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 Faberge 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."

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 9 1/2--but she is so natural she makes soignee 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 Chateau Margaux. Voil`a!

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."

Her parents encouraged her to try art school, but Margaux was too energized to buckle down and took off after a year for Europe. Her adventures were just as lively, if less genteel, than Lorelei Lee's. In Morocco, she was "sorta kidnaped" by a smuggling gang who made her into an unwitting hash courier. Fortunately, a friendly mechanic ("He was just snappin' ") sniffed out the fact that her car was mined with hash. Recalls Margaux: "It was really veggy" (translation: Margaux could not move or think).

"Margaux is neither domestic nor domesticated. She's a free spirit," says her father, now 51. Still, there was a stir last Christmas when, for the first time, Margaux brought a man home. He was Errol Wetson, 34, a second-generation entrepreneur, whose father ran a variety of concessions in the East. Errol's career has been bold but erratic. Since age 18, when he and his brother started Wetson's hamburger chain, he has bought and sold antique cars, run a trendy Manhattan restaurant called Le Drugstore, imported soft denim, and backed the TV show Kung Fu. One day last spring, he was sitting in his favorite place, the Plaza hotel's Palm Court, when he saw Margaux, who was in town for a skiing promotion gig. Their eyes locked. They have been in love ever since, and when Margaux arrived in New York last fall, they pooled their resources, rented a grungy Upper East Side pad and settled down to construct the Big Deal. Frequent reassuring trips to the Palm Court were necessary. "If things began to cave in or if we were confused, we would rush over there, sit at a table, and suddenly things became clearer," says Errol. Margaux says, "Errol has horns but he's an angel."

The Hemingways were at first cautious about Errol. But since that Christmas visit, Errol has been in close touch with Jack. Together with Margaux's agent Peggy Nestor, they set up the Faberge deal, which runs until 1980 and may yield Margaux more than a million if she promotes other products for Faberge as well.

She is hurt by the recurrent criticism that Errol has exploited her. "The other day," she says, "he came to me and gave me his share of the deal." When she got film offers, it was Errol who cautioned her to wait until she was ready. She plans to take acting lessons in preparation for a movie career, but first she and Errol are honeymooning in Europe and South America. Marriage may come later--or next week. Her younger sister Mariel is not so sure: "I don't know--Margaux is kinda crazy."

Crazy like Napoleon. Margaux has picked up the fashion world and wrapped it round her little finger; she has tamed the press and subdued Madison Avenue. "It's like a fairy tale," she agrees. "But blah blah, woof woof, as Jimi Hendrix used to say." Says Miss Mary, Ernest Hemingway's widow (and Margaux's step-grandmother): "She was such a nice healthy kid, I hope nothing spoils her, natch." About her publicity-hating grandfather, Margaux is admiringly respectful, exulting: "Grandpa's spirit's in my marrow." But she prefers people to realize that it is Margaux, not Ernest, who is the big name today. She is even getting over her fear of competition. When Joan came to New York recently to promote the movie Rosebud, for which she had helped write the original novel, Margaux talked up Muffet's forthcoming cookbook, Picnic Gourmet, to the press.

Now that she is rich and free, "the girl of the '70s," Margaux is moving from pop fame to superstardom. Her life seems to stretch ahead of her like a field of virgin snow. Margaux likes that terrain. Says she: "I love to ski in powder. Then I can look back and see my tracks alone--nobody else's at all."

Professional Beauties

Although Margaux is almost literally out of sight, she is not alone in the rather special world of professional beauties. Many make $100,000 a year or more from their looks. "You either have it or you don't," says Carrie Donovan of Harper's Bazaar. "A beauty must be able to project herself, be dramatic, an actress." Hollywood Starlet Deborah Raffin, 22, a lean blonde with almost cliche American looks, has projected herself with more effect on the covers of glossy magazines than in the movies. Picked at age 19 to play Liv Ullmann's daughter in 40 Carats, she also starred in the uproariously bad Once Is Not Enough. Deborah insists on being identified when she models. "She does it to build her name," says her husband-manager, Michael Viner. The Viners are a refreshingly naive couple in Beverly Hills. Deborah likes stuffed animals, and Michael, who is also a record producer, insists that no mention of hard drugs be made in any of the songs he produces. Deborah, too, has firm ideas. In Enough, she played January, the chick who matures with the help of alcohol and drugs, but she modified the role to a more normal adolescence. She also objects to nudity in films: "It violates my privacy." That stand prompted Co-Star Kirk Douglas to ostracize her on the set. He accused her of being frigid. "It seems funny now," says Deborah. "But at the time it took all my strength to hold back the tears. I never want anyone to think I'm one of the thousands of 'starlets' who will do anything to be in a movie."

Beverly Johnson, 23, approaches movies with less fretting. She is one of the top models, "not just the biggest top black model," earning more than $100,000 a year. Beverly is a lithe bronze beauty with the poise of a pedigreed Abyssinian cat. She beams with soft radiance. Five years ago, she dropped out of Boston's Northeastern University after making Glamour's cover at her first try. "Black models then looked like they were going to attack you," says Beverly. "Black women couldn't respond to them at all." When Beverly became the first black on Vogue's cover last August, thousands of her sisters wrote in, "Right on, sister. Show them we can have taste and be natural."

She has become a focus for young blacks. She gives time to such charities as Africare and the Atlanta Black Education Fund, which recently held a Beverly Johnson Day. She is about to launch a line of cosmetics for black women because "we've never been taught how to take care of ourselves."

As a teen-ager from a middle-class family in Buffalo, Beverly's ambition was to make the U.S. swimming team for the 1968 Olympics (she missed by a splash). But now other opportunities are opening up. This year she is concentrating on singing and acting in preparation for a Hollywood screen test, and last year she appeared on-screen for the first time in Land of Negritude, a documentary about an American who returns to Africa. On location at Senegal's Island of Goree, from which slaves were shipped to America, she was for the first time moved by her heritage. "Maybe my grandmother was there." The President of Senegal, the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, had other ideas. Bowled over by her beauty, he wrote two poems in her honor and proclaimed, "The Queen of Sheba is here before me."

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