Mixed media and oil painting. Model Bill Clune. Unsigned.

Image measures: 21.5" H x 17.5" W

The Estate of Bill Clune, Rochester’s “Original Marlboro Man” and world famous model, which includes items from his prominent parents: The esteemed Rochester author Mr. Henry Clune and Olympic Medallist & International Swimming Hall Of Fame member Charlotte Boyle Clune.

Bill rode the whirlwind for a decade, 1955-1965, as perhaps the highest-paid male model in America. He worked with the chichi photographers of the day: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Mark Shaw, Frank Scavullo (whom success renamed Francesco). Bill was television’s first Marlboro Man, though he struck his cowboy pose sitting atop a split-rail fence in the Elliot Unger Elliot Studio on West 54th Street, five thousand martinis east of the lonesome prairie.

Bill had pedigree. His father, Henry W. Clune, was the star of Frank Gannett’s Rochester newspaper and a novelist praised by the likes of Dawn Powell. His mother, Charlotte, daughter of adventurer Joe “King of the Klondike” Boyle, swam the 100-meter freestyle for the 1920 U.S. Olympic team at Antwerp.

A friend introduced him to John W. Harkrider, who had directed the 1929 Flo Ziegfield extravaganza “Glorifying the American Girl.” Harkrider, whom Bill remembers as a “nut box,” got him a job posing as a rapist for Howell Conant in True Detective. Bottom’s barrel was being scraped, but Bill was on his way. (So was Conant, who would be Grace Kelly’s palace photographer.)

Soon, Clune’s long-nosed handsome mug was all over the place: Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Esquire, Vogue, Life, the Saturday Evening Post. He had the outdoor look prized by Marlboro, which had been a lady’s cigarette—its motto was “Mild as May”—until undergoing phalloplasty on Madison Avenue. (Bill was a stranger to the demon weed, so he spent the weekend preceding the Marlboro shoot gagging his way through a self-taught smoking tutorial.)

Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen gushed, “Flicker scouts are excited about the male model of the moment—Bill Clune. He’s the son of a Rochester newspaperman, and the experts think he may be another John Wayne.” Patrick Wayne was closer to the mark, though you can glimpse Bill as the coal mine owner in Martin Ritt’s cave-in “The Molly Maguires.”

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2017/03/06/original-marlboro-man-lives-scottsville/96497544/

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/picture-gallery/news/2017/03/06/bill-clune-the-original-marlboro-man/98794232/

Good condition.

13.5 x 24.75 in