FALLING FAR FROM THE TREE
During my time at two of the newspapers I worked for in Houston, I had a customer named Dolores Phelps. She sold country properties in Washington County back when rich people from Houston were buying those properties, and she did very well for herself.
She was so interesting and generous and took me out to eat lunch all the time, always treating me. What I eventually found out was that she was the first supermodel in New York before that term was coined for the likes of the supermodels of the 1980s.
At that time her name was Dolores Hawkins. She was discovered in New York at a restaurant called Longchamps and on only her second job she landed the cover of Mademoiselle and signed with the Ford Modeling Agency. Later she was on the cover of Vogue. The latter magazine is coveted by all models even today.
She was a contemporary of “haughty and unapproachable” models of the time like Dovima, Jean Patchett and Suzy Parker, but unlike them she was a new type of model who exuded happiness and approachability. Famous photographer Jerry Schatzberg photographed her for Vogue and said of her, “Dolores was one of the three or four best models around and she had no attitude.”
According to writer Karen Radkai, “Dolores worked full-tilt from 1951 until she married in 1966. She was on hundreds of magazine covers in the US and Europe, in countless print advertisements and magazine editorials. It would have been impossible to keep track of all of them, and sadly a large quantity perished in a barn fire in the '60s.”
She met transplanted Texan Stuart Phelps in New York through a mutual friend, and both shared a love of the country and horses. With some of her modeling money she had earlier bought a 167-acre horse farm north of Manhattan. They married in 1966 and had three sons in 1967, 1969 and 1970.
She worked occasionally, but the family left New York for Houston in 1977. Raising three boys was her full-time job and she decided to retire from modeling. That’s when she decided to go into real estate.
I started thinking about her when I was on my way home from Galveston the other day when driving through Brenham. I decided to Google her to see what she was up to and found out she died at age 90 in November of 2021 at her home in Independence. She is buried in the Phelps family cemetery in Independence.
Rest in peace, my beautiful friend.
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