Last year when things looked glum, Andy Warhol's gossip sheet Interview defined a new figure in society: the millionette. Now these "rich young brats" have succeeded café society, the jet set and the beautiful people as social pacesetters. To emulate them, however, requires a lot of loot. Take the personification of the ideal, Nicky Lane, 23, a dégagée Englishwoman with fire-engine red hair, matte-white face and enormous carnelian eyes. "She looks like an apricot," says her whimsical husband Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume-jewelry designer. Nicky is what Cole Porter liked to call "rich-rich"; she inherited a pile from her father Howard Samuel, a London property magnate.
Now ensconced in a Manhattan town house (Kenny is her second husband, her first marriage was a brief misalliance), Nicky is a happy lotus-eater. She and Kenny, who is pretty rich himself, are the hosts with the most publicity. They throw a last-minute dinner for any friend who drops in from "another planet," and "we let people wander all over the house." Nicky also gives tea parties (replete with cucumber sandwiches) in their "Kenny Gothic" drawing room, a jungle of sculpture, animal skins, Chinese tea chests and scattered bibelots.
Isabel de Rosnay, 21, is richer than Nicky. She is a billionette (looks like a billion), an heir to the fortune of her grandfather Antenor Patiño, the Bolivian tin king. She resembles a sleek, lacquered Andean Indian. Despite her wealth, Isabel is not idle. She does freelance public relations work, and helps her husband Baron Arnaud de Rosnay, 29, known as the Baroncito, promote backgammon in Europe. Recently, the Rosnays spent some time in the Middle East. Arnaud has devised an oil game, Monopoly style, called Petropolis ($790 for silver-plated derricks and gold-plated platforms in a green morocco case). Isabel fell in love with Saudi Arabia: "Women may not be visible, but they are taken care of. Men do all the heavy things. There's none of that 'Carry your own bags, lady.' " Arnaud has probably never asked her to carry anything heavier than a silver-plated derrick. That is lucky, because Isabel is fashionably fragile. A friend says that Isabel has only one fault: she is seldom on time. This may be because Isabel, who finds tending her looks very demanding, has sudden, crippling doubts about her appearance. "If I am tired or feeling bad, I just can't go out," she explains. "My friends would never recognize me."
Princess Grace would rather not, thank you very much, think of her daughter Caroline, 18, as a millionette. "She is a very levelheaded girl," says Grace. Mom notwithstanding, Caroline is a natural ornament of any smart set. She is charming, mercurial and regal, a Grimm heroine who has all of Europe wondering what she will do next, and hoping against hope that she will only settle for Prince Charles. (She will not, because the Prince of Wales cannot marry a Roman Catholic.) Just now, Caroline is studying at Paris' elite Institut d'Etudes Politiques, and she is strictly chaperoned by Grace. "Take one look at the girl. Can you blame her?" asks a sympathetic friend. Caroline fairly smolders whenever she gets the chance, earning admiring appraisals from Parisians or revealing almost total décolletage at a disco.