On November 28, 1966, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived at the Plaza Hotel in an outfit so revealing that a biographer later described it as closer to nudity than to clothing. By the following morning, two of the most influential figures in fashion had already decided her face represented an entire era. Photographer Richard Avedon spotted her in a ballroom packed with 540 of the most famous adults alive and called Vogue editor Diana Vreeland at seven the next morning to say he had found something special. Vreeland phoned the girl herself two hours later and asked whether she would agree to appear in American Vogue.
Within two years, she had joined the trio the fashion press abbreviated by surname alone: Twiggy, Shrimpton, and Tree. Her background offered every privilege except warmth. Her father, Ronald Tree, was a British Member of Parliament, a magazine editor, and descended from Marshall Field, the Chicago merchant whose department stores made him one of the wealthiest men in America. Her mother, Marietta Peabody Tree, came from the Peabody family of Groton, Massachusetts, and represented the United States on the UN Commission on Human Rights during the Kennedy administration.
Ronald’s first wife, decorator Nancy Lancaster, had spent the Field inheritance on Ditchley Park, an 18th-century estate in Oxfordshire so carefully prepared that Churchill preferred sleeping there over his official residence during the Blitz. Penelope was born in 1949 after that marriage had ended. She grew up as the only child of two successful, preoccupied parents. Ronald spent most of his time building a resort in Barbados and saw her mostly on holidays, while Marietta treated motherhood, in her daughter’s words, as a duty best delegated to the nearest nanny.
Surrounded by a Pulitzer Prize-winning half-sister, a UN commissioner mother, and a parliamentarian father, Penelope said she felt completely invisible in her own home. That long loneliness became the hidden mechanism behind everything that followed. When a photographer finally noticed her, the attention answered a need that had nothing to do with vanity. The first camera to record her face may not even have been Avedon’s but Diane Arbus’s, who photographed her at thirteen in a chance encounter driven by a photographer’s eye for an unusual face.
Truman Capote entered her life around the same age through one of her mother’s Manhattan lunches, and their correspondence continued for years. She said his letters were a lifeline during an unhappy stretch at a New England boarding school she eventually left under circumstances neither party wished to publicize. That unlikely friendship is why a sixteen-year-old found herself on the guest list for the most photographed private party of the century. Capote’s Black and White Ball was built to be the party of the decade, and Tree was invited, by all accounts, to be part of the scenery rather than the center of attention.
Betsy Johnson dressed her in a black jersey number closer to dancewear than evening attire, worn over tights and a bikini bottom, with a black mask whose tendrils hung like tears down her cheeks. It was bolder than anything else in a ballroom full of evening gowns and tiaras. One chronicler of the night later called her the star of the ball, drawing cameras away from the movie stars simply by standing still. Avedon noticed her first, and photographer Cecil Beaton shortly after.
Both were drawn to a quality one report described as pure and slightly enchanting. The phone call from Vreeland the next morning astonished the teenager completely; she had spent most of the party too shy to speak to strangers. Her surprise at being noticed lasted for weeks, because a lifetime of feeling ignored does not disappear because a famous photographer glanced across a crowded room. Tree also revealed that she had been sexually assaulted by a stranger during her teenage years, trauma that preceded the sudden public scrutiny by only a few years and found no place in the glamorous coverage of the ball.
She later described that room as the moment her life split from everything before it: the neglected daughter on one side of the mask, and the discovery on the other, with no gradual transition in between. Within days, the phone at the Tree home rang with requests from magazines that had never bothered to learn her name before. Avedon’s studio worked at the speed of a team used to fast work, and colleagues who witnessed those first sessions later described a strange chemistry between the photographer and his discovery. Tree arrived in modeling already struggling with an eating disorder that had begun around age fourteen.
