Carmen Dell'Orefice (born June 3, 1931) is an American model and actress. She is known within the fashion industry for being the world's oldest working model as of the Spring/Summer 2012 season. She was on the cover of Vogue at the age of 15 and has been modelling ever since.

Biography

Dell'Orefice met and married Bill Miles in the early 1950s. Miles exploited his wife financially, by picking up his wife's modeling agency checks, allowing her only $50 allowance from her earnings. They had a daughter, Laura, and divorced soon after. In 1958, she met photographer Richard Heimann and married him six months later. She decided to retire, after which he left her. Her third marriage was to a young architect, Richard Kaplan, in the mid-1960s. The marriage lasted nine years.

In the late 1980s, Dell'Orefice was engaged to television talk-show host David Susskind. He died before they were married. In 1993, a neighbor introduced her to Norman F. Levy, who was Bernard Madoff's best friend. Levy was her boyfriend for several years.


Financial losses
In the 1980s and 1990s, Dell'Orefice lost most of her money in the stock market. She was forced to auction off her famous modeling photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s through Sotheby's.

In 1994, with what little money she had left, and with money from boyfriend Norman Levy, she invested with notorious financial fraud Bernie Madoff. For twelve years, Ruth and Bernie Madoff and Dell'Orefice and Norman Levy were a "foursome", traveling and partying together on lavish yachts. Levy died in 2005, at age 93, and Madoff was the executor of his will. Levy had $244 million in assets at the time of his death, according to Dell'Orefice. Madoff's fraudulent investment scheme drew on these funds to lure over 13,500 individuals and charities to his Ponzi scheme. She continued to socialize with the Madoffs after Levy's death.

In December 2008 a 68-year-old friend, who invested her life savings with Madoff, telephoned Dell'Orefice to inform her that she too had been bankrupted by the scheme. Dell'Orefice said, “For the second time in my life, I've lost all of my life savings.