Jean Patchett comes from Preston, Maryland, a little town on the Eastern Shore, population 395. Today she lives in a prestigious community in the California desert, smack on the fairway of a golf course, with Louis Auer, a onetime investment banker, her husband of forty-plus years. Glass animals are everywhere, and the walls are hung with trophies of Pancho Patchett’s modeling years, photographs by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Rawlings, and Blumenfeld and two walls covered with nothing but Vogue covers. The prominent beauty mark on her lip is featured in almost every one of them. Long before Cindy Crawford, Patchett made a mountain of money on a mole. Though Patchett still has the thin frame and fine-boned face of her photographs, the mole is gone now. “It got icky,” she says, and she had it removed.
After she spent a stint in secretarial school, Patchett’s parents sent her to college, but she wasn’t prepared. Her roommate looked at her one day and said, “You’re so unhappy, why don’t you go to New York and be a model? Just get up and go look in the mirror!”
Her parents weren’t pleased, but Patchett prevailed. She headed off to New York in February 1948, moved into a Methodist home for girls for $13.50 a week, and signed with Harry Conover. She paid for her own test pictures and then “traipsed the streets,” she says. Her first job was with Mademoiselle. She thinks she was paid $12.50 an hour. “Whatever bookings I got at Conover I had to get myself. You just went from studio to studio to drop off your test pictures. He had five hundred girls. I don’t think he paid attention to any of them.”
In March 1948, while working for the Ladies’ Home Journal, she met Natálie, who said, “You ought to get out of Conover and go with Eileen Ford.”
Jean Patchett photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Jean Patchett by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York
Patchett recalls, “I went to Second Avenue, to a red door in a walk-up, and I go into this room, and there’s Eileen Ford sitting at a card table, in an icecream chair, with about six phones on the card table, two phones on her shoulders, and talking away into a third, and I came in the door, and I said, ‘I’m Jean Patchett.’”
Ford turned in her chair. “You’re as big as a horse,” she bellowed.
Patchett, who weighed about 127 pounds, burst into tears.
“I lost weight. Eileen made appointments. I was working—immediately! White gloves, my dear. I dressed every morning to go to work in white gloves. My first cover on Vogue was September. The next one was October, on Glamour. The following November I moved into the Allerton House. When I was living at the Allerton House, Barbara Mullen was living there, too. Some cover had just come out on the stand, and I was just full of myself. Barbara and I were having a whiskey sour, and she said, ‘Look, just get off that high horse! Who in the hell do you think you are anyway?’ I didn’t realize I was being such an obnoxious woman. That just brought me right down, and after that I think I became very modest about the whole thing and realized that really, it was nothing more than a tabloid on the newsstands that’s going to last for about a week and it’s going to go to the trash heap! And I just never let it go to my head again.
“I went to Cuba with Life magazine. My Life cover was January first of 1949. After my trip to Cuba I went to South America with Penn.
“I’d done only one sitting with Penn in New York. I didn’t even know who he was. We get to Lima, and we’re there for five days, and we don’t take a picture. We had thirteen outfits to do for Vogue Patterns, and I was getting kind of nervous because I thought maybe my face was turning green or something. I thought he didn’t like me. We’d get up at five-thirty in the morning for the mist, and he’d look in his little Rolleiflex, and nothing would happen. He just couldn’t take a picture. Finally, we went to this café one day, and I had on this lovely hat and cocktail dress, and there’s a young man sitting there, and I’m sitting with a glass of wine, and I kind of just said, ‘Oh, the hell with it,’ and I kicked off my shoe and sat back. I thought, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ I’m sitting there eating my pearls, and he said, ‘Stop!’ And it was the most horrible sound I ever heard in my life, because what he wanted me to do was not to be pose-y. He wanted me to do things that I would do if I was sitting talking to a young man, and that was the whole secret, and it just went from there. It’s interesting today to look back on it. We really made history. To have five pictures of yourself hanging in the Museum of Modern Art! I didn’t know that I was going to be doing that!
