Nine months ago, Margaux Hemingway stepped off a plane at New York's La Guardia Airport. Like other immigrants to the Big Apple, she was a little green. She had the blessing of the folks back home in Ketchum, Idaho, a happy disposition and a waiting boy friend. As a "hotdog skier" and sometime soccer player, and with only a year of odd jobs behind her, she did not have the exact skills suited to Manhattan's job market. But her grandfather had been Ernest Hemingway, so she had a well-known name. And though some of the guys in Sun Valley used to call her "Pigpen," she was tall and blonde. Anyway, a girl can dream, can't she?
Within a month, Margaux's name was popping up all over the place. Within two, she was picking up top-scale fees for modeling gigs ($100 an hour). By the time her 20th birthday came round in February, Margaux had posed for a Vogue cover, was starring at celebrity-jammed parties, and had announced her engagement to Boy Friend Errol Wetson. On the pop scales, Margaux was beginning to outrank even Mick Jagger. Clearly, something big was about to happen to Margaux. Sure enough, in the middle of May, just 249 days after her arrival in Manhattan, she landed the biggest advertising contract ever given to a woman: $1 million from Fabergé to promote a new, unnamed scent. Said Margaux simply: "It's the best, you guys."
Why Margaux? Well, the boys back home must have been short or myopic. Margaux is the American Sex Dream incarnate, a prairie Valkyrie, 6 ft. tall and 138 lbs. "I never saw such a big, marvelous, wide-eyed, warm girl," recalls Fashion Artist Joe Eula, one of her first mentors. "She just made me feel so good." Effortlessly, Margaux stands out in a gallery of fresh young faces, newcomers who are making their names in modeling, movies, ballet and in the exacting art of simply living well. They add up to an exhilarating crop of new beauties who light up the landscape in the U.S. and abroad.
Their chief distinction is variety. It used to be that every few years yielded a different image. In 1960 it was Jackie Kennedy's finishing-school polish, later Twiggy's innocent charm and the tomboyish Ali MacGraw. But increasingly women refuse to accept anyone else's beauty package. Today the one standard left is the camera's unblinking eye. Margaux is a photographer's ideal, and despite the trend to diversity, hers is the face of a generation, as recognizable and memorable as Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Shrimpton. When Margaux has her hair wet and slicked back, Photographer Francesco Scavullo thinks she looks Etruscan. Says Designer Halston: "She has all the components to become a modern young superstar—openness, infectiousness, beauty and the ambition to follow through."