Christian Dior called her the most beautiful woman in the world. Koko Chanel made her the signature face of the house. Richard Avdon, who photographed her more than any other woman in his career, said there were great models before and after Suzie. But she was something else. A red-headed force of nature, a wolf in chic clothing, the one flesh and blood woman in a world of exquisite creatures.
In 1956, Susie Parker was the most photographed woman on earth and the first model in history to earn $100,000 a year, a salary that rivaled the president of the United States. Then she vanished. No farewell tour, no retirement announcement, no perfume deal capitalizing on her fame. She moved to a quiet California suburb, cooked dinner, planted a garden, raised six children, and never looked back.
The fashion world was baffled. The press could not understand it. But Susie Parker, as it turns out, had been trying to escape Susie Parker for almost as long as the name had existed. She had been secretly married twice during the years the world thought she was single. Her first husband demanded a nose job and acting lessons as the price of granting her a divorce.
Her second husband denied their marriage existed when a hospital called him after the car accident that took her father’s life. She had survived being born without vital signs, two catastrophic car crashes, both arms broken at the same time, a husband who offered her company for a price to a wealthy admirer, and the loss of the one person in her life who had loved her without conditions. She told Edward R.
Muro at the absolute apex of her fame, “I do not suppose there is anything I love more than leaving. She meant it.” In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how a sickly red-headed girl from a Florida orange grove became the highest paid model on Earth. How a train crossing in St.
Augustine destroyed everything she had built. And how the woman the world could not stop photographing spent her last 35 years making absolutely certain the world forgot where to find her. The story of Susie Parker begins with an almost mythic refusal to conform to expectations. On October 28th, 1932, Cecilia Anne Renee Parker was born in Long Island City, New York, the fourth daughter of Elizabeth and George Loftton Parker, and the last child anyone expected or wanted.
Her mother had been convinced she was going through menopause. The depression was grinding into its third brutal year. The family had already sold their car to pay for this birth, and they had been hoping privately for a boy. “Daddy was always hoping for a boy,” Sus’s sister, recalled years later. “And Susie was it.
” The infant emerged pulseless and blue, without vital signs for so long that no one believed she would survive. later said that Susie had been gone longer than any other baby at that time who lived. A desperate intern resorted to physically striking the newborn. Against all probability and medicine’s best pessimism, she screamed to life.
Her birth name was a comic disaster in itself. It was Dorian, Suz’s oldest sister, already a mischievous personality, who suggested saddling the infant with the names of three of their mother’s friends, Cecilia, Reena, Anne, and Parker. The initials mortified their strict Baptist parents. Their father, George Loftton Parker, a chemist, inventor, and rigid man of few words, who had rarely shown physical affection to any of his other three daughters, fell completely for this unexpected, red-headed fourth child, who was the spitting image of himself. “Never let
anyone call you Cecilia,” he told her almost as soon as she could hear. “You are my little Suzy.” This bond between a solitary intellectual father and his overlooked youngest daughter would shape everything about her life, her inwardness, her independence, her eventual need to escape the world’s gaze, and the devastating trajectory of June 1958.
To understand Susie Parker, you must first understand George Loftton Parker, the man whose red hair and private temperament she inherited in full. He had been raised as the youngest of 12 children on a cotton farm in Mount Enterprise, a small town in Rusk County deep in southern Texas. When oil was discovered and the Parker Creek ran black with petroleum, Loftton’s brothers became millionaires virtually overnight.
Loftton, who had already sold his share of the family farm to pay for college, could not have cared less. This was the man Suzie came from. The one who walked away from easy money without flinching, who went his own quiet way, and who found that independence more interesting than wealth.
In San Antonio, he had met Elizabeth Kirkpatre at a dancing class. They married quickly. He was 18, she’s 17, and within 3 years had produced three daughters in rapid succession. Dorian, born 1917. Florian, nicknamed born 1918, and Georgible, born 1919. All three were beauties. The Kirk Patrick line ran to impressive heights and impressive looks, averaging 6 ft, with a family taste for exaggeration and elaborate storytelling that Suzie would fully inherit.
By the 1930s, Loftton had found his professional calling. Dissatisfied with the absence of standardized railroad freight rates, he computed every possible distance and cost himself and published his own monthly rate schedule. Then, unsatisfied with the quality of printing used to produce it, he spent his evenings developing a better etching acid for printing plates, then a formula to remove the acid so the plates could be reused.
