Sex on Lex

the most pulchritude-packed palazzo in all new york

In the waning hours of the morning, New York's Lexington Avenue is practically deserted except for the ladies of the evening who lurk in the shadows. Lexington Avenue is a business street in more ways than one, and it is with good reason that the Night People and certain detachments of the police often refer to it as "Sexy Lexy."

As the day takes shape and the city stirs, sex moves off the sidewalk and congregates, in a somewhat different form, in a 12-story beige, palazzo-like building which stretches the whole block on Lexington Avenue from 46th to 47th Street. Behind a closed door on an upper floor of the building a caressing male voice murmurs:

"All right, dear, I'm ready now ... lean back a little, sweetheart ... your body is fine, just fine ... now give me some action with the legs ... let's relax and enjoy it ... good ... now turn your head to me ... your position is great ... let me have your eyes ... flirt with me, sweetie ... great ... you're marvelous ... now hold it ... beautiful ... hold it ... let's try it again ..."

Behind other doors throughout the building similar, if less passionate, ejaculations are uttered, usually in tones not loud enough to carry into the corridors. And scurrying in and out of the doors all day can be seen a flurry of females, all exceptionally pretty, and all carrying large functional-looking leather or canvas bags.

There is nothing in the outward appearance of the building to explain this strange activity. The facade's only distinctive features are four huge, Hellenic columns, which lend the structure an aura of classic grandeur, and a narrow, 100-foot-high unlit electric sign which spells out Grand Central Palace, a relic of the time part of the building was the home of the once-famous exposition center. The building's first four exhibition floors which used to house an automobile show one week and a flower show the next are now occupied by a branch of the Internal Revenue Service.

However, the odd goings-on and the colorful calling of the tenants heard and seen on the upper eight floors have, for the past 30 years, made the structure located at 480 Lexington Avenue one of the most unusual and -- accepting the scarcely debatable theory that sex, in a direct or sublimated form, is a key factor in everything we do and think -- one of the most important buildings in the country, if not the world.

The voices heard are those of commercial photographers who dominate the building's roster of tenants; in fact, no other building on earth has so great a concentration of photographers. The building's 51 leased studios (many subdivided into smaller studios), which occupy a total of four acres of space, roughly the equivalent of four football fields, are staffed by some 400 camera operators, assistants, darkroom technicians, retouchers, prop men, stylists and other minions. The females seen flitting in and out of these studios are, of course, models. Probably three or four hundred of these top-flight specimens of pulchritude pass through the building every day.

At 480 Lex, or simply 480, as the building is known to members of the photographic, modeling and advertising professions, the joint efforts of this tremendous task force of talent result in the output of the great bulk of the pervasive, persuasive pictures eventually used in the advertisements that beguile the eye, woo the wallet and influence our way of life, as well as that of the rest of the world, to an incalculable degree. These advertisements not only keep our wheels of mass production turning but, as Stuart Chase once pointed out, also "make people do things they had not planned to do, buy things they have no use for, believe things they have never thought possible, fear things which do not exist, hope for things which are unattainable."

Advertising's most powerful ally in creating these artificial desires, beliefs, fears and hopes is sex -- usually in the form of the female model. The seductive powers of a shapely, or even a smiling, woman have not been underestimated ever since some advertising genius had the happy notion to show a pretty girl flashing her teeth as a come-on for Sozodont dentifrice sales just 100 years ago.

Today, because of our intense preoccupation with the female form, the pretty girl often bares more, and the model has become the supersalesman of the Western World, the dream girl who has come to represent the ideal the American female wants to be like and the American male just wants. Although this dream girl is supposed to typify the average American woman, she, of course, really doesn't. "The reason foundations and girdles and other undergarments look so good in the ads," a brassiere model once confided, "is because the girls who model them don't really need them."

480 Lex is a modern temple of Venus, its goddess is the model, its god the mogul of Madison Avenue, and its high priest the photographer, a veritable Merlin of merchandising. Here in a bedlam of backdrops, props, cameras, lights (one studio alone has $50,000 worth of equipment), sound and fury -- the building is also sometimes referred to as "Hollywood on the Hudson" -- the photographer performs his mysterious rites of mumbo-jumbo and hocus-focus that magically transform prosaic products into glittering, glamorous offerings that we find we cannot live without and therefore buy.

The average photographer-tenant, whose overhead may run from $500 to $1000 a day, must be prepared to shoot anything from a can of beans to a Cadillac, usually, of course, with the ubiquitous model. This not only calls for a certain amount of versatility, but also for the ability and ingenuity to cope with a host of problems, not the least of which are the vicissitudes of the weather and seasons.

