THE SECRET TO INNER BEAUTY

a Story about Ophelia DeVore

by Melissa Sones

for American Legacy, Fall 2003, pp.20-30

Ophelia DeVore says that growing up she didn't realize she was graced with such looks. Nevertheless, at five feet seven inches tall, with long, lithe legs, a willowy body, a fac beloved by the camera, and hair that could easily be adapted to any style, she clearly possesses the characteristics of the American fashion model. As we speak, she outlines these ingredients objectively, as if they were the stats for a magnificent thoroughbred racehorse. The human version of which is just what Ophelia DeVore is.

The next thing I observe is that this woman is strikingly intelligent. I bet she could ace all those college courses that still give some of us migraines al these years later. After a stroke that has left her with few if any visible infirmities, it's the occasional Latin phrase she apologias for missing. It's no wonder then that one of her favorite mottos is: The secret to inner beauty is to take command of your mind.

What more than anything strikes the first-time visitor to DeVore's eclectic Manhattan aerie is her determination, hard-charging drive, and boundless ambition. You can't miss it. You also may feel a slight twinge of jealousy, since she is clearly one of those blessed individuals who know from the start what they want to do with their lives and go about it relentlessly--often seemingly without a hitch.

Childhood

Ophelia DeVore was born in 1922 in the small town of Edgefield, South Carolina, not far from the Georgia border. Her father, John Walter DeVore, was a tall, powerful, and charming white man of German and French descent who owned a road contracting business and was away from home a lot traveling. In slack periods, he bought and sold cattle. It was at his knee, DeVore says, that she learned how to sell and how to communicate well with people. In sharp contrast to her high-living, outgoing father, her mother, Mary Emma Strother, was quiet, reserved, bookish, and "an intellect," as DeVore puts it (Ophelia was named for the character in Hamlet). She was also a well-respected school teacher and church organist who was part African-American, part European-American, and part Native American.

Her parents' contrasting skin tones seem to have taught the young Ophelia that although in a perfect world looks don't matter, when it came to fitting in with what she calls the "image of America," they mattered a lot. "When you were multiracial in those days," she says, "you had to fight both. You had to fight the white and the black. The whites would call us niggers; the blacks would call us stringy-haired whites."

Her mother stressed education as well as the social graces, the arts, and the importance of appearance. "If you didn't carry yourself well," DeVore says, "it was a sign you just didn't have it." Like the debutantes of the day, the blossoming Ophelia was taught the importance of learning a talent--not to be brilliant at it but because that's what good girls from good families did. They also read the right books, did well in school, learned a foreign language, practiced good grooming, and were invariably polite.

Her mother taught her something else: She didn't have to be a victim of racism. She did this by forbidding the young Ophelia to go anyplace that was segregated (other than school and church)--which in 1920s and '30s Edgefield included "everything commercial." "If they didn't let us in the front," DeVore states matter-of-factly, "we weren't allowed to go there." As a result, the DeVore family unit became a little nation unto itself. And some unit it was. Her mother gave birth to 10 children in about 20 years. With seven of them lined up in a fading 8-by-10 photo, the multiracial brood could double for a meeting of the United Nations. And like their parents before them, the siblings chose to operate, as DeVore says, out of "different sides of their heritage," at least socially. Some lived in the white world, some in the Native American, some as "people of color." Ophelia could "pass," as she's wont to say, though she never intentionally did so; she says many people took her for Italian or Spanish.

She attended segregated schools in Edgefield until she was nine, when she went to live in Winston-Salem with her uncle, John Strother (he was a co-owner of the Safeway Bus Company, one of the only such black-owned enterprises in the country). When she was ii her parents sent her to New York City to live with her great-aunt Stella Carter to prevent further school interruptions as a result of her father's travels. She says she didn't experience the move to New York as a hardship or a form of abandonment; rather she was beginning to understand a crucial lesson: "I've learned you have to be independent emotionally," she told a reporter in 1984, "even more than financially or physically."

