Biography

[following her role in Brute Force (1947)] I don't want to act. I want to get into the executive end of the [film] business.

[about her early acting career, prior to her staff job at "Harper's Bazaar"] I said I was going to be a top model, and I was. Then I had five offers from Hollywood. I went out there and found everything easy. I was earning more than Lucille Ball and Joan Fontaine. I was sure I was going to be a star any day, so I didn't do any work. Suddenly I awoke to the fact that I wasn't getting anywhere. Brokenhearted, I went back to New York, determined never to go to Hollywood again.

Of course I take beautiful photographs. That's because I know how to use make-up. I'm nothing unusual to look at in real life. But the men who make movies, even though they know what make-up can do for their stars, don't seem to realize that a model's beauty may be all artificial. They sign us up, and then comes the awful shock! We're not beautiful, except when our faces are re-done and are in repose. And then they lose interest in us.

[on how she became a model] I was 19 and dancing at the Georgetown prom. In came a cover girl, and would you believe it, all the other girls were left stranded on the wall. All the men went for that cover girl! I vowed then and there that I would be a cover girl, though I didn't have the least idea how to go about it. I was in an elevator in New York a little later and Harry Conover--he was then a model but now he has his own agency--asked me if I was a model. I was flattered and said I'd like to be. So he sent me to John Robert Powers and I became a model.