Published April 26, 1995|Updated Oct. 4, 2005
The swirl of platinum hair that frames her beautiful face gives Carmen Dell' Orefice an aura befitting an icon.
She's known as Carmen; her last name is difficult for others to pronounce, so she prefers just using her first name. The stunning model with her wild hair, striking eyes and long, slender legs has been one of the world's leading models for 50 years.
Yes, for half a century her famous face and wand-like body have appeared on the covers of thousands of top fashion magazines around the world. And her slinky, almost sensuous, presence on fashion catwalks from New York to Paris to Milan has been the making of many a designer's collection.
Catching up with her isn't easy. In late March, she was in Milan to model for the Italian design house Moschino and then went on to Paris where she took to the runway for the French designer Thierry Mugler at the Paris autumn and winter shows. In Milan, she shared the fashion catwalk and spotlight with Gianne Albertoni. At 13, Albertoni is the same age Carmen was when an agent discovered her riding a New York City bus.
That was 1945. Within weeks, the only child of an Italian violinist and a Hungarian ballet dancer, a girl who once had been pronounced as "unphotogenic," was the subject of a seven-page layout in Vogue.
She was paid the then-staggering sum of $70 a day, she recalled in a recent phone interview from her Park Avenue apartment in New York. In those days, rent for an apartment was $30 a month.
Carmen's longtime friend, fashion designer and artist Michaele Vollbracht, who now calls Safety Harbor home, invited her to the Tampa Bay area recently to take part in a fashion benefit.
"She's amazing when you think all her peers are either fat, retired or dead," said Vollbracht, the arranger of the fashion show and who also designed two of the outfits she wore.
"Carmen just blew away Birmbaum and Bullock, the two young bridal designers out of New York," he said. They created a "second-time around" gown for the thrice-married Carmen. She will wear the champagne lace and tulle sheath to a gala she is hosting in Washington next month for Mikimoto pearls. The honorees will be Katharine Graham and Evelyn Lauder.
"I am trying to set an example for young women and say you don't have to become old and decaying, that they should keep on working on themselves until the day they die," she said. "Actually I keep recycling myself. I never got caught up in just one look."
She has gone from ingenue to glamor girl to the symbol of maturity, beauty and style for American women. Her distinctive features and slender body (she's 5 feet 9 and weighs between 130 and 135) have been immortalized by some of the world's leading photographers including Cecil Beaton, Helmut Newton, Scavullo, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson.
Now the the model of choice for designer Gianfranco Ferre, she can be seen in his current campaign wearing low-cut white body suits and showing lots of leg and in black minidresses with white starched cuffs.
Carmen is also one of the featured subjects in two new books: The Beauty Trip by Ken Siman and Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross, a senior editor at Esquire magazine.
She is updating her own book, Staying Beautiful _ Beauty Secrets from 40 Years. The new book will offer 50 years of beauty tips.
Working in a youth-oriented profession, when many a model's career ends at puberty, Carmen said, she was horrified when she started finding gray hairs in her chestnut mane. She was in her late teens. She started dyeing it but found it looked "very false." So she let her hair go gray and lightened it by having her hairdresser, Eva, of New York frost it. It's a ritual she has continued for decades. Her silver tresses have given her a singular look.
The styling she does herself. As for maintaining her reed-like figure, she said, "I am a generalist. I do not gorge. My body needs food. I love vegetables and I crave chicken and fish."
Carmen, who will be 64 in June, said she has never smoked or used drugs. She works out on a rowing machine in her apartment and relaxes and unwinds doing her own version of yoga.
"I am not a gym person, but I love spas," she added. The Safety Harbor Spa, which she once represented as a public relations specialist, is one of her favorites, she said.
Carmen readily admits to having silicone treatments, having told New York's Newsday about her treatments. She's had 60 treatments in her face, neck and hands since 1962. In The Beauty Trip, Carmen's modeling was described as "the greatest lover in her life in the sense that she has been able to see the most wonderful places in the world with someone else's money."
Her professional life has been successful; her personal life less so. But things are great with her mother and daughter. Carmen sent them both to college. Her mother, Peggy Dell ("she shortened the name"), is retired after having worked for the state of New York. She lives in Hawaii.
Carmen's daughter Laura Miles, 41, is a psychologist who lives in California.
"She was on the cover of Harper's Bazaar at 16 but decided that modeling was not the life she wanted, so she is very happy doing what she is doing," Carmen said.
Carmen's three marriages, she said, were costly. The big romance of her life was with the pioneering TV talk show host David Susskind. He died two weeks before they were to be married.
"I had known him for 35 to 40 years and just didn't like his actions," she recalled. "Then when my book came out, he invited me to come on his show. I saw him in a different light. I not only found him to have a good intellect, but he was also charming and old-fashioned."
Carmen said she took "one hiatus" from modeling, during her third marriage to a very wealthy man. Their home was featured in Town and Country, she recalled. When that marriage failed she said she did not know what would become of her. She went to a book party for Norman Parkinson, who among other things was the official court photographer for the British Royal family.
"For an old bag, you don't look so bad," Parkinson told her. "Come with me to Paris to do a shoot." She was 49, and the photos were great, so much so that French Vogue did a six-page layout on her. She has been working ever since.
Once a Catholic, Carmen said her current "approach to life is more Zen. There is a reason for everything."
"I've transcended darkness through luck and fate," she said in The Beauty Trip. "I can't bring beauty down to physicality. I've devoted my life to living it. Beauty is a flower, a fern that has lasted over a year. Maybe there is something in me that's beautiful because I have lasted so long. It's about balance in my life: the physical and the spiritual. Beauty is not disconnected from action. It's a moment."
Her moment seems to be lasting forever.