Early Modeling

At the age of 16, through a network of friends and relatives who considered her a good prospect, DeVore began doing some occasional modeling--a hard calling, for in the Depression year of 1938 there was essentially no modeling profession. "In those days there was very little work," she says. "Maybe one or two jobs."

In the meantime, she finished Hunter College High School, one of the most competitive in the country, and went on to New York University, where she majored in mathematics and minored in languages. In 1941 she married a New York City fireman named Harold Carter (he and his brother were among the first African-Americans in a previously all-white department), left school, and began raising a family of five--all the while studying fashion, public relations, and advertising, and focusing on a highly ambitious new challenge.

Her Own Agency

In 1946 DeVore and four friends launched one of the first modeling agencies in the United States aimed at the ethnic market. It was the brainchild of DeVore; Rupert Callendar and Albert Murphy, both photographers; Charles Mayo, an advertising-agency sales representative; and Marie Mayo, Charles's wife and a relative of DeVore's. They made up the name Grace Del Marco Agency and set up shop, if you could call it that, in the studio the two photographers shared in Corona, Queens. Marie handled recruiting, which at the outset consisted of asking friends, family, and organizations to recommend teenagers from prominent African-American families and sororities, where girls already had the training to carry themselves well enough to work as models.

The 24-year-old DeVore would soon find out that even the most promising girls needed a year of preparation before they could go to work, because African-Americans "had been excluded from the business world,'7 she says. And there was everything to learn. Fashion photographers had never shot people of color before; makeup artists needed to create new cosmetics, because none yet existed for darker skin tones. DeVore showed the girls how to walk, sit, and dress; she simultaneously enrolled in the Vogue School of Modeling on Fifth Avenue to enhance her own expertise. And there was diet and exercise too.

"There's a lot more to it than people think," she says. Moreover, when she sent the pioneering models out on jobs, some clients turned them away. "They weren't taking people of color, whether it was American people of color or other people of color," says DeVore. "Asians, Latinos, Mediterranean Europeans they didn't take either."

According to Barbara Summers, author of Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models, the other two first ethnic agencies, Brandford and Sepia Arts Models, arose about the same time as DeVore's, as did the mainstream Ford Models, Inc. Like Ford, says Summers, DeVore's agency brought professionalism and sophistication to an industry that had not always been known for either. Our World and Ebony magazines, both founded in 1946 and aimed at African-Americans, would play an important role in creating jobs for black models.

Even then modeling was a very lucrative business. A day's work posing for publicity shots, for instance, earned an average of $150, with DeVore's agency getting to percent. But with the jobs so scarce, DeVore's partners bailed out by 1948, "because they had to make a living," she says. Not long after, she moved her offices from Queens to Harlem and opened up a school to complement her modeling agency, calling it the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm. The idea was to provide a steady source of income that would compensate for meager agency bookings. The school would focus on "inner beauty," confidence-building, self-esteem, and "how to venture out and compete."

The Students

By the early 1950s DeVore's agency and school had begun to attract some African-American beauties who would go on to become well-known pioneers in fashion, television, and movies. At 16, while still in high school, Diahann Carroll (then Carol Diann Johnson) worked for DeVore as a receptionist. Cicely Tyson was both a model and teacher there. Over time, young would-be actors enrolled too, like Richard Roundtree, who went on to star in Shaft, Gail Fisher, of Mannix, Trudy Haynes, one of the first African-American female TV reporters, and Ellen Holly, of One Life to Live. Among the wives and children of U.N. diplomats from the emerging nations, DeVore's school became the place for social training, in large part because it was the only game in town.

