NYT Jerry Ford, 83, Man Behind the Models, Dies

Jerry Ford, 83, Man Behind the Models, Dies
By ERIC WILSON
Published: August 26, 2008

Jerry Ford, who with his wife, Eileen, established one of the most recognizable modeling agencies in the world, turning a profession regarded as practically a hobby in the 1940s into one dominated by well-paid supermodels in the 1980s, died on Sunday in Morristown, N.J.. He was 83 and lived in Oldwick, N.J.

Gary Settle/The New York Times
Jerry Ford and his wife, Eileen, in 1978. Mr. Ford, in the 1940s, recognized the potential that modeling had as big business.











While Eileen Ford, as the public persona behind Ford Models, was considered the doyenne of the New York modeling industry for more than four decades, it was her college sweetheart (later her husband) who first recognized the potential of a company that would approach modeling as a big, sophisticated business.

Shortly after the company was started in 1946, Mr. Ford successfully introduced a payment system for models in which they were paid for their work in advance. Ford later recouped their fees from their various clients.

In the 1970s, Mr. Ford was credited with creating the first contracts for models to represent specific brands exclusively, commanding significantly higher fees for the models. He negotiated the first such contract for Lauren Hutton to represent Revlon in 1974.

“Before Jerry came along, there were only robber barons who were out there running modeling schools,” said Carmen Dell’Orefice, who has modeled with the Ford agency for 60 years.

Ms. Dell’Orefice said she was introduced to the Fords by the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in 1947, months after they had opened the agency in an apartment on the Upper East Side. It had been common then for models to manage their own invoices and billings, and it was therefore not uncommon for them to be paid one or two years after a job, she said.

“He knew about business and he saw what was going on with the models, the clients and the photographers,” she said.

Mr. Ford established a five-day workweek, and every Friday the models were paid their fees, less Ford’s 10 percent cut, whether the clients had paid the agency or not.

Within a decade, those fees began to skyrocket, to as high as $3,500 a week for top models like Dorian Leigh and Mary Jane Russell, the first stars of Ford Models.

In 1956, Mr. Ford said the agency was interviewing as many as 5,000 models a year but would accept only about 15. Ford represented the biggest names for decades — China Machado in the 1960s, Ms. Hutton in the 1970s, Christie Brinkley in the 1980s, Veronica Webb and Kristen McMenamy in the 1990s. Mr. Ford also managed the early modeling careers of Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Brooke Shields and Ali MacGraw.

Gerard William Ford was born Oct. 2, 1924, in New Orleans, one of six children of John William and Ermine Ford. According to Michael Gross’s 1995 book, “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,” Mr. Ford was a boxer and football player at Notre Dame (his roommate was John Lujack, a Heisman Trophy winner) before transferring to midshipman school at Columbia University. Mrs. Ford, then Eileen Otte, was studying at Barnard College and was herself briefly a model. The couple met and eloped in 1944 as Mr. Ford was waiting to ship out with the Navy.

In addition to Mrs. Ford and Katie Ford, Mr. Ford is survived by three other children, Jamie Ford Craft of Washington, Gerard William Ford Jr. of Palm Beach, Fla., and Lacey Williams of Los Angeles; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In December, the modeling company was sold to an investment bank, Stone Tower Equity Partners.

After serving on a supply ship based in Asia, Mr. Ford, upon his return to New York in 1946, resumed his studies, in accounting, at Columbia, while Mrs. Ford worked as a secretary for several model friends and eventually became their informal agent; when she became pregnant, he stepped in to manage the business and found that he liked it.

“I’m not from New York,” Mr. Ford is quoted as saying in Mr. Gross’s book. “I thought models were the most incredible things in the world.”

Westward, Ho: Traffic Concerns Aid Westhampton's Growth

Westward, Ho

Traffic Concerns Aid Westhampton's Growth
By Candace Taylor, Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 24, 2008

When Dore Hammond, a film producer, and her husband, James Normile, a lawyer, began spending summers at Long Island's East End, they gravitated to the exclusive hamlet of Bridgehampton, where they would be close to friends. "We thought, 'This is where all the action is,'" Ms. Hammond said.