Both formulas, referred to in the family simply as the fluid, were mixed in the family bathtub and bottled at home in Jackson Heights, New York, where the Parkers had relocated. The business made him comfortable enough that in 1946, he retired entirely to Pomona Park, Florida, a climate he thought would help his youngest daughter’s asthma.
By then, Susie was 13 years old and already the tallest girl in her class. The family dynamic that shaped Suzie was complicated in the specific way that families organized around a mother’s favoritism are always complicated. Loftton was physically shy with his older daughters, reserved, formal, the kind of father who showed love through quiet acts rather than embraces.
With Susie, something was different from the start. She was Uncle Loftton’s pride and joy, said cousin Nella Jarrett. They shared the same pale freckled skin, the same copper hair, the same pensive inwardness underneath a surface wit. The relationship was difficult for Elizabeth Parker, who was not accustomed to sharing her husband’s devotion.
“My mother hated Suzie,” Dorian said with characteristic bluntness. “She did everything in the world to be unpleasant to her because Daddy liked her so much. Mother was jealous of her always.” described it more diplomatically. Mother lived through Dorian and daddy lived through Suzie. What this meant in practice was that Suzie grew up receiving the warmth of one parents complete devotion and the chill of the other’s resentment.
A combination that would leave her with the untouchable autonomy of the truly loved child and simultaneously a deep lifelong hunger for a home where she was simply and unconditionally wanted. That hunger would drive her into two disastrous marriages before she turned 30, and it would eventually, after enormous cost, deliver her to the one place she had been looking for all along.
The paradox of Susie Parker is that the woman the world would call the most beautiful creature alive spent her childhood convinced she was monstrous. She was a genuinely sickly child, plagued by severe asthma, chronic allergies, painful earaches, and recurring pneumonia. a litany of ailments that set her perpetually apart.
The asthma attacks could be alarming, sudden, violent, frightening for the whole household. It was partly to ease her breathing that Loftton chose their Florida retirement, the orange grove, the warm maritime air, the flat terrain. By the time they arrived, however, the medical problem had been somewhat outpaced by a new social one.
At 13, Susie had reached her full height of 5′ 10, the tallest girl in every classroom, which is to say in every social world that mattered to a teenager in the 1940s. She had freckles and red hair when the era wanted brunette delicacy. She had cheekbones so high and pronounced they registered as strange rather than beautiful to the uninitiated.
The angular frame that would later define an era of fashion looked to a girl’s own eyes grotesque. She cried herself to sleep so many times. Dorian remembered people would be shocked when she came in because they were expecting another Dorian Lee. It made her upset when they had to open seams because she was very big. Here was the germ of a lifelong duality.
The woman the world could not stop photographing was in her own internal experience a person who had learned from adolescence that her presence caused people’s expressions to change when she walked in and not always pleasantly. That specific kind of early beauty, the kind that overwhelms and unsettles rather than merely pleases, creates its own psychological complications.
Because the girl who possesses it receives attention that is simultaneously admiring and hostile, and the combination teaches her very early that being looked at is not the same thing as being seen. She would carry that lesson for the rest of her life, and it would be one of the reasons she eventually decided to stop being looked at entirely.
She was also mischievous in ways that made her simultaneously adored and exhausting. She invented an imaginary girl named Mary and blamed every misdemeanor on her. She disrupted her dance class so comprehensively, performing for the other students until they followed her antics instead of the teacher, that the instructor summoned her parents to tell them their daughter needed to leave the class because the class is following Suzie and not paying any attention to me.
She had already the quality that would make her the most photographed woman in the world. She was impossible not to watch. And then there were the accidents. Susie Parker’s relationship with physical catastrophe began in childhood and never entirely ended. She slid in her socks on the porch and sent both arms through a window pane.
She jumped off a roof on a dare and broke both ankles. She roller skated into a plate glass window and cut her arms, breaking her wrist. She rode her first bicycle under the chassis of a truck and broke her fingers, wrist, and elbow. All Daddy heard was the scream,” recalled. “And he was around the front in the car, waiting.
He knew whenever anything happened, it would be Suzie.” The family developed a resigned fluency with her injuries. They knew the rhythm, the scream, the drive around to the front. It was as if her body were rehearsing for the disasters still to come. Susie began modeling during summer vacations in New York.
Initially at Dorian’s gentle insistence, and then because the money was useful and the work was, she decided bearable. She was represented by the Huntington Hartford Agency at $25 an hour, a sum she kept secret from her Florida classmates, who knew nothing of her double life. When she was 16 and asked Hartford for a raise to 40, he laughed.
