Barbara Gould, Model in a Famously Long-Lived TV Spot, Dies at 81

Most television commercials have relatively short shelf lives. The conventional wisdom says that repeated viewings bring advertisers diminishing returns.

One particular ad in the New York market of the 1970s and ‘80s defied that rule so spectacularly that its very longevity became the subject of news stories. It was for the Ritz Thrift Shop, a store then located on West 57th Street in Manhattan that specialized in used furs. A beautiful but unremarkably dressed woman gets off a bus, goes into the store and comes out in a fur.

“You don’t need a million to look like a million,” a voice-over announcer intones. And the woman pauses, looks at the camera and says, “Oh, thank you.”

Viewers of New York stations encountered that ad across an astonishing 14 years. The woman who was its focal point, Barbara Clement Gould, was already a successful model when she made the ad in 1975, having appeared on the covers of magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s as well as in other commercials.

Her endlessly repeated 30 seconds’ worth of Ritz Thrift Shop fame, though, gave her a different type of exposure. Probably few who saw the ad knew her name, but for a whole generation of New Yorkers she attained a kitschy sort of cachet.

“I got off the bus, and I went into the Ritz Thrift Shop, and then, like 20 years later, they took it off the air,” she said in an oral history for the Fashion Institute of Technology, exaggerating the commercial’s life span only slightly.

Gould — who went by Barbara Clement in her modeling career — died on Aug. 31 at her home in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her daughter Alexandra Scott said the cause was cancer.

Gould had an enviable run as a model, working with the prestigious Ford Models agency on campaigns shot by some of the industry’s top photographers. Then, in the 1990s, she took up a new career as a real estate broker for the Corcoran Group. At her death, she was a senior vice president there.

Barbara Joy Clement was born on Dec. 14, 1936, in Hermosa Beach, California, to Elmer and Helen Clement. Her father was a metallurgical engineer, and her mother was an office worker.

After graduating from San Jose State University in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in education and English literature, she taught briefly in San Francisco, then came to New York in 1959 with, she said, vague ideas about becoming a writer.

She did not have a chance to pursue that goal because fate quickly intervened. Shortly after arriving, she read a newspaper article about the Ford agency. She was staying with friends from the West Coast who had invited her to sleep on the floor of their East Side apartment.

“My roommates said, ‘You should go to Ford’s; it’s around the corner,'” she said in the oral history. She suspected they were sending her as a sort of guinea pig because they themselves were interested in modeling, but it was Gould who ended up with the career.

“I became a Ford model immediately,” she recalled in a tribute when Eileen Ford, who had created Ford Models with her husband, Jerry, died in 2014. “Eileen sent me to the booking room.”

She also invited Gould to come live at the Fords’ town house, where other models stayed. Gould quickly found herself living an unexpectedly glamorous life.

One of her first assignments was for Seventeen magazine, a spread photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who would become known for his celebrity portraits and for one attention-getting centerfold: of Burt Reynolds, naked on a bearskin rug, for Cosmopolitan. She would later work with Richard Avedon, Jerry Schatzberg, Horst P. Horst and other noted fashion photographers.

Shortly after joining Ford, she was sent on assignment to Paris. She appeared on magazine covers and in ad campaigns of all sorts. She was a Breck Girl — one of many models who advertised that brand of shampoo — twice: in 1962 wearing a ballgown, and again in 1975 with a more contemporary look. She graced advertisements for Pepsi, Clairol, Hallmark Cards and others. She said she was also among the runway models for Ralph Lauren’s first show after he began designing clothes in the late 1960s.

Her first TV commercial, she said, was for Helena Rubinstein cosmetics. In the oral history she recalled doing a live ad for Toni hair products on “The Merv Griffin Show” in the early 1960s. Around 1980, she was an “Ivory Soap mom” in a commercial that also included her daughter Alexandra. (Scott said her job was to run in and give away that Gould, despite the young-looking hands she had courtesy of Ivory dish soap, was a mother — a conceit Ivory had been using for years in its ad campaign.)

The Ritz Thrift Shop commercial, though, is the one burned into the minds of countless New Yorkers. In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, Keith Tauber, then the manager of the store, said the spot began running in September 1975. It is still displayed today on the website of the store, which is now on West 29th Street.

The commercial was said to have cost about $20,000 to make. That, apparently, did not include a wardrobe budget for the star; she provided her own clothes, she said, except for the mink she ends up in.

In the oral history, Gould said that Ralph Lauren would let models shop at his warehouse and that she often picked up clothes there, even though “they were really cut too short for me, and too small.”

“When I see that commercial,” she said of the Ritz ad, “and see myself waddling out, or off, of the bus, I see this jacket that was Ralph Lauren’s that I got at the warehouse” — what she was wearing before she is transformed. She said she could never watch the spot without thinking, “That was too small for me.”

Gould’s first marriage, to Joseph Hannan, ended in divorce. In 1975 she married Harry E. Gould Jr., chairman of the Gould Paper company. He and Scott, her daughter, survive her, as do a son, Trip Gould, and three grandchildren. Another daughter, Katharine Gould, died in 2004.

Gould acknowledged that although she worked quite a bit during her modeling career, she never became a household name like some models from that era.

“In each picture, I think I look different,” she said. “In a way, that’s good, but in a way I never became identified.”

That may have suited her personality. Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of the Corcoran Group, said that Gould did not flaunt her glittery-sounding earlier job.

“She was absolutely the most understated lady,” Liebman said in a telephone interview. “She would not bring anything up, but if you asked about her, she would address it. She was so cute and shy about the whole thing, but eventually we got some pictures out of her.”

“She had quite the Rolodex,” Liebman added, “but you would never know it. There wasn’t a braggy bone in her body.”