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Openness and a boggling spontaneity have made Margaux something more than a model, a pop personality. She may be too big for model clothes—her shoes are a size 9½—but she is so natural she makes soignée sound like a dirty word. Manhattan, which has made famous such gaudy eccentrics as Andy Warhol and Tiny Tim, is enchanted by the antics of a seemingly guileless hick. Even fashion's supreme arbiter, Diana Vreeland, renowned for her aphorisms ("Pink is the navy blue of India"), lapsed into hyperbole: "She has such energy of beauty—it just flashes out at you." Meanwhile, in her husky, baby-Carol Charming voice, Margaux was revealing that she had really been christened Margot. Then one night her parents told her she had been conceived after they had downed an exceptional vintage of Château Margaux. Voilà!
Nervous at her first interviews, Margaux snapped her fingers and came on with language and syntax baffling to anyone over 15. "You just keep snappin'," she would say. Growing more confident, she let out "Yippie-skippies" of pleasure and would growl "Rich, happy blues." As her bookings grew, Margaux cried, "Just t.c.b.—taking care of business!" Says Scavullo: "She talks a mile a minute. She chews gum until she gets in front of the camera; then we carry a silver spoon and platter to her and take the gum."
Margaux did pine for the great outdoors. "I saw The Four Musketeers and I wanted to fence," she said wistfully. She tried jogging around Central Park reservoir, but a band of urban guerrillas hounded her, yelling, "Hi, Shorty!" Yoga, she decided, was a suitably citified form of exercise. One evening she discovered a new position she thought would lengthen the lifeline in her hand. "I felt so energized," she beamed. "That's how I like to feel—healthy and energized."
That is how Margaux grew up in Idaho's spectacular Sun Valley, where her father Jack, Ernest's eldest son, settled down in 1967 after throwing over a career as a stockbroker. He is now a member of the state's fish and game commission. Jack and his wife Puck, a gourmet cook and an old friend of Julia Child's, brought up their three daughters—Margaux, Joan ("Muffet"), 25, and Mariel, 13—to hunt, fish, shoot and ski. Margaux had a prodigious appetite for Puck's meals too. As a result she suffers from "foodism." A plump bebopper, she felt the pangs of sibling rivalry when Muffet became the 1968 Idaho woman tennis champion and modeled some very sexy clothes in a local show. She was also an expert skier, who chose to become a ski clown, a reckless hotdogger. "Margaux never did like competition," says Jack, "and I think that's why she wasn't too interested in school."