Jean Patchett, 75; Fashion Model for Ford Made 40 Magazine Covers

Jean Patchett, one of the most photographed fashion models of the 1950s, has died. She was 75.

Patchett died Jan. 22 of emphysema at her home in La Quinta.

It is often said that Patchett made a mountain out of a mole to the left of her lips, which became her trademark years before Cindy Crawford was born.

Patchett collaborated with photographers Louise Dahl-Wolfe, John Rawlings and Erwin Blumenfeld, but was most closely associated with Irving Penn. His 1949 shot of Patchett sitting at a cafe, chewing on a strand of pearls, was one of their most famous photographs.

“We really made history,” Patchett said in Michael Gross’ “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women” (William Morrow, 1995) of her work with Penn. “To have five pictures of yourself hanging in the Museum of Modern Art! I didn’t know that I was going to be doing that.”

She worked in the same glamorous era as cover girls Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker and Lisa Fonssagrives, Penn’s wife. Patchett was the first star model for New York’s Ford Models, a new agency when Patchett walked in the door in the spring of 1948.

“I don’t remember everyone, but I do remember her,” Eileen Ford said Monday. “You just had to take a deep breath, even then. She had on a black coat with black velvet at the shoulders and a black velvet beret--all made by her mother--and garnet earrings, bracelet and necklace. She really was a country girl.”

Patchett was born in Preston, Md., a small town on the Eastern Shore. After unhappy stints in secretarial school and in college, she set her sights on a modeling career in New York. She signed with Harry Conover’s agency and moved into a Methodist rooming home for women for $13.50 a week, she told Gross.

After a few months, she left Conover for Ford. By September 1948, she had her first of more than 40 covers.

Patchett earned $50,000 a year at the peak of her career.

“I think Irving Penn said it best: ‘She was an American goddess in French couture,’” Ford said.

Patchett was a regular at the legendary Stork Club. “None of us had any money, but we managed to look the part,” Ford said. “God bless Loehmann’s. We’d go clear out to Brooklyn to shop there.”

Patchett met Louis Auer, a banker, at a luncheonette in 1949. “We met through a pair of twins I had known for a few years who were modeling in New York and living at the Barbizon,” he said Monday.

“They called and said, there’s a cute gal that just came into the place.” Soon after, Auer gave her the nickname Pancho. “Patchett, Patcho, Pancho ... that’s how it evolved,” he said.

The two were married in 1951.

“She was not one of those people who assumed she was pretty and entitled,” he said. “She worked hard and was always prompt.”

Patchett retired from modeling in the early 1960s to take care of her two children. In the early 1980s, she and her husband moved to La Quinta.

In addition to Auer, she is survived by daughter Amy Auer of Westhampton Beach, N.Y.; sister J. Fred King and brother Frank Patchett.