Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross Page B

laundry bag over his shoulder, and that was the last time I saw him as a father.” He registered under a pseudonym at the Plaza Hotel, took up with an eighteen-year-old model named Astride, and started giving nightly parties. “I never thought of him as being with a girl,” Candy said. “I assumed he was sitting talking in the same restaurant, telling the same old story to some man in the agency.” She didn’t even blink when he had a friend sneak into the office and take furniture to fill up the new apartment he’d rented. But when her absent husband started signing checks, Candy used her power of attorney to close his bank accounts. He screamed. She gave him money. He went on a car-buying spree. Finally he even spent $125,000 of Candy’s. “He cleaned out the accounts, and he did it swiftly, too,” says son Harry. When Candy discovered she’d bottomed out at $36, she started talking divorce and headed to Mexico.
    Just after she returned, in May 1959, the district attorney seized Conover’s books, and his license was revoked after a lawsuit was filed alleging that he and Candy had stolen fees belonging to child models. His remaining models immediately started demanding the money he owed to them. “It wasn’t easy being a Conover that day,” says Harry, Jr.
    Outside court the next day Candy’s lawyer revealed to the world that she’d divorced her husband in Mexico six weeks earlier. “I left her no alternative,” Harry said. “I just got tired of Candy. We were married fourteen years. The very nature of our business—fourteen years is a lifetime.” He admitted he was responsible for the agency mess and allowed that Candy had stepped in to run things in his absence. “The story goes back seven years when I wanted to sell the agency after suffering a heart attack,” he said. “It was for reasons of health that I walked out nine months ago.” He estimated that he owed about $25,000. Candy said Harry owed her alone $100,000. She had to wear a wig to avoid process servers.
    The Conover affair ended anticlimactically. In 1960 all charges against Harry were dropped when it was proved he hadn’t stolen the money. But he had mismanaged the agency—and his family. Several of his children died young, and at least one more has disappeared, according to daughter Carole, who struggles with her father’s ghost to this day. Candy Jones continued operating the charm school, renamed the Candy Jones Career Girls School, into the 1960s. She also wrote eleven books on beauty. She married Long John Nebel in 1972 and became cohost of his late-night radio talk show. She hosted the show alone from his death in 1978 until just before she died in 1990. An obscure book written about her before she died, The Control of Candy Jones , tells a chilling story about her life after modeling.
    After she married Nebel, Candy Jones started having insomnia, suffering mood swings, and showing two distinct personalities. Her husband, an amateur hypnotist, put her under his spell, and it emerged, the book alleges, that she’d been recruited, drugged, brainwashed, used, and sexually abused as a pawn of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    The book is based on transcripts of unscientific question-and-answer sessions with Nebel and later with a professional hypnotist. It carries an endorsement from Candy herself. But it is also laden with pseudonyms, “could haves,” “must have beens,” and “possiblys.” Regardless, Harry Conover, Jr., believes it. “There was clearly a double life going on,” he says. “It’s not just Candy Jones, model. It’s Candy Jones, superpatriot. Candy Jones, chump. And if she hadn’t been a model and gone on USO tours and gotten to know generals personally, none of this stuff would have happened.”
    And Harry, Sr.? Despite his legal vindication, Conover was ruined. Unable to find a job, he went to his mother for support, kept on hanging out in nightclubs, and traveled to California, where he tried to set