Oh, So Beautiful: Here’s How Texan Suzy Parker Became The World’s First Supermodel

The San Antonio-Born Texan Graced Magazine Covers, Was Revlon’s Most Desired Model, And Then Became A Movie Star. She Was The American Success Story

Suzy Parker was the world’s first supermodel and single-handedly defined elegance, to become an icon for an entire generation of post-war women who hungered for the sophistication and prosperity reflected in fashion’s New Look from the late 1940s into the 1960s. Here, our pop culture arbiter Lance Avery Morgan reveals how the native San Antonian Parker used beauty as her calling card for a life of unimaginable glamour. 

Photography Courtesy of Archival Photography

Mid-20th-century lens luminaries such as Avedon, Penn, and Horst captured Suzy Parker’s elegance, a style that has rarely been duplicated since then. She made their jobs easy because the native Texan redhead was known for her striking green eyes, luxurious auburn hair, and high cheekbones. “I thank God for high cheekbones every time I look into the mirror in the morning,” she once commented, in her trademark tongue-in-cheek humor. Fashion industry leaders of the era, such as Edie Locke, the former editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, viewed Parker as a one-of-a-kind star when she began modeling. “A lot of the models are beautiful, but it takes a lot of makeup and this, that, and the other trick to make them look fabulous,” Locke once stated. “But, all Suzy had to do was shake out that mane, and she’d look fabulous.” The late San Antonio resident Nancy Holmes, who often worked with Parker in her fashion career, also felt that the model’s thick tresses were one of the key secrets to her success.

More Than A Pretty Face

Born in 1932 in San Antonio, as a child of the Depression, to an inventor and his homemaker wife, Cecilia Ann Renee Parker’s road to fabulousness started young before she became known as Suzy Parker. Dorian Leigh, Parker’s eldest sister, was the one who first encouraged her curiosity about the modeling world. Leigh had been a magazine cover model superstar since the early 1940s. In 1947, she introduced her 14-year-old sister to high fashion by taking her to see now-legendary modeling agent Eileen Ford.

The agent’s initial impression was not positive, commenting that 5’9″, Parker was too tall to be a successful model. Yet, she moved forward and began modeling during her summer vacations in New York while visiting her sister. But, Ford finally came around, asserting, “She was the most beautiful creature you can imagine; she was everybody’s everything.” Diana Vreeland, fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar for 25 years and then editor-in-chief of Vogue, disagreed with Ford’s first reaction and immediately placed Parker in fashion shoots that would chart the course for a successful career beyond her wildest imagination.

As Parker’s ascent to supermodeldom began, her appeal transcended mere beauty. In the fickle fashion industry, she garnered acclaim as a true fashion chameleon—she could don a simple gingham dress for the mainstream cover of McCall’s and then slip into a voluminous Charles James couture gown for a high-fashion cover of Vogue, looking entirely appropriate in each.

As Parker told Andrew Tobias in his tome on Charles Revson’s Revlon beauty empire, Fire & Ice, “[Revson]thought I should be working for the sheer joy of working for Revlon. I think I was a good model, not because I was such a particular beauty or anything, but I am as strong as a horse.” Yet, after a contract dispute with Revson, the strong-willed model commented, “The next time they wanted me for an ad, I said, ‘No, thank you.’ Then, the war was on. He hated me. He absolutely hated me.” Regardless, the rest of the world adored Parker and her bewitching beauty, and she continued to pose in several hundred other ads throughout her career beyond Revlon.

After a short while, her national fame shot overseas to the international crowd, making her a global hit. The London Times called her “the epitome of the new American woman: healthy, assured, and in charge of her life.” Because of Parker’s flexible style, a fashion editor also observed that Parker “was like a girl you might glimpse in between planes at DeGaulle, wearing only a trench coat, with a mysterious secret.” She was more than just a symbol to women. Parker was the kind of woman most Med Men-era males wanted to take for a moonlit swim, in the vernacular of the times.

“The Most Beautiful Woman In The World”                                                                           

With her sparkling green eyes offset by slouch hats and a slew of Coco Chanel classic numbers, Parker inspired millions of women to aspire to her perfectly proportioned figure. Christian Dior went so far as to name her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Yet, she was so much more than met the eye. “Suzy Parker gave emotion and reality to the history of fashion photography,” photographer Richard Avedon once explained. “She invented the form, and no one has surpassed her.” It took only one look at an Avedon-Parker collaboration to glimpse her mystique. “Suzy Parker’s imagination and ability to perform to Richard Avedon’s imagination and direction was brilliant,” veteran photographer Victor Skrebneski shared. “Their photographs will always remain the first original high fashion statements of their time.”

The high-fashion life is precisely what Parker sought. As she once said about herself, she wanted “a life in pursuit of fun, bright lights and career.” In 1952, she became the star in Chanel’s stable of mannequins as the designer’s signature face. After eight decades of modeling, the silver-haired Carmen Dell’Orefice, still widely known as Carmen, likely knew best what working with Parker was really like. She understood that Parker had gained fame as an international celebrity, a status previously reserved for only movie stars and royalty. “She was a Southern beauty to behold: tall, lanky, with a million-dollar dimpled cheek smile, she implemented her success by her self-confidence and intelligence… and that unrelentingly scathing wit,” reflected Dell’Orefice.