She said she developed anorexia nervosa independently of the fashion industry, but it happened to align with the decade’s preference for exaggeratedly thin silhouettes. Vreeland published the resulting images in American Vogue as a large portfolio, a page biographers credit with introducing the “flower child” look that would define the second half of the sixties. Her parents were deeply embarrassed. Neither Ronald nor Marietta had expected their daughter’s nearly naked face to appear in the most influential fashion pages in America.
The early auditions were not kind. Tree remembered agencies and editors telling her outright that she was odd and ugly, that they had asked for a beautiful girl and gotten something stranger. Photographer David Bailey, after finally shooting her, called her a cross between an Egyptian Jiminy Cricket and Bambi. The compliment revealed how far she initially stood from conventional standards of beauty.
That rejection often came before the obsession matters to everything that followed, because it proves her beauty was never a given; it had to be proven, and then it could be withdrawn. John Lennon, who met her in that period, reportedly summed her up in six words he repeated: lovely, lovely, lovely; clever, clever, clever. Praise that mattered because it came from outside the fashion system entirely. By 1967 her face had moved from unclassifiable to unmistakable, appearing on three Vogue covers within the decade and inside its pages so often that British editors began paying attention to the exiled English MP’s daughter living in New York.
In the summer of 1967, Tree traveled to London to work as a reader at a small publisher, away from the modeling career gathering momentum across the ocean. At a party she met Beatrix Miller, editor of British Vogue, who invited her to the magazine’s offices to discuss a shoot. There she met David Bailey, the British fashion photographer from working-class London whose lens had already shaped a nation’s idea of beauty. He was twelve years older, technically still married to Catherine Deneuve, and had recently ended his notorious relationship with Jean Shrimpton.
Both later described their meeting in nearly identical terms: an immediate connection neither could fully explain. Tree called him a golden lion prowling the savannah, devastatingly attractive with a dangerous charm, the brightest and most vital talent in the magazine. She returned to New York to begin college that autumn but could not resist him, and within months dropped out and moved into his house in Primrose Hill. She was eighteen; he was thirty and still married.
When Bailey arrived at the Tree family home in Manhattan to collect her, Marietta tried to close the door in his face. He replied with one line: it could have been worse. In the early years, by almost every surviving account, the relationship brought real happiness mixed with real chaos. The couple traveled the world together on work assignments, through Paris, Rome, Milan, and New York, and on to Kashmir, Zambia, Egypt, and Turkey.
Bailey’s assistant John Swanell usually accompanied them, which meant that the most intimate years of Tree’s twenties were conducted largely with a witness present. Bailey’s commitment to his career rarely extended to fidelity, and Tree spoke openly about loving a man of whom it was said, without much exaggeration, that he made love every day. Modeling in the late sixties ran on a punishing schedule that prized youth and novelty above almost everything. Tree understood implicitly that her position, however unconventional, could not last forever.
She acknowledged that her years as a model coincided with the worsening of the eating disorder she had brought with her into the profession, not one she acquired from it. Anorexia nervosa and later bulimia took more than two decades of her life, by her own account, from age fourteen to thirty-six. What almost no one noticed at the time was the biological toll those years of malnutrition and hormonal disruption would eventually take on her skin. In later interviews she carefully refused to blame the fashion industry outright, insisting the disorder simply happened to align with prevailing standards of beauty.
In her late years with Bailey, her weight began to fluctuate unpredictably, and the steady stream of bookings slowed. Then, in her words, a severe outbreak of acne destroyed her confidence, appearing in her early twenties with a severity completely unlike the teenage complexion she was famous for. She described it as cystic, sudden, and disfiguring, the kind that leaves permanent scars rather than fading. For a woman whose entire professional value rested on an irreplaceable face, visible scarring was not simply a health problem; it was an eviction notice from an industry that had never guaranteed her job security.
