Eileen Ford, founder of Ford Model Agency, dies

Modeling agency founder Eileen Ford, who shaped a generation's standards of beauty as she built an empire and launched the careers of Candice Bergen, Lauren Hutton, Jane Fonda and countless others, has died.
She was 92 and died yesterday, according to Arielle Baran, a spokeswoman for Derris & Co, which handles public relations for Ford.
Ford was known for her steely manner and great eye for talent. She demanded the highest level of professionalism from her models, putting them on strict diets and firing those with a taste for late-night revelry.
Her discipline pushed Ford Model Agency to the top of its field, making multimillionaires of both Ford and her late husband, Jerry, who handled the company's business affairs.

"I think our success came from Eileen's energy and her bluntness and, to some extent, her comfort with confrontation," Jerry Ford told USA Today in 1997.
"A fortune teller once told her if she wasn't an agent, she should be, because all the stars pointed that way. She's always loved to tell people what to do."

The typical Ford woman was tall, thin, often blond, with wide-set eyes and a long neck. Eileen Ford was known to tell hopefuls shorter than 5 foot 7 to give up their dreams.
The Ford look changed remarkably little over the years, and set a standard for the industry. Today, height and a willowy build remain paramount, though Ford was disdainful of the "waif" look typified by British model Kate Moss that swept the industry in the early 1990s.

Ford maintained that a model's charisma was as important as her looks, and she prided herself on being able to detect successful personalities.
"There's a cockiness to them ... They're just going to be good and you can just tell it," she told Life magazine in 1970. "I see girls that I know I absolutely know will be star models within just a matter of weeks, and they always are."
For high-fashion photography, she said, an ample bust was a disqualifier because the camera adds pounds and the curves distract from the picture. "A bosom is terribly detrimental because it cuts you all up in pieces," she told The New York Times in 1967.

Ford often said she felt a motherly responsibility toward her models, and often invited her youngest hires to live at her Upper East Side apartment until they established themselves.
She prohibited the young Kim Basinger from going out before finishing her French homework. And supermodel-to-be Christy Turlington once recalled pretending to do laundry at night so she could sneak out while the family slept.