WORLD IN ACTION ’65

“These men,” the model story began, “are creating a modern goddess. For creating goddesses the pay is enormous – up to £50,000 a year.”

“These men” were some of the world’s most famous fashion photographers. Their goddess is the model girl, the face on the cover. The top goddess of them all is Jean Shrimpton – “The Shrimp”. It is her face which stares at you from every newstand. In one single week she was on the cover of all the eight top fashion magazines of the world. Other models, photographers, fashion editors and those who just look at her with admiration, all testify to her queenship:

“Well, she is just the most beautiful girl I know, that’s all.”

“I think Jean has more influence than anyone else in my time.”

“I think she has got the most marvellous body.”

“I think she looks so terrific – I don’t think anyone’ll ever be able to beat her.”

“You can put her in any shape you like and she still looks elegant.”

“There won’t be another Jean Shrimpton for a long time because it’s like trying to top the Beatles.”

This is Dick Fontaine’s and Jenny Isard’s story of The Shrimp.

Jean Shrimpton is 21. She’s also 34-23-35. Height 5 feet eight inches, mostly legs. Weight 114 pounds. She has mousey hair, blue eyes and a mole in the middle of her back. With this conveniently packaged equipment she can earn more money than Dr. Beeching by simply standing very still and looking beautiful. Her fantastic success is something new. It’s the result of a fashion revolution which has made her the front girl for an industry with an annual turnover of £800 million. She is the world’s top model because she represents the Girl of the Age. Everybody wants her.

To stay at the top a model girl has to endure hours of tedious preparation before each photographic session. “I don’t really feel about the day at all,” Jean told World in Action. “I am miles away a lot of the time. What does anyone think about? Tick-tick-tick-tick – nothing special, nothing specific. When they’re doing my hair, it’s just a job to me. It’s probably less tiring than standing up posing – at least I’m sitting there and I haven’t got to think and I haven’t got to bother. I’ve done shots where they’ve put nine pairs of eyelashes on me, sprayed my hair gold, and I’m in agony and they keep fiddling and then I could scream. You feel like saying “Christ, I’m human!” I’m not here to project Jean Shrimpton. I project what I’m paid to project.”

Where do goddesses come from? Jean Shrimpton comes from a farm in Burnham, Buckinghamshire. Her father is a builder who does farming on the side. She has a brother and a sister. Said her sister, “I was terribly jealous of her when I younger, of course – I suppose anybody would be. I should think most girls would be.” Said her mother, “She was very much a country girl, you know – pets. I think she still is at heart. She’s always liked dogs. She’s not terribly interested in clothes or anything.”

For a time Jean thought only of ponies. Then, like lots of others, she went to one of London’s biggest model agencies. Twelve thousand girls apply to London’s twenty model agencies each year – ready to go through a ruthless inspection. If a girl is accepted it takes her four weeks and 28 guineas to learn the first steps of the modelling business. The average working life of a model is eight years. At twenty-five you are getting old.

Most of London’s 3,000 working models would like to be photographic models. But 2,500 of them have jobs as showroom models at an average of nine guineas a week. The photographic model is a rarity; top photographic models can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

After four weeks of pummelling themselves into the shape of the moment, many girls start their modelling far from the world of high fashion. One showroom model described her work:

“I come in about nine o’clock in the morning, and I clean coats – that is taking off stray threads and little bits of fluff. Then we allocate them to the models they’re to go to. Meanwhile you’ve probably got six or seven customers coming in. You’ve got to try the coats on, model them in front of the customers, and then when they’ve gone you get the designer down and he comes in and then you stand for hours and hours while they sort of pick the coat to pieces on you and your feet are aching, but you mustn’t show it.”

A few years ago two plump unknowns were luckier. The day they left model school they got their pictures in the paper. Their names were Celia Hammond and Jean Shrimpton. Today Celia Hammond is one of Jean Shrimpton’s closest rivals. She remembers how they both began:

“Jean left me behind. She went to Vogue and immediately she got started. But for about 18 months nothing happened to me at all, and I very nearly gave up.”

Lady Wrendlesham [sic – Rendlesham], then at Vogue, also remembers how Jean started; “When she went there somebody said ‘You’d make a good model’ and she came in and we looked at her and she was rather fat and she didn’t know what to do in front of the camera.”

No one realized straight away that Jean was a goddess – nor did Jean herself. “I didn’t take it seriously,” she said. “It was just that it seemed easy money. I’d get on the set and go through my routine of posing and it didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t aware of clothes or shape or feeling or mood or the atmosphere that different clothes have to project a different feeling, and I wasn’t aware of the photographer or anything.”

But within two years the fashion trade realized that Jean Shrimpton’s was the face it had been waiting for. The Shrimp had made a perfectly timed entrance. The top models of the past recognized a new star. Madame Saignon, famous model from Norman Hartnell’s, said: “Her timing was right. Her face was required, and the clothes at the time were being made for a girl like her.”

Barbara Goalen, the most famous English model before Shrimpton, said of her, “I think Jean Shrimpton has an enchanting little face. I don’t know her so the fact that I say this shows that it means quite a lot to me. I think she’s very much part of her time; it is a face that just appeals at this particular time. Because of the young feeling in clothes, everything is for the under-25s now, which is quite the opposite from how it was in my time.”