Fashion Shows

Once DeVore was fully independent, nothing received her pioneering stamp more indelibly than the promotional fashion show, a historical breakthrough at a time when African-Americans were excluded from runways, fashion magazines, and other model agencies. She knew that the shows would be a smart way to bring in money--by producing them both for herself and for others. They also provided much-needed press attention for her businesses and her students, and gave the latter an opportunity to gain experience on a runway. In the early days, when DeVore visited the Seventh Avenue showroom of a New York City clothing manufacturer to solicit samples for a show, the company's chief executive didn't merely refuse to lend her clothes, he hid in his office. "So much misinformation had been printed about people of color," she says, "that people who didn't have any exposure would think we were from Mars." Nevertheless, the shows took place--on college campuses, in churches, and most often in the gilded ballrooms of the Diplomat and Waldorf-Astoria hotels.

France

DeVore's biggest breakthrough came courtesy of the French fashion world, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s was at its peak. The French found African-American images of beauty energetic and exotic. The dynamic Dorothea Towles, the first nationally known model of color, proved herself in Paris before succeeding at home. Helen Williams, whom DeVore calls the first African-American supermodel, also found Europe far more receptive. Christian Dior himself invited Williams to be photographed on his runways as part of a DeVore-organized marketing campaign. "Instead of working in my own country," says the model with some sadness, "I had to go to Paris." Meanwhile, in the United States, the famous couturier and French transplant Pauline Trigere hired the first full-time African-American showroom model, a DeVore protégé named Beverly Valdez.

Knowing the French were more open when it came to beauty, DeVore entered Cecilia Cooper, a five-foot-six 20-year-old secretary and dancer from New York City with deep dimples, in the 1959 Miss Festival beauty contest at the Cannes Film Festival. She won, an unprecedented gain for an African-American in any integrated contest. A year later, LeJeune Hundley, also a Grace Del Marco model, followed with another victory at Cannes. (Hundley found it a somewhat poignant moment: "for the first time I was considered not as a Negro but as a person.") Phyl Garland, the first African-American woman on the faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, whose mother worked with DeVore, calls DeVore's fashion and beauty efforts "revolutionary," because they marked the start of African-Americans being portrayed by the media as glamorous rather than as servants or mammies. And when she lined up Ballantine beer as a Cannes sponsor, at a time when many companies "were timid," says DeVore, "it showed that black is not only beautiful, it's also profitable."

The event also showcased DeVore's persistence. "In the beginning there was nothing out there, so I had to put events on constantly. I also had to subsidize the business in order to sustain it," she says. "We pushed hard," echoes Dee Simmons Edelstein, a former model and beauty queen and the current director of Grace Del Marco Models. From the start, DeVore gave seminars on college campuses and organized tours of Europe and Africa. "I was in and out of the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Bermuda," says DeVore. She orchestrated elaborate graduation ceremonies and reunions and put on a wide range of contests, including two of the first nationally known ethnic beauty contests in the United States--Miss Empire State and Miss American Beauty. They served as "out-of-town tryouts," she says, to develop talent for the blowout in Cannes; top-prize winners were entered in Cannes. For all these events she lined up sponsors and financing and put up her own money. She invited celebrity judges (Jackie Robinson and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., among them), sold tickets, found participants, and even served as a commentator. Long before TV was integrated, she went to work as a fashion and beauty cohost with Ralph Cooper on ABC's Spotlight on Harlem. At a time when there were few fashion columns geared to the African-American market, DeVore created her own, for the Pittsburgh Courier.

Diahann Carroll went on the television game show Chance of a Lifetime in 1952 at 16, and that, she says, "gave me a beginning." As DeVore recounted in an interview for the book I Dream a World, "Whoever got the most applause won. We got all the tickets we could get, zillions of tickets, and we jammed the place with people for Diahann. Everybody was applauding, and that old meter jumped." Carroll says, "I admired Ophelia because we all had to do anything we could in whatever manner we possibly could." DeVore is quick to add that her approach was always "moral and ethical and legal" at a time when modeling wasn't necessarily thought of that way.