Of course, that elusive essence also contributed to her financial success. In the 1950s, when successful career women were much less common and when women regularly earned 30 cents on the dollar of what any man earned in the same position, Parker soon rose to the top of her field as the world’s highest-paid model, earning $100,000 a year (accumulated from $200-an-hour photo sittings and would be, adjusted for inflation, well over a million dollars today) and posed for over 60 magazine covers and several hundred advertisements. She appeared in everything from a cover story in Life in 1957 to the cover of Esquire in 1961…and offered something for everyone. She even appeared on album covers. Parker’s face was so ubiquitous that she was the first fashion model to become a household name. When she posed in one of fashion’s first bikini shots while visiting the French Riviera, it was the shot heard ‘round the fashion world.

New York To Hollywood

In 1957, while at her modeling career’s zenith, Parker made her Tinseltown debut in the musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. The film parodied fashion magazines and French couture, and she performed in a musical number, Think Pink, which spoofed fashion editors such as her mentor, Diana Vreeland. Interestingly, Hepburn’s character in Stanley Donen’s musical comedy was loosely based on Parker and her professional relationship with Richard Avedon, with Astaire in the Svengali-esque Avedon role. The film symbolizes the best of high fashion in that era, and Hepburn and Parker became pals during the shoot. In fact, Hepburn became such a cheerleader that Parker called the swan-like actress her ”Hollywood press agent.” Perhaps Parker and film were a match made in heaven. ”Suzy Parker didn’t stop talking when I first tried to take her picture,” superstar fashion photographer Horst P. Horst once remarked. “So, I said, ‘You keep talking,’ and left. When she got into the movies, I joked that maybe she would do for the movies what she would never do for me—to hold still.”

Parker’s first significant role was opposite the legendary Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me, also released in 1957. Jayne Mansfield played the female lead, and the film effectively displayed Parker’s graceful good looks. “I watched myself on the screen with a sort of frozen horror,” Parker said at the time, “And I wasn’t at all surprised to learn it had a similar effect on the audience.” Announcing that she intended to become a good actress “if it kills me,” Parker moved on to other redeeming roles that lured audiences of the time. “Parker’s trademark in photographs and later on the movie screen was icy sophistication, often likened to that of Grace Kelly,” wrote The New York Times writer Douglas Martin. “But in person, she exuded a girl–next–door prettiness and a wacky loquaciousness. Critics did not always favor her thespian talents, but in New York and Hollywood circles, she was considered entertaining, funny, and possessed a meaningful intellect.”

In 1958, she co-starred with Gary Cooper in Ten North Frederick, in the role of Cooper’s much younger girlfriend, and with their torrid May-December affair, she cost him his family. To cap off the decade, she appeared in 1959’s The Best of Everything, a modern melodrama, co-starring Hope Lange, Joan Crawford, and Robert Evans, in which she played a secretary trying to become an actress. In that film, her character’s lines summed up her life at the time: “The only thing I want is to be free, to have no ties. To have, to hold, and then to let go. Here’s to men: bless their clean-cut faces and dirty little minds.”

Best Wife And Mother.

Her 1960 film, Circle of Deception, would change her life by introducing her to her co-star and future husband, Bradford Dillman, whom she married three years later. Parker later undertook guest spots on popular television shows such as Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, Chrysler Theatre, and other popular shows of TV’s golden era. “She acted through the still camera brilliantly, but when she acted in front of the moving camera, she was not so free and comfortable,” revealed her stepdaughter, Pamela Dillman Harman, in an interview in the 2000s. “She said she wasn’t the actress she wanted to be, so she decided, ‘OK, I’m going to give up on this and devote my talents to being the best wife and mother,’ and she really was that.”

However, moments from Parker’s past are as inexplicable as her beauty. While engaged to actor and model Gardner McKay in 1956, they were returning from Paris on the ocean liner Ile de France, and the ship stopped to pick up survivors of the Andrea Doria. This luxury ocean liner shipwreck made international news at the time. In a terrible car accident in 1958, she broke both her arms, and her father was killed when the car collided with a train in Saint Augustine, Florida. It was also revealed that, at 17, she had eloped from high school to marry a childhood sweetheart, Charles Staton. Later, it emerged that Parker had also been secretly married since 1955 to a French journalist and novelist, Pierre La Salle. However, it did not last, and they divorced in 1961. As Parker told one interviewer, “Being married to a Frenchman is interesting—you hardly ever see your husband.” Parker once commented to a reporter that she believed the institution of marriage destroys love.

“All Suzy really wanted was love and a big family, which she finally achieved,” confided Carmen Dell’Orifice. Parker had escaped the jaded outcomes of other stellar models of her era, and the Dillmans moved from Los Angeles to Montecito in 1968 to live a quieter life with their children. Together, they raised six children: Ms. Parker’s daughter, Georgia, from her marriage to La Salle, two children from Dillman’s previous relationship, and the three children they had together: Dinah, Charles, and Christopher.

Suzy Parker passed away in May 2003 at the age of 70 following a history of ill health and medical problems that included respiratory problems, diabetes, and hip surgery. But despite her early passing, Parker proved it’s better to savor youth at its height than live it dully until 100.

She summed up her life in a quote she gave a journalist in the mid-1950s: “I don’t tell lies; I merely embellish stories—the truth is so dull.” One aspect of her life remains undeniably true: her life and beauty were anything but dull, and this perpetuates the theory that many of the most beautiful women in the world are from Texas.