Donna Baldwin stands out in a crowd

Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

Published March 22, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photos By Ellen Jaskol / The Rocky And Courtesy Donna Baldwin

Donna Baldwin, above, has been both a model (that's her at right in a print ad from the '60s) and an agent for models.

Agent Diana Gormley and Baldwin select photos for a Donna Baldwin Talent Inc. model's portfolio.

In the fashion trade's Book of Genesis - lots of pictures, not much text - a key chapter concerns one Lee Miller, a headstrong beauty from Poughkeepsie, N.Y. If we can believe the story, she had distractedly stepped off a Manhattan curb one day in 1927 when a well-dressed man yanked her back, just in time, from the path of a speeding taxicab.

The man was Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue. The lovely stranger he supposedly saved went on to become the magazine's top model, a subject of Picasso, an intimate of the surrealist Man Ray and a celebrated war photographer. In the days after Adolf Hitler was defeated, Lee Miller famously shed her clothes and hopped into der Fuhrer's Berlin bathtub, smiling enigmatically.

Donna Baldwin, who has overseen one of Denver's two top modeling agencies since 1991, never got to see her nose painted next to her ear. But she, too, experienced a moment of fate, dependent on beauty, that changed her life. Baldwin was a freshman at Colorado College in - no point fudging, the year was 1956 - when a scout from Mademoiselle spotted her in front of the student union and recruited her to model for the annual campus issue. She still has the magazine somewhere, maybe down in the basement.

Call it chapter one in the Book of Baldwin. More than a half-century after the flashbulbs first went off, this quiet, elegant woman - still striking, her beautifully chiseled features framed by a darkly glossy, fashionably-cut mane - continues to search for high cheekbones, long legs and the ineffable mystery that transforms good-looking young women into icons capable of selling lizard-skin handbags and $3,500 evening dresses that most women couldn't fit into without eight years on green tea and carrot sticks.

Donna Baldwin Talent has cozy offices in the Highlands neighborhood, nearly 2,000 models and actors, almost all of them part-timers, on its roster and a secure place in the local flesh-and-fashion business. You can scarcely go to a Denver runway show without seeing a half-dozen Baldwin models strutting their stuff. Many of them move on, with Baldwin retained as their "Mother Agent," to the overheated "primary markets" of New York, Milan or Paris, where no one has a second job or an impending midterm in Sociology 101.

That willowy blonde on the cover of a recent Cosmopolitan is Baldwin model Alex Browne. The discovered-by-Donna green eyes of Jenna Reeves gaze out from the glossy front of Marie Claire. Her finds, male and female, sport cable-knit sweaters in the L.L. Bean catalog and costume jewelry in the weekly Kmart insert. Meanwhile, the hottest new market for Baldwin talent is Hispanic and bilingual, mostly broadcast commercials for "everything from Local Joe's Heating and Plumbing to the big-box stores," according to Baldwin agent Kathleen Ham.

"I've been on all sides of the fence," Baldwin says. "I've been the model. I've been the client. And now I'm the agent. Whatever else it does, that gives you a certain perspective."

In a business built on fantasy - and often tainted by sleaze - her perspective always has been remarkably illusion-free.

As a model in Las Vegas, in the 1960s, Donna Baldwin stood 5-foot-7 in her stocking feet, the minimally acceptable height at that time. In the 1970s, when she owned a high-end Cherry Creek boutique that bore her name, she learned quickly about the grind of New York buying trips and the profit-killing reality of shoplifters. After 14 years of marriage, she divorced in 1972 and never remarried. She never met the right man and has for years lived alone in the Grant Ranch section of Littleton.

When she opened her talent agency, in 1991, with her lawyer-son Brad as partner, she defied Denver convention by not attaching a "school" to it.

"In the beginning, it was a struggle," she says, "but here we are - 17 years later."

'It's the girl that shines'

To the uninitiated, "modeling classes" may look like the real deal. More often than not, they're an expensive scam in which unscrupulous agents take thousands of dollars from naÃve students while making a lot of empty promises about future success on the runways of Paris - even if the student in question stands five-three in her party pumps and looks like Nick Nolte's mug shot.

