Early Years
Karen Graham was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1945. After studying French at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a French-language high school teacher. In 1969, however, her life was changed forever when she shopped at the Bonwit Teller store in Manhattan one day. Becoming impatient waiting for the down elevator, she took the stairs instead, where she met modeling agency owner Eileen Ford. As Graham remembered in a 1999 interview, she had started chatting with Mrs Ford on the stairs, and by the time they were outside, Mrs Ford handed Graham her card and suggested that she think about becoming a model. Because Graham had not found a teaching job yet and was working as a bookkeeper, she decided to try modeling for a few years to make extra money to furnish her small apartment.
Graham's early work as a model included a photo shoot for Irving Penn, who found her to have a lovely look and was interested in photographing her for Vogue. Diana Vreeland, then the magazine's editor-in-chief, found her too small, but reluctantly agreed after Penn persisted. Graham first appeared in Vogue in 1970, and suddenly found herself in greater demand when Grace Mirabella replaced Vreeland as editor-in-chief. Between 1970 and 1975, Graham would appear on the magazine's cover twenty times.
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