FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY – IN 1936, a glamour girl named Cynthia became a minor toast of the town. She went around with a guy named Lester, who took her to all the showoff places — the opera, El Morocco — and the next year she made the cover of Life. Cynthia would get fan mail, but if anyone ever got a reply, it was guaranteed to come from Lester.
That’s because Cynthia was a mannequin. She was 120 pounds of plaster and paint, the work of Lester Gaba. Saks Fifth Avenue had wanted a lifelike mannequin, and Lester, a soap sculptor of untapped skills (he later became a columnist for Women’s Wear Daily), needed little encouragement. Calling her Cynthia, a name that gleamed like a bauble, was his crowning touch.
The war passed, and, in 1953, Lester thought his hollow lady should have a TV show. He spent $10,000 to have her jaw wired so she could say witty things, and he hid the cables in the back of her Dior dress. But it was no good, he told Gay Talese, in The New York Times, some years afterward. “Cynthia never made any sense,” he said. She was finally escorted to an attic in Greenwich Village.
Why does this sound so familiar? The mannequin hair, sleek and heavy-falling, and lipsticked smiles that meet every parade and homicide with the same frozen interest, are par for the course on television news. The anchors give us meaningless happy chatter as the world falls apart. Saying something actually disturbing is out of the question. And in no way are they in control — any more than Cynthia, any more than the survival-conscious actress who turns her face into a sheet of plastic. Read more »
