Making Magic with a Funny Face

When Lauren Hutton started displaying herself for pay seven years ago, the ultimate fashion model was Veruschka, who was as tall as a basketball player, thin as an eyebrow pencil and mysterious as an Ingmar Bergman heroine. By those standards Hutton seemed to be in the wrong game. She is only 5 ft. 7 1/2 in.--slightly below average for a mannequin. Worse, by her own rather exaggerated reckoning, she has a "lopsided face, crossed eyes, a bumpy nose, and a Huckleberry Finn gap between my front teeth." When Photographer Richard Avedon first saw her, he wrote her off as not having enough "intensity." He thought she was too much like "a Florida type on water skis -- just another pretty girl."

Hutton, now 28, still looks orange-juice wholesome, and her funny flaws remain. Tastes change, however, and Hutton has become modeling's new superstar. Her 19th Vogue cover will appear in October. She is now getting film offers and requests to appear on the Carson, Cavett, Griffin and Sally Quinn shows. Recently she got one of her profession's great plums by signing to appear in all magazine and TV ads for Charles Revson's Ultima II cosmetics line. That two-year contract alone will bring her about $400,000.

What makes any face so magically salable? Hutton herself is not sure: "There is no work anybody does to justify such enormous sums. But that is the situation I am in, right or wrong."

The negotiations with Revson took months. Hutton recalls that "he sobbed, he gasped, he clutched his chest." In the end he also met her price. Revson, chairman of the Revlon Co., knew what he was after. Back in the '50s he built a successful campaign around Suzy Parker. For Ultima II, his high-priced line, he also wanted someone special.

A persona to sell cosmetics must have a much more subtle appeal than one hawking dresses, furs or bras. Garments speak for themselves, and the wearer must simply show them to good advantage. Makeup is something else. It blends with the face, and the potential customer cannot distinguish the product apart from the package. So Revson bought the exclusive advertising rights to Hutton's image because she has a "reachable, nonremote" quality. "She is a symbol," he says, "of the ability of the American woman to achieve beauty despite isolated features not in themselves beautiful."

Avedon believes that "all the great models are exceptions to the rule. Twiggy was too small, Parker too tall, Veruschka too eccentric, Jean Shrimpton too vacuous. Lauren is too ordinary." Vogue Editor in Chief Grace Mirabella says: "Year after year she gets better looking. It's the mood of the girl that comes through. She is a direct, strong, intelligent, straight woman. There's nothing chichi."

Hutton's background apparently immunized her against chichiness. Born in Charleston, S.C., reared in southern Florida, Mary Laurence Hutton led a tomboy's existence. She learned woodsmanship, fishing and baby-alligator trapping from her stepfather, Jack Hall. (Hutton is the name of her real father, who died after her parents separated; Lauren she borrowed from Bacall.) A scruffy, skinny girl whom the kids called "the yellow wax bean," she earned her first pennies selling worms to fishermen. It took a matchmaking teacher to get her an escort for the senior prom. She wore blue jeans all through high school, tossing a dress over them to get around the anti-dungaree regulations. "I looked like a drag queen," she recalls.

Between the times she dropped out of two colleges--the University of Southern Florida and then Sophie Newcombe in New Orleans--she came to New York in 1964 looking for a job. She landed one--as a Playboy Bunny. "I was always afraid of being fired for having my ears on wrong. It was all so dopey--like Girl Scout camp."

Hutton's start in modeling was almost accidental. She was in New York, intending to leave for Africa on a whim, when she answered an ad for a house model at Christian Dior's salon. "I conned them into thinking I had modeled before," she says. "I just watched the other girls do their pirouettes and imitated them." The job was hers--at $50 a week. Not everybody was so cooperative, however.

When she tried to find a modeling agency to handle her, they all turned her down. Finally, in 1966, she found one taker, the Ford Agency, which happened to be the best in town. "Eileen Ford said she'd hire me if I got my teeth and nose fixed. I said I would when I had the money, but I figured it might take me a while to get around to it--if ever." That time never came. That gapless smile in ads is not a sign of capitulation. It is a result of a tiny false tooth Hutton inserts when working.

