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Greetings from the Stork. When war broke out, Lisa and Fernand came to the U.S. Soon after her first pictures appeared in U.S. magazines, smitten strangers sent her presents, including a bottle of champagne from Stork Club Impresario Sherman Billingsley, whom she has never met. She recalls, "I thought: what a strange country this is. Maybe I'd better go home now." Today, Lisa works an average of 20 hours a week, half on advertising and half on magazine fashion illustrations, which pay less than advertising pictures ($12.50-$15) but carry prestige. Lisa averages about $500 a week, could easily make more if she worked a 40-hour week. Once, working hard, she made $1,800 in one week.
Her home town has not always approved of Lisa's career. Says she: "Uddevalla is, perhaps, a little Bostonian." Her family, however, regards her with a worldly tolerance. Only her brother, a retired army captain, has reservations. "We don't quite know what it is Lisa is doing," he explains, "but I am sure it must be getting on her nerves."
Lisa has managed to maintain something of Uddevalla's freshness chiefly by keeping her life separate from the nervous and narcissistic world in which she moves. She prefers simple sport clothes, rarely wears evening gowns off the job, never goes to nightclubs. She keeps herself in fine modeling fettle—underweight (122 lbs.) and hard as a pole vaulter—by swimming, tennis, horseback riding, and gardening on her new four-acre farm. Daughter Mia frequently functions as her mother's severest critic. Whenever she does not like one of Lisa's ads, she pencils in bold crayon corrections or, by cutting down one of her mother's nightgowns, herself demonstrates a better pose.
Lisa is an expert with a camera, is thinking of combining modeling with a part-time job as a fashion photographer. She has been a top model for 14 years while younger and prettier ones have come & gone, but no one was yet ready to name her successor when and if she stops modeling.
What Every Woman Knows. In one sense, of course, Lisa Fonssagrives would never stop. If her face should disappear from the magazines tomorrow, other faces would crowd to take its place and the American public would scarcely know the difference. For the model is more than an individual; she has become a type and an inevitable part of the American scene. She is everywhere; she smiles down from mountains and from steely skyscraper façades, from billboards and from the most exclusive bars. She is no longer an enticing stranger; the American is fond of her, sometimes irritated by her, but he takes her for granted and looks for her, even when he has no intention of buying what she is selling.
As, in her ads, she moves along in constant and successful pursuit of happiness, from high school prom to church wedding to a mortgage-free white frame house, she becomes a nearly epic figure: America's Everywoman. Her great and simple message is: life can be happy and Everywoman can be beautiful.