Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (9 page)

Powers lived for another twenty-five years after his move to California, and he died at age eighty-four in 1977. Why did he quit? “I think he just got old and he got tired,” says son-in-law Charles Rainey.

The year 1945 was a heady one for Harry Conover. He created a Cover Girl line of cosmetics for Borden, Inc. And his agency became the city’s biggest, with 750 models. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and not just on the magazine page. Advertisers asked for girls to take out on the town. Usually they were told no. But when a Navy admiral, a pilot, and a couple of generals called and offered $100 each for six girls for a private dinner at the Stork Club, certain models were told of the offer and allowed to decide for themselves. And private dates, though rare, could be arranged. “If a guy was married, a trusted friend would take her out,” Fertig says. “There’s all kinds of ways of skinning the kitty.”

A new breed of playboy appeared on the scene, the model hound. Harry Conover, Jr., remembers Bobby and Ted Kennedy hanging around his father’s agency. Says Fertig: “I used to sit with new girls and say, ‘Now that you’ve arrived from Upper Japoop, Indiana, and you’re in New York and at the top, you’re gonna meet a lot of weird guys. Wolves. They’re going to call you up.” Like Huntington Hartford, the dissolute A&P supermarket heir. “He used to come up,” Fertig says. “He had all that money. He would date girls. It was hard to control, so we tried to head it off at the pass. We told them, it’s OK to participate in the life, but don’t get a reputation as a party girl.”

Conover didn’t play by Fertig’s rules. He left Gloria to deal with the kids while he went out with a different model every night. “There was an interest here and there,” admits Fertig. “Where you have a concentration of women, you’re going to have a problem.” When the Women’s Army Corps sent a
group of officers for charm training, Conover fell for a lieutenant. Then he chased a model named Jiggs Butler. In 1944 he spotted an aspiring twenty-year-old in his office and named her Lassie Newland. “He went off the beam with Lassie,” says Fertig. “We’da been out of business, fer chrissakes, if it hit the papers.”

Lassie and Harry spent weekends at the Cinnabar Dude Ranch in Peeks-kill, New York. “She rode western saddle,” Fertig says meaningfully. “She was an oversexed broad, to be sure.” She told friends they were getting married and bought herself a dress. By April 1946 Gloria Conover, twenty-four, was in Reno. Proclaiming that Harry was still her best friend, she sued him for divorce on the ground of mental cruelty. She revealed they’d been separated for almost a year.

June brought the surprise announcement that Harry was going to marry not Lassie but Candy Jones, twenty-three, another blond Cover Girl. Candy was discovered at the Miss America contest in 1941. She was sixteen years old, the daughter of a movie theater ticket taker and car salesman who called his daughter Doll. After spurting eight inches in high school, Candy, whose name was then Jessica Wilcox, won a Miss Atlantic City contest and was hostess of that year’s beauty pageant. Afterward she approached John Robert Powers, who’d judged the contest for several years. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he promised her.

“This is the beginning of the end, Jessica,” her irate mother said. “This is the start of your downfall.”

That fall Jessica got a telegram from Powers, offering her a cigarette advertisement. With her mother’s grudging permission, she arrived in New York only to discover that there was no ad. “You have wrinkles in your neck,” Powers told her, before offering to enroll her in his charm school. When she threatened to report him to the Miss Atlantic City contest organizers, he agreed to let her sit in his model room and see if any work turned up. Two weeks later, having earned a mere $10, she went to Conover’s agency to look up a friend’s sister. “You could model, you know,” the receptionist told her, sending her in to see Conover.

“I’m Jessica Wilcox,” she said.

“You’re Candy Johnson,” he replied. “And your rate is $5 an hour.”

By 1943, thanks to her good looks and his aggressive promotion—including candy-striped outfits and calling cards—Candy Jones (the name was shortened because she couldn’t remember the longer one) was a top model, winning eleven covers in a single month. Conover later said he’d had only one date with her before he proposed long distance while she was on a promotional trip for Cover Girl cosmetics in Portland, Oregon. Their engagement announcement included the news that they planned to start a Tex and Jinx—like radio show after their honeymoon. “They began to see a commercial potential in marrying their two names,” says Bob Fertig.

