PUBLISHED: 19:01 EST, 30 November 2013 | UPDATED: 08:05 EST, 1 December 2013
As one of the most photographed faces of the 1950s, Barbara Mullen is bemused by the modern cult of model as celebrity. In a rare interview, she speaks to John-Michael O'Sullivan
I first read Barbara Mullen's name a year ago, in an interview with photographer William Klein. His description - 'She was a tough Irish-American living in Brooklyn and she had a foul mouth, she was not at all well-bred' - didn't square with the poised, sophisticated world I imagined 1950s models inhabiting. The few images I could find online showed someone frustratingly enigmatic, blurred into vagueness by fashion photographer Lillian Bassman's lens.
Tracking down this lost girl (who was actually from Harlem) became half-hobby, half-obsession. But the rise of picture-hosting sites such as Flickr has made the internet hungry for beauty (and strangely nostalgic about the kind of beauty it values), and as the months went by that trickle of images became a flood. The more I found, though, the less straightforward Barbara became.
As Bassman's muse, she glided through frame after frame like a blurred ballerina; for Richard Avedon she was sophisticated and graphic, in vibrant colour or startling black-and-white. On location in India with Norman Parkinson she could be elegantly exotic, while for Klein she turned self-parodying clown.
The era's other great models (sex bomb Suzy Parker, platinum-blonde Sunny Harnett, long-limbed Dovima, all-American Jean Patchett, exquisite Evelyn Tripp) were always reliably, recognisably themselves. But Barbara was different - beanpole-tall, with slicked-back hair, startled eyes and a rosebud mouth. Her features, in front of a lens, somehow morphed, endlessly transforming her into somebody else.
One day my search led to a news piece about a theatre company that had created a performance piece about Barbara's life. An optimistic enquiry received a response a fortnight later. And that turned into a correspondence that led me, earlier this year, to Barbara's front door.
It is 57 years since Barbara left New York. She lives in Switzerland with her second husband in an apartment that looks across rooftops towards deep-blue mountains. The windowsill is lined with ornaments - the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State. But Manhattan and her modelling career seem a lifetime away. She's bemused by the notion that anyone would be interested in her story: 'We weren't anything special. No one knew our names. And no one whistled at us on the street. But we were young, and we were thin, and we were damn lucky.'
'We were ordinary girls. No one knew our names'
That luck allowed an 18-year-old Barbara to trade in her hated beauty-parlour job for a life as a department-store mannequin, showing clothes to Bergdorf Goodman's wealthy clientele. In autumn 1947, her Cinderella moment arrived. Vogue needed to shoot a Bergdorf dress that had been cut to Barbara's tiny frame. It wouldn't fit any of their models, so she suddenly found herself, terrified, sitting for Condé Nast photographer John Rawlings, straining to hear the polite instructions coming from behind his 10x8 Deardorff. She still has that magazine page (one of her few souvenirs) showing a nervous girl on a green sofa, her dress swamped in tulle, with the words beneath heralding the coming decade: 'The new beauty is part attitude.'
Paris had become the undisputed centre of fashion that spring, thanks to Dior's New Look; but the New Beauty would be defined and photographed in Manhattan. Vogue editor Jessica Daves pinpointed the change in her 1967 history of the American fashion industry, Ready-Made Miracle: 'Over the years the style of beauty...offers a commentary on public taste in women. In the early 50s the type veered sharply, and there came to be a group of mannequins in the French tradition of the belle laide...Barbara Mullen was the first of these to be accepted as a top mannequin. Her eyes were slightly too prominent; the proportions of her face were not those of classic beauty. But the proportions of her body were made for modern clothes. Her tiny head, long neck and delicately elongated torso were the essence of the new elements.'
Belle laide: ugly pretty. Daves's words put Barbara into a tradition of misfit beauty that began with Edward Steichen's muse Marion Morehouse in the 20s - and which would resurface, decades later, with models such as Kristen McMenamy.
As she recalls, it was simple: 'I'm not shy now, but I was then - and the camera didn't talk back. It was really just a relationship between you and the lens. You stepped into those wonderful couture dresses and you were taken out of your everyday element. We were ordinary girls, but you felt...elevated.'
Ordinary girls in wonderful clothes - it's a contrast we take for granted now. Before the 50s, though, fashion models had largely been society women - the kind who would have been buying and wearing couture. Barbara arrived on the scene at a time when extraordinary-looking ordinary girls were suddenly being discovered at Bloomingdale's, such as Evelyn Tripp - or on the street, such as Dovima. Schooled by a new breed of model agents including Eileen and Jerry Ford, they took their careers seriously. European models were stunned by the rigid discipline of the Americans, with their girdles and falsies, their meticulously kept schedules and benzedrine-and-coffee diets.
Models had to work fast - doing their own hair and make-up - but the money was terrific. In an era when the annual US wage averaged $3,000 [£1,860], Barbara was making 20 times that. And in 1955 Photography magazine put her on its cover alongside Patchett, Tripp and Dovima, with the headline: 'Meet the most expensive models in the world.'
But the fairy-tale was crumbling. One day, Barbara's first husband, Jim Punderford, stopped on the stairs and said the same sentence three times over. It seemed like nothing, but he was soon diagnosed with brain cancer. The Fords were Barbara's rock, ensuring she worked solidly so she could pay the medical bills. But three months after that Photography magazine hit the newsstands, Jim was dead. There were rumours that Barbara and Jerry had had an affair (which the Fords denied). When she talks about that time, Barbara sighs: 'You know, you can't do anything about your mistakes. All I remember about that time was desperately - desperately - needing to be held.'
'I'm not shy now, but I was then - and the camera didn't talk back'
In search of a new start, Barbara moved to Paris - and enjoyed a second phase in her career, modelling for new names such as Guy Bourdin, Frank Horvat and William Klein. But her era was drawing to a close. In 1963, in London, Klein photographed a 20-year-old Buckinghamshire girl called Jean Shrimpton for the cover of Vogue. The strapline read: 'The New Beauty' - just as it had below Barbara's first picture, 16 years earlier. For Barbara and her generation - the girls one model would later refer to as 'The Untouchables' - it was time, and they knew it. Some carried on, switching to catalogue modelling or forming model agencies. But Barbara simply walked away - with little trace of nostalgia or regret.
There are few people alive now who can tell you, like Barbara can, what it was like to be photographed by a young Avedon, or do a hilarious impression of Dovima, petrified of the elephants surrounding her in that unforgettable image at the Cirque d'Hiver. Or who can remember sitting with Coco Chanel in the luxury of her Rue Cambon apartment in Paris - and who in the next breath can give those spectacular eyes a 360-degree roll at the mere mention of Heidi Klum's name.
She doesn't understand modern magazines - the tortured poses, the flesh flashing. 'Is that sexy?' she asks. And she doesn't think she'd have made it now; not in this world where becoming a model isn't a wonderful accident any more, but an intensely contested ambition.
I think I had scripted my visit to Switzerland before it happened - a series of frames, ending with Barbara blurring into a Bassman-like dissolve. Instead, she's very present; a charming, mischievously funny woman. After six hours of solid talking, she and her husband drive me to the station where she dashes out of the car for a last, energetic hug - and then speeds off without looking back.
Additional photographs: Nina Leen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images, Lillian Bassman, Genevieve Naylor/Corbis.
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