In 1939—while Germany was invading Poland, Italy was trampling Albania, and women and children were being evacuated from London—Seventh Avenue’s captains of industry were panicking about selling dresses. In an unprecedented maneuver, labor unions and manufacturers banded together to form the New York Dress Institute in 1940, with propaganda as their mission. Strategic ads, created by the J. Walter Thompson agency, sprang up across the country targeting the female consumer. The boldest sign hectored, aren’t you ashamed you only have one dress—one dress beulah? Another, needling patriotic consciences, showed a soignée Martha Washington ministering to dying soldiers at Valley Forge. In spite of the looming war, dress sales soared. But Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, Adam Gimbel of Saks Fifth Avenue, Andrew Goodman of Bergdorf Goodman, and Henri Bendel of the eponymous store were appalled. They demanded that the New York Dress Institute switch to more tasteful tactics, and they insisted on publicity sorceress Eleanor Lambert for the job.

A petite pastel blonde who masked her brilliance behind what Cecil Beaton called the “halting” veneer of a hayseed, Lambert was still “pretty obscure at the time,” remembers a magazine editor. “And the field of fashion publicity hardly existed.”

One reason Lambert was still relatively unknown was that she had emerged from an Indiana art background. Born in Crawfordsville in 1903, Lambert was the youngest child of a newspaper publisher who deserted his family of five to become an advance man for Ringling Brothers, and of a mother whom she described as “feckless.” With money Lambert earned by cooking and packing picnic baskets for the boys of Crawfordsville’s Wabash College, she took sculpture courses at Indianapolis’s John Herron Art Institute. There, while moonlighting as a shopping columnist for The Indianapolis Star and the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, she met architectural student Willis Connor, with whom she eloped to Illinois. “I guess he was my ticket out of town,” Lambert said. The restless couple enrolled briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1925, with $200, they lit out for New York. “Willis wasn’t the right husband for her,” says Lambert’s only child, poet and art critic Bill Berkson. “He was a leech. And she wasn’t much of a sculptor. She was determined to be the best at whatever she did, even if that meant she had to invent a new profession.”

Installed in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, Lambert juggled two $16-a-week jobs, one at a fashion newsletter, Breath of the Avenue, and another designing covers for a book publicist. During her free time, she’d eat at the Automat and head “to the Algonquin to study the crowd,” Lambert said. “One night I ended up joining Dorothy Parker and some actors—they were drunk—and they dragged me downtown to a tattoo parlor in the Bowery. I wanted to be a good sport—I was too young and scared to say no. So I ended up with a small blue star on my right ankle.” She also hunted down her father, Clay Lambert, who had in the meantime produced a fleeting Broadway success called Twin Beds. “New York being no place for a young lady, Clay dragged her to the next train back to Crawfordsville,” Bill Berkson says, “which she smartly exited on the other track.”

Lambert’s job at the book publicist’s required her to cold-call celebrities such as Mary Pickford for quotes. Observing Lambert’s zeal for promotion, her boss suggested that she hook up her own phone line and start a business from his office. He advised her to hawk something she knew about. And, Lambert remembered, “I thought I knew a good deal about American art.” (By then she had already fast-talked at least one gallery into giving a show to a starving-artist friend, and performed similar P.R. miracles for aspiring director Vincente Minnelli.) Before long Lambert was peddling her services to John Curry, George Bellows, Jacob Epstein, and Isamu Noguchi—who made a portrait bust of her when he couldn’t afford her fees. From there she took on the whole American Art Dealers Association, and in 1930, the year of its founding, the Whitney Museum of American Art. While traveling in Europe in May 1934, Lambert and Seymour Berkson (who would become her second husband) “met cute.” As the museum’s publicity manager, she was trying to have an interloping Polish painter’s retrograde portrait of Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst’s mistress, removed from the Whitney-sponsored Venice Biennale’s American Pavilion. And Berkson, the general manager of Hearst’s International News Syndicate, was under orders to make sure the offending picture stayed.