Challenged by another guest on the show — the writer Gwen Davis, who compared a model agency to pimping — Mrs. Ford coolly replied, “I never worry about fat people worrying about thin people, because slender people bury the dead.”

Mrs. Ford was born Eileen Cecile Otte on March 25, 1922, in Manhattan, the only daughter of four children of Nathaniel and Loretta Marie Otte, who together owned a credit-rating company. Eileen grew up in Manhattan and in Great Neck, on Long Island. Her mother had been the first model ever hired by the venerable clothing chain Best & Company. Eileen began modeling as well, for the prominent Harry Conover agency, during her summer breaks from Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1943 with a degree in psychology.

Jerry Ford was in the wartime Navy and attending officers’ school at Columbia University when the couple met in 1944 at a nearby drugstore, Tilson’s. Three months later they eloped to San Francisco, where Mr. Ford was stationed and preparing to ship out for the Pacific for two years.

In New York, Mrs. Ford worked briefly for a photographer, Elliot Clark, and as a stylist and reporter for The Tobe Report, a fashion trade publication.

After serving on a supply ship, Mr. Ford returned to New York in 1946 and resumed his studies in accounting at Columbia. By then Mrs. Ford had been working as a secretary for several model friends and becoming their informal agent. When she became pregnant, Mr. Ford stepped in to manage the business, and he soon recognized the potential for a more organized agency that could compete with the big ones like those of Conover and John Robert Powers.

Ford Models was born in 1947, starting out in Mrs. Ford’s parents’ home. In 1948 they opened an office on Second Avenue, selling their car to pay the rent.

Mrs. Ford was the deal maker, snapping at photographers like Mr. Avedon and Louise Dahl-Wolfe and inspecting the young models who came through their doors; Mr. Ford managed the operations, introducing a five-day workweek for models, organizing their scheduling and establishing a voucher system, which allowed them to be paid in advance. (Before then, models often had to wait a year or more to be paid.) The agency then recouped the fees from the clients.