”Eileen Ford is the mother, the “godmother” of all modeling agencies. She was sometimes challenge, but never matched, and she also incidentally introduced me to my wife Sondra”. These are Daniel Filipacchi’s words on the occasion of Eileen’s 90th birthday and it is writer Robert Lacey who provides her portrait.

This is the Diamond Jubilee year of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. And it is also the year in which America’s Queen of modeling, and the Queen Mother of modern modeling all over the world, is celebrating two anniversaries of her own. It is sixty-five years this month since Eileen Otte Ford opened her ground-breaking model agency in New York (in the spring of 1947) with her husband Jerry, and this Sunday, March 25th 2012, she also celebrates her ninetieth birthday.

Jerry, who provided both the name and the financial expertise behind the famous agency that set new standards in the fashion world, died in 2008, but this Sunday’s hundred-strong celebration at the Standard Hotel, New York (the latest hotspot of her former son-in-law Andre Balazs), will be very much a family affair. Leading the festivities will be Eileen’s three daughters, Jamie, Katie and Lacey, her son Bill, plus eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, all ‘marvellous human beings’ Eileen told the London Times in a major profile published last week. www.erinsmodelsanctuary.com/erin-oconnor/

For Eileen, taking advantage of a girl could include keeping a model beyond the time for which she had been booked. The young Richard Avedon lived in fear of Ford wrath if a photo session stretched out longer than intended.

“I remember him quite losing his cool and dashing to the phone when the session started running late,” recalls Bianchi, whose gamine, Audrey Hepburn looks kept the photographer snapping more than he expected. “The poor man couldn’t concentrate until he’d made certain Eileen would let him have the extra half hour – and, of course, he had to pay extra for it.”

Making money for the girls, and hence for the agency, was the cornerstone of the Fords’ success. In 1947 models were engaged for a flat fee, and on an entirely provisional basis. If rain fell on an open air shoot, the models were sent home without a penny.

Jerry Ford changed that immediately. Clients had to pay for the time they booked, whether they made use of it or not – and as the years went by, he negotiated what was effectively a royalty system on advertising jobs: so much for the session itself, with so much extra for a full page or half page; an extra fee was due if the image was used on the packaging, and there was still more money if the package was reproduced on a store card or hand-out.

Girls could go on earning for months, if not years, after the shutter had clicked, the basis of the multi-millionaire dollar incomes earned today by the supermodels. Ford had its share in its heyday, Suzie Parker, Dorian Leigh, Dovima, Jean Patchett, Lauren Hutton, Sonny Griffin, Beverly Johnson, Jerry Hall, Chanel Iman, Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington, Karen Graham, Naomi Campbell, Elle MacPherson, Brook Shields, Stephanie Seymour, Patricia Velasquez, Rachel Hunter, Veronica Webb, Crystal Renn, as well as the evergreen Carmen, and models-turned actresses like Tippi Hedren, Ali MacGraw, Maud Adams (Octopussy), Veronica Hamel, Rene Rousso, Kim Basinger and Candice Bergen.

These dazzling Ford girls make up a unique roll call of some of the greatest names in the fashion business. But there is a sense in which every modern model and supermodel, no matter what their management, is a product and beneficiary of how Jerry and Eileen Ford transformed the practices of the modern modeling industry.

Robert Lacey

Robert Lacey, author of Majesty, The Kingdom is currently writing an account of Eileen Ford and the growth of the modern world modeling industry that is slated for publication by HarperCollins in 2013. TV drama rights have been secured by Fox Television Studios who are currently developing the project under the working title Model Woman.