Click Image to Enlarge

Konrad Fiedler / Konrad Fiedler/New York Sun

After three summers in Bridgehampton, the couple got fed up with the traffic and began renting a rambling Victorian 20 miles west, across the Shinnecock Canal, in Quiogue, a hamlet between Westhampton and Quogue.

"We were happy to cut the drive in half — the traffic is killer," she said, adding that they are looking to buy a summer home in the area.

A decade ago, Westhampton was a disparaged area of the South Fork, with a reputation for seedy nightlife and share-houses. Times have changed, brokers said. While Westhampton and the surrounding areas west of the canal still lack the cachet of their neighbors to the east, the area's proximity to Manhattan, the availability of waterfront property at lower prices, and revitalized downtown Westhampton Beach are drawing a growing number of well-heeled buyers.

According to Brown Harris Stevens, the median sales price west of the canal was $630,000 in the first quarter, compared to $965,000 for the South Fork overall; at the same time, the number of homes that sold for more than $4 million in the Westhampton area rose to four from the prior-year quarter's three, even amid a slowing economy. In the South Fork overall, the number of homes selling for more than $4 million dropped to 39from 47 in the prior-year quarter.

Among the recent arrivals in the area is the actor Michael J. Fox, who this winter paid $6.3 million for a newly built 7,000-square-foot home in Quogue, and CNN's Anderson Cooper, who bought in the area despite spending childhood summers in Southampton. Other well-known names who spend summers west of the canal include the actress Susan Lucci, singer Kathleen Battle, and journalist Tina Brown.

"Because of the traffic, we've got more people looking in Westhampton who used to go to Sagaponack or Bridgehampton," a broker at the Corcoran Group's Westhampton Beach office, Robert Murray, said. "That's a major difference. We've always wished this would happen, but this is the first year I've heard it verbalized by buyers."

On Dune Road, the single-lane road that runs parallel to the ocean through Westhampton and Quogue, fishing cottages and aging contemporary mansions are being torn down and replaced with the stately, weathered-shingle homes more commonly found east of Southampton, Mr. Murray said.

"In the last four years, Dune Road has changed tremendously," he said, attributing the change in part to the arrival of wealthy newcomers in once-sleepy Quogue. "The old family money is not turning over," he said. "They've moved on, and in their place have come people from New York and Europe."

The executive director at Brown Harris Stevens for Eastern Long Island, Charles Manger, blamed the increasing congestion on a construction boom in the Hamptons in the past five years, making homes west of the canal more appealing. "You are seeing more interest in the area because of the proximity to New York City," he said.

Another draw is the number of waterfront homes available, often at bargain prices, according to Corcoran's senior vice president for the East End, Rick Hoffman. "You can find deals in Westhampton," he said. "There's a much larger supply of waterfront. Of the people who want waterfront who begin looking further east, more and more are ending up in Westhampton."

The revitalization of downtown Westhampton Beach, with bustling stores and restaurants and a performing arts center, also has helped raise the area's profile, residents said.

A group of community organizers founded the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center in 1997 as a way to rehabilitate the town's reputation, which they felt was damaged by nightclubs and the prevalence of share-houses in town, the president of the board of the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, Leonard Conway, said.

"We very much felt that the performing arts center could serve as a catalyst to enhance the economy and the quality of life," Mr. Conway, a partner in a New York investment firm who purchased a house in Westhampton Beach in 1989, said.

A decade later, community members credit the theater with luring more retail shops to the area and bringing families in place of share-houses.

"They still have them, but not as much as they used to," a longtime Westhampton homeowner, Lee Bailin, said of share-houses. "There are many more families here now."