She later attributed the scarring directly to years of disordered eating, telling one interviewer that anorexia had affected her hormones and caused the skin damage, adding without self-pity that she had paid the price for it. The timing could not have been crueler. The scarring coincided with the deterioration of her relationship with Bailey, a man whose professional obsession was female beauty, leaving her without the one relationship that might have softened the blow. One fashion writer summed up the end plainly: it ended with anorexia, infidelity, and a skin condition that ended Tree’s modeling career and her status as an icon of the decade.
What one legendary party built in a single night was about to collapse in public, faster than it had been built. By 1971 the bookings had nearly stopped. The industry that had competed desperately to sign Tree now treated her as a cautionary tale rather than a commodity. Tree described the shift with unusual frankness: she went from being in demand to being shunned, because no one could bear to talk about her appearance.
She said this decades later with complete calm, as someone who had fully absorbed the wound. The scars cost her more than bookings; they cost her the identity she had built outside her formidable family. A woman the world had called radiant now said the artistic establishment could not look at her. An exchange of identities she never agreed to and could not reverse.
Bailey, whose personal and professional passion centered on female beauty, found himself with a partner who no longer matched the image on which his career was built. Tree stated plainly that she had been with a photographer whose greatest love was the beauty of women, and she no longer fit that description in any way. A relationship built on visual desire had little left to hold it together once the visual element changed. In 1972, in the midst of this collapse, Tree was arrested for cocaine possession after buying drugs from an abandoned house in London, where police caught the dealer almost immediately.
The arrest added a criminal record to a career already struggling under psychological wounds, malnutrition, and a failing relationship. In 1973 or 1974, depending on the account attributed to her, she and Bailey separated for good. She later said that losing her career to the late-onset acne, along with the drug arrest and the end of the relationship, left her completely shattered. At twenty-one, amid that wreckage, she suffered what she called a nervous breakdown, describing an unshakable feeling of continuous falling that never fully left her even after the acute crisis passed.
The years after Bailey were, by her own description, among the darkest of her life, marked by long-term depression and a search for any footing that did not depend on her appearance. She turned first to movement, joining dance classes taught by choreographer Arlene Phillips, finding in discipline what the camera never offered: control instead of judgment. Then came therapy, and an attempt to untangle a childhood shaped by two successful absent parents and an adulthood shaped by an industry that had loved her and discarded her on almost identical terms. She left London for Los Angeles, and by 1981 had moved again, this time to Sydney, partly to be near her half-brother and partly, it is believed, to put great distance between herself and the industry that had made and destroyed her.
In Sydney she met Ricky Fataar, the South African-born musician who had drummed for the Beach Boys and played with the Routers. They married and built a life far from modeling. Their daughter Paloma was born around 1980, and Tree, who had once posed nearly naked in Vogue, found herself working as a researcher on an Australian television program and training to become a birthing instructor. She had said she had never held a baby before the birth of her own daughter.
The love she felt for her child, she said, was profound in a way nothing in fashion or fame or even Bailey had ever approached. For a woman whose public identity had been built and destroyed entirely on evaluations of her face, motherhood offered a belonging that asked nothing about her appearance. In the 1980s, Sydney placed Tree, as she tells it, in the middle of the AIDS crisis. She watched friends fall ill and die at a pace that made her own concerns over beauty and rejection suddenly seem small.
A friend too unwell to attend a public lecture by the Dalai Lama gave her the front-row ticket. Inside the crowded cathedral, Tree felt a powerful connection with the Tibetan spiritual leader, describing him as a real man whose presence carried extraordinary awareness, not a performance of holiness. The encounter began a serious engagement with Buddhism that lasted decades, built on daily meditation, study, and organized volunteering. The practice taught her, in her words, to let go of the preoccupation with appearance that had dominated her twenties.
She said she no longer spent much time looking in the mirror. In 1989 she gave birth to a second child, a son named Michael McFarlane, fathered by Stuart McFarlane. She began volunteering on issues connected to her new spiritual commitments and later joined the board of the Lotus Outreach charity, which supports girls in Cambodia and India vulnerable to human trafficking, and became the UK representative for the Khyentse Foundation, which promotes Buddhist studies. Before those formal charitable roles, she had spent time in Sydney working for the environmental organization Planet Ark.
