Harry loves to shop in Tokyo and can be extravagant. On the whole, however, she has been disciplined about saving money for wiring to her accounts back home in Orange County. She place where she always saved money was on entertainment. At fashionable Roppongi discos models, especially foreign ones, are always comped for admission and drinks. Good thing too, because, Harry loves to dance. Many were the days when she flew to Tokyo, worked the next day, then flew straight home.
Angela Harry was born in the southwestern Japanese city of Fukuoka to a Korean mother and a father who was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. Her girlhood was a long succession of moves. By her fifth birthday she had also lived in Hawaii, Colorado, Texas and California.
A year later the family returned to Japan, but soon moved to Korea where her family lived for a couple of years. During that time she took up ballet and piano, taking lessons five days a week. Her shyness led her to stop the ballet lessons, but the piano lessons continued even when the family moved to Ohio when she was nine. For the first time her family was able to live in their own house off-base. The Ohio stay was the longest of her childhood — four years.
It was as a teenager living in Santa Ana, California that she began dreaming about becoming a model. Upon finishing high school she began approaching local agencies. That being the early 1980s, Wilhemina told her, “You’re too exotic. Why don’t you become a commercial artist?” At Elite the reaction was, “You’re pretty, but too exotic. Why don’t you go to New York or Paris?” To this day Harry has never worked in Paris.
“They’re silly,” Judith Fontaine told her after one look. “I’ll take you.” Within a month the eighteen-year-old Harry got her first assignment — modeling for a catalog in Marina del Rey. A sales job at Saks Fifth Avenue provided the regular income that wasn’t yet coming from modeling.
One day a Japanese man came to see Harry at Fontaine. He happened to be the owner of a Tokyo agency called Model Management, MM. He liked what he saw and promised to make Harry the proverbial “big star”. He offered her a round-trip ticket and a place to stay in Tokyo. She went. Upon arriving in Tokyo she discovered that MM had only six to eight models and was struggling. Deciding to take her fate into her own hands, she approached the Folio agency and Shiseido directly and was rewarded with jobs almost immediately. Even as Model Management went out of business, Harry’s career had been launched.
Harry signed with Folio and became a regular for Shiseido. That big break came on her 19th birthday. In those days other Japanese cosmetics companies were still using caucasian models like Brooke Shields. When Harry was unveiled as the new Shiseido girl, the response was so overwhelming that Shiseido renewed her contract for three years running. Next