Donna Baldwin doesn't do that. Aside from recommending a $75 runway class and a good set of promo pictures (another $600 or so) she doesn't try to sell her charges anything. Instead, she speaks plainly. There are some jobs for "petites," she says, and for what the fashionistas delicately call "plus sizes." She gets occasional calls for models, men and woman, in their 50s, even 60s. But the ideal, the heart of an essentially heartless game, is still based on a certain kind of genetic accident.

"If you're a model," she says, "you're probably tall, slender and you have a great figure. You are also beautiful. But you need more than that. It's the girl that shines, who has that charisma and confidence, that's the one. The super models all have that magnetism: Look at Heidi Klum."

Truth be told, you won't be running into Heidi anytime soon on the 16th Street Mall. Compared with the fang-and-claw body-battles fought every day by the top 10 New York modeling agencies, or the overheated competition among L.A.'s "Big Five" for a 15 percent chunk of Tom or Julia or Angelina, our quiet little outpost on the Colorado plains might as well be Donna Baldwin's hometown. That would be Omaha, where she once earned "best-dressed" honors in the high school yearbook.

In Denver, the preferred look is not what the Vogue and Bazaar editors call "editorial" - dessicated, spiderish, sometimes radical. The girl- next-door does better here. A more "commercial" type, in trade parlance. She is 5-8 to 5-11 and wholesomely beautiful. Unthreatening. She's the friendly girl you might share a chocolate malt with - if she didn't wear a size 4 and hadn't sworn off chocolate malts for the rest of the century.

The men? Same thing. The top male models in Denver are 5-11 or taller, athletic, "approachable," conventionally good-looking. Like male models everywhere, they wear size 40 or 42 suits. But unlike some of their counterparts in New York or Milan, they almost never look like they just arrived from Neptune with a bad attitude about earthlings.

This is not New York, not the savage arena the recent NBC series about the beauty trades calls Lipstick Jungle. Baldwin is justly happy about that, and with the reasonably un-pressurized life she gets to live here.

"I've always liked New York. It's invigorating and inspiring because it's the cream of the industry. But even when I went on buying trips for the store, I was always glad to get off the plane back home. You can breathe - there's a spaciousness here that I cherish."

Keeping it conservative

In one way, though, Denver does suggest the wolfish ethics of Manhattan. The president of Maximum Talent Agency, Baldwin's main competitor in this market, is Rob Lail, a man with whom Baldwin has some unhappy history. Two decades ago, they worked together at a now-defunct Denver agency called Kristi's and in 1990 they made tentative plans to be partners in a venture of their own. When that didn't work out, Lail took umbrage.

He says today that the feud is over, that it's old business which doesn't matter anymore. But he also claims that Baldwin has "no idea whatsoever what she's doing," that Maximum is the only real agency here and gets all the decent out-of-town business.

"The models making $400,000 a year in other markets are not with Donna Baldwin," he says bluntly. "They are with me."

For her part, Baldwin says she wants only "to heal the venom. I'm truly happy for (Lail's) success, I really am. I'm coming from that space, and I hope all this will finally be put to rest."

Meanwhile, her own standards apply. Always will. Donna Baldwin - born Donna Rice - moved to Colorado Springs in the 1950s, where her mother had an interior design business called Bricks and her stepfather, John Burt, worked as an electrical engineer on construction of the new U.S. Air Force Academy.

Infused with a powerful work ethic and upright principles, she remains rather straitlaced. Her disarming gentleness, friends and co-workers believe, comes from her abiding interest in Hinduism and yoga. She's twice traveled to India.

"I have a spiritual life that I don't really want to talk about," she says. "But everybody that knows me knows I'm conservative. This business breeds a lot of stuff that's unsavory, for sure. But that stuff doesn't happen in my agency."

When the skin magazines call, she says no. Firmly.