"In this business," says Irving C. Christenson in whose seventh floor 7500-square-foot studio as many as eight different set-ups are shot simultaneously for accounts like L & M cigarettes, U.S. Rubber, Gilbey's vodka, Tide and Montgomery Ward, "it's usually Christmas in July and violets in December." This is because most ads and catalogs are generally prepared as much as six months in advance.

And so the model, swathed in furs (often just over her bra and panties) swelters indoors under hot studio lights or on location outdoors under a summer sun. Or she cavorts in an abbreviated bathing suit on an icy beach in the dead of winter. When the photographer prays for a sunny day so he can hie to 480's rooftop for an outdoor shot, it invariably rains. When he wants it to rain for, say, a raincoat and umbrella picture, it doesn't and the model, fully clothed, must stand under a sprinkler in the studio for that caught-in-the-rain effect.

Although photographers prefer the complete control of lighting that studio equipment affords, they also like the feeling of authenticity that only natural light can provide. To achieve this they sometimes go to great lengths and distances. Recently one flew to Egypt to photograph a vodka-and-tonic ad in the sands of the Sahara against the background of a pyramid and a camel. Not a week passes when some photographer, a flock of models and 5000 pounds of equipment aren't taking off for Florida, Paris or even Arabia for location shots.

But more often, matters of time and expense rule out such burdens on the budget. When the model cannot go to Mohammed or the mountains, the latter are brought to the studio. The simplest way of doing this is by placing a mural-size picture or by projecting a slide of the scene desired behind the model. Or if necessary, a set is constructed. For a snow scene that had to be photographed in July, Gray-O'Reilly, who now devote their efforts to television commercials and industrial films, once built a ski slope capable of sustaining the weight of eight models as well as 1500 pounds of ground granite used to simulate snow.

At times, more than a little ingenuity is necessary to get art to imitate nature. How to capture for Woodbury face powder the romantic springtime feeling of a young couple in a canoe gliding down a moonlit stream -- in February? Gray-O'Reilly lugged a canoe into the studio; blue crinkled cellophane, artfully lighted, became the moonlit stream; a dead limb with leaves tacked on it suggested the foliage; and the boy and girl, inspired by mood music and the mumbo-jumbo of the photographer, did the rest.

To bring other aspects of nature indoors, most studios keep on hand several tons of sand for beach scenes, rolls of grass matting, artificial flowers, leaves and branches, fences, a trellis, cloud backgrounds, and an electric fan for those wind-blown hair effects. One of the most unusual features of 480 is a simulated street complete with curbs, sidewalks, street lamps, and make-believe store and other building fronts. It is located on the seventh floor, forming the corridor outside the Christenson studios. Built back in the late Twenties by Westinghouse to dramatize the various uses of electricity, it is occasionally used as an exterior.

Most conventional interiors do not present any special problems. Most studios can knock together a living room, boudoir or half-a-house in no time at all, and mock kitchens are standard equipment in every studio. Phony pot roasts and plastic ice cream, immune to the heat of the lights, can be secured if necessary, and if watermelons are needed in winter and cannot be flown in from sunnier climes, not-too-unreasonable facsimiles can be found, too.

But at times props are not so easily fabricated or found. What first seemed to be a simple assignment for Talon Zipper called for a model to be photographed fully dressed in a transparent tank of water. But it soon developed that no tank large or strong enough could be secured from the usual sources, and the cost of building a special tank was prohibitive. Finally Vic Backer of the Paul Wing Studio recalled that he had once seen a tank that would fill the bill in the Broadway musical, Make Mine Manhattan, which, unfortunately, had folded several years before. It took him 30 days to trace it, first to a burlesque queen who had used it briefly for an underwater strip routine, then to theatres in Buffalo and Staten Island and finally to a theatrical warehouse less than half-a-mile from 480.

An assignment for a picture of a model swinging a tiger by the tail stumped the experts at another studio until someone got the bright idea of borrowing a stuffed animal from a museum. Because it weighed almost a ton it was placed on its side with its tail stretched taut and photographed alone. Then the model was photographed with arms extended and a composite was made of the two pictures.

To bring real animals into 480, a matter of daily occurrence, requires special permission of building manager William A. Kane ever since a photographer adopted the habit of taking his newly acquired Irish setter to work with him and allowing the beast, not yet completely housebroken, to roam the building corridors.

Kane, who has long ceased being amazed at the requests of his unusual tenants, likes to recall the time Anton Breuhl was doing a series of magazine (continued on page 67) Sex on Lex (continued from page 62) covers featuring various country creatures such as the rooster, goat and horse. Although Kane was not perturbed about admitting to the premises the more diminutive denizens of the barnyard, he felt that a horse clomping down the corridor would not only disturb his other tenants -- aside from the photographers they include a sprinkling of such diverse enterprises as Superman Comics, the New York League for the Hard of Hearing, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, the Washington School for Secretaries and Marilyn Monroe Productions -- but might also cause some irreparable wear and tear. He therefore stipulated that some sort of protective covering would have to be put down on the 250-foot length of corridor leading from the building's automobile-size freight elevator, the horse's hoofs would have to be sheathed in burlap bags, and the horse would have to be brought in after six o'clock in the evening.

