Written by Penelope Green
Barbara Stone, who as an agent nurtured fashions together with Cheryl Tiegs, Cybill Shepherd and a younger Martha Stewart, died on April 26 at a hospital in Roslyn, New York, on Long Island. She was 87.
Her daughter, Julie Stone, stated the trigger was congestive coronary heart failure.
It was the early Nineteen Sixties, nonetheless the period of dual units and pearls, of white gloves and white faces on the covers of magazines like Seventeen, Glamour and Vogue, when Stone was employed by Stewart Cowley, a former theatrical agent, to run his firm, Stewart Models. A former cheerleader from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, she would in a short while assist make Stewart the No. 2 company in New York — the Avis, as Michael Gross, the creator of “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,” put it, to Eileen Ford’s Hertz.
Stone had a really feel for fresh-faced American blondes, although inside a decade Stewart Models had additionally scooped up Twiggy, the angular British gamine in any other case often called Lesley Hornby, and Veruschka, the towering German countess. She was strict about comportment and punctuality; agency but type to her younger fees, a lot of whom had been nonetheless in highschool; and a reassuring presence to their anxious dad and mom.
She usually managed her purchasers’ cash, doling out a weekly allowance, as she did for Lucy Angle, a 16-year-old mannequin then thought of an American Twiggy — “the same no-figure figure,” as Eugenia Sheppard, the style columnist, wrote in 1967 — together with airplane fare dwelling to Washington to see her mom.
“Barbara was our mother, our modeling mother,” stated Martha Stewart, who was then Martha Kostyra, working to pay her Barnard College tuition along with her modeling earnings. “Agents in those days were very proper. I remember getting a call from her telling me to iron my clothes. I was in Paris, and someone had complained because I had shown up wearing a dress I’d packed that was wrinkled from the suitcase. Barbara was our mother hen.”
But Stone was hardly a pushover. “She was no-nonsense,” stated Bonnie Trompeter, who was 14 when she began modeling (and was the topic of a canopy article in Life journal, “Discovering the Fun of Being Pretty”), and simply 17 when she was a glamour woman in ads for Parliament cigarettes. “She ran a tight ship. We had to show up on time, with our hair done and our makeup on. There were no divas in those days.”
Stone had a superb eye for expertise. Scouting fashions for a tv pageant known as “Model of the Year” in 1967, for which the winner and the 2 runners-up acquired a yr’s modeling contract, Stone advised a reporter how she made her selections.
“It’s really unexplainable,” she stated, “like charisma. I can look at a girl and instinctively know that she has that quality. It’s just something — a certain thing about certain girls. They have a spirit — a freshness that projects. It’s in the way they walk. They don’t tread. They seem to be walking on air.”
Baraba Stone had labored for Maybelline. She additionally printed a literary journal, Hampton Shorts, which contained quick fiction from writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, Judith Rossner, Joseph Heller and Spalding Grey. ( Source : New York Times )
In 1968, Cybill Shepherd, then simply 18, gained the pageant.
Cheryl Tiegs, the California woman who would go on to change into a family identify because the face of Cover Girl make-up, was in school when she met Stone. Ford was additionally wooing her, however she selected Stewart Models as a result of, she stated, Stone put her comfy.
Barbara Sue Thorbahn was born on Nov. 20, 1933, in Philadelphia. Her father, Stewart, was a newspaper reporter and editor; her mom, Alice (McGinley) Thorbahn, was a homemaker.
Barbara grew up in Swarthmore and graduated from Swarthmore High School, the place she was voted almost certainly to succeed, earlier than attending Gettysburg College. An early marriage to George Frederic Pelham III resulted in divorce. In 1964 she married Richard Stone, who was then {a magazine} illustrator and later a industrial director and painter. He survives her, alongside along with her daughter and a son, Lucas.
Stone left the modeling enterprise within the mid-Nineteen Seventies. For a time she had a manufacturing firm and made quick magnificence spots for tv. She additionally labored for Maybelline and was briefly an actual property agent. From 1996 to 2003 she printed a literary journal, Hampton Shorts, which contained quick fiction from writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, Judith Rossner, Joseph Heller and Spalding Grey.
In her modeling days — when she was “the lady vice president” of her company, as a male reporter for The Daily News as soon as described her — she and her husband lived on the El Dorado on Central Park West, and invariably a number of of her fashions can be staying with them, an in loco parentis association that started to put on on Barbara Stone’s precise household.
Richard Stone remembered waking up one morning, wanting ahead to placing a salmon dip his spouse had made the night time earlier than on his bagel for breakfast. When he arrived within the kitchen, he discovered {that a} mannequin had licked the bowl clear. “It all got to be a bit too much,” he stated.
Barbara Stone and her husband threw events for enterprise, intimate omelet dinners of their residence and larger bashes, together with one at a city home in Kips Bay, Richard Stone recalled. When a gaggle of younger British males arrived at that exact occasion, issues had already gotten out of hand and there was a crush of company, he recalled, so he turned them away.
“You’re not on the list,” he remembered saying. “Don’t you know who we are?” they protested. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Richard Stone advised them. Neither of the Stones had any thought the younger males had been the Rolling Stones.
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