Dorian was of gifted intelligence, a voracious reader, a star in school. “Dorian was her pride,” says Nella Jarrett, a Kirkpatrick cousin. That didn’t keep Elizabeth from spoiling Dorian. Both Elizabeth and Lofton were rigid Baptists, and they raised their daughters in kind-no makeup, swearing, drinking, or, God forbid, smoking. Parker came from a line of superbly attractive Scots with a family taste for exaggeration and an average height of six feet (they were as tall as their tales). Within three years the Parkers had three daughters: Dorian, born in 1917 Florian, 1918 (nicknamed Cissie) and Georgibell, 1919.Īnd what daughters! All three were beauties. In San Antonio he’d met Elizabeth Kirkpatrick at a dancing class, and when they married the following year-he 18, she 17-he left college for a paying job at Standard Oil. When they became millionaires-the Parker Creek, it happened, ran black with oil-Lofton couldn’t have cared less. To get money for college, he sold his share of the family farm to his brothers. Raised on a cotton farm in southern Texas, the youngest of 12, redheaded Lofton grew up to look like Lindbergh, and was just as self-contained. Her father was George Lofton Parker, chemist, inventor, a man of few words who went his own way. As much a personality as a beauty, she was the first model America cared about, and hurt for. Suzy loved the freedom she derived from her earnings, but her spirit was searching. For much of her career she was the highest-paid model in the world, her rate always double that of her peers. It would be easy to name Suzy the first supermodel. What Suzy doesn’t say is that the heroine of Funny Face, a freethinking ingenue more interested in Sartre than in Vogue (Audrey Hepburn in the movie), was inspired by none other than Suzy Parker, who in her playful relationship with photographer Richard Avedon (Fred Astaire!) pushed fashion photography into a new phase of energy, emotion, and delight. And I only do what I do in life, which is model.” All her life she would joke about the luck of her high cheekbones, but Suzy’s smile-there would never be another one like it. Suzy had half-smiles, mystery smiles, sly, knowing, and slow smiles, but that million-dollar Suzy Parker smile, pure phenomenon framed by deep-dish, apple-pie dimples, it was a thing unleashed-sunshine and thunder. “I think that face,” she said, “is the most fabulously beautiful thing I have ever seen in my whole life.” And the smile. Christian Dior, the reigning king of 50s fashion, called Suzy “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Coco Chanel, fashion’s dowager queen, mentored the young American, mothered her, and in 1954 looked on Suzy as the muse of a newly global Chanel. She was 24 and at the peak of a modeling career that was arguably the biggest in the history of the business. It had all happened and was still happening for Suzy Parker in 1956. It’s like being on a boat.” And so she sails through living rooms across the country, the first American model on a first-name basis with the world: Suzy. “It’s getting a little bit foggy now,” she explains, “but it’s sort of lovely. Murrow asks, and the camera follows this heavenly, singular girl out the French doors into a New York night of ghostly glows. You know like when you’re in love and you hurt a little bit? I always hurt for Paris.” Because you never know what’s going to come around the next corner, because you live in surprises. I don’t suppose there’s anything I love more than leaving.” And a favorite city? “Paris. So all the thrill is gone.” And pinball: “My favorite indoor sport.” Her magnificent Coromandel screen: “It’s something I’ve looked for for so many years.” And travel: “It’s a funny thing. The couture, for example, in Harper’s Bazaar: “All those things you see now I did last July. With the poise of a princess, she shows the country her Sutton Place penthouse. She is five feet ten, a slim bough in a dark Chanel suit, her hair a tumble of copper that even on black-and-white television has a new-penny glint. Murrow’s Person to Person gives America a captivating Christmas present.
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