The next morning, the president of a company who had worked after hours the evening before and had taken a couple of nips before leaving his office, phoned Kane and asked uncertainly in a somewhat shaken voice, "I know you'll think I'm crazy, Kane, but I could swear I saw a horse walking down-down the corridor outside my office last night. Now tell me, is that possible?"

Most of the non-photographic tenants, on the other hand, are accustomed to the bevy of beauties who are a common sight in the corridors, elevators, lobby, or in Allan's and Hutton's, the two restaurants on the street floor of the building. Male visitors to 480, however, are soon impressed by this plenitude of pulchritude. Sometimes to an extent that causes trouble. One New York wolf stalked the corridors for weeks, approaching his pretty prey with the hoary gambit that begins, "Haven't I seen you somewhere before ... ?" After a number of complaints from girls he had carelessly made the mistake of accosting more than once he, in turn, was stalked by the police and arrested, perhaps unjustly.

Chances are that they (and you) have actually seen at least some of the girls somewhere before -- smiling in brazen invitation from a billboard or bus card or peering pertly from the pages of a newspaper or magazine. Close to four billion dollars a year are now spent by U.S. business on newspaper and magazine ads alone. From one-third to one-half of these feature a pretty girl. More than the exotic background, prop or even product, she is the key ingredient in the magic formula of the advertisement.

With as much as $500,000 or more often riding on a single campaign, it is important, too, not to have just any pretty girl, but rather, the right pretty girl. Not all advertisers go to the trouble Rheingold does in inviting an electorate of 20 million beer drinkers to assist in the selection of its annual queen who, incidentally, is christened, rigged and launched from 480 by the famous Hesse-Patston studio. Nor to the lengths of Palmolive who once determined, after a four-year poll, that its customers preferred to be sold soap by a brunette.

But casting an ad or series of ads -- a chore attended to by either the studio stylist or the advertising agency's art director -- often involves looking through photographs of hundreds of models and seeing five or 10 in the flesh for every one eventually selected. A familiar sight at 480 is that of models, scrapbooks in hand, trudging from door to door, in the hope that they may fit the specifications for any assignments that may be in the works. "When I have nothing else to do," a fledgling model wearily complained, "my agent sends me to 480 to make the rounds."

The final decision is often made by the advertiser, usually with the concurrence of the photographer, but is sometimes left entirely to the latter. "The client just tells us to pick a young-housewife-type or a healthy-outdoor-type or a big-busty-blonde-with-long-hair-type," says photographer Larry Gordon, "and it's our business to know what he means."

To fill the vast and varied needs of the photographers and their clients, some 26 model agencies have evolved to handle New York's 1000-or-so active female models (plus about 100 men and children). Literally and figuratively the handmaidens of big business, their rise has paralleled both the growth of modern high-pressure advertising and the establishment of 480 as the photographic center of the commercial world. All three phenomena probably have their roots in George Eastman's revolutionary foolproof Kodak ("You press the button -- we do the rest"), which made America camera-conscious just before the turn of the century.

Although the early advertising geniuses had already discovered, by this time, the relationship between sex and sales, most ads were illustrated by drawings as in the case of the Sozodont girl of 1857. Oddly enough, it was a female photographer, Beatrice Tonneson of Chicago, who, back in the 1890s, used photographs of live girls in ads for the first time. Other advertisers gradually followed suit. In 1913, a year after 480 was erected, a motor-capped cutie aptly dubbed Lotta Miles poked her head through a Kelly-Springfield tire, and by the end of World War I, with the emancipation of American womanhood, the rush was really on.

The advertising man teamed with the photographer to create virtually new industries. Modeling was then a part-time pursuit and most of the models first used were recruited from the ranks of the theatre. To 480 Lex flocked such immortals as Gladys Glad, Marion Davies, Ann Pennington and other Ziegfeld beauties to have their charms captured on film by Alfred Cheney Johnston, one of the first photographers to move into the building in the early 1920s. (The international furniture exchange, for which the upper floors were originally designed, didn't do too well, and photographers found the high ceilings, as well as the central location of the building, ideal for the manipulation of their lights, backdrops and other paraphernalia.) A typical Johnston photo of that era, which showed Gilda Gray, of shimmy fame, garbed principally in a guitar, was used in an ad captioned, "What Gilda Gray, star of the Ziegfeld Follies, says about Dainty-Form Fat Reducing Cream."