And John French, one of the “greats” in fashion photography commented, “It was wonderful that at that moment this live figure appeared with her own way of putting across her own personality. Instead of making the clothes into a certain shape she made them part of herself, part of her own life.”

But until photographer David Bailey took a deep personal interest in her no one had seen in her the makings of a goddess. Jean Shrimpton’s partnership with David Bailey was so close that they became engaged to be married. Between them they probably earned about five times as much as the Prime Minister.

“Just being with David is an influence,” Jean said. “And then he began to influence my movement and my dress, and then when he’d get me on the set he’d put me into shape, you know, and he’d encourage certain expressions, and then I began to feel something inside that I didn’t know existed. And it gradually sort of builds up and when it’s going well there’s a lot coming out of you and there’s a lot going on between you and the person photographing you, and the clothes are good and you know you look good. You work much better than if you think you look awful and nobody’s particularly interested.”

Norman Parkinson, another of the great English photographers, has discovered several of today’s top models. For it is the photographers who transform the raw material into the finished product. Like other leading photographers, Parkinson works in close partnership with a few favourite girls – Celia Hammond is one of these.

“I don’t think anyone can get started.” Celia told World in Action, “until they get someone who is prepared to spend really a long time with them, and get them through all the bad bits, because if you don’t find someone who is really interested your first pictures are inevitably appalling and you lose confidence.”

“When I see dozens of girls,” Parkinson said, “I just sit there rather like a pudding, rather like the dullest reader of any magazine you know, and I just sit there, and I look at the girl and I say to myself ‘This girl must send me some signal.’ I don’t make an approach to the girl. She has got to send a signal of looking different, of reacting to what I say, because the whole model-photographer relationship is one of reaction of one to the other.”

David Bailey confirmed this. “I think the only way you can get a really super image and a super model is if a photographer takes a personal interest in the girl. Otherwise she’s going to wander around and work for this fellow and for that fellow, and she’s not really going anywhere. I mean he’s got to sort of fall in love with her – not love like taking her to bed, but love the image, you know, and the image he wants to create. 1 think this is very important. I think each time you have a girl in the studio and you’re taking pictures against a piece of white paper, you’ve got to make the girl feel she’s loved and that she’s wonderful and beautiful. When I first met Jean she just walked into the studio that I was working in at the time and it was sort of instant, you know. I knew that she would be great. She was just the country waif then, you know, and not much at all. She didn’t know a thing, really. But she’s a born model. There’s not many. Her legs and everything – she’s got the longest legs I’ve ever seen, I think, and the very big mouth. The weaknesses are the small eyes, and the bags, I suppose. She won’t like that.”

David Bailey’s grooming paid off. Jean Shrimpton is now the most sought-after model in the world. In New York everyone wants her at their parties. Not that she is a great party person. “I don’t find conversation easy,” she said. “It’s difficult to talk to people. I can’t bear those cocktail parties for cocktail talk, you know, where nobody really wants to talk to anyone. I don’t think I react frightfully well to new people. I’m just quiet and polite, I think.”

Where can Jean Shrimpton go from here? How long can a goddess last? Her throne is a shaky one because she can keep it only as long as her face stays in fashion. Already people are naming successors. Unlikely girls get predicted because glossy magazines like the Queen have a problem. The Editor, Jocelyn Stevens explained:

“There’s this tremendous restless search for new faces. I think part of the thing from a magazine proprietor’s point of view is that one’s always trying to make one’s editorial better than the advertising, and if you have your advertising photographed by the same photographers using the same girls as the editorial, the magazine has a sort of curious sameness; it goes right through. So we’re always trying to find a new girl for editorial, and as soon as you find a new girl the advertisers want to use her, and as soon as they start to use her the Americans want to use her, so there’s this terrific turnover of girls.”

And Clare Wrendlesham, Fashion Editress of the same paper was “terribly glad that Jean has gone to New York because the photographers will have to train new talent.”

A goddess can lose favour. But worse still, a goddess can start believing her own myth. “If you’re told every day how wonderful and how fabulous you are and what a wonderful person you are, and you’re the best, the most desired girl in the world – the fashion world anyway — it’s very difficult to keep control and this,” said David Bailey, “this is going to be Jean’s problem. What she must watch now is this image thing. Top Models become this sort of great image, and then they start believing they really are the image. That’s the terrifying thing.”

Jean Shrimpton was to have married David Bailey on 2nd June, a week after the programme. The wedding did not take place – but the photographs go on being taken — every day, every hour. At twenty-one, Jean Shrimpton has become an international name with a five-figure income, simply by looking beautiful. She can go no farther as a model. Where can she go?

Said Jean herself, “I’m not very bright at making decisions, but I think I’m shrewder than I was a year ago. If I’m in a film it’d have to be a film that had a character like me in which I could be almost myself, you know. In ten years time I’d like to be married and have a home of my own – I could have animals there and I’d have a donkey in the field or something – I love donkeys.

“Life’s been pretty good,” she added.

Indeed life has been good for Jean Shrimpton who had the luck to have the face of 1964.