everyone and everywhere

 

----------------------- [continued-Excerpt from Jerry Hall book] --------------- Antonio knew everyone and everywhere we went he would introduce me to extraordinary people from the worlds of fashion, film and art.  One of the people I met was the artist Andy Warhol.  Andy loved Antonio's fashion illustrations and would come to the studio to admire his work.  Andy was sweet and gentle and we became lifelong friends.  He was always with his sidekick, Fred Hughes.  

        Fred was Texan and, with his slicked back shiny black hair and fitted, elegant suits, he was a beautiful dandy and one of the funniest men I have ever met.  They both said I must come to New York and they would help launch my career there.

        I had been in Paris less than a year and a half when Newsweek did a story with a photo of me, saying I was the new model taking Paris by storm.  By then I had changed agencies and was finally starting to make money.

        I was so surprised at being famous and a little bit frightened too.  People had always looked at me, because I was tall, but now strangers kept recognizing me and kept coming up and talking to me.

        With all the attention I was getting in Paris, word spread to New York.  Eileen Ford, who owned Ford Models, invited me to dinner one night.  She asked me to come and model in New York and said I could live in her house.  I accepted.

Becoming a Model

The agent who signed me up in Paris -- I always called him 'The Tunisian' -- gave me an advance on my earnings.  He took the money out of his sock, that's where he kept it!  He paid me 1000 Francs (about 200 dollars) for a seven year contract for the world; models nowadays would be getting paid millions for that kind of contract.  But in those days there were a lot of crooks and sleazy types in the modelling world and I was very naive....

        In the early days I pounded the pavements and used the metro all day on model 'go-sees', meeting people for jobs.  And within a week, I had my first -- a poster for a petrol station in which I posed in a suggestive manner holding a petrol pump!  My next job was my very first magazine cover shoot, although it was only a knitting magazine.  

And after that I started getting better jobs, and made the covers of Elle and Vogue.  I couldn't believe how quickly things took off and how lucky I was.

_______________________________

{Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures.  Written by Jerry Hall.  Curated by Jonathan Phang.  2010.  Quadrille Publishing.}

-30-

The