For the last twenty-nine years, Ophelia DeVore, through her Ophelia DeVore School of Charm, has taught thousands of young black women how to do just about everything properly. She has given them lessons in Essentials of Good Grooming, Social Graces, Visual Poise, The First Step into an Adventure of Loveliness, Positive Thinking, Microphone Technique, and Figure Control with Fencing and Ballet. She has had some famous successes. Diahann Carroll, the singer-actress, is a graduate of the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm. So is the WABC newscaster Melba Tolliver. The actress Cicely Tyson used to be an instructor.
We recently visited Miss DeVore at the school, which is in midtown Manhattan, for a chat and a tour. She greeted us with a cheery “Hi!” A strikingly beautiful woman, with a smile that is both ready and winning, she wore a smartly tailored blue suit, a brown blouse, a brown scarf with blue dots, gold earrings, two gold rings on each hand, and brown shoes. Miss
DeVore told us, “I started out as a model in New York in 1946, when I was sixteen years old, and then it was very hard for a black girl. In 1946, there were very few good, sophisticated career jobs for the black girl. In 1947, I started doing this. I had my first class in a photographer’s studio in Queens. I rented the space. Then I fixed up the basement of the house my parents and I were living in, in Queens, and I became so successful that in 1950 I had to move in to Manhattan. I had my whole family working for me. My husband was doing one thing, my children were doing others. I became an adviser to industry. I had to tell them how to use blacks without offending whites. I had to create from scratch, because there was no place for me to go to find out. I created fashion shows and beauty contests for my girls, so that they could get some experience in how to handle themselves. I made them feel special. At some point, all this will become extinct. As black people integrate, they won’t want to do the special little things that they needed to do in an earlier time to get them across.”
Miss DeVore showed us a big black book that was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings of her and of some of her famous students. Some of the photographs had captions. We saw a picture of Diahann Carroll. It had a caption that read, “At fifteen years of age, Miss Carroll came under the Influence of the Magic Touch of Miss DeVore.” We saw a picture of Miss DeVore modelling nylons. We saw a picture of Melba Tolliver modelling baby-doll pajamas. We saw a picture of LaJeune Hundley, who at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960
became the second black girl (Cecelia Cooper was the first, in 1959) to win the title of Miss Festival.
Next, Miss DeVore took us into a classroom, where two small girls were being instructed in wardrobe planning as part of a Little Ladies course. They were learning to tell the difference between Lounge Wear, Sportswear, Dressy, Casual, and Formal. Then we sat in on a class for older girls. They were studying Good Grooming and Health, and displayed much enthusiasm. Then we sat in on Makeup III—Corrective. The women in this class were studying when to highlight and when to shadow parts of the face. The teacher, Mrs. Phyllis Branford, told them how to get “the hungry look” (“Highlight the cheekbones, shadow the jawbone”), how to slim the nose, and how to put on makeup for the stage. “Girls, remember,” she said. “Mascara is a must, must, must.”
—June 6, 1977