People: Millionettes

Last year when things looked glum, Andy Warhol’s gossip sheet Interview defined a new figure in society: the millionette. Now these “rich young brats” have succeeded café society, the jet set and the beautiful people as social pacesetters. To emulate them, however, requires a lot of loot. Take the personification of the ideal, Nicky Lane, 23, a dégagée Englishwoman with fire-engine red hair, matte-white face and enormous carnelian eyes. “She looks like an apricot,” says her whimsical husband Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume-jewelry designer. Nicky is what Cole Porter liked to call “rich-rich”; she inherited a pile from her father Howard Samuel, a London property magnate.

Now ensconced in a Manhattan town house (Kenny is her second husband, her first marriage was a brief misalliance), Nicky is a happy lotus-eater. She and Kenny, who is pretty rich himself, are the hosts with the most publicity. They throw a last-minute dinner for any friend who drops in from “another planet,” and “we let people wander all over the house.” Nicky also gives tea parties (replete with cucumber sandwiches) in their “Kenny Gothic” drawing room, a jungle of sculpture, animal skins, Chinese tea chests and scattered bibelots.

Isabel de Rosnay, 21, is richer than Nicky. She is a billionette (looks like a billion), an heir to the fortune of her grandfather Antenor Patiño, the Bolivian tin king. She resembles a sleek, lacquered Andean Indian. Despite her wealth, Isabel is not idle. She does freelance public relations work, and helps her husband Baron Arnaud de Rosnay, 29, known as the Baroncito, promote backgammon in Europe. Recently, the Rosnays spent some time in the Middle East. Arnaud has devised an oil game, Monopoly style, called Petropolis ($790 for silver-plated derricks and gold-plated platforms in a green morocco case). Isabel fell in love with Saudi Arabia: “Women may not be visible, but they are taken care of. Men do all the heavy things. There’s none of that ‘Carry your own bags, lady.’ ” Arnaud has probably never asked her to carry anything heavier than a silver-plated derrick. That is lucky, because Isabel is fashionably fragile. A friend says that Isabel has only one fault: she is seldom on time. This may be because Isabel, who finds tending her looks very demanding, has sudden, crippling doubts about her appearance. “If I am tired or feeling bad, I just can’t go out,” she explains. “My friends would never recognize me.”

Princess Grace would rather not, thank you very much, think of her daughter Caroline, 18, as a millionette. “She is a very levelheaded girl,” says Grace. Mom notwithstanding, Caroline is a natural ornament of any smart set. She is charming, mercurial and regal, a Grimm heroine who has all of Europe wondering what she will do next, and hoping against hope that she will only settle for Prince Charles. (She will not, because the Prince of Wales cannot marry a Roman Catholic.) Just now, Caroline is studying at Paris’ elite Institut d’Etudes Politiques, and she is strictly chaperoned by Grace. “Take one look at the girl. Can you blame her?” asks a sympathetic friend. Caroline fairly smolders whenever she gets the chance, earning admiring appraisals from Parisians or revealing almost total décolletage at a disco.

She is far more the daughter of her father Prince Rainier III of Monaco than of Grace Kelly of Philadelphia and Hollywood; the immigrant Kellys’ struggle for social acceptance is beyond her ken. She can chaff the prostitutes that line Avenue Foch outside her parents’ Paris apartment and even joke when one is dropped off by a customer: “I wonder how those girls keep their hairdos in such good shape.” But she will not be bourgeois. Grace would like her to take a cooking course at Maxim’s. Says Caroline: “We have slaves for that.” Replies Grace gently: “Yes, darling, I am your slave.”

Caroline is used to having her own way in her father’s principality. Her own zoo used to prowl the palace in Monaco; one unfortunate nanny was pinned to the floor on arrival by a Rhodesian ridgeback. A baby lion playfully snapped at the heels of visiting celebrities until finally banished. “It was smelly,” says Grace. Now Caroline is content with a couple of horses and her Yorkie, Tif-Tif; they are the safe kind of pet that a mother loves. But Caroline is only biding her time. As she suddenly informed Grace in the middle of a family spat, “I can fool you, Mother, I can fool you any time.”

A time warp intervenes between 20th century Paris and Spain. The only swinging Carmen Ordóñez de Rivera, 21, does is from the ropes in her father’s bullring. Then her stark beauty sparks into a dazzling smile, she starts to laugh and becomes a kid on a spree. Normally, Carmen, the elder daughter of one of Spain’s greatest matadors, Antonio Ordóñez, is as poised as an infanta. Descended on both sides from bullfighters, she is an elegant young woman with a simpler joie de vivre than her contemporaries in such racy cities as London and New York. She is happy minding her 15-month-old son or supporting her husband Francisco de Rivera, also a matador, when he puts on his suit of lights to go out and fight—not so much for the money as for his honor. He is ranked as one of the five top bullfighters in Spain. Says Carmen loyally: “You can only respect a man who has the courage to go out day after day to fight a savage animal.” Demure as she is, Carmen does not trust herself to watch Francisco in the ring. Suppose the crowd got surly and started shouting, pelting him with cushions. Carmen shakes her head sadly: “I have an aggressive temper, I would feel forced to shout back, and you can imagine what effect that would have on the public.” Of course, she does not say what she would shout.