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∙MAROLA WITT, brown-haired, brown-eyed and just 19, was born in Berlin (real name: Wittenstein), left Germany five years ago. In her senior year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Conn., Marola went to the Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, was spotted by a Glamour editor. Marola soon dropped her plans to be a painter, now makes $60 an hour, has appeared on the covers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Glamour. Since her mother and architect stepfather live in Hamburg, Marola shares a Greenwich Village apartment with another girl, professedly yearns to get married and live in California, where "you can breathe and see sky."
∙ISABELLA ALBONICO, Italian by temperament as well as birth (24 years ago, in Florence), began modeling in Europe when she was 15, arrived in New York four years ago. Brown-haired and brown-eyed, she has had covers on Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and LIFE, makes $60 an hour, and has won, she says, "a reputation for being allergic to being pummeled around under the lights. Nobody touches me." She "would like most of all to be a movie star," has just returned from Hollywood, where she played a small part ("but opposite Gary Grant") in A Touch of Mink and a larger one in an all-Italian film, Smog. Besides English and Italian, Isabella speaks French and Spanish, hates big groups ("At the end of an evening in New York, everybody's lost; nobody knows anybody else").
∙DOROTHEA MCGOWAN is the exception in the new crop: she speaks only English and was bom in Brooklyn. Her pre-modeling life took her as far from home as Staten Island, where she finished her freshman year at Notre Dame College before taking a summer job modeling $2.98 house dresses. A few months later, her first photographic try at a cover made Vogue; this year she set some kind of a record by appearing on four Vogue covers in a row (nobody but her mother or agent could have told that it was the same girl). Twenty-year-old Dorothea ("My middle initial is E, and Dorothy sounded so ordinary") makes $60 an hour, has her own apartment in New York, studies French at Manhattan's French Institute twice a week ("so that when my dream of living in Paris comes true, I'll be ready for it"). In the relentless search of fashion editors for bizarre backdrops, Dorothea has been sent, all expenses paid, to be photographed in front of the great architectural monuments of Europe, among Middle East bazaars and under Caribbean palms, is absolutely "infatuated with the idea of being paid to travel."