In 1998, after an absence of nearly two decades, Tree returned to London, the city where her modeling career had ended, this time as someone whose self-worth was no longer tied to that industry’s opinion. That was fortunate, because that industry was about to ask something of her again, this time on terms she alone would set. In London she found a different kind of visibility, built on words rather than images. She began writing for American and British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Financial Times, presenting herself as an observer of the industry rather than merely its subject.
For the first time in her adult life, the byline replaced the commentary. The woman who had been analyzed and photographed by the most prominent fashion editors now analyzed them instead, in her own words and at her own pace. Occasionally, when it suited her, she returned before the camera, appearing in a Burberry campaign in 2006 and Barneys New York in 2012. The same field that had cast her out for the condition of her skin was now, decades later, willing to photograph that same face, aged by time, as something worth showing again.
A reversal offered without any explicit apology for the first one. Tree never framed the later returns in the language of triumph; she treated each as an occasion rather than a vindication. She spoke instead of the limiting effect of modeling, telling one interviewer that excessive focus on a young person’s appearance can hinder other aspects of growth or at best contribute little to an emerging personality. Yet she refused to disown the experience entirely, insisting she regretted not one moment of the travels, the photographers, or the extraordinary people she met, even with the obstacles that took years to overcome.
Her writing career continued to grow through the first two decades of the new millennium, alongside her charity work. But another confrontation with appearance, aging, and loss awaited her, and this time the judgment came from aging itself, not from any magazine editor. At sixty-two, after the end of a romantic relationship, she found herself lost again, proof that decades of psychological work do not immunize anyone against fresh grief. By then, the obsessive gaze on her sixteen-year-old face had passed entirely, not through deliberate cruelty but through the quiet erasure that eventually claims almost every model.
She spoke about this stage with the same frankness she had used when discussing the acne scars, admitting she could not say she enjoyed looking in the mirror even now, while finding relief in having shed her obsession with her appearance. Aging, she said, had given her a strong desire to make the most of her current life rather than mourn the life the camera had rewarded. In her seventies, at an unexpected turn, the fashion world that had cast her out decades earlier invited her back, this time not for the rebellious teenager of the Capote ball but for the woman she had become. She walked in shows for Fendi, Valentino, and British designer Richard Quinn over several seasons, in an industry that had once excluded her entirely.
Asked about it later, she said she tried to think of the other models and the show as a whole, acknowledging with her characteristic modesty that people were not looking at her specifically. Alongside her return to the runways, she resumed print modeling on her own terms, working in her seventies with photographer Steven Meisel on two Zara campaigns and with Juergen Teller on a Vivienne Westwood project. These were careful choices, not driven by need. Around the same period she turned toward a quieter ambition: writing fiction, a pursuit that had accompanied her since her days as a publisher’s reader in London in 1967, long before Bailey, Vogue, or the Plaza.
In 2024, Moonflower Books published her first novel, “Piece of My Heart. ” Tree said the novel accurately reflects her early years: the photo shoots, the drugs, the consuming relationship with an older photographer, and the spiritual reassessment that followed, condensed into a narrative over which she alone had the final word. She described the process as emotional but ultimately clarifying, allowing her to see her most chaotic years with a distance, as she put it, she had not reached before. The book’s publication brought a new wave of press attention, but this time the interviews focused on her interior life, her craft, and her spiritual practice rather than documenting her appearance.
The mechanisms of Tree’s early rise and fall belong to an industry built almost entirely around a handful of gatekeepers in the late sixties. Vreeland at Vogue, Avedon behind the camera, and a small circle of editors around them held enormous power over which faces the public would recognize as beautiful and which would suddenly vanish without explanation. It was a concentrated discretionary authority accountable to no outside body. A model could rise overnight on the strength of a single evening gown, as Tree did, and fall just as quickly when a flaw appeared that no publicist could hide.
