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Dorian LeighAmerican model
Date of Birth: 23.04.1917
Country:  USA |
Content:
Biography of Dorian Lee
Dorian Lee Parker, an American model, became a true fashion icon in the early days of the modeling industry. She is considered one of the first supermodels to achieve fame in the United States and Europe. Dorian Lee was born on April 23, 1917, in San Antonio, Texas. Her parents, George and Elizabeth Parker, got married at a young age when they were 18 and 17 years old. In addition to Dorian, the family had three daughters - Georgiabelle, Florian, and Cecilia, who later became a model and actress under the name Suzy Parker. After some time, they moved to Queens, one of the neighborhoods in New York.
Early Life and Career
Dorian graduated from high school at the age of 15 because she was a bright student and completed several classes as an external student. As a sixteen-year-old freshman at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, Lee met her first husband, Marshall Powell Hawkins, who was 25 years old at the time. They secretly married in North Carolina a year later. In this marriage, Dorian had two children - Thomas Lofton Hawkins and Marsha Hawkins. They divorced three years later. To support herself and her children, Dorian worked as a secretary in a department store in Manhattan and also monitored radio program ratings. Discovering her abilities in mathematics, drawing, and engineering, Lee completed evening school and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from New York University, which was a rarity for a young single mother in the early 1940s.
Dorian landed a job at the prestigious Bell Laboratories (telecommunications, electronic, and computer systems) and during World War II, she worked as a tool designer at Eastern Air Lines. Lee helped develop aircraft wings for $1 per hour. Her attempts to get a promotion failed because she was a woman, so she became a trainee copywriter at the independent film company Republic Pictures. In 1944, one of her colleagues, Mrs. Wyburn, advised Dorian to try herself in the modeling business. Dorian decided to follow this advice, ordered a professional portfolio, and went to the modeling agency of Harry Conover. It took extraordinary courage for her to take this step, as Lee was already 27 years old and her height barely reached 165 cm. However, Dorian's first contract was to take photographs for the cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine. The magazine's editor, Diana Vreeland, and photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe were amazed to learn that their model already had two children, as they believed Dorian was no older than 19-20 years old. Dorian's parents considered modeling work not very respectable, so she had to shorten her name. When Dorian achieved incredible popularity, they changed their minds and allowed their younger daughter Suzy, also a successful model, to use the Parker surname.
Modeling Success
Success came to Dorian very quickly - she constantly appeared on the covers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Paris Match, LIFE, and Elle. Her most notable advertising campaign was with the cosmetics company Revlon. In 1952, 35-year-old Lee posed for a photoshoot that became legendary - "Ice and Flame." She wore a tight, rigid silver dress embellished with countless sequins and a bright red cape from Balenciaga on top. There were so many sequins that they only had time to sew the front of the dress, and the back was simply pinned with brooches. An interesting detail was the silver streak in Lee's black hair. The advertisement was hugely successful and received the annual Magazine Advertising Award.
Along with fame, Dorian's life was filled with numerous relationships with men. It is believed that it was Dorian who inspired writer Truman Capote to create the character of Holly Golightly, later played by Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Dorian was married five times and had five children, but all her marriages ended in divorces and scandals, and the children grew up with their parents. Her relationship with her family became seriously strained, and her daughter's lifestyle infuriated her parents. One of Dorian's sons, Kim, became a drug addict and committed suicide at the age of 21 by jumping from the 33rd floor.
Later Life and Legacy
After retiring from her modeling career, Lee founded a modeling agency in Paris, but it failed due to the theft by her last husband, young Israeli Ido Ben-Gurion, from whom Lee divorced in 1966. In Paris, Lee completed Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and opened a restaurant, but it also went bankrupt. After Kim's death, Dorian lived in New York and worked on making pâtés for delicatessen stores. In the early 1980s, she worked with the famous culinary television host Martha Stewart and published two culinary books. In 1980, Dorian Lee published her autobiography, "The Girl Who Could Do It All." According to her, she wrote it for her late son, who would never be able to read the book, and with the hope that her sad experience would help other parents avoid the same mistakes. Dorian Lee survived two of her five children and passed away on July 7, 2008, at the age of 91, in a nursing home, due to Alzheimer's disease.
