"She is a princess in a world desperately looking for diversion from inflation, devaluation, unemployment, revolution, coups, wars and death." European Correspondent William Rademaekers' assessment of Princess Caroline of Monaco's special appeal applies more or less equally to Margaux Hemingway and the ten other young women chosen by TIME'S bureaus round the world as the collective subject of this week's cover story. For varying reasons--looks, talent, what Margaux would describe as the "snappin' " zest for life that she and Deborah Raffin have brought to modeling--all have arrived on the scene with their own claims to attention. Photographing "The New Beauties" was an especially welcome diversion for TIME'S Dirck Halstead. Since joining the magazine in 1972, Halstead has spent much of his time on various military and political battlefields. Between visits to Indochina to cover North Viet Nam's 1972 and 1975 offensives, he spent almost two years as TIME'S White House photographer covering the painfully unfolding Watergate drama. Twelve of his pictures from that era became TIME covers. Says Halstead: "When I was told to travel around the U.S. and Europe shooting beautiful women, it was like a dream come true."

Halstead's assignment was to try to "portray the real girls journalistically, not stylistically." In his quest for the genuine, he sometimes found unusual props or received unexpected help. Spanish Heiress Carmen Ordonez de Rivera blossomed while swinging from--of all things--a block and tackle used to hoist bulls into her father's ring for a corrida. Actress Tessa Dahl's radiant smile came while shooting in London's Hyde Park, when Tessa looked past Dirck and saw a dog in the act of mistaking his camera bag for a fireplug.

This assignment also provided diversion for some of TIME'S own snappin' women in New York: Gina Mallet, who wrote the story, Martha Duffy, who edited it, and Amanda MacIntosh, who researched it. At one point the three joined Ms. Hemingway in a Manhattan restaurant; they were halfway through lunch (cold lobster, white wine) before they could really understand her lickety-split, California-hip patois, but the interview turned out "okeydoke artichoke," as Margaux would say. Mallet also talked with Model Beverly Johnson and interviewed Millionette Nicky Lane in her Visconti-decadent drawing room on Manhattan's East Side. Not all of the work on the cover was done in such appealing surroundings, but no one involved would quibble with Halstead, who says, "It was a once-in-a-lifetime assignment--but I hope not."

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