There was no appeals committee and no precedent to protect her. An actress might survive an unfavorable season on talent, a singer might outlast shifts in fashion on voice, but a model of that era offered the industry a single asset: an irreplaceable face. When that asset changed through illness, through the harsh accounting of an eating disorder, or simply through time, the industry’s usual response was not sympathy but replacement. Tree described the mechanism that made everyone unable to talk about her appearance as closer to collective embarrassment than open malice.
An entire ecosystem was uncomfortable confronting the fragility of the beauty it had spent years celebrating as timeless. Her contemporaries Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton left the profession largely on their own terms, retiring by choice rather than being forced out overtly, which makes Tree’s experience a rarer and more revealing test of how fashion treats a woman once her usefulness ends. Because choice was precisely the missing element in her departure, Tree herself resists blaming the industry directly, attributing her skin’s collapse to her eating disorder rather than any external villain, a nuance that complicates any simple narrative of victimhood. But that nuance does not erase the result.
Whatever mixture of biology and starvation produced the scarring, the industry’s silence, its discomfort, its cessation of work were freely and unhesitatingly chosen. No editor was ever publicly held to account. That choice, repeated over decades with countless models whose stories were not documented as carefully as Tree’s, forms the hidden pillar of an entire era’s relationship with female beauty. There is a particular injustice in the fact that the same publications that made Tree’s name through images of her flawless sixteen-year-old skin never published a comparable article explaining her disappearance, as if the story simply stopped being worth telling once her face changed.
She simply stopped appearing. The work dried up, and any explanation circulated in private conversation rather than public reporting. Compare that silence with the near-hagiographic documentation of her rise. Biographers devoted entire chapters to the dress she wore at the Capote ball.
Historians of the Black and White Ball still list her name among the 540 guests. The gap between how carefully the industry documented her ascent and how completely it ignored her decline says much about which aspects of a model’s life the press considers worth preserving. Tree’s family background, with all its inherited wealth and political influence, provided her no protection at all once the fashion industry issued its verdict. That fact would surprise anyone who assumes money buys immunity from every reversal.
Her descent from Marshall Field wealth, her father’s seat in Parliament, and her grandfather’s Chicago real estate fortune did not win her a single magazine cover after her skin was damaged. In a strange way, that made her fall more revealing than a similar story involving a model from a modest background, because it demonstrates clearly that old money and distinguished lineage, however useful elsewhere in society, have no value at all in an industry that prizes only the current state of a face. Her mother, despite her high social standing, could not make a single phone call that would change this industry’s judgment of her daughter’s skin. Tree’s later reflections on her mother deserve special attention because they complicate any easy reading of her story as a simple lesson in the humbling of a spoiled girl.
She described Marietta as beautiful, highly intelligent, and hardworking, but lacking maternal instinct, a woman for whom motherhood was a duty rather than a vocation, organized around a public career rather than her daughter. That physical and emotional distance shaped Tree long before any camera found her, producing a teenager so hungry for recognition that a single evening at a costume ball could change the course of her life. A hunger the fashion industry satisfied for as long as her face was useful, then abandoned once it was not. A clear line runs from a childhood spent competing for attention with successful parents and a Pulitzer-winning half-sister to an adulthood in which Tree tied her identity entirely to whatever approval the fashion industry offered.
Her eventual embrace of motherhood and her insistence that she loved her daughter from the first glance, despite never having held a baby before, reads as a direct corrective to the parenting she received. Where Marietta handed her children to nannies, Tree built her adult life on actual presence, raising two children herself, working as a birthing instructor, and devoting decades of volunteer work to a charity protecting vulnerable girls from exploitation. There is a quiet symmetry in a woman valued primarily for physical fragility spending her later decades protecting girls whose fragility the world treats far more harshly than fashion ever treated hers. Her work with Lotus Outreach, specifically focused on girls at risk of human trafficking, suggests an awareness that her own experience of being valued then discarded for her appearance shares roots with a darker exploitation faced by girls without any of her advantages.
