Barbara Mullen

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Barbara Mullen was another New York kid; the same age as Dovima, and - for a few short years - equally famous. But Mullen is an enigma: in nearly every picture I’d seen of her she was shot in motion (neck craned, waist bent, impossibly slender arms and hands woven into graceful arabesques), but with face angled into shadow, or turned altogether away. And in Lillian Bassman’s photographs - the images by which she’s chiefly, if at all, remembered - she was blurred out to the point of abstraction.

"The replacement girl walked in. I said to the editor, ‘This girl is a monster.’ Then I turned on the lens and saw this girl just bloom like a flower … In Paris everyone said she was horrible, but as soon as they started drawing her they thought she was wonderful. The way she responded to the light … "

Lillian Bassman in conversation with David Bailey, Models Close Up, 1998

A tough, foul-mouthed, horrible monster; it’s quite a way to talk about a girl who was Klein’s favourite model, and Bassman’s adored collaborator; a girl who began the Forties as a schoolchild from 49th Street in Queens, and ended them modelling couture at the Ritz. Mullen went from reluctant beautician to low-paid house mannequin at Bergdorf Goodman, to stardom as one of Eileen and Jerry Ford’s earliest (and greatest) recruits, with a combination of slim, endless limbs, small head and minuscule waist that made her body the perfect fit for the era’s blossoming New Look shapes.

Open any issue of Vogue or Harper’s from 1949 till about 1956 and Mullen is there, shot by Horst, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, John Rawlings, Norman Parkinson  or Richard Avedon. A collision of startled Betty Boop eyes and porcelain skin and rosebud lips, selling America everything from twin-sets to convertibles to face cream with a twist of her perfectly arched eyebrows.

And with the right lighting, at the right angle, she was - as Bassman said - ‘glorious’. Undereye bags could be concealed, her gap-toothed smile muted, and in an instant Mullen became whoever she was need to be: preppy teenager or poised housewife, chic international jet-setter or fresh-faced girl-next-door.

'Mr. and Mrs. James C. Punderford Jr., popular young New York socialites, say,” We smoke Herbert Tareyton because the genuine cork tip is always so clean and firm.” '

Advertisement in LIFE, April 1954

But Mullen was, by the double-standards of the Fifties, a bad girl -  or at the very least a fast one. Out of frame, she drank, and smoked, and partied all night. She shocked hotel guests on magazine location shoots, by dressing up in mens’ clothing and dancing with the female fashion editors. Francesco Scavullo (then an up-and-coming photographer’s assistant) claimed she’d had an affair with him - and then summarily ditched him.

That wasn’t, of course, how she was presented at the time. To the world, as pitched by the Ford Agency, she was Mrs. Jim Punderford Jr,: attractively supportive wife first, and supermodel a distant second. In May 1955, Popular Photography magazine ran a feature on the women it called the ‘Big Four’ (Mullen, Dovima, Jean Patchett and Evelyn Tripp) It’s a demure, strangely prophetic companion to Peter Lindbergh’s iconic shot of the ‘90’s supers; the photographer, George Barris, marvels at the models’ unearthly grace and astronomic $50-an-hour rates - but grounds them securely in a world of picture-perfect picket-fenced bliss.

And for a short time, Mullen and her husband were precisely the perfect country-club couple they seemed. But a few months after their Tareyton cigarettes ad ran in LIFE, Jim had fallen ill: and by the time her 'Big Four' cover hit the news stands he was dying of brain cancer. Mullen - stoked up with pills and whisky - was working herself into the ground to cover his medical bills. And in the middle of it all, earlier that spring, she’d embarked on an affair with agency boss Jerry Ford.

'Each of the Big Four commands a few of fifty (count 'em) dollars an hour. Their working hours are generally from 10 to 4.30, with double for overtime to discourage clients from interfering in the girls' private lives. All four are married; Barbara Mullen designs interiors and washes dishes as charity work for a hospital, Evelyn Tripp lives and works on a farm in New Jersey, Jean Patchett plays golf, Dovima Horan likes to go to Europe at short notice … '

George Barris, Popular Photography, May 1955

Jim Punderford died, and Eileen Ford (allegedly) discovered the affair. And at 28, Mullen found her career was over. She continued to work until the early Sixties, on and off, for Parkinson and Avedon and Klein - but mainly in Europe, far away from the past. And in 1958, on vacation in Klosters, she met a teenage ski instructor called Fredi Morel. After they married, she opened a small boutique there, and (as far as New York and the modelling world were concerned) vanished.

In hindsight, she might have done better had she been born a few decades later. By the Nineties, her exaggerated cartoon features and long, spindly limbs would have fit comfortably into the slipstream of other ugly-duckling swans like Erin O’Connor or Kristen McMenamy. And by then - as Linda Evangelista could have told her - sleeping with your agency boss was no longer a career killer.

And yet, of the four beautiful women on that magazine cover from 1955, Mullen is the only one still here. Of the models from that era, the good girls moved to the suburbs, and died quietly and early; and the other bad girls, by and large, crashed and burned. And the rest got lost the moment they stepped out of the moment of those unforgettable images, and back into the far less black-and-white real world.

In 2011, on a local TV station in New Mexico, Barbara Mullen reappeared; now a serene 83-year old, sitting quietly beside Fredi whilst an eager interviewer prodded them for the secrets to a happy marriage. In their overfilled adobe bungalow, they seemed the essence of unexceptional, faded American domesticity. But even fifty years on, those violent, too-big-for-anyone’s-face eyes and extravagantly elegant hands are unmistakable.

And this summer, in the tiniest of ways, Mullen made a comeback. Lillian Bassman’s death in February reminded the world of her work, and Mullen’s name (like those of Margy Cato, and Anne-Marie Saint, and Mary Jane Russell) began to resurface, in small print captions underneath those extraordinarily intimate images. Images which Bassman, in her darkroom, had bleached, and burned, and blurred out of all recognition. And so, on Tumblr and Pinterest, she’s enjoying a kind of afterlife, alongside all those other icons of what Barris called the decade’s ‘impersonal’ beauty. Perfect, abstract, interchangeable (and as often as not, mistaken for one another); a generation of invisible, anonymous girls whose work was a universe away from the decade of blow-ups and snap-shots and Technicoloured celebrity full-frontals that would follow. 

But between 1962 and 2012 there’s half a century of silence, broken only by William Klein giving Mullen yet another of his strangely backhanded compliments. In 1999, asked by the French magazine Photo to choose his image of the century, he nominated one of himself. And this time Mullen was as invisible and anonymous as always; but this time out of frame altogether - behind the lens, and taking the shot.

 

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Vogue Usa

 

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Vogue UK