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"I'm an optical illusion," she says, laughing. A cab driver this morning gave her an "uh-huh" reaction when she said she was a model. The days are gone, clearly, when a model getting out of a New York taxi meant furs, a flash of great legs and a telltale hatbox. Clotilde's mufti is early L.L. Bean — galluses, a checked shirt and baggy cords — because it is easy and inconspicuous, unlikely to attract muggers in the scruffy neighborhoods where photographers' studios are often located. What Clotilde and most of the other successful models do a lot of is the misty, haunting Sears catalogue, and what they are paid for is to make polyester look like silk. A face that Botticelli would have admired helps a great deal, and after an hour at the makeup table Clotilde has drawn one on herself, cooked her long brown hair in curlers and As Photographer Watanabe shoots Polaroid stills to test the light and color, Clotilde waits. Like all the real pros, she is good at waiting. She daydreams of Paris, where she keeps an apartment. She sees herself doing the spring collections, "and Yves St. Laurent himself is tying my ribbon, and I'm going down the runway, and every reporter in the world is watching, and it's total magic . . ." Magic indeed, as, nearly three hours after this shoot began, Watanabe is ready to expose her first frame of color film. It is uncanny, but the Paris-in-the-spring reverie runs across Clotilde's face as if written there with subtitles. Click!
In another part of the forest there is Apollonia, called Apples, called crazy by friends who watch her in amazement.
"Come, let's go lie on the bed," she laughingly greets TIME Correspondent James Wilde.
She is slinky, auburn-haired, built for both speed and comfort. She is wearing a black body stocking, and the bedroom, the bed, her nails and the rubies in her ears are red. "Have some champagne," she says in her silverbell voice. Apples is Dutch; she speaks six languages. She lives her life allegro; she makes between $100,000 and $200,000 a year and needs it all. She lives on take-out Chinese food, and her kitchen, as it develops, is equipped with two plastic cups and one plastic fork.
Abruptly she decides to go roller-skating at the Roxy Roller Rink, a hangar-sized, strobe-lit, hard-rock hell just north of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where she is capable of circulating for eight hours at a time. She leaves the Roxy, much refreshed, at 4 a.m. and goes home to her boyfriend, she relates later with enthusiasm. By 8 in the morning she is reclining in the studio of Arsi, her Rumanian skin specialist. Later she is sitting in the kitchen of Photographer Ara Gallant, being made up for the Italian edition of Vogue. Gallant's apartment is a good setting for Apples; the floors are white, with rivers of fake blood, the living room is solid black, and the dining room, where she will be photographed, has a stainless steel floor and walls made of thousands of tiny mirrors. The photographer, a wiry fellow from the South Bronx with a reputation for freaky brilliance, believes that a photograph should be "a lie with a small measure of truth."