The Plaza ballroom, a Sydney television studio, and the Buddhist meditation hall sit side by side, forming a single pattern. Each institution that measured Tree’s worth by one narrow standard eventually gave way to something more durable. Her family compared her to successful siblings and parents. Fashion judged her on the condition of her skin.
Both judgments, however final they seemed at the time, proved temporary and replaceable. What eventually replaced them were commitments Tree built herself rather than inherited: her children, her charity work, her writing, and her spiritual practice. None depends on anyone’s approval of her appearance. None can be cancelled by an editor’s phone call, as her bookings once were.
None of this erases the real damage done by the industry’s rejection in her early twenties: the depression, the breakdown, the years spent rebuilding her confidence from nearly nothing. No later reconciliation with the fashion world has ever fully undone that harm, however warm the reconciliation ultimately became. But it complicates the narrative that ends simply with the cruelty of fashion, because Tree’s own trajectory suggests the rejection that broke her in 1971 eventually pushed her toward a far broader definition of self-worth than a modeling career alone could have offered. Her decision decades later to return to modeling selectively, choosing Zara campaigns and Fendi shows rather than treating any of them as a true comeback, indicates genuine peace with the industry, neither forgiveness nor resentment.
Peace negotiated entirely on her own terms. She continues writing, most recently her first novel, revisiting the early years that once broke her, but now as the author rather than the subject, controlling a narrative that once controlled her. Her charitable commitments, sustained for more than two decades without much fanfare, point to a woman whose sense of purpose long ago outgrew any value fashion assigned or withdrew. Her spiritual practice, launched by a stranger’s generosity during the AIDS crisis, gave her a framework entirely separate from the standards of beauty that once made and unmade her.
Six decades after the Plaza, what remains is a fuller portrait than any cautionary tale about a merciless industry could offer alone: a woman whose worst professional collapse proved survivable, and whose eventual peace owed nothing to the industry that had denied it to her. Her story resists the tidy arc documentaries prefer, because there is no single villain, no cinematic reversal, no triumphant final magazine cover erasing the years of ostracism that preceded it. Instead there is a woman now in her seventies, living quietly in the city where her career ended, who spent decades building her identity through writing, charity work, and Buddhist practice precisely because fashion stripped away the only identity it had given her. The enormous family wealth and connections gave her every advantage except the one that mattered most inside the industry that made her famous: immunity from its judgment.
When that judgment turned against her, neither old money nor transatlantic social capital could restore a single booking. What eventually returned some peace was not the fashion world’s forgiveness, which came partially and decades late, but Tree’s own refusal to let the industry’s verdict stand as the final word on her value. She built a second life and then a third, through motherhood, charity, writing, and a spiritual practice that rejected outright the premise on which her first career was built: that appearance determines worth. Each of those lives proved sturdier than the one the cameras drew.
The girl rejected at auditions as ugly, celebrated as the face of a generation, then cast out because her skin changed, became finally a woman whose story matters not because fashion once decided she was beautiful, but because she decided for herself what beauty would cost her and what it would never be allowed to take. A decision in which no editor or photographer ever had a say. Old money gave Penelope Tree extraordinary privileges: the fireplaces of Ditchley Park, the Groton lineage, a childhood adjacent to Churchill’s war cabinet. But it never protected her from an industry that trades in its own separate currency, indifferent to appearances.
In her case, that currency moved quickly, granting her everything at sixteen and withdrawing it at twenty-two. The speed of that transaction remains the most instructive lesson her story offers about the pull that old money still holds over the fashion world, a lesson that applies as much to the women being discovered today as to those fashion cast off decades ago.