photographers for whom she posed, recalls that she trembled with fear during her early sittings, but soon lost her stage fright, and became a top Paris, model. (She once posed in an evening gown while hanging on to the Eiffel Tower with one hand and one foot.)