Push yourself to the limit as often as possible.
There’s nothing except what you sense.
—Sayings carved in the stone of the Barnard campus bench
BARNARD COLLEGE WAS AN EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCE FOR THE seventeen-year-old Eileen Otte. For the first time in her life she was expected to finish her papers and hand them in on time, fully annotated and with the grammar correct. “I had never done that in all my years at high school,” she recalled. “It was a revelation to me. And it was even more of a revelation to discover that there were girls who actually did that automatically, week after week, paper after paper—without being nagged!”
Eileen always credited Barnard with giving her the mental discipline to succeed in her subsequent business career. “I feel very grateful to have been organized so wonderfully. Barnard made me work hard, and really taught me to enjoy learning.”
Psychology, the subject in which she had signed up to major, turned out to be less gripping than Eileen expected. Yet she found that she loved the obscurities of constitutional law, along with history—and especially English. She wrote a well-received essay on Britain’s World War I poets Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen, and sixty years later she could still recite the opening lines of John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” In the spirit of her father’s patronage of the Art in Trades Club, she joined a design class and sketched out a modernistic bathroom in malachite, every surface bright green.
For her first year, Eileen stayed in a dormitory on campus, but she found it difficult to concentrate on her studies. She decided she would get more work done living at home, so she spent several semesters traveling in from Great Neck, where her commuting companion was a fellow Barnard freshman who lived along the Long Island Railroad line, at Douglaston.
“I remember that I met Jean Compo on my very first day at Barnard—on September 21, 1939. She asked me the way to the bookshop. So I walked her over, and we became fast friends. When we were both commuting on the LIRR we would arrange to meet up on the train and play bridge all the way into town, laying down the cards on top of a spread-out newspaper.”
Jean Compo was a stunningly beautiful blonde with a pageboy hairstyle with straight-across bangs. From the start of her studies at Barnard she had been earning extra money as a spare-time young model for the recently created Harry Conover agency, so when she heard of Eileen’s unhappy experience with Walter Thornton, she persuaded her friend to try her hand at modeling again. Conover, she assured Eileen, was different.
HARRY CONOVER WAS THE HOT NEW NAME IN NEW YORK MODELING at the end of the 1930s. Six feet tall, green-eyed, and wavy-haired, Conover had started as a model himself with the John Robert Powers agency, then defected in 1937 with his handsome flatmate and fellow Powers model, Gerald Rudolph “Jerry” Ford, Jr., the future Michigan congressman, vice president to Richard Nixon, and eventually U.S. president, who became co-owner of the agency for a few years. Like Walter Thornton, Conover liked to give his “Conover Cover Girls” exotic new identities, but in a slightly different style, devising coquettish nicknames to go with their otherwise routine surnames—“Chili” Williams, “Jinx” Falkenburg, “Dulcet” Tone, and “Frosty” Webb.
When Jean Compo brought Eileen Otte to Conover’s office at the start of her 1940 summer vacation, Conover could see she was no glamour-puss, but one of his skills was to pick out the “natural” or “authentic” face that advertisers sometimes preferred over stagier beauty. Eileen was a fresh-faced college girl, pert and eager, with an uplifted ski jump of a nose. As such, she filled a perfect short-term niche. Every summer Mademoiselle magazine ran a “college” issue to preview youthful fashions for the fall. Professional fashion models were remote and aspirational figures—fantasies, at the end of the day. College girls were a step closer to reality, and Eileen certainly looked like the girl next door. So Conover booked photo sessions with her for the advertising and editorial sections of Mademoiselle’s special issue.
It was unfortunate that Eileen’s moment of glory, her sole appearance on an editorial page, was miscaptioned: she was labeled as “Helen Otte” on page 170 of the college issue for August 1940, which described her as “the brightest sophomore on her campus in Stroock’s fleece-cloth reversible . . . $39.95, Lord & Taylor.” But later that year she became a cover girl, featured on the outside of Campus Classics for Knitters for October 1940 with a dazzlingly wide smile that revealed an evenly balanced array of handsome teeth. As well as appearing on the cover, Eileen was depicted on the inside pages, parked cheerily on a stone doorstep in Heidi-style socks, holding a pair of ice skates.
“The skates were the reason why I got the job,” she recalled. “I was the only person at the agency who owned a pair. I signed up with Conover again for the summer of 1941, and he got me still more work.”
Once again Eileen featured in a range of college girl shots in the pages of Mademoiselle: she advertised a collection of dressy undergraduate outfits for Saks–34th Street, and also appeared in the hallowed pages of Vogue, advertising Enka rayon and also SporTimer dresses—“To See Them Is to Want Them!” The highlight of her modeling career was her appearance that September on the cover of Liberty, the “Weekly for Everybody,” which prefaced each of its articles with its famous “Reading Time” prediction—an estimate of the time that each article would take to read, down to the second. A diminutive Eileen gazed up admiringly at a huge, muscular Cornell Big Red football player, above the cover line “They Had Magic Then! A Short Story by Sinclair Lewis.”
Looking back on her modeling career from her eminence as a successful agent, Eileen could not remember the details of her final college-era photo session as a mannequin, but she could recall one very important upshot: “Conover never paid me a penny for all the sessions that he booked for me.” Might there be a niche in the world of modeling for an agency that actually treated its models decently?
Back on campus at the halfway stage of her college education, Eileen was tempted by her brief contact with the beauty culture to try an experiment in the power of attraction. “I had a bet with another girl that if I sat in the front row in class and did no work and showed my legs, I’d get an A. And if she sat in the back and kept her head down working, she’d get a C. I won the bet.”
Barnard had not shaken Eileen out of her bumptiousness—it is doubtful any institution could have achieved that. “Eleanor Roosevelt came to visit the campus, and we were all required to attend her talk. She was dressed totally in black, with shoes that were so big that we were trying not to giggle. Then she started speaking in her strange voice, ‘Girls and women of Barnard College . . .’ and we all burst out laughing. I got the blame, and I got banned from going to the assemblies, which was fine by me. It meant I could go off to Tilson’s drugstore and meet all the boys from Columbia.”
Boys now loomed very large in the life of Eileen Otte. “The war started in December 1941, at the beginning of my third year, and from that point on I suppose you could say that I majored in men and minored in psychology.”