“As we kept working, he’d tell me little stories. In New York he would get me in front of the white paper, and he would said, ‘OK, it’s intermission at the theater, and your young man has gone out to get you an orangeade, and it’s been an awfully long time, and you’re standing there, and you’re waiting for him, and you can’t find him.’ So my neck would get longer and longer, looking for my young man! There was always a story behind every picture.
“I didn’t belong to Penn. I belonged to Vogue. You couldn’t work for Harper’s and Vogue at the same time when I was working. If you went to work for Harper’s, you couldn’t work for Vogue anymore! I did work for Dick [Avedon], but I don’t know, I always felt inadequate. He jumped around too much for me. Penn was a serene person and quiet, always chasing the bluebird. We’d take five hundred pictures on one outfit. It would be a whole day. We had thirteen outfits in Lima, and we took thirty-two hundred pictures! I don’t think he ever took a model anywhere after that.
“I knew nothing about Dorian. [Penn and I] were very fond of each other. We had a very good time together. I didn’t even realize that he had been seeing Dorian. When we were in Lima, I think he was seeing Lisa; he was getting letters from Lisa. We were in the elevator one day, and I said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a wonderful long letter,’ and he said, ‘Yes, from my tailor!’
“The only time [I met Dorian] was when I first started at Vogue in May [1948]. I was working for [fashion editor] Bettina Ballard, who I adored. She loved me because I called her Miss Ballard, and I’d always say ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am’ to her. We didn’t have cubicles in that dressing room, and Dorian was out on the set, being photographed, and she came back in, and she said, ‘That dress is mine. Take it off!’ Here, I’m really a meek person, and I’d heard of Dorian Leigh and she kind of scared me! Luckily Mrs. Ballard walked in right behind her, and she said, ‘Now, Jean, we’re ready to take you onto the set.’
“I did not mix business with pleasure. I never dated any photographers, ever, like Billy Helburn or whatever. Oh, Billy was a naughty boy! God! But he adored me, and I adored him, and I never had any trouble with him. But he would do such awful things—burps and wheezes in the studio—and I’d say, ‘Bill Helburn, if you don’t stop that, I’m out of here!’ He’d try to sneak in the dressing room when we all had no clothes on. I always had a petticoat on, a slip. He never had a chance!
“I was twenty-one years old. I was dating a lot of guys. Young Gussie Pabst from Milwaukee, the Pabst Brewing Company. Tim Ireland. Jimmy Magin from the fuse box family. I met my husband, Louie, even before I went with Eileen and Jerry. He was working at Macy’s on their training program. Then he went to the New York Trust Company and was an executive vice-president. We saw each other for three years, and we became very good friends. If I wanted to go to ‘Twenty-one’ for dinner, I’d call him up, and I’d pay our way. I was going on trips to Paris with Vogue. I went with Mrs. Ballard and Norman Parkinson and actually began to realize that the person I was missing was Louie Auer!
“After we were married, I gave all my money, all my checks, to Louie, and he gave me back five hundred dollars a month to pay the maid, the rent, my taxis. I would bring home checks for fifteen hundred dollars a week or more. I think the best I ever made was fifty thousand dollars a year. But that’s nothing today.
“I didn’t travel much after that. We were married when I went to do the collections in ’53. I went to Spain with Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and he came over. Our first child arrived in ’59, and Amy arrived in ’62, and I worked, but I found that I couldn’t really be three people. It was impossible, to be the wife, the mother, and the career gal. I don’t know how women do it, I swear!
“The last photograph that I took was in ’68, and it was one of my favorites of all time. But I’m so glad I didn’t live in that era because I don’t think I would have made it. Or in today’s world, either. The new Vogue is out, this little girl is on the cover, the skirt’s up to here. Who, at the age of forty, is going to wear that? I just think that things are not as elegant as they used to be.”