On Suz’s behalf, Dorian made a phone call that would change both their fortunes. “I can tell you about the day I first met Susie,” Eileen Ford later recalled. “One day, Dorian Lee, one of the top models in the world at that time, called and said, “I will come with your agency. If you tell me now you will take my little sister Suzie sight unseen to get Dorian Lee, I would have taken Gargantua.
” Ford’s fledgling agency desperately needed Dorian’s prestige. They agreed without hesitation. The deal was sealed before anyone at Ford had laid eyes on Cecilia Parker. The arrangement tells you something about the economics of the early modeling industry that is easy to miss from this distance.
Eileen Ford was building an agency in a business that barely existed as a profession and the difference between having Dorian Lee on your roster and not having her was the difference between being taken seriously by the magazines and being ignored. Ford would have agreed to almost anything to secure Dorian, and Dorian, who understood this leverage with the instinct of someone who had been calculating her own market value since childhood, used it to guarantee her youngest sister a career before the youngest sister had even been evaluated.
The first meeting took place at a restaurant on 55th Street. Eileen Ford and her husband Jerry sat waiting as Dorian walked in, followed by 5’10” red-headed, blue-eyed Susie Parker. Jerry and I almost fainted with delight. Eileen recalled the girl they had agreed to take sight unseen turned out to be, in Eileen Ford’s own words, the most beautiful creature you can imagine.
She was everybody’s everything. The gamble Dorian had forced on the Fords turned out to be the best deal the agency ever made. And it had been made without the agency having any idea what it was getting, which is either a story about the genius of Dorian Lee’s negotiating instincts or a story about the blind luck that occasionally attends the birth of an industry.
Diana Veland, the imperious visionary fashion editor who would shape first Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue for a generation, agreed with Ford’s assessment and placed the teenager into major fashion shoots immediately. How important was Suzie to the still fledgling Ford agency? Eileene was once asked. How would you like to guess the answer to that? Eileen said with a laugh wildly.
There are not many Suzies in the world. God did not create them. And yet the girl herself remained constitutionally unimpressed. During the day, Susie and Carmen Delorifice, who had started modeling at 13, would be sent off to shoots and instead disappear to a movie theater. It was her idea, Carmen recalled, so I would get in trouble.
At night, a more sensitive creature emerged. The tall girl who cried herself to sleep. Dorian initially thought Susie missed her high school sweetheart, Ronald. She was wrong. It was the rawness of being seen and found different that undid her. Dorian also introduced Susie to the photographers who would define her career.
She tested first with Irving Penn, John Rawlings, and Karen Radkkey. Test photographs that found their way into magazines almost immediately without effort simply by existing. Then Dorian deployed the trump card. The hottest young fashion photographer in the world, Richard Avdon, who was not looking for new muses and very much did not want to be told he needed them.
In came this girl, Avdon recalled, who looked utterly unlike the usual model type, wearing one of the most rebellious expressions I have ever seen on anybody. She positively glowered. He took Dorian aside and confessed his genuine anxiety. I do not know if I can work with someone so beautiful there may not be enough I can do to create something of my own.
He was a photographer of enormous ego and precisely calibrated artistic intent. What he feared specifically was that Susie Parker’s face would overwhelm his artistry that the equation would be simply beauty with no room left for the photographer. He was wrong. He took her to Paris anyway in 1950 when she was 17.
Everything that happened to Suzie, Avdon would say of that first trip happened after that. The partnership that would define both their careers and reshape fashion photography entirely had begun. The girl who had been crying herself to sleep over her height and freckles in a Florida classroom was standing in the back of a Paris taxi with her head and shoulders above the rollback roof, seeing the city for the first time face to face.
What Avdon discovered in Paris was that Susie was not a surface to be photographed, but a collaborator who understood instinctively what the camera needed from her at any given moment. Their working method was unlike anything the fashion world had seen. Intimate, bilateral, a kind of creative jazz between equals, 7 minutes of flow built on 2 hours of relationship.
The two hours were the preparation, the conversation, the mood setting, the gradual construction of a feeling that would, when Avdon finally raised the camera, produced 7 minutes of images that looked effortless and spontaneous, but were in fact the product of a collaborative process, as deliberate and as rehearsed as a musical performance.
No other model worked with Avdon this way because no other model had the combination of intelligence, emotional availability, and technical understanding that the process required. He would later tell interviewers that she gave emotion and reality to the history of fashion photography, that she invented the form, and that no one had surpassed her.
