The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a photograph of a young woman in Paris, dressed in couture and leaning over a pinball machine.
She called it her favorite indoor sport, a clue to the free spirit underneath the gown.
When CBS cameras toured her Manhattan penthouse for the TV show Person to Person, viewers met a glamorous woman who appeared to live alone.
She was one of the most famous models of the 1950s, and her name was Suzy Parker.
She was also hiding a husband. Before long, she would hide herself.
A Whiz-Bang, High-Living Girl
In 1956, the year she turned 24, Suzy Parker stood at the very top of the fashion world.
In Paris the year before, Richard Avedon photographed her in a Dior evening dress and a Lanvin-Castillo gown, pictures the Metropolitan Museum of Art now keeps in its collection.
Time reported that she earned $100,000 a year (equal to over $1 million today), and editors sold her name to readers as eagerly as the clothes she wore.
Hollywood came calling next. In 1957, she made a brief appearance in Funny Face, then played opposite Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me. Paris couture, the top magazines, and now the movies all wanted the same face.
Suzy Parker swore off marriage while secretly married to her second husband.
Offscreen, she sold a character as carefully as any gown. She told reporters she could love a man more outside marriage and doubted she’d ever walk down an aisle, and the line worked because nobody had a reason to doubt it.
The public adored that version of her: the tall, independent model who answered to no one, living alone above the East River.
Magazines retold the tale so often that her husband all but vanished from it.
Her sister Cissie later told Jacobs that Parker fed reporters false stories deliberately and laughed when they were discovered. To Cissie, the invented Suzy looked like a game her sister played with the world, and she played it well.
Even the people closest to her never told her story the same way twice.
Her sisters, her husbands, and her children would all give competing versions of the same moments, from her childhood in Florida to the night her father died beside her.
But the marriage she concealed in 1956 was, in fact, her second secret wedding, and the first came before she was out of her teens.