After the announcement a public relations man from Canada called, asking Harry to judge a July 4 Miss Canada contest in Hamilton, Ontario. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Conover asked Fertig. With the contest organizers paying for everything, Harry and Candy flew off to Canada to get married and judge the contest together. Speakers were set up outside their church for the benefit of the overflow crowd. The next day they were married again in an Iroquois ceremony, feathers and all.

“Do you love me now?” Candy asked as they returned to their hotel.

“As much as I can,” Harry answered, “but don’t pin me down. Nothing is forever.” Conover fell asleep on her that night and didn’t consummate the marriage for some time. “I don’t want to break in a virgin,” he complained.

Candy knew she was in trouble but was determined to make the best of things. “I wanted to be held and caressed,” she said. “Harry didn’t like that and soon, I didn’t care one way or another.”

Meanwhile, intrepid tabloid news hounds had sniffed out Lassie Newland, nursing her wounds at the dude ranch. She told them she’d left Harry because he was an introvert who cared only about business. “Right in my own office we have the very thing that every man looks for, works for, fights for and dies for,” Conover said, just before he was excommunicated by the Catholic Church in New Jersey.

It wasn’t the best of times for modeling. A dress manufacturer named Samuel Chapman and oleomargarine heir Minot Frazier Jelke III both were arrested for procuring in 1952—and the women arrested with them called themselves “models.” The resulting scandal “threw the whole modeling business back twenty years in public esteem,” according to Harry Conover. A bright light had been cast on the murky underworld of modeling. “When I first came to Seventh Avenue, house models doubled as escorts for out-of-town buyers,” says designer Bill Blass, who arrived in the garment center as a sketcher in the early 1940s. “The assumption was true. Those girls really did put out, Christ, with the gross manufacturers who employed them. Most of the models were kept, and some turned a trick or two.”

Within a week of the arrest, a bill was introduced in the City Council to regulate model agencies, and two models appeared at the entrance of the Criminal Courts Building carrying placards that read
THERE ARE
5,000
LEGITIMATE MODELS IN NEW YORK CITY
.
DON
’
T BELIEVE SENSATIONAL NEWSPAPER HEADLINES
! Prostitutes were said to be carrying hatboxes as part of their pose. Models carrying hatboxes were being spit at on the street. The hatbox fad ended.

It was also the beginning of the end of the Conover agency. Harry still lived high. In 1955 he and Candy shared a ritzy six-room apartment at 1199 Park Avenue. But as anyone in the modeling business knows, appearances can deceive. Conover’s weight had risen over two hundred pounds, he’d grown a little mustache, and his psoriasis was spreading. He rarely saw his children from his first marriage. And his relationship with Candy wasn’t much better. He made her pay for her three births and two abortions out of her own earnings. Candy’s mother moved in with them. “He seemed to tolerate Grandmother; she had an incredible hatred for my father,” says Harry, Jr. “My pop psychology guess is that she felt he took her little girl and turned her into a wicked, wanton Cover Girl in lipstick.” Harry started spending his nights and the agency’s money in restaurants and bars, entertaining employees and friends. When he
was
home, he frequently shuttered himself in the bathroom.

“Our relationship became one of simply sharing living space,” said Candy. “I didn’t much care that he almost never made a sexual advance towards me. In fact, I was relieved.” He initiated sex only when drunk. He referred to his wife’s ample bosom as “revolting.” Sometimes he hid friends in his bedroom closet when he tried to seduce her. Her mother figured he was cheating. But Candy felt he just wanted to be revered and preferred the company of dependent pals to that of an increasingly independent woman. “I detested our marriage,” Candy said. Although she adored their children, “I didn’t care whether Harry Conover even existed.”

Not only was he never at home, he was rarely in the office. Neither was Candy. She’d formally quit the agency after the marriage and set herself up next door at the Conover School for Career Girls, a supposedly separate operation that actually fed Conover’s agency. Harry bragged that he wouldn’t make a deal without consulting Candy first. Indeed she was taking over the business as he became ever more scarce. “He liked hanging out at all the watering holes, the Stork and Toots Shor’s,” says Harry, Jr. “It kept him in the columns.”