By 1956, at age 23, Susie Parker was the highest paid model in the world, earning $100,000 a year, commanding $200 an hour when the industry average was 25, and appearing on the covers of more magazines than anyone could reliably count. The rate she commanded was not a negotiation. It was a declaration arrived at by Susie herself, who understood with the same instinct her father had brought to computing railroad freight rates that her value to the magazines and the advertisers was so far above her competitors, that the only
rational pricing strategy was to charge what no one else could and let the market confirm that she was right. Dior called her the most beautiful woman in the world. Chanel made her the face of the house. The two greatest designers in France, whose aesthetic philosophies were in almost every respect opposed to each other, agreed on exactly one thing, that Susie Parker was the woman their clothes were designed to be worn by.
If you want to know the private details of Susie Parker’s relationships with the designers and photographers who built her career, the stories we cannot tell on this channel, subscribe to our Substack newsletter, Old Money Allure, where we publish the accounts that would never survive a content review.
She was by any measure the most famous face of the 1950s, and almost nobody knew she was married. Susie Parker, the glamorous bachelor of every fashion magazine in America, was secretly married for most of her peak career, and the deception required coordination, complicity, and the kind of bare-faced audacity that only she could have carried off without apparent anxiety.
The first marriage began with precisely the wrong omen. Her mother had walked into Suz’s bedroom one day and found her with her childhood sweetheart Charles Ronald Stton. The Parkers already considered Ronald a catastrophically unsuitable match. What they did not yet know was that the two had already eloped.
Susie wearing in what must be the most telling wardrobe choice in the history of romantic impulsiveness a bikini and a raincoat. It was 1950. She had just returned from her first transformative trip to Paris with Avidon and she was 17 years old. She would later describe the marriage in a single phrase, sheer disaster. Ronald discovered the magnitude of Suz’s modeling income and immediately calculated his position.
He refused to grant a divorce unless she met a list of demands that would have been farical had it not been legally binding. The demands included a large cash settlement, cosmetic surgery, and acting lessons. The acting lessons in particular are worth pausing over. The man Susie had married at 17 in a bikini was demanding she fund his dreams as the price of her freedom.
She agreed to all of it. The divorce was finalized in Mexico in 1953. It would not be the last time Susie Parker paid heavily to escape a man who knew what her freedom was worth. By the time Ronald released her, Susie had already fallen for someone else entirely. She had met Pierre de Lasal, known universally as Pu, at a garden party thrown by the Couturier Jacat outside Paris in 1950.
He was born July 12th, 1925, making him seven years her senior, a journalist, a novelist, a worldclass skier, and a man with the kind of effortless continental charm that was to a girl raised on cotton farms in East Texas and flat Florida farmland. Practically a foreign language made flesh. She compared him to Ashley Wilks from Gone with the Wind.
courtly, elusive, fatally romantic in a way that disguised a fundamental unwillingness to commit to anything concrete, including honesty. The Ashley Wilks comparison, in retrospect, was the most precient thing Susie Parker ever said about her own life. She pursued Pierre for years, paying his mounting personal expenses out of her own pocket, while he maintained the casual availability of a man who understood that his primary value to her was the ability to disappear and return on his own schedule.
When a wealthy admirer once propositioned Pierre directly, asking the price of her company, Pierre’s response was not outrage, but a quoted figure. By 1955, Susie had accumulated $60,000 in unpaid taxes, a figure that had swollen from her years of spending freely on a lifestyle calibrated to a Sutton Place penthouse, a French husband to be, and the relentless social performance of being Susie Parker.
Jerry Ford of Ford Models stepped in and paid the entire tax bill himself, simultaneously finding her enough new bookings to rebuild her finances. It was in New York in a Methodist church in Greenwich Village that she and Pierre quietly married in 1955. Everyone else was kept in the dark. The machinery of the deception was most visible in 1956 when Susie was featured on Edward R.
Marorrow’s Person, the prestige television program that brought cameras into celebrities homes. for the Marorrow broadcast. All traces of Pierre were methodically removed from the Sutton Place apartment before the CBS crew arrived. When Marorrow asked about her romantic life, Susie was the picture of elegant availability. We told some people we were married and then told them we were not.
Susie later said, “We just did it. That is all.” What she did not know or had trained herself not to examine was that Pierre was cheating on her throughout their marriage constantly, flagrantly, without particular concern for discretion. He later told a journalist that he found it humiliating to be known as Susie Parker’s husband.
The most photographed woman in New York was funding his lifestyle, raising his social profile, and paying his bills, while he found the association demeaning. No one could see any of this. That was in large part the point. At some point in the late morning of June 7th, 1958, a car carrying Susie Parker and her father, George Loftton Parker, approached a railroad crossing near St. Augustine, Florida.