At about this time, John Robert Powers, a small town boy who was eking out his slim earnings as an actor by posing for illustrators, hit upon the idea that was eventually to change America's concept of beauty and make the Powers girl -- for whom he later coined the term "long-stemmed American Beauty" -- a national institution. John Robert Powers performs his booking activities at 247 Park Avenue, the building adjacent to 480. In fact, it now connects with 480 by means of a sixth floor ramp and a main floor arcade known to the elevator operators as "Glamor Gulch." Many of the studios at 480 even have special phones connecting them to Powers so that a model, needed at a moment's notice, can be summoned to race from one building to the other. A fleet-footed Powers girl can negotiate the distance of 100 feet that separates the Powers office on the sixth floor of 247 from the Paul Wing studio at the other end of the ramp in 480 in less than 10 seconds.

Joining them in the race are models from other agencies which, inevitably, sprang up around 480 to offer the photographers their own particular concepts of glamor and beauty. Among the largest are those of Harry Conover, a Powers alumnus who raided college campuses in his search for the "well-scrubbed American look," and Huntington Hartford, the A & P millionaire, whose girls exude a sexy wholesomeness. These two agencies, along with Powers, are "department store" operations; their rosters feature models of every conceivable type -- housewife, junior, matron and pin-up -- as well as a number of specialists, who by virtue of certain anatomical endowments or shortcomings are usually called upon to do hosiery, lingerie, hair, hands or high fashion. Some of the newer agencies specialize in models of only one category.

Of all the types of models, perhaps the most distinctive is the high fashion girl, a svelte, sophisticated, semi-starved, skyscraper-like creature (she usually towers to a height of five feet nine or 10 inches) with the ability to wear clothes that most women can't even get into. Because her fragile frame lends a certain elegance to clothes, she is the darling of the world of haute couture and the ultra-chic fashion magazines.

But the less angular model with a good figure that does not leave too much to the imagination is in great demand at 480 for "beauty" pictures. These pictures call for the model to pose in lingerie such as bras and girdles or sometimes in nothing at all for towel, shower curtain or bathtub ads. For this type of work the model receives double her regular fee (which may run from $15 to $60 an hour depending on her popularity) in order to assuage her dignity and possibly to compensate for the risk of catching cold. Some beauty models occasionally experience a certain frustration peculiar to their specialty. "The thing I mind most," says Betty Biehn who is tall and Texan, "is that my face hardly ever shows in any of the pictures I pose for. For bra and girdle ads, they're only interested in you from your neck to your knees."

The beauty model also has to take the precaution of either arranging her bookings early in the morning or else arriving at the studio well in advance in order to give time for the marks left by her bra and other undergarments to disappear. One not-so-bright model, during the course of a tight schedule, rushed to an assignment with just minutes to spare and hurriedly disrobed to pose in the nude for a medical ad. As the marks left on her shoulders, waist and hips by undergarments were still in evidence, the photographer asked the model to sit down for a while until they disappeared. In a half hour or so she got up to pose. Although the earlier marks were now gone, her fanny looked like a waffle because she'd slumped into a wicker chair.

When nudes or semi-nudes are to be shot, an intense interest in the ad often manifests itself in anyone even remotely connected with its production, although usually only the art director and stylist are present, aside from the photographer and his assistants, during the more matter-of-fact shooting sessions. Yet one well-known beauty model, booked for a towel ad, was rather taken aback at the size of the assemblage that greeted her arrival at the studio. Present were 35 people including the client, copywriter, agency research director, account executive, and it seemed, all their friends, many armed with cameras. "Have you sold tickets, Mac?" the bewildered beauty asked the photographer. She refused to disrobe and the mob, in turn, refused to leave. As the hour allotted for the session drew to an end, a compromise was finally reached. A hat was passed around and each member of the congregation solemnly dropped in his contribution. The $700 collected represented probably the biggest fee in modeling history.

Although herself a symbol of glamor, the model will, in most cases, achieve a glamorous life primarily in the carefully fabricated photographs in which she appears, artfully posed, pinned, pancaked, powdered, pomaded and painstakingly lighted by the photographer.

True, some models move onward and upward to Hollywood (Lauren Bacall, Joan Bennett, Paulette Goddard, Gene Tierney, among others), to fame and fortune, but the fame achieved by the more average girls is mostly an anonymous one, and the fortune closer to five grand a year than the $10,000 to $30,000 hauled in by the top models.

Still, it's a job that few girls would trade for anything else, and you can spot the dedicated ones on the street by their hurried gait and by the expendable canvas or leather carry-all bag, in which they tote make-up, waist cinchers, extra hosiery, costume jewelry and other essentials of their craft.

The model no longer carries the round hatbox, the one-time traditional badge of her business. This was usurped several years ago by the ladies of the evening who lurk in the shadows of Lexington Avenue, long after the strange, floodlit world of 480 is dark, to convert sex into the dollar sign in quite a different way.