"You can teach a person how to make up, lose weight, stand, work before a camera, but you can't impart that special instinct a great model has," says Eileen Ford of her longtime protegee. Diana Vreeland, onetime editor of Vogue, spotted it early in the game. Watching Lauren at a shoot one day, Vreeland told the then second-string model: "You have presence." That appraisal landed Hutton on Vreeland's picture pages, and on the pages of many other magazines from then on.

At Richard Avedon's spartanly white studio on the East Side of Manhattan, that presence is quite evident. Hutton is the calm center of the storm of activity swirling around her. As she lounges on a sofa in her slinky red-sequined snakeskin dress. Hairdresser Ara Gallant deftly recombs her honey-blonde hair for the umpteenth time.

China Machado, the stylist, dollies in to arrange the folds of a scarf with the care of Michelangelo planning the folds on the Pieta. Sitting immobile for hours at a time has its problems: "My muscles begin to shake after a while. Sometimes the tears start to flow from pain, and we have to airbrush them out of the picture." Such discomfort, of course, cannot be allowed into the photographs.

"You must create a mood, an ambience," says Hutton. Wrapped in a scruffy blue towel, preparing for a session, she takes extreme pains to transform her face with makeup--glopping a brownish base on her neck to create "shadows," penciling in an outline around the lips to make them look more even. To even out her jaw--the left side is minutely larger than the right--she adds bronze gel to one side.

No Underwear. Off the set. Hutton rejects the glamour role completely. So far she has turned down talk-show invitations because she thinks that the hosts are "putdown artists," and she does not have anything interesting to say--at least not yet. "It would be pretentious for me to come on and say, 'O.K., folks, let's stop killing whales.' "

Her style is offhand. California hip rather than Gotham sophisticate, and four-letter words stud her rap. She avoids high-fashion designer clothes, prefers casual wear such as blue jeans, pants and sweater outfits, often teamed with a crazy hat and tennis shoes. She does not own a shred of underwear --just a head-to-toe tan.

Home is a former sculptor's smallish skylighted studio in Greenwich Village, which she shares with her boyfriend of eight years. Bob Williamson, a "freelance stock speculator." Marriage? "Great for taxes, necessary for children, but abominable for romance." Hutton also boycotts the uptown party scene: "I feel foolish in that kind of setup, and I think those people would feel foolish in mine." Lauren and Bob divide household chores because "I've never had a maid and don't want one. If you've got more things than you can take care of yourself, you've got too much." What they do have is old Moroccan rugs, Mexican hammocks, African fur throws and several cases of mounted insects and butterflies, which Lauren collects.

She could certainly afford a grander way of life, but prefers to sock her money away in "safe investments. I found out early in the game there is freedom in money. You can buy time with it." One extravagance Lauren indulges in recklessly is travel. Ignoring the advice of agents and business associates, she takes off as frequently as she can for far points--Malaysia, Africa, Nepal, Central America. The choice is simple. "We just find out where it is tourists are absolutely not supposed to go and strike out for there."

No Garbage. She also has a career itinerary in mind. From the beginning, Hutton has wanted to be an actress. Some of her contemporaries --Cybill Shepherd, Jennifer O'Neill, Ali MacGraw--have gone to Hollywood. Ironically, Hutton began a film career before any of them. Starting with Paper Lion in 1968, she went on to make three other mediocre films. But her career fizzled when she turned down other offers ("Some garbage you just can't eat") and got a reputation for being difficult. She also got depressed about her future. Often she is compared to one of her personal heroines, Suzy Parker, the top model who faded from Hollywood after four film tries.

Discouragement or no. Hutton is determined to transfer that special quality she has before still cameras to the movies. Reason: "Modeling is psychological lemonade compared with acting. When you make an emotion that others see and recognize, then you are flying." She will have a chance to "fly" again. Following the Revson contract, she immediately got two movie offers. She has already accepted--and begun shooting--one of them: Paramount's The Gambler, in which she is directed by Karel Reisz. James Caan costars.

At a time of life when most models begin to think of marrying a rich man and retiring to a Park Avenue duplex, Hutton is just beginning to hit her stride. "I have started coming together," she says. "I'm older, smarter, more comfortable with what I am now.

Consequently I look better." But her famous self-confidence vanishes for just a moment. Perhaps thinking of that once failed film career, she says, "There's always a surprise. I keep looking for that banana peel."

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