A freight train hit them. The vehicle was destroyed on impact. George Loftton Parker, the inventor, the self-made man from the East Texas cotton farms, the quiet man who had walked away from oil money without flinching, who had mixed the fluid in the family bathtub, who had waited at the front of the house every time there was a scream because he always knew it would be Susie was gone instantly. He was 62 years old.
Susie survived with both arms broken. She was admitted to the hospital. The admitting paperwork identified her as Mrs. Pierre De Lasal. The hospital called Pierre. He said, “I have never been married. The five words are worth their own silence.” A woman with both arms broken, her father gone in the seat beside her, identified on her own hospital paperwork as the wife of Pierre de Lasal and the man she had married in a Methodist church in Greenwich Village 3 years earlier, responded to the hospital’s call by denying she existed.
The denial was not a misunderstanding. It was not a moment of panic from a man overwhelmed by bad news. It was a choice. And the choice told Susie everything she needed to know about the marriage and the man. And she received this information while lying in a hospital bed with two useless arms and a father she would never speak to again.
her mother, Elizabeth Parker, the woman who had resented Susie since birth, who had always loved Dorian Moore, who had not been able to conceal her jealousy of the bond between Loftton and his youngest, was already hospitalized, recovering from major surgery of her own, and was unable to come to her daughter’s bedside.
Susie Parker with both arms broken and her father gone and her marriage publicly denied by her husband spent three months in the hospital largely alone. What happened in those months was the transformation of everything. She blamed herself for her father’s passing. The guilt was consuming, irrational in the way that survivor guilt always is, and devastating in proportion to the depth of the bond, because the one consistent unconditional love of her childhood, the man who had called her his little Suzy, was gone in an instant, and she had been
in the car. She survived. He did not. It left her broken, in the words of the most extensive account of her life. She was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. The world’s most photographed woman, the face of Chanel, the person who earned $100,000 a year, was alone in a hospital bed, both arms useless, father gone, husband denying her existence, mother unavailable.
Pierre’s behavior after the accident was its own kind of final answer. He had denied the marriage publicly when confronted. Then, as Susie recovered, he made her pregnant and left. He did not want to be a father, and he was gone. Susie gave birth to their daughter Bell Florian Koko Chanel Deasal named for her aunts Georgie Bell and Florian and for her godmother Koko Chanel in December 1959 alone.
Pierre De Lasal would not meet his daughter until Georgia was 17 years old. The divorce was completed in 1961. In the span of 3 years, Susie Parker had buried her father, broken both arms, been publicly humiliated by a husband who denied their marriage existed, delivered a child alone, and watched the man she had loved for a decade walk out permanently.
She told one interviewer in the aftermath, “If I survive, I want to have children.” The life she was beginning to construct in her imagination was not organized around magazine covers or film contracts. It was organized around warmth, children, and a home where she was simply finally wanted. The paradox of Susie Parker’s acting career is almost classically tragic.
The woman who could make a still camera achieve what art historians later called a revolution in fashion photography was constitutionally unable to reproduce the effect for a motion picture camera. where the click of a Roliflex found her completely uninhibited and free, the were of a motion picture camera turned the tables and froze her.
The difference was specific and technical. With Avdon, the process was intimate, bilateral, a kind of creative jazz between equals. On a Hollywood set, there were marks on the floor and crew members and directors and script supervisors and continuity photographers all watching, and the machinery of attention transformed the most watched woman in the world into someone who could not remember what her hands were for.
The irony was precise and cruel. The woman who was most alive when a single photographer was watching her became most frozen when an entire crew was doing the same thing. because the intimacy that made her work with Avdon so electric was exactly the quality that a film set with its industrial apparatus of collective observation could not reproduce.
I watched myself on the screen with a sort of frozen horror, she said at the time, and I was not at all surprised to learn it had a similar effect on the audience. Kiss them for me. Her 1957 debut opposite Carrie Grant was received with reviews that described her as stiff and mannered, her beauty translating perfectly to the screen, her emotional availability somehow vanishing.
She improved measurably between that first film and 10 North Frederick, her 1958 film with Gary Cooper. And one reviewer noted that the chemistry seems right between them, that she was so tall and striking against him, and that she managed the film’s difficult romantic arc with more conviction than critics had expected.
On the set of Kiss Them for Me, something else notable had occurred. Gary Cooper, who would co-star with her in 10 North Frederick the following year, was on the Fox lot during production and sought her out specifically to confide in some detail that he had always disliked Carrie Grant since their first meeting in 1933.
