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Hutton's background apparently immunized her against chichiness. Born in Charleston, S.C., reared in southern Florida, Mary Laurence Hutton led a tomboy's existence. She learned woodsmanship, fishing and baby-alligator trapping from her stepfather, Jack Hall. (Hutton is the name of her real father, who died after her parents separated; Lauren she borrowed from Bacall.) A scruffy, skinny girl whom the kids called "the yellow wax bean," she earned her first pennies selling worms to fishermen. It took a matchmaking teacher to get her an escort for the senior prom. She wore blue jeans all through high school, tossing a dress over them to get around the anti-dungaree regulations. "I looked like a drag queen," she recalls.
Between the times she dropped out of two colleges—the University of Southern Florida and then Sophie Newcombe in New Orleans—she came to New York in 1964 looking for a job. She landed one—as a Playboy Bunny. "I was always afraid of being fired for having my ears on wrong. It was all so dopey—like Girl Scout camp."
Hutton's start in modeling was almost accidental. She was in New York, intending to leave for Africa on a whim, when she answered an ad for a house model at Christian Dior's salon. "I conned them into thinking I had modeled before," she says. "I just watched the other girls do their pirouettes and imitated them." The job was hers—at $50 a week. Not everybody was so cooperative, however.
When she tried to find a modeling agency to handle her, they all turned her down. Finally, in 1966, she found one taker, the Ford Agency, which happened to be the best in town. "Eileen Ford said she'd hire me if I got my teeth and nose fixed. I said I would when I had the money, but I figured it might take me a while to get around to it—if ever." That time never came. That gapless smile in ads is not a sign of capitulation. It is a result of a tiny false tooth Hutton inserts when working.
"You can teach a person how to make up, lose weight, stand, work before a camera, but you can't impart that special instinct a great model has," says Eileen Ford of her longtime protégée. Diana Vreeland, onetime editor of Vogue, spotted it early in the game. Watching Lauren at a shoot one day, Vreeland told the then second-string model: "You have presence." That appraisal landed Hutton on Vreeland's picture pages, and on the pages of many other magazines from then on.
At Richard Avedon's spartanly white studio on the East Side of Manhattan, that presence is quite evident. Hutton is the calm center of the storm of activity swirling around her. As she lounges on a sofa in her slinky red-sequined snakeskin dress. Hairdresser Ara Gallant deftly recombs her honey-blonde hair for the umpteenth time.
China Machado, the stylist, dollies in to arrange the folds of a scarf with the care of Michelangelo planning the folds on the Pietá. Sitting immobile for hours at a time has its problems: "My muscles begin to shake after a while. Sometimes the tears start to flow from pain, and we have to airbrush them out of the picture." Such discomfort, of course, cannot be allowed into the photographs.