When Eileen Otte and Jerry Ford eloped to San Francisco in November 1944, in the midst of World War II, it was hardly surprising that Jerry should declare his profession as “Naval Officer” on his marriage certificate. His new spouse, however, set down an occupation that was more unusual in a time of war, “Stylist,” and she listed her employer as a “commercial photographer.” Earlier that spring, around the same time the young couple first met, Eileen had embarked on the career path that would lead to her creation with Jerry of what would become the Ford modeling agency.

It had started not far from her Great Neck, Long Island, home. Lying on a towel on Jones Beach, Eileen was engaged in one of her favorite activities: perfecting her tan. “I had just finished a hot dog when this charming photographer came up to me,” Eileen recalled in one of our numerous conversations before her death. “He said he was called Elliot Clarke and that he was taking pictures for an article on the history of beach fashion. Would I care to put on, he asked me, these old-fashioned suits?”

Eileen jumped up and put one hand to her ear and the other to her hip to present herself as the perfect 1910 Bloomer Girl. Then she put on a black-and-white spotted “dressmaker suit” from 1922 and waded out into the surf to show what a bathing belle looked like in the year of her birth. With her animated features and wide, toothy smile, Eileen made herself the star of the quirky color feature that Elliot Clarke put together on Jones Beach that day, completing her poses with children and other bathers gathered around a picnic basket in a family tableau worthy of Norman Rockwell.

The photographs appeared early in August 1944, in The Saturday Evening Post, accompanying the headline YES, MY DARING DAUGHTER. They hardly prompted a flood of phone calls from modeling agencies. In fact, the session with Clarke would be one of the last in Eileen’s relatively modest career in front of the camera. Yet it did prove a crucial step in her progress on the other side of the lens.

Cover Girl

‘Elliot was looking for a secretary,” Eileen remembered, “someone to get in early every day and open up the office. He asked me if I could type and do shorthand, and I said I could do both. I was lying, of course.”

Yet Elliot Clarke, a courtly character who was seldom seen without a bow tie, recognized the potential in his energetic young assistant. At the time of their meeting, he had just won a major commission to help launch “a new kind of young magazine.” Walter Annenberg, publisher of the moneymaking Daily Racing Form and of The Philadelphia Inquirer, had noted the recent coining of the word “teenager” and had decided to take one of his show-business titles, Stardom, and rebrand it to capture the advertising revenue being aimed at this new demographic: “All the clothes shown,” promised the mission statement, “will be found in Teen Departments of the best stores in the country.” Elliot Clarke got the commission to design the cover, so Eileen Otte found herself on the launch team of America’s first-ever teenage magazine, Seventeen.

The beach recruit’s role was minor—to help create the large numerals, 1 and 7, that would be held up on the cover by the model selected and photographed by Elliot Clarke. Yet it was Eileen’s idea to decorate the numerals with brightly colored alpine flowers—Shirley Temple had been a hit as Heidi, after all. So the new studio assistant could claim some small role in the instant success of Seventeen, which sold out its first printing of 400,000 and was soon handling more advertising than any other women’s service magazine.