It is a bizarre anecdote and also somehow perfectly Susie Parker, who had the gift of attracting confidences from people who should have had no particular reason to share them. a quality that would serve her well with Avdon and badly with Pierre, and that was in its way the connecting thread of her entire life.
People told her things, but Fox Studios was sliding toward its own crisis, and the studios approach to Parker was never coherent. They offered her three lead roles she considered beneath her, roles she found insufficiently interesting, roles with no artistic merit by her own exacting assessment. And when she refused all three, they suspended her.
Most actresses would have been devastated. Her reaction was, as one account puts it, classic Suzy. She walked away unbothered and made a phone call about something more interesting. In The Best of Everything, the 1959 film she cared most about, Susie Parker played a character who delivers a line that reads less like a screenplay and more like a diary entry.
The only thing I want is to be free, to have no ties, to have, to hold, and then to let go. Given everything that had happened in the previous decade, two secret marriages, one lost father, one absent husband, one pregnancy, carried alone, the line is almost unbearable in its precision. She was reading the words of someone who had learned at enormous cost that the things she most wanted to hold on to had a way of being taken from her.
She was 27 years old and she had not yet met the man who would change everything again. Not with betrayal this time, but with its opposite. In 1960, filming Circle of Deception in Britain, Susie met Bradford Dilman, dark-haired Ivy League educated, a serious stage actor with a successful television career.
They were both still technically married to other people at the time. He was also, to complicate matters further, seeing someone else. None of this deterred either of them. 3 years later, on April 20th, 1963, after Suz’s divorce from Pierre was finalized in 1961, they married on a boat, and Susie spent their entire wedding night violently seasick.
The marriage, despite its chaotic beginning, became the stable axis of Susie Parker’s life. Together they had three children, Dinina, born 1965, Charles and Christopher, with Georgia from Pierre and two of Bradford’s children from his previous marriage. They raised six children in total. Susie had finally found the big family she had always wanted.
The household was chaotic and warm and exactly what she had been looking for since the Florida orange groves, a house full of children who needed cooking and driving and arguing with. a house where the phone did not ring with booking requests and the mail did not contain contracts and the only people who cared about her appearance were the ones who loved her regardless of what it looked like.
In 1964, just one year after the wedding, Susie was injured in yet another car accident, the second catastrophic crash of her life. The details of this second accident are less thoroughly documented than the 1958 disaster. But its consequences were decisive in a way the first crash, for all its devastation, had not been.
Bradford Dilman looked at his wife and said, “You do not have to do this anymore.” She said, “Thank God.” And she stepped away from her career entirely. The simplicity of the exchange is its own kind of revelation. A man telling a woman she did not have to keep doing something that was causing her pain.
And a woman hearing those words for the first time in her life from someone she believed. She was not the actress she wanted to be. Her stepdaughter Pamela Dilman Harmon later explained. So she decided okay I am going to give up on this and devote my talents to being the best wife and mother.
And she really was that. friend Nancy Failing, who moved with the Dilmans to Monteito, put it still more plainly. She had led the glamorous life, and she was ready to draw in her horns. Bradford Dilman deserves more credit than he usually receives in this story. He was, by all accounts, the enabling condition of Susie Parker’s second life.
His acting career continued successfully through television for decades, but he never competed with or pressured her to continue her own. He was the one who said, “You do not have to do this anymore.” And meant it. They were married for 40 years until she passed. The contrast with her previous marriages is the whole story.
Pierre De Lasal had used her money, denied their marriage, cheated continuously, and abandoned her while pregnant. Ronald Stton had tried to profit from her fame even as he demanded to be rid of her. Bradford Dilman simply loved her and got out of her way, which was for Susie Parker the most radical and generous gift anyone had ever given her.
Two sentence explanation she retired to raise her family is true, but it is also the respectable surface of something more complex. Several forces had been converging for years. She had always found the work meaningless. This is perhaps the most important and least discussed fact about Susie Parker’s career. She considered it trivial.
Modeling was always only a way to make money. Never any more than that, she said. She publicly called herself an animated clothes hanger and dismissed the fashion industry with cheerful contempt. She referred to modeling as selling a lie and described Hollywood as a meat market. She was already trying to escape by the mid1 1950s when she gave up her $200 per hour career to work as a photography editor for French Vogue at a salary that barely covered her cigarettes.
The career change was not a whim. It was a genuine attempt to transition from being the subject of photographs to being the person who selected and edited them, to move from one side of the camera to the other, and to find in the editorial process the same creative satisfaction that Avdon found in the shooting process.
