Pavlovian response
WANT your brand name on the shapely back of Flora Cheong-Leen? Fine. As long as you've got a few million dollars to part with.
Miss Pavlova caused a stir at a fund-raising 'cut-in' staged by Vidal Sassoon last week when she not only intimated that her hair was insured, but also seemed distinctly uncomfortable about being photographed wearing a Sassoon gown.
The event was an innocuous enough PR exercise for the Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award Association, of which Cheong-Leen is the fund-raising chairman. A few days afterwards, however, she still seemed to have passionate feelings about the affair.
The insurance gag, she assured us, was nothing more than that ('my hair and my legs were insured when I was with the Royal Ballet, but not now'), but she was vehemently against being associated with the product.
'I don't want to be seen as a model, and I don't want to be seen endorsing these brand names because I do ads professionally for other companies,' she explained. 'If I do endorse a product, it is worth half a million dollars to me.' Excuse us? Cheong-Leen explained that she had just signed up to do a minute-long advert for a major product, which on a year-long exclusivity deal was worth US$500,000.
And this product - whose identity she preferred to keep a secret for the time being - is not the first to have been sold using Cheong-Leen as a model. In the past, she has lent her services to the promotion of Fuji film, Winston cigarettes (a long time ago), Harvey's Bristol Cream and, yes, Whisper feminine hygiene pads. All, she says, were on a paying basis.
'So, you see, I don't want to be seen to be so eagerly keen to promote these different products [like Sassoon],' she concluded. 'I'm just in charge of a fund-raising committee.'