"I had one girl who did Playboy on her own," she reports, clearly distressed. "No one would book her in town after that. It brought down the image that most of my clients want."

The truth about beauty

Baldwin's own image is that of a woman who speaks Truth to Beauty - and to the not-so-beautiful. But gracefully. There's no Devil Wears Prada poison about her, and she bears little resemblance to the legendary New York agent Eileen Ford, who once told one of her charges "you're as big as a horse" and once ordered an underling to remove the 6-footer Veruschka from the building thusly: "Get that German hag out of here."

"Donna's made a girl or two or three come to tears," Kathleen Ham says. "But for all the right reasons. She's very direct. She'll lay it out there because some people have never been told the truth.

"People come to us who've been led to believe that 5-4 is the perfect size for modeling. You know what? That's not true. You'd be surprised what people don't want to know. But Donna's a straight shooter. She tells it like it is."

What way is it? Why not consider dermabrasion for those acne scars, she might say. They don't book redheads in Tokyo, she'll tell you. It would be good to lose seven pounds, she will say. You're plucking your eyebrows wrong. Size 8 is too big, except for wedding dresses. How about a glycolic acid peel? I am trying to be realistic with you.

"This is an industry that's wholly based on how you look," fellow agent Diana Gormley says. "In that way it's completely superficial. But Donna is a woman about things. Her success has come from her honesty - and from being as kind as she can be with such a delicate subject. Because of her age and her elegance, she can be a little bit intimidating. But people know to take her opinions to heart."

Meet the 'Mountain'

On a recent Wednesday afternoon Donna Baldwin Talent held its weekly open call, a ritual crucial to restocking the stable. It's a time when people of assorted shapes and sizes, mostly young, show up to be interviewed and gauged by Brad Baldwin, Donna's 48-year-old son, partner and business manager.

"I'm the heavy," he allows.

Some Wednesdays, up to 30 hopefuls come. This week there are eight, and only two will survive Brad's prescreening and gain a second interview with Donna Baldwin.

The obligatory height measurement has sent many a prospect back to algebra class and truck-driving. On this day it instantly eliminates a pretty, dark-haired immigrant from Ukraine, who stands 5-8 in the heels she's wearing and barely 5-5 without them.

A pleasant film student from CU-Boulder is 5-8, far too short for male modeling, and he is advised to reapply, in writing, as an actor candidate. In Denver, most acting calls are for voice-overs, TV commercials, industrial shorts and product-spokesman gigs. Baldwin talent landed some speaking parts in John Sayles' Silver City and the new Eddie Murphy movie, NowhereLand. But neither 20th Century-Fox nor the William Morris Agency is prowling the local malls for the next Matt Damon.

In Brad Baldwin's audition room, the discreetly ruthless winnowing continues, until a dramatic-looking boy from Nepal, with blond streaks in his dark-brown hair, makes the cut. Mostly because he's every bit of 5-11. Ushered in to talk with the boss, the boy says he is Hemanga Guruacharya, that his first name means "mountain" in his native language and that he's recently parted with $5,000 for three months' worth of local "modeling lessons."

No matter who he is or what he's paid, Donna Baldwin and Gormley, an 11-year veteran of the New York flesh wars, decide to call the boy "Sid." They also break the news that his $5,000 may not have been well-spent and ask him, in no uncertain terms, to restore his hair to one shade of dark. Denver doesn't get many calls for Asian male models, they explain, but his 5-11 helps. So they sign Sid the Mountain. He sounds vaguely confused by the whole thing, not least his vanished five grand.

The next big thing?

Next, the denouement. Just like in the movies, the best gets saved for last.

She is a spectacular 16-year-old blonde, originally from Lithuania and now a high school sophomore in Golden. She tells Brad Baldwin that since she last came in for a look, about eight months ago, she's had her braces removed and that she may have grown "just a little bit."

The interview and the height measurement take about 12 seconds. The girl is almost 6 feet tall, has blue eyes the size of dinner plates and is wearing size 4 designer jeans that look like two endless, slinky ribbons of blue paint.

