(8 of 9)
This seems reasonable, since she is only 17. She is a rarity, a blazing, natural redhead, discovered in Milwaukee in 1979. Top-Top Photographer Albert Watson says that Decker is a face to watch. Nancy, who makes $1,500 a day after six months on the job, thinks so too: "I feel like it's all of a sudden going to go boom, boom. I can just feel it. It's like when you're waiting for a pimple to come up." Not having had time to become jaded or to embrace a pragmatically spartan regimen, she still likes rock-'n'-roll joints like the Ritz and the Peppermint Lounge. She likes to eat a brownie, strawberry ice cream and whipped cream horribility, and as she does so she looks innocent enough to break an art director's heart. She is sufficiently seasoned, however, to set meticulously aside cab chits, makeup bills and other tax-deductible receipts every evening after work. She hopes to finish high school one of these days.
> Rachel Ward, like Apollonia, is one of Zoli's exotics. She is English, a former art student with a flamboyant figure (dress designers, she says, "were always strapping my breasts down") and an eye on an acting career. Modeling—she is this year's Lincoln Mercury girl and Revlon Scoundrel perfume girl—pays the bills nicely but does not interest her much. At 23, she lives in Los Angeles, and has so far appeared in two horror films, Terror Eyes and Bump in the Night. Brooke Shields, she says, arching her willowy neck, "is a rotten actress."
> Valerie Lohr is a ravishing, 18-year-old blue-eyed brunette who has been modeling for the Wilhelmina Agency for 2% years. She works for $1,200 to $1,500 a day, every day, "and I still can't rationalize why I make more than the President of the United States does." She has been through drugs—like many models—and out again: "I felt a lot of pressure to be what 'they' wanted me to be. Now I can stand around the dressing room and watch the girls snorting coke, and I don't care any more." Sometimes it seems to her that trading on her face and body is a form of prostitution, but she works hard at it, carefully scheduling more catalogue jobs than editorial sessions for fashion magazines, to avoid overexposure.
Some day, Valerie says, sounding for the first time like a young woman only a few years beyond childhood, she would like to be a cattle rancher, or maybe a politician. Neither the matronly married life nor the perpetual roundelay of cafe society holds much allure for most of today's models. If they are not would-be actresses like Shields, they have other aspirations. Iman wants to write children's books. Dickinson recently came back through the looking glass, moving behind the camera to shoot a designer showing for Italian Harper's Bazaar.