I was going to hang in there and make it happen, she said of the photography career. Her agency, Magnum, failed to sell a single one of her photographs. She went back to modeling to repay her tax debts, which was the crulest possible outcome. The woman who wanted to stop being photographed was forced to resume being photographed because the career she had chosen as an alternative could not pay her bills, but she always wanted out.
The loss of her father in 1958 had permanently altered her relationship to public life. The accident and the loss of Loftton Parker were not simply personal tragedies. They severed the last connection between Susie Parker and the self-inventing, carefree persona she had built.
From that moment on, the world’s most photographed woman began quietly erasing herself from fame, walking away from fashion, from Hollywood, and from the myth of Susie Parker to live in near total privacy. She had always been, at her core, intensely private. Susie was never very social, said Dorian. I felt she could have a marvelous life just being Suzie.
But she did not feel that way. She hated Hollywood parties and never attended them. She refused every one of Hollywood’s available bachelors, not because she was uninterested in men, but because she already had her man, and her privacy was more important than any career strategy. She preferred a card game at Chanel’s apartment to a nightclub meeting cockto over the celebrity of the moment.
The famous public persona, witty, outspoken, larger than life Suzie, was to some degree a performance, and she was exhausted by it. She felt honestly that she was not a good enough actress. Unlike many stars who maintain delusions about their talent, Susie Parker was painfully cleareyed. “If I do not make it, no one will have to tell me,” she had said of her acting career.
She had tried acting classes, studied hard, and acknowledged freely that the camera and she had never fully understood each other. And she craved what she had never had as a child. Born blue and unwanted during the depression, raised by a mother who resented her for being the father’s favorite, bounced between Florida and New York, married twice before 30, Susie Parker wanted, most fundamentally warmth, stability, and a family that was unambiguously hers.
“All Susie really wanted love and a big family, which she finally achieved,” said Carmen Delorifice. When she found it with Bradford Dilman, she held on to it with the same ferocity she had once brought to demanding $200 an hour. In 1967 or 68, after their daughter Dinina was bitten by a rattlesnake in the family’s Bair home, the Dilmans fled the city and settled in Monteito, the quiet, wealthy enclave east of Santa Barbara.
They took up residence in a 1920s George Washington Smith house, airy, rambling, and strangely spiritual in the description of those who visited it. Here Susie Parker lived for the rest of her life, and here she was, by all accounts, happier than she had ever been. She became an obsessive cook, specializing in what friends called French southern fusion, her roots in both the American South and the Paris left bank meeting in the kitchen.
She was a passionate and slightly reckless gardener known for attempting to grow apple trees in a climate entirely wrong for them. She took up needle point. She created family rituals. Christmas tree decorating was a sacred and elaborate annual production. She read voraciously. She argued with her Republican neighbors about politics with the same take it or leave it directness she had once brought to film directors and advertising executives.
She became, in the words of those who knew her in Monteceito, the unofficial mayor, passionate, humorous, confrontational when necessary, and entirely uninterested in being recognized for who she used to be. There were no cosmetic alterations, no attempts to preserve the look that had defined an era.
A friend noted that she would return from the hairdresser with perfectly set hair, and then mus it herself on the way home because she preferred to look human. The mussing is a detail that tells you everything. A woman who had spent 15 years being paid to look perfect, who had been photographed by every major camera in the Western world, who had been the face of Chanel and the muse of Avdon and the cover of more magazines than anyone could count, was now deliberately undoing her own hairstyle on the drive home from the salon because she did not
want to look like what she had been. She occasionally returned to Vogue for a shoot in the early 1960s, sometimes photographed alongside her daughter Georgia, but these were concessions to friendship, not ambition. She had no interest in fashion’s nostalgia industry, no appetite for the machinery that feeds on former luminaries.
Susie Parker deliberately lied to the press, her sister confirmed, and found it hilarious when they believed her. She claimed to be descended from French royalty, insisted she was born in San Antonio. She was born in Long Island City, shaved a year off her age, and invented various colorful backgrounds for journalists who wanted a story.
She would tell these awful things, said. And then when they found out it was not true, she laughed at them. The lies were not malicious. They were defensive. the equivalent of a smokeokc screen deployed by a woman who understood that the press wanted a story and who preferred to give them a fictional one rather than allow them access to the real one.
Because the real one with its blue baby and its jealous mother and its confederate era cotton farms and its two disastrous marriages and its train crossing in St. Augustine was not something she owed anyone. This mischievous relationship with her own public image suggests that Susie Parker always understood her celebrity as a kind of game she was playing rather than a truth she was inhabiting.