For Upper East Side residents Melissa and Larry Stoller, the performing arts center was a major factor in their 2002 purchase of a summer home in Westhampton. "We wanted to pick a community that not only was a beautiful beach community but also had vibrant cultural arts," Ms. Stoller, whose two older daughters recently performed in the center's production of "Snow White," said.

As a result of buyers such as the Stollers, home prices in Westhampton are beginning to catch up to those in towns farther east. "There's definitely a differential that exists, but I think it's narrowed," Mr. Conway said. In fact, Mr. Conway is testing the waters and has put his 10-acre waterfront estate on Seafield Lane on the market for $39 million, a figure that would set a new record for Westhampton Beach.

"That's a Southampton price," Mr. Murray said.

Click here to view the full article from the website.

Thank You Mr. Herzog

Burt Glinn London Times Obituary April 11, 2008

Burt Glinn

Veteran Magnum photographer who won his spurs by recording Castro’s entry into Havana 

Burt Glinn’s instinct as a photographer was to go where his rivals were not. Never was this shown more to advantage than in 1959 when, allied to the necessary good fortune, he captured defining images of Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana and of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to America.

On New Year’s Eve 1958 Glinn was at a party in New York hosted by the journalist Nick Pileggi (who later wrote the novel Wiseguy and adapted it as the film Goodfellas). Having heard a rumour that Cuba’s leader, Fulgencio Batista, had fled, and that Castro was advancing on the capital, Glinn immediately went home, borrowed some money from the neighbours of his fellow photographer Cornell Capa, took the precaution of changing out of his dinner jacket, and flew down to Miami.There he persuaded a pilot to take him to Havana, landing at the airport in the early hours just as it was being blockaded by the rebels. Venturing on to the city’s streets, he was congratulating himself on his daring when he realised that he knew neither Havana nor Spanish, and that gunfire was everywhere.

Within a day or two, however, he managed to get out into the countryside, where he encountered Castro’s victorious but ramshackle convoy. Every so often it would pull up at a petrol station, and Castro would get out to pay for everyone to fill up. Glinn enjoyed days of unfettered access to the revolutionaries and subsequently shot memorable pictures of them being greeted in Havana by crowds so thick that he lost his shoes.

Later that year he also covered Khrushchev’s trip to Washington, the first by any Soviet prime minister. Arriving tardily at a photocall at the Lincoln Memorial, Glinn found his way through barred by policemen, and was forced to find a spot behind the Soviet party. There he spotted the happy image of the Communist leader looking up at the symbol of American democracy, a photograph that was to become one of the most reprinted and lucrative of his career.

Though not as well known as many of his fellow Magnum photographers, Glinn was much admired by them. Not least, this was because of his work behind the scenes securing their copyright, both in two spells as president of the agency (1972-75, 1987), and as head in the 1960s of the American Society of Magazine Photographers.

This role involved him in much tough bargaining with the organisations that commissioned pictures, such as Life magazine. When the publishers’ lawyers argued that photographers would not get their images without having had their costs paid for by the magazines, Glinn liked to recall the indignant response of Henri Cartier-Bresson: 

“Yes, but it’s the skin off our eyeballs!”

National Review Online WFB Remembered

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

Remembering WFB

 

Hospitable and Engaging   

When I read the newspaper commentaries about Mr. Buckley by different authors I was struck by the similarity of their praises for this amazing man. Everyone, from David Brooks to myself were in awe not only of his brilliance but also by the gracious way he welcomed you into his rarefied world.

Two years ago I was producing an independent documentary about New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. I asked Mr. Buckley if he would be kind enough to let me interview him on camera for my film.  My interview with him took place in his glamorous Manhattan home. By his hospitality and his engagement you would have thought I was Charlie Rose.

After the interview I received a couple of letters from him in  response to mine. They were always mailed. I was delighted to receive them. The fact that he took the time to jot off a few quick letters to me and sign them "warm regards" did much to encourage me in the documentary field.

Even though I did not know him very well he made me feel as if I did. I will miss him. Dore Hammond 

 

03/05 11:40 AM