The International Model

With the winter fashion showings only a week away, Parisian newsmen should have their eyes on hemlines, but their attention was drawn instead to the girls inside the dresses. "Too many foreigners!" cried Lucy ("Lucky") Janichevski, 33, who despite her Polish name is native French and has been Paris' top mannequin for a long time. The late Christian Dior once described her as "couture become theater--from a dress she can make, at her pleasure, a comedy or a drama." Now Lucky was on the warpath. "If a model has a foreign accent, she gets paid more," Lucky charged. "These young girls arrive here in Paris by the tens and twenties and thirties."

Social Security. Lucky's real target was another aging model, raven-haired Dorian Leigh, 41, the elder sister of Suzy Parker and the 1940s queen of New York high fashion. Last week Dorian sat behind the kidney-shaped, Victorian desk of her model company in London, kept an eye on a red phone for overseas calls, a black phone for clients, an olive phone for the models, and purred out her reply: "Twice a year, before the collections, Lucky mounts the same fatuous warhorse. And at a time when the French government and I are working together to get models covered by social security--she's being unfair to her profession."

The rub is that Dorian has bested Lucky on her own home ground--and in two years has revolutionized Paris modeling. She did it simply by starting the city's first successful agency (partly to take her mind off the Marquis de Portago, who fathered her fourth child but died in a 1957 auto racing accident before he got around either to marrying her or adopting the boy). Her first business problem was a French law that forbids charging a fee for finding someone employment (a clause she evaded by charging the fee to magazines or photographers rather than to the models). She also had trouble with the police. "Any time someone gathers a group of girls together for employment purposes in France," she says, "the police are bound to think you're up to no good."

Today she commands the field, with 115 models in Paris, and branch offices in Hamburg and London. Says Dorian: "I have just a logical American mind--it was like inventing the safety pin." Lucky, after her own model agency flopped, opened a modeling school, but few of her graduates even make the cabines, the stables of mannequins at top fashion houses (who earn only about $100 a month), and none have broken through into the $20-an-hour field of fashion photography that is the specialty of Dorian's girls.

Wellborn Babes. Dorian scouts the world for new talent, has helped make the Parisian model market so cosmopolitan that perhaps not even De Gaulle himself could turn back the clock. Among the season's best: trim and Finnish Brigitte Juslin, who is tops in sportswear; Switzerland's dark, blue-eyed Carla Marlier; Germany's Nico Ozack ("a magnificent Renoir body--in the nude she doesn't look like a model at all"); Jasmine, ex-shepherdess from Algeria, who gained her poise carrying water jugs on her head. The favorite in the February Harper's Bazaar is Italy's Viviane, known as "La Divine" for reasons explained by a friend: "Such a divine bosom for such fabulously slim proportions elsewhere."

Dorian claims that her major service has been to upgrade the status of modeling in France, has made it so respectable that it has attracted not only French but wellborn girls of all nationalities. The current Paris roster, she points out, now includes David Niven's twin nieces. Playwright Jean Anouilh's daughter Catherine, Tony Trabert's wife Shawn, along with a princess, a countess, and nieces of Dean Acheson and Paul-Henri Spaak.

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