When she decided she no longer wanted to play, she stopped and unlike most celebrities who try and fail to stop, she managed it completely. Susie Parker’s health began to decline in the 1990s. Complications from diabetes, ulcers, hip surgeries, and chronic respiratory problems accumulated over the decade.
An ulcer surgery turned life-threatening when her heart stopped on the operating table in an eerie echo of her birth, and she was resuscitated by medical intervention, the same way she had been revived as a blue baby 60 years earlier. The symmetry was almost too precise to be coincidental. A life that had begun with a desperate intern striking a blue infant back to consciousness was now six decades later being sustained by the same kind of last resort intervention.
The same refusal of the body to cooperate with the plans of the medical professionals attending it. Kidney failure ultimately became the proximate cause. In her final weeks, she made the decision herself to stop treatments and leave the hospital. The decision was consistent with everything she had ever done. She chose to go on her own terms at the time of her own choosing to the place of her own selection.
She came home to Bradford and Pamela and the children to the George Washington Smith house in Monteito and she passed there on the night of May 3rd, 2003. She was 70 years old. There was no funeral. She had explicitly forbidden one. No service, no ceremony, no final public act. The woman who had spent the second half of her life making sure the world forgot where to find her was not going to provide a location for her departure either.
The fashion world mourned her in the only language it had. Retrospectives, tributes, and the quiet acknowledgement that something irreplaceable had left the room. Richard Avdon, who knew the terrain of beauty more completely than almost anyone alive, was asked for a statement. His words were unambiguous. Susie Parker gave emotion and reality to the history of fashion photography.
She invented the form and no one has surpassed her. In 2001, when Avdon published Made in France, a definitive collection of his life’s work in Paris, the cover image he chose was a photograph of Susie Parker. Of the hundreds of models he had worked with across six decades, it was Suzie he put on the cover of the book that was meant to be his final word.
The choice tells you everything you need to know about what she meant to him and about the distance between what the world saw when it looked at Susie Parker and what Avdon saw. Not a surface, not a face, not a product, but a collaborator who had changed his art and through his art had changed the way the 20th century understood the relationship between a woman and a camera.
There is no mystery about why Susie Parker walked away. The mystery is only that the world was surprised. She had told Edward R. Maro in 1956 that the thing she loved most was leaving. She had tried to abandon modeling for photography years before the accident. She had never attended a Hollywood party she was not paid to attend.
She had called modeling only a way to make money from the beginning of her career. She had named her daughter after her closest friend, Koko Chanel, who had herself retreated from public life for years before a chance encounter with Suzie brought her back. The train crash of 1958, her father’s passing, Pierre’s abandonment, Bradford Dilman’s love, the rattlesnake in Bair, these were not causes, but accelerants.
They burned away the remaining obligations and rationalizations that had kept Cecilia Parker playing the role of Susie Parker. When the fire cleared, what was left was a woman who wanted to cook, garden, argue about politics, raise six children, and live in a 1920s house in Monteito with a man she trusted. Absolutely. She achieved it.
She held it for 35 years. She left no funeral. The cultural echoes of her life are everywhere, though most people who encounter them do not know the source. Actress Parker Posey was named after her by an admiring father who considered her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen on a screen. Audrey Hepburn’s character Joe Stockton in Funny Face, the 1957 film, was inspired by Suz’s working relationship with Richard Avdon.
Dorian Lee’s lifestyle inspired Truman Capot’s Holly Golightly. And then in one of literary history’s more ornate coincidences, Audrey Hepburn played both the character inspired by Suzie and the character inspired by Dorian. The Beatles recorded an informal song called Susie Parker during the January 1969 Let It Be sessions at Twickenham Film Studios, a brief joyful tribute that appeared in the documentary film.
Koko Chanel’s decision to reopen her house in 1954 was directly connected to a single evening when Susie wore a 1938 archive dress at a card game and a fashion editor did not recognize it as Chanel. The face that launched a thousand covers. The woman who invented the modern concept of the supermodel. The girl who earned more per hour than any woman in American fashion history.
Spent her last three decades musing her hair on the way home from the salon and growing apple trees in the wrong climate. In the end, the most beautiful woman in New York did not disappear. She simply stopped performing a disappearing act, the one that had required her to be everywhere at once, to be all things to all cameras, to be Susie Parker, and allowed herself finally to be nobody in particular.
That, as it turns out, was exactly what she had always wanted.
