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Million-Dollar Babies
| Article
# : |
11022 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
2,479 Words |
| Author
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Leil Lowndes
Leil Lowndes is a free-lance writer and model agency owner
living in New York. |
Victoria Christine Benson--top New York model--has made a not-so-small fortune in the past year alone. She has been the principal in fifteen major television commercials and her beautiful face and semi-clad figure have been featured in dozens of magazines and newspapers promoting fashion, food, and home products. In addition to her modeling talents, Christine sings, dances, and has appeared on PM Magazine.
Christine is 35 inches high, weighs 28 pounds and was born on January 26, 1984. And if predictions of modeling agents in the baby business come true, Christine will be over-the hill in six months.
Advertising using babies and child models is a multi-million-dollar big business, which is attracting more and more agents and parents. A single national television commercial can bring a fee of over thirty thousand dollars including residuals (money paid each time the commercial is shown). How much the children receive of those fees is a very individual matter. Some parents create trust funds for the children. The son of an officer of AFTRA (a theatrical union) bought himself a new Firebird car when he was seventeen and put himself through college--and all from the fees he received for doing television commercials he did when he was a preteen. Other kids never see a residual dime.
It's all up to the parents. As Maggie Thoma, president of the Privilege Talent Agency in Los Angeles, says, "Even though I'm dealing with the child, I'm really dealing with the parents. Or, I should say, the mother. Ninety-five percent of the time, it's the mother who has to convince the father that little Johnnie or Jennie should be allowed to model. I try to avoid the greedy parent or "Hollywood mother." So many of them push and push. I want the child who wants to model, not the child whose mother has pushed for it. It's very important to my agency to have a fun-loving child--a happy child--not one who is just doing what the mother wants."
John Pryce is an unusual father in that he started his three-year-old son in the business, and now, at the almost over-ripe age of twelve, his son has made forty commercials and two movies. Pryce started International Media Management in Atlanta and handles hundreds of child models.
What motivates parents who are not frustrated models to submit their children for modeling careers? As Sabena Basch, a Staten Island, New York, mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter who was an infant model, says, "There's no feeling like
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