Before she had her first role in Tootsie, Davis used to pay her rent by modelling clothing alongside the mannequins at Ann Taylor. According to Davis, she got the job as such: "One time there was a window display where the mannequins were sitting at a table eating plastic food. There was one empty chair, and I kept looking at the window." Against the advice of her co-workers at the retail store, she went and sat in the empty chair. "Somebody saw me do that, and then he stopped to see what was now going to happen. But I just froze…I didn't know, but I had an uncanny ability to be still." Eventually, a crowd gathered, trying to figure out if she was real or not. "When I felt like their attention was drifting, I would move kind of like a robot. But then somebody said, 'Well, that's not an electric mannequin because it's not plugged in.' " So the next time she sat at the mannequin table, she attached a little wire down her leg to make the ruse more convincing.
