In June 1958, a train slammed into a car stalled at a railroad crossing in Florida. The car was destroyed. The man in the driver’s seat was killed instantly. The woman beside him, badly shattered but alive, was Cecilia Susie Parker, the most famous model of her generation.
The crash ended her father’s life, broke her body, and marked the dividing line between the two very different women she would become. Susie Parker was not born into poverty or tragedy. She was born in 1932, officially in Long Island City, New York, though she always preferred to claim San Antonio, Texas. Her father, George Parker, was an engineer who filled the house with books.
Her mother, Elizabeth, was a Southern woman with fierce ambition for her daughters. Susie was the third of three Parker girls. Her older sister Dorian Lee was the first to make a name in New York, becoming one of the great models of the 1940s. Growing up in Dorian’s shadow, Susie watched her sister’s chaotic romantic life and financial struggles and resolved to be different, to be controlled and smart.
At fifteen, Susie was dragged into the modeling world. In 1947 her mother took her to New York to visit Dorian, who brought her to the Ford agency. Eileen Ford was unimpressed at first, rejecting the gangly redhead as too tall with too large a nose. But something in the girl’s defiance convinced Ford to sign her.
Susie’s first major booking was for Life magazine. She was fifteen, claiming nineteen, and discovered that she could do more than pose. She moved, she laughed, she inhabited each garment as a character. In a world of silent statues, she was a talkie.
By 1950 she was accomplished enough to pursue Paris. The city was still healing from the war, but its fashion houses were manufacturing beauty with desperate intensity. Susie arrived as an American curiosity, loud and modern. There she met photographer Richard Avedon.
He hated static studio poses and wanted motion and emotion. Together they changed how fashion was photographed, taking models out of the studio, into the streets, onto roller skates. She became the muse of Coco Chanel, one of the few people the designer genuinely liked. Susie was wealthy and independent, demanding two hundred dollars an hour when others took twenty-five, and becoming the first model to earn over one hundred thousand dollars a year.
She liked to say, “I am the gold standard. ”
Yet the fame was hollow. She had a brief secret marriage in high school, followed by a disastrous short marriage to a French journalist, Pierre de Lasal, kept hidden because public married models did not fit the fantasy. She wanted more than standing still looking pretty.
She wrote, she read, she grew bored. Hollywood came calling, first with a cameo in Funny Face, then with a starring role opposite Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me. But film acting felt stiff and technical to her, and critics dismissed her as a clothes horse trying to gallop. She took acting classes and fought for better roles.
On that June day in 1958, she was in Florida visiting her father, the man she loved most. Their car stalled at a railroad crossing. The impact destroyed everything. When she woke in the hospital, her arms were broken, her shoulders shattered, her face swollen and bruised, and her father was dead.
She survived and carried the guilt of that survival. The press cared not about her grief but about her face, speculating whether she would model again. She understood then that the world had loved her utility, not her person. She did model again.
Avedon photographed her, but the joy in her eyes was replaced by something knowing and melancholic. And in 1959, at the height of her comeback, she disappeared. The public was told she was resting. In truth she was pregnant.
Fearing ruin in conservative America, she hid the pregnancy and secretly gave birth to her daughter Georgia that December. She returned to the celebrity world while her heart was tethered to a child she could not publicly acknowledge. Work continued. In The Best of Everything she played a version of herself.
Then came a grim spy thriller shot in London, Circle of Deception, and a brooding actor named Bradford Dillman. On set they clashed. He thought she was a high-maintenance model; she thought he was stiff and condescending. But one night, exhausted by pretense, she spoke honestly to him about her father, the crash, and her hidden daughter.
He listened. He fell in love with the woman, not the face. She finally felt seen. He told her he did not want to be Mr.
Parker, and she replied she did not want to be Susie Parker either. She began sabotaging her own career, refusing interviews, showing up late, called difficult. She described modeling as selling a lie. In 1963 she and Bradford married quietly on a ship at sea, and then she made the decision that stunned the industry.
She quit. She told Vogue she was done. She said she was tired of being a clothes hanger and wanted to be a human being. They moved to Montecito, California, far from Hollywood, bought a house behind high hedges, and built a wall between her old life and her new one.
For the next four decades she lived as Susie Dillman. She cut her famous red hair, wore no makeup, gained weight defiantly, baked bread, gardened, drove a station wagon, and raised four children, including Georgia from her secret past. She refused to let her children model. She rejected offers from Revlon and Chanel and threw away letters from journalists wanting interviews.
When they asked her opinion of the supermodels of the 1990s, she said they were overworked and underfed and hoped they were saving their money. To her, modeling was a meaningless profession and she had never trusted her beauty. Not everything in her retreat was peaceful. Her sister Dorian’s life spiraled into chaos, five marriages, failed ventures, and in the late 1970s the suicide of her son Kim.
Susie watched from a distance and withdrew, terrified the glamour she had escaped could still destroy her family. She spent her final decades in declining health, the results of the 1958 crash and a lifetime of smoking. Bradford, the actor who had swept her away from Paris, retired to become her caretaker, driving her to doctors and guarding her decline from the world. When a documentary crew tried to film a retrospective in the late 1990s, she sent back a message that she was busy dying and had no time for television.
On May 3, 2003, at the age of seventy, she died quietly in the Montecito home she had built, with Bradford beside her. There was no press release and no ceremony. She had left strict instructions against a circus. When the news broke, the fashion world mourned an era, publishing obituaries that listed her accomplishments, the first model to earn one hundred thousand dollars, the face of Chanel, the muse of Avedon.
The family mourned Susie Dillman, the mother, because the two women had essentially stopped being the same person decades earlier. Her sister Dorian outlived her by five years, dying in 2008, closing the Parker dynasty. But Susie’s legacy grew after her death. Young models were told to study her; designers placed her old photographs on mood boards.
She became a patron saint of personality and intelligence in modeling. Yet her true legacy was her escape. She was the first woman to reach the summit of fame and walk away while still winning, proving that a woman could be more than her reflection, and that the most glamorous thing she could possess was a private life.
She kept herself for herself, and in a world that demands everything, that was her final elegance.