Big Trouble

The 1950s also brought the avowed and proud workaholic grave challenges. After a big fashion show in the ballroom of a New York hotel, for which she had stayed up for three days straight, Ophelia DeVore, still in her twenties, suffered a major heart attack. She was in bed for three months. A few years later, while driving home from a show in Detroit, she was in a serious car accident in which her makeup artist was killed. She continued to do business in a shoulder-to-toe cast that left only the tips of her toes and one paralyzed arm free. "It was like starting over," she says.

The Marketing Expert

By the early sixties, DeVote had become known as a highly respected marketer to the African-American and ethnic communities. And corporate America began to clamor for her expertise as the civil rights movement took hold. Big business knew, as she explains, that its products had to be sold "in an acceptable light, or people would throw them out on the street." Often she had to create a different campaign for each and every market. And she wasn't just bringing in the African-American models. She had to customize every setting, from the furniture to the backdrop. "I was constantly overseeing everything to make sure it wasn't offensive to any group, she says. At the same time, a number of African nations grew interested in doing business in the United States, and they needed someone to tell them how to go about it: image, presentation, position, media. In 1969 DeVore traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, while the country was fighting a war with its Biafran population. She helped put together a promotional campaign aimed at giving Nigeria a more positive image in the Western world. Her charm school, meanwhile, was attracting the daughters of civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and CORE's director Floyd McKissick.

The sixties were indeed a breakthrough decade. Diahann Carroll was the first agency's pioneering black actress to star role, with the in her own weekly activist Flo Kennedy sitcom, Julia; and (in glasses), 1970. the former Grace Del Marco model Melba Tolliver became one of the first black television correspondents, on New York City's WABC-TV. Model agencies began to integrate, too, and black designers--Stephen Burrows and Jon Haggins among them--surfaced and started using many of the African-American models, who were also employed more frequently in established showrooms and collections and in publicity photographs. Nevertheless, everyone interviewed for this article said that while these firsts opened doors, there was, and remains, a long way to go.

A Turning Point

In the late 1960s DeVore and her husband divorced. Her second husband, Vernon Mitchell, whom she married in 1968, died in 1972. Around that time she decided to take some of the pressure off herself by making her son Jim, who possesses the same movie-star looks and communications skills as his mother, president of Ophelia DeVore Associates. He knew the ropes because, like her father before her, DeVore had taken her children with her to work. She continued to lecture, to receive honors (she was named to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), and above all, to be outspoken. She sued a major magazine when she felt that a reporter did not properly credit her agency as a pioneer in ethnic modeling, and then she held a press conference in their lobby bearing a large placard that read: "Inked Out by Racism." Not much came of her protest, but she relishes it. "I made a statement," she says. "That was my purpose."

In 1974, the same year the first African-American model appeared on the cover of Vogue, DeVore appeared at the annual shareholders meetings of the high-powered ad agencies Foote, Cone & Belding and Grey to demand that large companies buy more advertising in black newspapers. Such issues have continued to consume her. "The illusion of change--and that's what it is--far outweighs the reality of actual conditions," she later said. In 1985, continuing her work far afield, she gained Swaziland as a client, opening a Fashion and Beauty Centre there and hoping to help the country "broaden its cultural visibility." In Georgia, she also took over her late husband's daily newspaper, the Columbus Times, becoming its publisher.

Recently a New York physician I know, Bruce Yaffe, M.D., happened to mention that he had hired Ophelia DeVore Associates to educate his staff on "how to treat people in distress nicely." He did this on the recommendation of his office manager, Diane Wilson, a statuesque woman who once attended the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm. "We learned some good lessons," he said.

As for DeVore herself, she surely knows that even if good manners have grown increasingly rare (a favorite conviction, about which she is eloquent) and sloppiness is now more common than what she considers good grooming, her pioneering legacy lives on.

Melissa Sones's article on the dress designer Ann Lowe appeared in the Winter1999 issue.