When Brad gets her into his mother's office, Donna and Gormley have the same look on their faces that Clint Hurdle would have if, having stopped for lunch in Kremmling or Eads, he stumbled across a 16-year-old with a 100-mph fastball, a wicked change-up and pinpoint control.

That blemish on the girl's cheek? Not to worry. Completely fixable.

"Do you take a multivitamin?" Donna inquires.

When the girl speaks, she's pure sweetness and light. This one has it all, Donna Baldwin says a few minutes later. The best girl she's seen in over four months. Could work here. Anywhere. New York. Paris. Germany. Any market.

But where's Mama? Why, down in the car, where else? They get Mama up into the room in a New York second and start talking contracts. Like Sid the Mountain, the gorgeous teenager seems a little baffled by it all.

Four minutes later, out in the hall, she confides to the visiting reporter: "My friends in school, that's all they say to me. Model. Model." She turns her beautifully sculpted hands upward in a gesture of questioning. "What do you think?"

What you can't help thinking, even if your eye is untrained, is that given a Baldwin-orchestrated scrub, polish and tint, and 75 bucks' worth of walking lessons, maybe she'll wind up on the cover of Vogue. Or on Donatella Versace's gilded runway. Or at least on America's Next Top Model. Maybe she will be one of the ones who fulfills Eileen Ford's canny old purpose: not to turn ugly ducklings into swans, but to turn swans into highly-paid swans.

Hands thoughtfully clasped as she stares into the girl's face, Donna Baldwin, the Mother Agent, clearly hopes so. But at the moment, the beautiful Lithuanian girl who's had her braces removed and has grown just a little bit must see to a previous engagement. And soon.

So down the stairs she hurries, with Mama in tow. Her shift as a hostess at the Mexican restaurant begins at 4:30 and she doesn't dare be late. For now, fame still belongs to the famous, her beauty to an unknown army of beholders.

Habla Español? Baldwin agency recruiting Hispanic models, actors

Five years ago, the volume of calls Donna Baldwin Talent received for Hispanic models and actors ranged from nothing to slim and the agency had only a handful of bilingual Latinos under contract.

These days, they're caliente.

At the beginning of 2008, clients clamoring for Hispanics comprise 10 to 15 percent of the agency's business - enough to justify a new department, a separate Web site (www.dbtlatino.com) and a full-time Latino/Latina cultural liaison, Myrna Ramos.

Still actively recruiting Spanish-speakers, the agency now has about 100 Hispanic models and actors in the fold. That includes "people who aren't comfortable doing commercials in English," according to Kathleen Ham, the agency's broadcast media director.

The bulk of the work is in on-camera spots and voice-overs (often shipped out to other Latino-rich markets), and the products range "from Local Joe's Heating and Plumbing to the big-box stores, along with lawyers, medical (services), Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart. Qwest is a huge client."

"I noticed a big uptick about three years ago," says marketing director Brad Baldwin, "when the big ad agencies started targeting the Spanish-speaking market.

"They finally recognized a huge demographic shift that was kind of being ignored. Now they're making up for lost time."

Three summers ago, he points out, advertisers hired more Spanish speakers from Baldwin Talent than English speakers.

Ramos came to Baldwin last May, after her 6-year-old son, Ian, signed on as an actor. Trolling for talent, she talks about holidays, food and family with her frequently uneasy prospects (her family comes from Chihuahua, Mexico), establishing trust.

"Sometimes we converse in Spanish, but many times it's Spanglish," she says.

Many of the new models and actors come from Mexico, but Baldwin has also signed Cubans, Peruvians, Argentinians and Brazilians.

"Our competitors understand the big picture too," Ham says. "We all see the need to be more recognized in the Latino community and expand the talent pool. But some have yet to cross the cultural and language divide. That's why Myrna is so valuable. I would be less welcome at a hard-core Latino function. But when I walk into the room with her, the lights suddenly go on."

Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

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