Blueblood in a Bathing Suit

By JAY COCKS

These things change, of course. Not a month ago, Karen Hilton, a director of New York's Wilhelmina model agency, was talking about her newest and ritziest signing. Princess Stephanie of Monaco, she said, "has the look that is in, a little boyish but sexy." Now, she insists, "people are just looking for something to say about her because she's a princess. She never struck me as boyish." It appears that the princess, like a new imported automobile, is undergoing some last-minute modification for domestic consumption.

In Europe, she has already appeared in her new guise as a supersalaried (reportedly $7,000 to $10,000 for a standard photo session) fashion supermodel. It seems like a retake of some 35 years ago, when her mother, Grace Kelly, was a model before becoming a movie star. She projected a serene, society-page sexiness. Stephanie has a contem- porary appeal: athletic, funky, challenging. She has been a mannequin only a few months, but she is on the cusp of signing a hefty contract with the Italian designer Enrico Coveri (exact figures to be publicized only when the ink is dry). She was due to appear in New York to pose for Vogue and LIFE before an eleventh- hour cancellation put a temporary cap on Stephanie's lens hopping.

The Wilhelmina agency told Vogue that the princess's New York trip was "indefinitely postponed," but Editor in Chief Grace Mirabella says, "I didn't get the feeling she was never coming." Rumors started to fly like sand gnats. Stephanie was suffering from exhaustion, or something even more dire, in a private hospital outside Paris; her father, Prince Rainier, had put his royal foot down right in the middle of the burgeoning career.

Monaco Palace Press Officer Nadia Lacoste patiently batted the stories back. "The truth is always much simpler," she said. "The Prince has never said what he thought of her modeling, and he won't make any comment now. The princess is still recuperating (from a bout of intestinal flu). She's been modeling since February, and she was just overtired." Hilton says that Stephanie is "on a little vacation with her father, and she's supposed to return to Paris in a week. Then I'll talk to her about rescheduling."

Photographer Patrick Demarchelier, who was originally scheduled to do Stephanie's LIFE and Mademoiselle pictures, suggests, "She's a personality. A model you use to do fashion. You can put clothes on a personality, but you're photographing the person more." Personality like that may help a second-rung designer like Coveri scramble for first class ("She will be the ambassadress of my fashion," he announces), but it carries a whole portfolio of particular problems. Catherine Oxenberg, who still works as a model when she is not making regular appearances on Dynasty, is a daughter of Princess Elisabeth of Yugoslavia. "I'm lucky I don't have a title," she says. "Being a princess can work against her in an enormous way. A lot of people don't want a name, they want a face. If models are known too well, it detracts from the impetus of the product."

The princess gets high marks for hard work and folksiness. "She is not the least bit conceited. She behaves very naturally, she ate what we ate," reports Marina Fausti, fashion editor of Moda. "She was very nice with everybody," says Gilles Tapie, who has done the best Stephanie photos so far. He caught a nice kind of regal raunch for a cover and bathing-suit layout in Elle, and reflects, "She's short for a model, and she's not a beautiful girl. She's muscled in the arms . . . She could be a boy with her short hair. But when she's in a bathing suit in front of a camera she becomes very feminine. And she has a great body."

Such out-front discussion of the princess's endowments is all part of the job and an aspect of modeling that may not appeal to Prince Rainier. "Her face is a problem," admits Fausti, a pronouncement that might not go down smoothly with the princess either. "Her chin is a weak point. You have to be careful how you position her or else she seems to have a double chin."

Indeed, the princess has been scrutinized by cameras for most of her 20 years, usually from an intrusive position. Many of her modeling efforts show an awkwardness in formal pose that may come partly from inexperience and partly too from something inborn: a sense that she may always be in an adversarial position with the camera. Lineage has given her career impetus, but it is a feeling of irresolution that gives her professional photos much of their impact. Most models work hard to beguile the camera, and Stephanie is clearly learning to do that. But in some shots, it looks as if she means less to seduce the camera than to snuff it out.

A paparazzo's flash ruptures privacy. A photographer's strobe can be softer: illusion backlit in short bursts. It is not glamour flashing in Stephanie's haunted blue-green eyes, though. Whatever she wears, however she holds herself, she seems to stare straight past the lens, resisting any easy truce.

With reporting by Julia Lieblich/New York and Ellen Wallace/Paris