Insolite

Life and death of Cynthia, the beautiful woman with hoarse voice of the 1930s

At the end of the 1930s she was for a few years as famous as Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh or Marlene Dietrich. Sculptural and moderately expressive, she was at all the great New York parties and never said anything that could have been reproached to her. It’s normal: Cynthia was a plaster model.

Some would say that it is only in the United States that we can see such a phenomenon. For if, in the absence of social networks and a lasting trace left on movie, her fame never crossed the Atlantic, Cynthia was a real star, followed by the press, courted by luxury brands and with a talk show on television. She was tall, blonde and sculptural in shape, but she wasn’t the only one. Her particularity was that she was a window model.

It is to a sculptor from Chicago that Americans entangled in the Great Depression owe her. Originally from Missouri, Lester Gaba moved to Chicago to live from his art, and the economic crisis resulting from Black Thursday led him, like many of his peers, to work on soap to cut costs. At the time, leading department stores began to use mannequins to brighten up their windows and attract the attention of shoppers, but those made of soap had the unfortunate tendency to melt when the sun lingered on the glass walls.

In 1932, Gaba designed a plaster model for Saks Fifth Avenue and added unusual physical features to the model, including imperfections such as freckles and pigeon toes to make it look realistic. It was an immediate success, and Life magazine decided to devote an article to these “almost living models”, using its star photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt (famous for having immortalised Hitler and Mussolini before emigrating to the United States because of his Jewishness) as an illustrator. Eisenstaedt’s series was so attractive that the publisher decided to make it his cover (in the course of his long career, Eisenstaedt produced 90 covers of the famous magazine). The latter marks the beginning of what we would call today the Cynthiamania: within a few weeks, Cynthia becomes a real star, to whom luxury houses such as Cartier and Tiffany send jewellery and fashion houses a star’s wardrobe.

Gaba could be content with this unexpected bliss, but the man is a creative and extravagant artist who imagines strengthening his creature’s star status by making her a character in the New York social scene. To do this, he will travel around the city in the company of Cynthia, presented to photo lens as his companion. Sculptor and window dresser, Gaba is also a close friend of the cinema director Vincente Minelli, who opens wide the doors of the influencers: here is the couple invited to all the parties and soon to the wedding of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson! Now Cynthia (and Gaba) have their weekly column in the Women’s Wear Daily, their radio show, their subscription to the Metropolitan Opera House, and Cynthia receives a ministerial letter. At parties, Gaba explains to the men who rush to her that she has laryngitis which prevents her from talking to them…

In the early 1940’s, Cynthia was a major star of New York dinners. But Lester Gaba was called up in December ’42 and entrusted Cynthia to his mother, after announcing to the press that she was taking a break from her overworked social life, not without specifying to Mom that she should have weekly beauty treatments, including a haircut. It was there that she slipped off a chair and broke on the floor in 1943.

Several newspapers will announce her death and Lester Gaba will be deeply affected. Demobilized, he will repair her and will equip her with an electric mechanism giving her the right to speak, but the Second World War took with it the magic of the Thirties and the craze of the country for the beautiful plaster model belongs to the past. Gaba returned to his job as a window decorator and from then on he turned his attention to teaching, becoming over the years a recognised academic specialist in merchandising. He died in 1987 in New York without descendants: Cynthia was finally his only child. Inventor of the modern window model, he was also a pioneer of artistic performance, whose influence on modern art remains unknown. On the other hand, some will not deprive themselves of finding some similarities between the intellectual level of his creature and that of various queens of today’s social networks – who do not have the foresight to reserve their words as she did, laryngitis or not.