[1] During her time at Sarah Lawrence, Edward Russell, a classmate of hers from Teaneck, sent her love letters featuring hand-drawn cartoons from the South Pacific where he was serving in the war as a radioman for the Navy.

[5] Eventually, Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper's Bazaar, intervened and personally asked Russell to work with Dahl-Wolfe a third time.

[7] The image was subsequently sold by the Marlboro Book Shops to a bedsheets company, Spring Mills Inc., where it was touched up to give the man a beard, and advertised in three magazines (Ladies' Home Journal, Look, and Promenade), inviting readers to submit their own captions, such as "Lost Between the Covers".

[7] The company was associated with sleazy advertising, which meant that it had difficulty persuading top-end models to consent to work for them,[6] and Russell, who had not authorized the image to be reused in this way, considered it damaging to her reputation.

[7] The decision of the New York Supreme Court in 1959 was that the broad release form she had signed with Avedon to allow Marlboro Book Shops use of the image had not authorized its use by other companies.

[6][8] After retiring from modelling, Mary Jane Russell and her husband lived in Pound Ridge, New York for 37 years, where she involved herself with local zoning and environmental issues.