Beauty Trap' Feud Sprung

Author Says Book Is True; Critics Call It Dirty

By Judie Bailey

When the modeling establishment blasts “The Beauty Trap," they're just protecting their business, says author Jeanne Rejaunier.

"Agencies always need new girls," explained Miss Rejaunier in an interview yesterday, “and they say girls will be afraid to come to New York after reading my book."

The novel, now in its fourth printing, is about three models who achieve a measure of success, "but not without discovering that she must pay a terrible price," as the jacket explains.

The "terrible price" includes love affairs, abortions and divorce.

IN HER column published Sunday in The Plain Dealer, Eugenia Sheppard classified "The Beauty Trap" as a “dirty book" of the Jacqueline Susann variety. She also quotes a top modeling agency head as saying it's “absolutely untrue to life.”

The author insists her book is not only true but impartial. Whether it's dirty depends on who's reading it, she said. "Someone once said, 'dirt is in the person of the beholder”.”

IN HER book, one agency head is "a 34-year-old male homosexual and another is a female alcoholic," Miss Rejaunier said.

She didn't have any of her well-known detractors in mind, she explained. "However, the modeling business is loaded with homosexuals, and I knew some alocholics, too."

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NOW in her early 30s, Miss Rejaunier spent 31⁄2 years in New York as a model for television commercials, including Stroh's beer, Halo shampoo, Lux soap and Chesterfield cigarettes. ("I'm 5-3, too short for fashion modeling.”)

She went to New York after graduating from Vassar, where she majored in drama and minored in philosophy.

At first, Miss Rejaunier and her contemporaries "actually thought we were appreciated for ourselves, our good minds," she recalls. "I didn't realize no one cared about my mind at all."

THIS is one aspect of the beauty trap, she explained. “A girl has no value except as an object, an attractive accessory on a man's arm." The men are either in the profession, as agents or photographers, or on its fringes, as "playboys, jet-setters, directors, producers or acting students," she said.

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Another trap for the unwary beauty is egotism. “These girls are using their beauty to get through life," explained the beauty who prefers to bank on brains.

TALKING to Miss Rejaunier is as comfortable as a kaffee klatsch and her personality matches her appearance. Although she wo e false eyelashes and a long brunette fall to augment her own long, but thin hair, she looked natural and un-made-up.

While one segment of the modeling business disagrees with her book, Miss Rejaunier says she has found support from a number of sister models.

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Jeanne Rejaunier

unflapped by "Trap" controversy

Plain Dealer photo (Edward J. Solotko)

"So many girls have said to me, 'It's all there what we've lived through”,” she said.

IN a radio talk show in New York last week, the author recalled, a former model said, "I think they (aspiring models) should be prepared. I know these things happen.'

A famous fashion photographer on the same show called it "trash, "Miss Rejaunier said between spurts of laughter. "He said he read it on his water skis over the weekend!”

She can afford to laugh, since her controversial novel was recently sold to a well-known film producer. "He wants to make the announcement himself, so I can't say who he is, but he wants me to star in it.”

ACTUALLY, Miss Rejaunier has always considered herself an actress, not a model, even when she was making commercials. She has also been in unmemorable Broadway productions, the movie, "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy," and several television shows, including starring with Ben Gazzarra in a "Run for Your Life" episode.

Since she is multi-lingual, many of her roles involved using another language or a foreign accent.

"THE Beauty Trap" is Miss Rejaunier's first published novel, but she started writing much earlier.

“When I was 6, I wrote a 70-page novella about Nazi spies," she said. "I didn't realize it, but it has sexual overtones that adults saw."

The budding author sent her work to "Double A Day." Somehow it found its way to Doubleday, where "the man said when I grow up and write another book, to bring it to

him.'

Instead, she first submitted "The Beauty Trap" to Trident Press and "they accepted it 48 hours later.”

She has lived in Los Angeles for seven years and is in Cleveland on a promotional tour.