In his absence Candy stepped out front. “The main source of income was Candy, sitting at that desk at the school, talking to mom and a girl,” says Fer
tig. “Depending on her sense of what kind of money they had, she’d decide what to charge them. She always tried to get money up front. She liked cash because it was untraceable. I remember Harry laughing when she was away, saying she’d stash hundred-dollar bills in books and they’d flutter all over the living room.”

In spring 1958 Conover disappeared. “I was eleven,” says Harry, Jr. “I’d just come home from Trinity. He said, ‘I’ve been a bad boy,’ slung his laundry bag over his shoulder, and that was the last time I saw him as a father.” He registered under a pseudonym at the Plaza Hotel, took up with an eighteen-year-old model named Astride, and started giving nightly parties. “I never thought of him as being with a girl,” Candy said. “I assumed he was sitting talking in the same restaurant, telling the same old story to some man in the agency.” She didn’t even blink when he had a friend sneak into the office and take furniture to fill up the new apartment he’d rented. But when her absent husband started signing checks, Candy used her power of attorney to close his bank accounts. He screamed. She gave him money. He went on a car-buying spree. Finally he even spent $125,000 of Candy’s. “He cleaned out the accounts, and he did it swiftly, too,” says son Harry. When Candy discovered she’d bottomed out at $36, she started talking divorce and headed to Mexico.

Just after she returned, in May 1959, the district attorney seized Conover’s books, and his license was revoked after a lawsuit was filed alleging that he and Candy had stolen fees belonging to child models. His remaining models immediately started demanding the money he owed to them. “It wasn’t easy being a Conover that day,” says Harry, Jr.

Outside court the next day Candy’s lawyer revealed to the world that she’d divorced her husband in Mexico six weeks earlier. “I left her no alternative,” Harry said. “I just got tired of Candy. We were married fourteen years. The very nature of our business—fourteen years is a lifetime.” He admitted he was responsible for the agency mess and allowed that Candy had stepped in to run things in his absence. “The story goes back seven years when I wanted to sell the agency after suffering a heart attack,” he said. “It was for reasons of health that I walked out nine months ago.” He estimated that he owed about $25,000. Candy said Harry owed her alone $100,000. She had to wear a wig to avoid process servers.

The Conover affair ended anticlimactically. In 1960 all charges against Harry were dropped when it was proved he hadn’t stolen the money. But he had mismanaged the agency—and his family. Several of his children died young, and at least one more has disappeared, according to daughter Carole, who struggles with her father’s ghost to this day. Candy Jones continued operating the charm school, renamed the Candy Jones Career Girls School, into the 1960s. She also wrote eleven books on beauty. She married Long John Nebel in 1972 and became cohost of his late-night radio talk show. She hosted the show alone from his death in 1978 until just before she died in 1990. An obscure book written about her before she died,
The Control of Candy Jones
, tells a chilling story about her life after modeling.

After she married Nebel, Candy Jones started having insomnia, suffering mood swings, and showing two distinct personalities. Her husband, an amateur hypnotist, put her under his spell, and it emerged, the book alleges, that she’d been recruited, drugged, brainwashed, used, and sexually abused as a pawn of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The book is based on transcripts of unscientific question-and-answer sessions with Nebel and later with a professional hypnotist. It carries an endorsement from Candy herself. But it is also laden with pseudonyms, “could haves,” “must have beens,” and “possiblys.” Regardless, Harry Conover, Jr., believes it. “There was clearly a double life going on,” he says. “It’s not just Candy Jones, model. It’s Candy Jones, superpatriot. Candy Jones, chump. And if she hadn’t been a model and gone on USO tours and gotten to know generals personally, none of this stuff would have happened.”

And Harry, Sr.? Despite his legal vindication, Conover was ruined. Unable to find a job, he went to his mother for support, kept on hanging out in nightclubs, and traveled to California, where he tried to set up a chain of Harry Conover Charm Schools. “We’d give Harry a bottle of Wild Turkey and prop him up on a sofa to meet people,” says Nina Blanchard, a Los Angeles agent who worked at a school. “He was double-selling franchises. He was an old con man who ran out of gimmicks.”

Finally, in 1964, Candy had him arrested for nonpayment of alimony and child support, and he was put in jail, where he suffered his second heart attack. Out of prison the next year, he had another heart attack and died, aged fifty-three. An autopsy found he was suffering from cirrhosis and toxic blood.